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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?

#461

Post by adriand »

afavour wrote: post #350
blitz_skull wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This—100%. The AI revolution with LLMs is creating a new type of interface with computers—the AI interface. Will it kill us all? Eh, probably not. Will it completely change human civilization forever? Eh... maybe not? (But also maybe). But what it already has begun to do, and will continue to do is change the way we interact with computers. The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and…

> The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close Year of the voice assistant is getting close to year of Linux on desktop. What you’re promising has been promised time and time again, received endless hype cycles then collapsed once people realised the limits of the technology. Yes, this time the tech is much more capable than what came before but I’m inclined to…

What you’re missing is that with LLMs the chief obstacle with voice assistants changed overnight from “how do we develop a system that can easily interact in natural language” (at the time, a very hard and possibly unsolvable problem) to “how do we expose our systems to API-driven input/output” (a solvable problem that just takes time).

Case in point, I asked Siri to change my work address. She stated that I needed to use the Contacts app to do that. This is not very helpful. The issue here is not Siri’s inability to understand what I want, it is that the Contacts app does not support this method of data input. Siri is also probably not very good at extracting structured address information from me via natural language, but the new LLMs can do this easily.

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

#463

Post by swalsh »

rvense wrote: post #68

On October 17th, 1979, VisiCalc was released. I'm sure pretty much every accountant in the world got up and went to work that day exactly like they'd been doing all of their career. It probably didn't feel different for that many of them. Most of them had probably never used a computer then, and a lot of them probably didn't feel any particular need to, at least until they tried it. There were probably more than a fe…

A young man in his 20's starting his career will never know understand how things worked without the tech. A man in his 30's see's an opportunity to boost his career, and an older man in his 50's see's a long fought career's worth of expertise being thrown away.

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

#464

Post by Devasta »

Everyone who I have seen speak positively about ChatGPT and the like have all suggested applications that are just awful.

It's going to be terrible in a few years time when you try to cancel a subscription or raise a complaint with a company and they throw an AI in front of you. Most call centres are designed to waste your time so you go away, we are going to see impressive new frontiers of absolute bullshit form.

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

#465

Post by mplewis »

hnfong wrote: post #149
samuellevy wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So humans have a level of knowledge, understanding, and reasoning ability that LLMs simply don't have. I'm writing a response to you right now, and I "know" a certain amount of information about the world. That knowledge has limits, and I can expand it, I can forget it, all sorts of things... "Hallucination" is a term that works well for actual intelligence - when you "know" something that isn't true, and has no path…

> I'm writing a response to you right now, and I "know" a certain amount of information about the world. How do you know? And more importantly, how do you prove it to others? The only way to prove it is to say: "OK, you are human, I am human, each of us know this is true for ourselves, let's be nice and assume it's true for each other as well". > But that doesn't really work for LLMs, because there's no knowledge at…

You can figure out if someone knows what they’re talking about or not by asking them questions about a subject. A bullshitter will come up with plausible answers; an honest person will say they don’t know.

ChatGPT isn’t even a bullshitter when it hallucinates – it simply does not know when to stop. It has no conceptual model that guides its output. It parrots words but does not know things.

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

#466

Post by weevil »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #115
weevil wrote: post #93

I spoke to my 70-year-old step-aunt about this yesterday for exactly this reason. She's a self-employed piano teacher with zero technical interest or knowledge, but a generally astute and clued-up kind of person. She said she's heard a lot about it, but it all sounds like marketing hype, tabloid sensationalism, or open alarmism from people who don't seem to know what they're talking about. She said some of her studen…

> but she found the assertion that mass unemployment is 6-12 months away 'pure speculation' Who in their right mind has been asserting that?

No idea. I've seen some mouths-for-hire on LinkedIn make these sorts of claims, but not seen any in reputable print.

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

#468

Post by weevil »

LUmBULtERA wrote: post #220
weevil wrote: post #93

I spoke to my 70-year-old step-aunt about this yesterday for exactly this reason. She's a self-employed piano teacher with zero technical interest or knowledge, but a generally astute and clued-up kind of person. She said she's heard a lot about it, but it all sounds like marketing hype, tabloid sensationalism, or open alarmism from people who don't seem to know what they're talking about. She said some of her studen…

I've never met a single person claiming it will cause mass unemployment in 6-12 months. But the impact of ~ChatGPT 10.0 in 5 or 10 years from now? It's a lot more believable given its current state. My anecdote is that everyone is concerned about what it will do in the future gives its current proof of concept.

I've heard people make claims about it being 'not far off', but in my experience, these people tend to be making a living from speaking on AI (or previously Blockchain) and don't have any actual technical credentials.

I personally think there's a number of reasons why we may be coming up on an AI plateau that we may not get out of for a long time, but that's a different matter.

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

#469

Post by lisasays »

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…

The thing is, it's perfectly possible for something to possess hybrid qualities.

In the case of AI: both potentially quite useful (unlike crypto) and incredibly, toxically overhyped (just like crypto).

Ironically, the fact that a lot of people think "You it's actually kind of useful sometimes, therefore you can't compare it crypto/web3" is part of the engine that drives the hype.

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

#470

Post by swalsh »

weevil wrote: post #93

I spoke to my 70-year-old step-aunt about this yesterday for exactly this reason. She's a self-employed piano teacher with zero technical interest or knowledge, but a generally astute and clued-up kind of person. She said she's heard a lot about it, but it all sounds like marketing hype, tabloid sensationalism, or open alarmism from people who don't seem to know what they're talking about. She said some of her studen…

> but she found the assertion that mass unemployment is 6-12 months away 'pure speculation'

I've found numerous places to use generative AI in my business. None of the use cases involve laying people off. A large amount of the use cases are adding something new to the business to help us acheive something that wouldn't have been practical if we had to pay a person to do it. The next batch of it, is preloading a humans plate so they can do a quick verification, some small edits, and then off to the customer, allowing the subject matter experts to handle a higher volumes which directly relates to revenue. The 3rd set of use cases involve helping creative employees be more creative.

Not a single use case i've evaluated (and there's a bunch) will put anyone out of work. Might give us more room to hire more people frankly. At least in my business, and I supect my business i not unusual.

It's like the paperless office. Sure eventually AI might get good enough to replace people, but we'll probably just end up hiring more people in the middle since a person with AI can do so much more revenue generating work.

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