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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?

#431

Post by adriand »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #309
runlaszlorun wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everywhere?? That’s exactly the hype talk that’s going to burst this bubble. Here’s tech’s dirty little secret. Despite all the screams about automation and universal basic income… the exact numbers where job replacement would show are in the labor productivity numbers. If GDP stays flat or grows while the number of jobs is reduced… bingo… you’d see that number climb. Productivity has actually stayed flat or gone dow…

The missing productivity paradox is something that should interest everyone in tech! Like any macroeconomic observation, there is plenty of uncertainty in both the measurements (GDP ain't perfect) and the context (2 financial crises and a pandemic). But even pro-status-quo institutions like Brookings agree that Something Is Up. Their 2021 review on the topic is both a decent summary and a good source of further refs…

Another explanation that I find persuasive, put forward by Ezra Klein, is that productivity-sapping uses of technology grew along with the productivity-boosting ones: social media, for example, is a powerful mechanism for distracting people and destroying their attention spans.

If this is a good explanation, it begs the question of what AI might do to destroy productivity as well. If you’re constantly sexting with your AI girlfriend, who just happens to be extraordinary adept at tapping into your sexual proclivities, maybe you won’t get as many support tickets resolved as your boss was hoping.

More hypothetically, I would also expect that a world in which people spend a lot of time with screens strapped to their head, consuming an infinite stream of entertainment provided by generative AI, is not going to produce higher GDP.

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

#432

Post by kolinko »

runlaszlorun wrote: post #233
DebtDeflation wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>puts it in a similar tier as crypto Comparisons between AI and crypto are horribly misguided IMO. Is AI overhyped? Sure. However - AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day. Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency…

Everywhere?? That’s exactly the hype talk that’s going to burst this bubble. Here’s tech’s dirty little secret. Despite all the screams about automation and universal basic income… the exact numbers where job replacement would show are in the labor productivity numbers. If GDP stays flat or grows while the number of jobs is reduced… bingo… you’d see that number climb. Productivity has actually stayed flat or gone dow…

GDP is not productivity. If I manage to produce/sell a hundred gizmos for $1 each, displacing my competition who were producing/selling 50 gizmos for a price of $5 each, I just halvened gdp produced even though both me and people using the gizmo are more productive than before.

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

#433

Post by rvz »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #206
sensanaty wrote: post #138

Definitely. The tech is impressive but anyone I've spoken to thinks of it as Cleverbot 2.0, and among the more technically minded I've found that people mostly are indifferent. Hell, IRL most people I know don't think much of it, though on HN and elsewhere online I see a lot of people praising it as the next coming of Christ (this thread included) which puts it in a similar tier as crypto and other Web3 hypetrains as…

>puts it in a similar tier as crypto Comparisons between AI and crypto are horribly misguided IMO. Is AI overhyped? Sure. However - AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day. Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency…

> Comparisons between AI and crypto are horribly misguided IMO.

Nope. The hype around AI by the AI bros is totally similar with the crypto bros back then.

> AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision...

Yet I guarantee that you don't trust any of their outputs for any serious applications and you need to constantly check for it's reliability since its output is often wrong, inaccurate or even outright nonsense. You don't trust it yourself, which that is the problem of this entire hype cycle.

On top that, it is all at the expense of the planet getting incinerated with no efficient alternatives to counter the amount of extreme waste of resources that these systems are consuming. [1] [2]

> Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction, a vehicle for speculation, and a platform for creating financial scams.

'never'

So Moneygram, Stripe, Checkout.com, etc using it is 'never amounted to anything'? If it was only for financial scams, all of them would have stopped using it a long time ago.

They simply didn't because financial scams on a transparent public ledger is a scammers nightmare and sounds like a very poor platform for creating financial scams.

But maybe you need to look outside of the AI bubble and see the trillions of dollars in which the banks have allowed in actual black market transactions by criminals in the FinCEN files [0] which is nothing compared to crypto.

[0] https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/ai-chatgpt-water-usage-envir...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/business/fincen-banks-sus...

[2] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training...

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

#434

Post by atonse »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #369
DebtDeflation wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>puts it in a similar tier as crypto Comparisons between AI and crypto are horribly misguided IMO. Is AI overhyped? Sure. However - AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day. Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency…

Crypto has been quite useful for me personally, from VPN payments to donating to locally forbidden causes. AI only does bad things to me so far: surveillance, spam, fakes, search results poisoned, twitter and reddit closed up because of it etc. Where is my automatic captcha solver? Where is a robot that will get me to a live person in a support call? Where is a spam filter that doesn't send all useful emails to spam?…

As soon as Amazon starts losing money in fake reviews, you bet they will miraculously have a solution in a weekend.

Until then, you’ll get a lot of “it’s a really hard problem to solve!” Coupled with zero progress.

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

#436

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

bane wrote: post #353

I think it's worse than that, it's a bubble. There I've said it. So much money is being poured into AI right now, and things are changing so fast, and products are being deployed, then matched, then overrun weekly, all with no regard to the law, safety, understanding any of the tech that's just been built, or even building a real business around it that it's become absolute nonsense right now. Two anecdotes: 1. I saw…

I.. can totally hear it in my mind.. including ISO20022 requirements happy talk.

My initial take to the posed question that it isn't just tech. Business orgs appear to be jumping in with both feet ( thankfully, my little corner of the universe seems more conservative for now ). Still, it does not disprove your statement that we are in a heavy hype train now.

edit: I do take issue with wire format being well written ( or structured ) at this point. There is a reason SWIFT had to back down a little on the aggressive timeline for example.

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

#437

Post by n_ary »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #369
DebtDeflation wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>puts it in a similar tier as crypto Comparisons between AI and crypto are horribly misguided IMO. Is AI overhyped? Sure. However - AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day. Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency…

Crypto has been quite useful for me personally, from VPN payments to donating to locally forbidden causes. AI only does bad things to me so far: surveillance, spam, fakes, search results poisoned, twitter and reddit closed up because of it etc. Where is my automatic captcha solver? Where is a robot that will get me to a live person in a support call? Where is a spam filter that doesn't send all useful emails to spam?…

Off-topic:

> Where is a filter to hide fake reviews on Amazon?

While it[1] doesn’t hide, it can generate some insightful information about fake reviews for me.

Disclaimer: Not affiliated, only a happy person using FakeSpot since this year.

[1] https://www.fakespot.com/

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

#438

Post by cantrevealname »

unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #368
laurent123456 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hype, maybe, but it's obviously not a passing fad like crypto was. Back then many people were trying to figure out what to do with it and we still don't really know. A week after ChatGPT was out and plenty of people were already using it for writing code, emails, and plenty of other tasks. It would be weird to argue that AI is not going to have a massive impact at many levels.

I like ChatGPT, but it is literally the autocomplete function from your favorite email interface. Give it a standalone prompt and a new name and everyone will embrace it? No, it's not that helpful and after some initial exploration they will disable it. My moment was when I realized if you ask ChatGPT a question about itself, like how ChatGPT works, you are not receiving an authoritative or 1st person kind of answer,…

> you are not receiving an authoritative or 1st person kind of answer

That’s how most human beings work as well. Ask someone about what India or Thailand is like, and even if they’ve never been there, they’ll be happy to give you a rehash of stories, pictures, and videos they saw about India or Thailand. They might make up totally wrong facts as well, just like ChatGPT.

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

#439

Post by Roark66 »

runlaszlorun wrote: post #233
DebtDeflation wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>puts it in a similar tier as crypto Comparisons between AI and crypto are horribly misguided IMO. Is AI overhyped? Sure. However - AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day. Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency…

Everywhere?? That’s exactly the hype talk that’s going to burst this bubble. Here’s tech’s dirty little secret. Despite all the screams about automation and universal basic income… the exact numbers where job replacement would show are in the labor productivity numbers. If GDP stays flat or grows while the number of jobs is reduced… bingo… you’d see that number climb. Productivity has actually stayed flat or gone dow…

Especially in translation quality. Being able to run high quality translation model that does 100 languages directly without going through English on a desktop pc with a previous gen gpu (2070 in my case) is huuuuge. (I'm talking about fairseq and m2m100 for anyone interested in spinning up their own).

If I was going to name the biggest good thing AI has done to humanity so far is the ability to read internet sites in other languages like Chinese (Google sucks at it, you have to use other tools, I use an app called "tap translate screen"). Also ability to do voice to text and translation at the same time on mobile devices (currently requires online connection).

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

#440

Post by LordShredda »

DonHopkins wrote: post #357
runlaszlorun wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everywhere?? That’s exactly the hype talk that’s going to burst this bubble. Here’s tech’s dirty little secret. Despite all the screams about automation and universal basic income… the exact numbers where job replacement would show are in the labor productivity numbers. If GDP stays flat or grows while the number of jobs is reduced… bingo… you’d see that number climb. Productivity has actually stayed flat or gone dow…

Maybe you live in a monolinguistic bubble, or speak every language fluently, but when is the last time you hired a human being to translate a language you don't understand instead of using AI like Google Translate? AI is already so ubiquitous and useful that you blindly take it for granted without even thinking.

Dealing with any international company requires having a translation office with a distinguishable stamp on every single letter. Might be slow, but they can be held accountable unlike your number soup AI
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