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Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

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Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#421

Post by Loic »

rideontime wrote: post #280
NikolaNovak wrote: post #236

All you can get in a survey like this is anecdotes and opinions. This may be sufficient for your purposes - here's my story:-) My sister is not technically minded. She has used chatgpt to create a request for permit for a backyard deck to city Hall, a letter to her boss requesting attendance to a conference, and her performance reviews. Another non techie and I use chatgpt to help us learn French and music theory. My…

How do you know that the French and music theory it’s teaching you is correct?

I am French, living in Germany. From my experiments with ChatGPT (I have access to GPT-4), the French is not going to be perfect, but so good that anyway nobody will ever notice the errors.

ChatGPT is a wonderful tool to improve your knowledge of a given language (at least for the ones having a lot of data on the web, I tested only French, German and English). You paste a mostly good text, you get back a very good one and sometimes it provides you with a description of your errors, why and what it restructured.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#422

Post by tester457 »

demarq wrote: post #81

Same experience, talked to a young, highly educated person about ChatGPT… they had no clue what I was going on about. But the more surprising thing is that even after I explained what it could do, they weren’t even slightly impressed. “So it tells you wrong answers? Sounds utterly pointless” I was flabbergasted. I think we do live in a bubble. I’m sure architects and surgeons have equally exciting advances in their f…

> they weren’t even slightly impressed

Could be because they haven't actually tried it. There are a surprising amount of applications something that tells wrong answers part of the time can do.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#423

Post by TideAd »

My aunt and uncle, whose main hobbies are drinking beer and watching football, pulled me aside at their daughter's wedding ceremony to tell me how much they love ChatGPT.

My friend is a librarian at a high school. She tells me teachers are worried about what ChatGPT means for take-home essays. (I'm guessing 2023 is the year these stop getting assigned)

Everyone in the world with internet now has access to a personal research assistant. This thing gives better medical advice than doctors!! Give it 3 years and let's see who hasn't heard of ChatGPT.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#424

Post by mdrzn »

rideontime wrote: post #280
NikolaNovak wrote: post #236

All you can get in a survey like this is anecdotes and opinions. This may be sufficient for your purposes - here's my story:-) My sister is not technically minded. She has used chatgpt to create a request for permit for a backyard deck to city Hall, a letter to her boss requesting attendance to a conference, and her performance reviews. Another non techie and I use chatgpt to help us learn French and music theory. My…

How do you know that the French and music theory it’s teaching you is correct?

How do you know that the French and music theory that a human teacher would teach you is correct?

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#425

Post by bondarchuk »

nerdbert wrote: post #337
mannykannot wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing wrong about the specific objection but, to borrow an analogy from Scott Aaronson, it is rather like dismissing the Wrights’ early airplanes as being slower than a train and only carrying one passenger. What is missing is an appreciation for how intractable the problem seemed five years before.

Except that people could explain how you could make an airplane faster and larger. Nobody can explain how you can make an LLM understand what it's saying.

A lot depends on the definition of "understand" you want to use. According to some definitions there is already some kind of understanding going on in the current generation of LLMs, according to others true understanding requires a soul in the Christian sense and thus it is unattainable an LLM, and of course there is a spectrum of opinions in-between.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#426

Post by perrygeo »

ozim wrote: post #404
perrygeo wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. My friends in other white-collar-ish jobs, which require lots of writing, are smitten with ChatGPT and think it's amazing. Friends in tech are largely dismissive/critical of it's abilities while being skeptical/fearful of its impact. My take is that, for most non-tech people, this is their first experience directing a computer to perform a precise task - ie programming. They're accustomed to using applications,…

I did not see a way where you can tell AI “make me a crud app for storing database of my post stamp collection” and it executes that. It is quite a stretch to say that lay people can effortlessly write application only with AI whatever it is copilot or chatgpt. You still have to know a lot of things to build simple crud to store data about stamp collection. LLMs are not changing that.

LLMs are not changing that, yet.

But well over a decade ago, we had high-level frameworks for translating "models" into all the gritty details of a crud app. Model description goes in. API endpoints, database migrations, admin UI, all auto-generated. I even developed something like it based on Django 0.96 (now abandoned).

It's not a stretch of the imagination to generate your model.py with model.txt containing the problem description in plain text.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#428

Post by jes5199 »

rsynnott wrote: post #142
demarq wrote: post #81

Same experience, talked to a young, highly educated person about ChatGPT… they had no clue what I was going on about. But the more surprising thing is that even after I explained what it could do, they weren’t even slightly impressed. “So it tells you wrong answers? Sounds utterly pointless” I was flabbergasted. I think we do live in a bubble. I’m sure architects and surgeons have equally exciting advances in their f…

I mean, I’d be inclined to agree with your friend here, to an extent. A machine for confidently being wrong has rather limited practical applications.

we’re all on HN aren’t we? isn’t it a forum for confidently being wrong?

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#429

Post by chrischattin »

andsoitis wrote: post #356
chrischattin wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a car with Bitcoin while the banks were closed on the weekend. There are tons of legitimate use cases. However, most of them aren’t immediately apparent to affluent people in the United States as it solves problems most of them don’t have.

> I bought a car with Bitcoin while the banks were closed on the weekend. > There are tons of legitimate use cases. However, most of them aren’t immediately apparent to affluent people in the United States as it solves problems most of them don’t have. Are you implying that you cannot buy a car on a weekend in the US? If you Google, you’ll see that not only can you buy a car on the weekend, but there are articles fro…

Good luck effecting a wire transfer outside of banking hours.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#430

Post by [deleted] »

cranium wrote: post #383

Try talking to students and you'll get a different answer. I asked a room of a dozen eighteen years-old if anyone did not use it regularly, and no-one raised their hand. They use it as a better Google to get understandable answers, write prose/code for them, and sometimes even as coach to bounce ideas.

[deleted]
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