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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?

#491

Post by tootie »

bigger_inside wrote: post #300
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…

I teach college, and in the beginning days, everyone was screaming about "the students will have chatGPT write papers now". Well, apart from the fact that chatGPT is really incapable of developing a thought, and also apart from the fact that half will fail to delete sentences like "I'm a language model, so I can't..." (insert gist of question here), it's painfully obvious if something is LLM generated. The moment a s…

I likened ChatGPT's style to an 8th grade honors student. It has consistently solid grammar and diction but it's incredibly bland and incapable of insight. I think it's value for writing with clarity is excellent but it's worthless at coming up with ideas.

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

#492

Post by phkahler »

No. Long story...

Saw an old friend of mine recently. He's smart - majored in math - but spent many years running a landscaping company. He was showing me a spreadsheet he made to show musical scales and the position of notes on a guitar. You could select picking style and it would change the layout. Very complicated cell formulas - no code. I asked how he ever did all that. He. Said ChatGPT saved him countless hours. He praised it highly for the conversational style vs Google that just gives links to generic information, and the ability to refine your request to get better answers. It can also give formulas in some instances but he tests them. He's taken up using it for other things as well.

To be honest though, he could have be a deeply technical person, but he's only interested in such things to the extent it can solve real world problems. Not sure how many people fall in that category.

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

#493

Post by shmel »

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…

Why does GDP measure anyway? How much money do we create for billionaires?

My life is permeated by tech (and big part of it is AI) and made 100 times easier. I can buy a plane ticket to another country while waiting for a subway (did people use to take an hour to go to a special place, wait in line and talk to human to buy a ticket? I still remember this). I go there and quickly navigate in a city I know next to nothing about, find something niche, like cool local cafés in the area because GPS and google maps. I go to a restaurant and I can use google translate to understand the menu. I don't even need to type unfamiliar words, AI scans the image and translates it on the fly. The same google translate with speech recognition AI helps me to converse with a person when we don't share any common language. I can click couple of buttons and video-call my mum who lives on the other side of the world. If I need to buy something I need very rarely, I can order it online and not think where I find a shop that sells those things. Even if I don't know the right word, I can now ask chatgpt "what do you call in German that fancy thing you mount on the ceiling and attach lights to it?"

My life is _hugely_ more efficient thanks to tech and AI. Does it help me to contribute more to the abstract economic growth? I don't know, perhaps not. But I just don't care about GDP.

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

#494

Post by michaelchisari »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #25
michaelchisari wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they're hooking kids because they're least likely to have the domain experience required to recognize how confidently wrong AI can be.

Well, I wonder what’s wrong more often: GPT or a 13 year old :)

Bet a 13 year old with total confidence in GPT beats them both individually on any subject of reasonable complexity.

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

#495

Post by oldandboring »

skepticATX wrote: post #259
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…

I don't think the rub is with AI in general. Everyone working in tech knows how pervasive ML especially has become. I think the contention is with AI suddenly being redefined as only referring to language models, and the view that intelligence has been solved by these models. There has clearly been a massive marketing push to label these models as the "one true AI", both from companies and from AI influencers. This i…

I agree completely, and I think the 'tipping point' came because of ChatGPT. And I think it's for two primary reasons:

1. ChatGPT was released for general-purpose use. It's not a data science team at a FAANG company or healthcare or finance enterprise using ML for a specific business need. It's there for anyone to ask it anything.

2. A design decision was made to have ChatGPT output words in "real time" instead of all-at-once after a delay. To the user, that makes it look and feel like it's consciously and actively responding to you in a way that animated ellipses do not. I never knew what it would feel like talking to an AI, but when I first used ChatGPT, I thought: this must be it.

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

#496

Post by afavour »

adriand wrote: post #461
afavour wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> 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

…which is something an LLM won’t help with.

“Just design an open ended API capable of doing absolutely anything someone might ask ChatGPT to do” is not the simple task you’re making it out to be!

There's a reason why people describe ChatGPT as a "research tool": you often need to do a bunch of iterations to get it to do the correct thing. And that's fine because it's non-destructive. But it's very far from a world where you can let it loose on a production, writable database and trust that it's going to do the correct thing.

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

#497

Post by solardev »

HKH2 wrote: post #146
solardev wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That probably speaks more to the quality of our homework assignments than the quality of the student. In this day and age, why is our education still based on rote regurgitation?

I agree. They should be chatting to ChatGPT instead.

They would probably learn more, honestly.

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

#498

Post by thewarrior »

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…

I have friends in academia who use GPT-4 to help with with research level code. TikTok just released an app where you can hum a song it will generate a full instrumental backing track.

This stuff can already do impressive things and its only getting better.

Douglas Hofstadter and Geoffrey Hinton both think that we are on the path to humans eventually being surpassed.

I would urge everyone to hold back their instinctive reaction to the usual SV hype and go and try GPT-4,Claude+, Mid Journey, RunwayML for a few weeks and come to their own conclusions.

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

#499

Post by bigger_inside »

rmorey wrote: post #388
bigger_inside wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I teach college, and in the beginning days, everyone was screaming about "the students will have chatGPT write papers now". Well, apart from the fact that chatGPT is really incapable of developing a thought, and also apart from the fact that half will fail to delete sentences like "I'm a language model, so I can't..." (insert gist of question here), it's painfully obvious if something is LLM generated. The moment a s…

Don't you have to believe there could be GPT submissions still flying under your radar? The obvious ones are obvious, and with subtle giveaways you probably catch most. But how could you know you aren't missing any?

If they're pruned and curated enough to not be immediately recognizable, let them have their chatGPT papers. Bad cheating is just a sign of not caring, but good cheating takes effort and smarts...

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

#500

Post by formulatwo »

rossdavidh wrote: post #483
formulatwo wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>If you're going to use it for anything where accuracy is important, you're going to need a human in the loop,

Having a human in the loop doesn't mean nobody is replaced.

If I have a job that requires 20 people to respond to emails all day, I can have AI do the job with 1 person in the loop. That's 19 people replaced.

The other thing you need to think about is basically the trendline. Sure the AI requires humans in the loop now, but will it in the future? Just 1 year back a tool like chatGPT didn't exist. Now it exists. What's the next year going to bring? Most likely a tool Better than chatGPT. If "better" keeps happening every year, inevitably there will be a point where the AI doesn't need a human in the loop.

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