I think this is the community that's an aberration. More often I see that "AI" has become synonymous with hallucinations and slop.
Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
41–50 of 119 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
#42I’m also curious about this. This morning I needed to generate summaries of news articles when I noticed Bing AI was inserting facts that weren’t present in the source article. (Not correct at all) It really hurts the potential of what AI could do if I have to double check everything it generates. We wouldn’t accept a spreadsheet program that required double checking with a calculator, why do LLMs get a pass?
Because the big corps are the ones running the show and they have money and they have money invested and want returns. I can't think of another reason. Your spreadsheet example is perfect.
Re: Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
#43Because 99% of people which have this issue ask a question to just a LLM. What you do is you add RAG to it, or you make it an agent which can retrieve information, and suddenly it's very accurate.
LLMs are language models, not magical information models with all information in the world somehow fit into several gigabytes. Use them right.
Re: Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
#44Probably for the same reason that tech hasn't improved anything in a long time. Tolerable Pizza delivery is ruined. The Internet is a walled wasteland now. Far too much "content" that doesn't need to exist. Everything is an ad. None of our lives have been improved by software.
Amen. I hate technology these days. It feels like the big corps managed to mess it up in the worst ways. Oh, you want to check the weather real quick? Here's an ad first. I'm sick of it. None of it even works properly or does what it's supposed to do half of the time but we're just supposed to eat it all up and pay more and more for it all.
Re: Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
#45So far this year the following companies have asked me for money for their new "AI" features:
- slack
- github
- microsoft
- google
- atlassian
- notion
- clickup
- hubspot
Re: Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
#46Another question, why does nobody care about the enormous and absurd energy cost to train and run models?
>why does nobody care about the enormous and absurd energy cost to ___________
Just fill in the blank and you've described human history after we started digging up coal in mass.
Now, beyond that, think of it this way...
You're very rich, but to keep having new yachts and pleasure islands and jumbo jets you need for the plebs around you to keep breeding and then spending 18 years to train them not to be completely stupid, then another 4 to 10 years for them to be experts, all while hoping they don't get hit by a car or off themselves. That's a massive amount of resource expenditures if you're looking to make yourself even richer. Now think of it this way. Instead of spending a lot of effort training those meat popsicles, you train a machine. Yea, it takes a lot of time, effort, and energy to get it where it needs to go. But after you have this 'general' machine, you never need other humans again. How much energy will that save you on your goal of world domination?
Re: Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
#47Hype. Every so many years some sort of semi-novel software gets invented/improved and some dude puts 100mg of 2c-b in his Huel shake and realizes that he’s invented the godhead. This dude invariably has buddies that do VC. It’s the same reason why we heard about blockchain for years despite it having near zero practical uses
2020 VR/AR
2021 Blockchain
2022 NFT
2023 AI
The hype is real. None of these solved anything that people need.
And I'm talking people, not "users".
Re: Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
#48"Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome."
There is a belief, cynical or otherwise, that AI will make (a very small number of) people extraordinarily wealthy. The drive to stuff it into every facet of the digital experience reflects this belief.
Re: Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
#49Another question, why does nobody care about the enormous and absurd energy cost to train and run models?
If the marginal utility AI is less than the costs of the energy needed to use it then presumably capitalism will solve this problem?
Re: Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?
#50We built a correctness checker for LLM-generated SQL code for the military before LLMs were commercially available, it is going live soon on http://sql.ai . Some people do care about this problem, but it is hard to solve; even for SQL alone, this requires significant computer algebra, automated theorem proving, having to define what 'correct' even means, and much else etc.