Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber? • Hacker News Board

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

#481

Post by PheonixPharts » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 3:39 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

I wonder if this is a regional thing, because traveling between the US Northeast and West coast I've found entirely the opposite.

I've had non-technical friends reach out to me in a panic worried that AI will disrupt humanity in just a few years, and even my 90-year non-technical grandmother recently remarked about her fears about what AI would bring in the next 5 years.

And among technical people: ever since I posted getting an AI related role my linked in I've been bombarded with old acquaintances trying to get ahead of the AI boom.

The funny thing is that I personally think that "AI" is useful but wildly over hyped right now. I do think it has some uses, but they aren't going to change the world in any fundamental way (but hey, if I'm wrong at least I'm in the right field).

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

#482

Post by pyth0 » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 3:43 PM UTC

cantrevealname wrote: post #438

unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are you trying to convince people of with this rhetoric? I don't understand the point of this tangent unless you are trying to say that the two are equivalent.

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

#483

Post by rossdavidh » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 3:43 PM UTC

formulatwo wrote: post #377

rossdavidh wrote: post #298

In the late 90's I got a Master's degree, specializing in neural networks. This caused me to learn about the hype cycle in AI, and since then I have seen it continue. Remember Watson, IBM's AI technology that was going to drive its growth? IBM got lots of press by making computers that could play chess and Jeopardy, which seemed impressive to people at the time, but they never found a way to make money from it. "AI w…

I think there have been so many hyped up stuff in the tech world that it's trained a lot of people to point at everything and call it part of the hype cycle. But this causes people to literally fail to notice that there are many things in tech that Aren't just hype. I mean literally think about it, the internet wasn't just hype, the smart phone wasn't just hype. There's millions of things that weren't just hype. >I h…

If you're going to use it for anything where accuracy is important, you're going to need a human in the loop, verifying each thing ChatGPT comes up with. That means it isn't going to replace nearly as much as you seem to believe (or, unfortunately, that it will replace people, but not for very long), because it isn't going to meaningfully increase productivity in any application which requires accuracy.

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

#484

Post by tiborsaas » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 3:44 PM UTC

healthyusa wrote: post #385

MatthiasPortzel wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a perfect example of an AI-hype comment. You’re treating it as a fact that LLM are going to replace existing products, at some unknown future date. “In 5 years, all code will be written by AI” “In 5 years, LLM will replace Siri and Alexa” “In 5 years, AI will replace [sector of jobs]” The thing that frustrates me about these statements is that you don’t know what AI technology is going to look like in 5 years…

GPT-4 writes 100% of my code now. Staring at a monitor, hunched over, tapping on a keyboard? Stone ages. That’s not 5 years from now. That’s today.

Do you work much with legacy systems, internal libraries and work with a large team?

I do and ChatGPT code is rarely useful for me. I can prompt it well enough to do language related stuff for me, but the code it can write for me is more like a highly custom boilerplate that I still need to refactor.

Even for green field private projects, at first it looks fine, bit the bugs are more likely to be traced back to these snippets than not.

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

#485

Post by rsynnott » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 3:48 PM UTC

jes5199 wrote: post #428

rsynnott wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sure, but I, at least, am here largely for entertainment purposes. Which is one place where LLMs are mildly useful, actually; while ChatGPT isn't very good at it (I think deliberately so) some LLMs can produce very amusing output (see https://www.aiweirdness.com - while occasionally, as now, there's a serious post, it's mostly AI stuff doing silly things).

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

#486

Post by kjkjadksj » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 3:50 PM UTC

ML has been a thing in data analysis for decades now. Still, a ML model is not always the one that has the most power. There are a lot of good models in statistics at this point, graphical modeling is like 100 years old. Reading the tech news though you’d think we’ve unlocked the god formula in the past year or something. Thats why I look at it with a heavy side eye today, since today its clearly like a square peg method being shoved into each and every hole since its popular.

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

#487

Post by jldugger » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 3:50 PM UTC

> I have had conversations with non-tech people about ChatGPT/AI, but not very frequently, which led me to think, are we just in an echo chamber?

Maybe, but like, ChatGPT has broken outside the echo chamber. NPR and marketplace have had plenty of stories on it. Like, my parents probably haven't but they are retired, and veg out on soap operas, game shows and avoid anything that sounds like news.

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

#488

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 3:51 PM UTC

atonse wrote: post #434

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The thing is, if there was a real useful AI, it could filter stuff on my end, independent of Amazon.

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

#489

Post by smt88 » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 3:51 PM UTC

23B1 wrote: post #336

smt88 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are not an opportunity to teach humans how to avoid hallucinations because they don't work even the slightest bit like human brains and we don't even know how to make them stop hallucinating in the first place.

Ahh but we known that both humans and LLMs 'hallucinate'. The study of the latter potentially provides insight to former; after all, isn't the core question we're asking in all of these discussions is 'what is intelligence?'

> The study of the latter potentially provides insight to former

It absolutely does not.

Using the term "hallucinate" for LLMs has nothing to do with the underlying cause or process. It's a metaphor that I feel was specifically chosen by the AI industry to avoid terms like "lying" or "making a mistake".

LLMs hallucinate because they're next-word prediction engines, not logical engines. They have no conceptual understanding, which is why their hallucinations range from small factual errors to bizarre lies that are obviously false.

Humans hallucinate because our brains are reality-simulation engines that evolved to model the perception of events that aren't currently happening (remembering the past, imagining the future, etc.) and sometimes we lose our autonomy over our brains. The underlying process has nothing to do with predicting the next word we're going to say.

In fact, there's an even more fundamental difference: human hallucinations aren't necessarily tied to speech. We have thoughts that don't require output. There's nothing in LLMs that doesn't "come out" as output.

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

#490

Post by asow92 » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 3:52 PM UTC

It seems like the tech community is more aware of the possibilities of LLMs because they are its parent in a sense: they created it and/or have watched it grow up. And the general public probably sees it more like a toy or novelty for information retrieval or generating meal plans and aren't aware of its full potential. Although, the general public will probably start to see it more negatively if/when low skilled office jobs start downsizing due to improved automation products on the horizon.