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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?

#471

Post by scarface_74 »

Roark66 wrote: post #452
scarface_74 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use ChatGPT to help me quickly write simple AWS SDK based helper scripts. I’ve also recently been involved in designing a DevOps /Docker deployment pipeline for a customer. They use Java and I haven’t used Java in decades. Before I would have just done my POC using a Python or Node container and rely on the fact that they knew Java well enough to get the concepts. But I used Java and started the chain of questions…

Watch out, I'm doing devops too and I've caught chatgpt on such obviously stupid behaviors it hurts to even think about it. It's not just hallucinations problem (edge cases or doing unusual stuff). It seems to give answers that are 100% incorrect and when told so says "of course you're right, here is the right answer". The only stuff I'd use it for is if I already know exactly how to write the script and I'm just usi…

Exactly.

But with code, it’s easy enough to prove correctness just by running it.

That being said, the one bug I find consistently with ChatGPT is that with the AWS APIs, all list type methods pagínate and you have to account for that. Python/boto3 have built in paginators and it doesn’t.

This an insidious bug because things will work correctly in a dev account with only few resources. But will fail in hard to debug ways in production.

What’s even worse is that ChatGPT “knows” the pattern and will correct itself once you say something like

“This won’t work with more than 50 roles/ec2 instances, etc”

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

#472

Post by rvz »

aenis wrote: post #398
rvz wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The AI bros here are doing the same thing as the crypto bros and almost all of them don't even know it. Pontificating their nonsense around the hype about LLMs to the point where they don't even trust it. The same thing they did with ConvNets and they still don't trust that either since they both hallucinate, frequently. I can guarantee you that people will not trust an AI to fly a plane without any human pi…

I'd like to point out that humans, too, are not trustworthy in high risk situations. For this we have procedures, deterministic automation and so on. I like to think of capable LLMs as pf gifted interns. I can expect decent results if I explain well enough, but I need processes around them to make sure they are doing what they are told. In my industry thats enough to produce a noticeable productivity gain, and likely…

> I'd like to point out that humans, too, are not trustworthy in high risk situations. For this we have procedures, deterministic automation and so on.

Except humans can transparently explain themselves and someone can be held to account when something goes wrong. Humans have the ability to have differing opinions and approaches to solve unseen problems.

An AI however cannot explain itself transparently and just resorts to regurgitating whatever output it has been trained on and black-box AI models have no clear method of any transparent reasoning meaning that it cannot be held to account.

Any unseen problem it encounters, it falls back to fixed guardrails and just repeats a variation or re-wording on what it already has said. Especially LLMs.

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

#473

Post by anonyfox »

To be honest I am busy with building gpt-powered backoffice tools for data classification, content creation, workflow automations, … to eliminate jobs down the road in my company. It’s already factored in future financial plannings that quite a few positions will be gone in a few months, except the affected people have no idea yet

… so my take is that it takes a bit of time to leverage these new tools popping into existence only a few months ago

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

#474

Post by lallysingh »

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…

AI affects both human interfaces (text, speech, sound, images) and the ability to interpret and create data by/for humans. That's effectively the entire interface space between machine and the human-experienced world. Can you think of an area of technology that won't be affected by AI? Even unrelated technologies are going to get affected in their interfaces and tooling.

As for the rest of your comment... please don't hijack other conversations for soapboxing on the industry as a whole. Instead, submit your post and open a real conversation.

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

#475

Post by hackinthebochs »

nerdbert wrote: post #343
hackinthebochs wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think your brain does when deciding the next word to speak? It is scoring words based on the appropriateness considering context and all the relevant known facts, as well as your communicative intent. But it is not obvious that there is nothing like communicative intent in LLMs. When you prompt it, you are engaging some subset of the network relevant to the prompt that induces a generative state disposed…

> What do you think your brain does when deciding the next word to speak? It is scoring words based on the appropriateness considering context and all the relevant known facts I mean, it's not. It's visualizing concepts internally and then using a grammar model to turn those into speech.

>It's visualizing concepts internally and then using a grammar model to turn those into speech.

First off, not everyone "visualizes" thought. Second, what do you think "using a grammar model to turn those into speech" actually consists of? Grammar is the set of rules by which sequences of words are mapped to meaning and vice-versa. But this is implemented mechanistically in terms of higher activation for some words and lower activation for other words. One such mechanism is scoring each word explicitly. Brains may avoid explicitly scoring irrelevant words, but that's just an implementation detail. All such mechanisms are computationally equivalent.

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

#476

Post by cmrdporcupine »

azangru wrote: post #164
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So; I think many people in our sector have a progress-bias from years of Moore's law etc. and run under the assumption that all things tech that display problems (in this case "incorrect information") will just resolve with time and progress. People outside of tech don't necessarily think this way. So hearing that "it produces incorrect answers" is kind of a deal breaker, no? Who is right in this case? I actually thi…

> People outside of tech don't necessarily think this way. So hearing that "it produces incorrect answers" is kind of a deal breaker, no? I think it's a deal-breaker for many people inside tech either :-) It looks like it may be useful in doing grunt work in the field where you are an expert and can check and correct anything that it produces. Where people expect it to be useful though is in providing them with infor…

Yep. CoPilot for example is great for making grunt code, filling in the blanks. But it's really crappy at anything that requires reasoning through a problem.

It is our responsibility as tech professionals to recognize this and explain it to laymen otherwise we're in trouble.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: It's really really bad that these systems are made to speak in first person, that they're often given "names", that they use human voices, and that they present authority. This is irresponsible engineering from a social and ethics POV, and our "profession" such as it is, should be held to task for it.

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

#477

Post by justsocrateasin »

educaysean wrote: post #409
rideontime wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Would your question change if the tutor was a person? How do you know if anything anyone teaches you is correct?

Humans are likely to share when they don't know something or to express concern when they aren't positive what they're is correct. LLMs are confident 100% of the time and don't understand when they're wrong. I get what you're trying to say but I don't think this is an instructive example.

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

#478

Post by kkielhofner »

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…

The issue now is that for many people LLM = AI and AI = LLM.

Meanwhile, there are tons of applications you use everyday (and have for YEARS) using “AI”/ML for document search, text suggestion, NLP/NLU, intent recognition, STT/TTS, image similarity/classification/search and a myriad of other tasks. LLMs have sucked all of the oxygen out of the room and there are tons of “AI” companies/“engineers” now who have never even heard of any of these and are doing all kinds of bizarre (wrong) things to wedge these tasks into LLMs.

I cringe when I see people all of a sudden jumping on the “AI” hype train thinking an LLM (or even the ML approaches I listed) is a universal solution to everything. They are interesting and have use cases but please stop.

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

#479

Post by 172023throw »

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…

I can evade taxes and government surveillance using crypto. That's value added for me.

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

#480

Post by 172023throw9 »

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…

I can evade taxes and government surveillance using crypto. That's value added for me.
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