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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?

#51

Post by solardev »

sp332 wrote: post #44
electrondood wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has unbelievable practical use. ChatGPT is a personal tutor on any subject you can think of. It's more that 90% of people can't even be bothered to google the answer to a question they have, despite having a personal computer and oracle in their front pocket. I'm using an LLM to teach me interactively how LLMs work and how to integrate LLMs into our products. It's replaced 90% of my googling/stack overflow. Every…

How can it replace 90% of your Googling if you have to go check everything it tells you afterward?

It's not like Googling typically gives you truthful answers either.

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

#52

Post by piva00 »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #34
threeseed wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My partner runs an ecommerce business and her team uses ChatGPT dozens of time a day. Everything from writing emails to suppliers, correcting grammar, responding to customers, brainstorming new product ideas, explaining contracts etc. Where as for me I can't find a use for it. Even as a coding assistant I find that I spent more time trying to understand/correct what it did than if I just wrote it myself.

The majority of my usage of ChatGPT as a dev has been to synthesize examples of APIs/tools/etc in usage when those aren't easy to find and/or when documentation is sparse/scarce.

Same to me so far, synthesise or summarise examples of tools I'm not familiar with to then explore the documentation.

Lately I've been using it quite a bit for Arduino on a ESP32 board, I had toyed around with Arduino previously but since I got this board for a small hobby project it's been great to ask ChatGPT to generate some examples of the kind of data I want to read from a few sensors. Even when it hallucinates something wrong it's been helpful for my learning.

Another way I've been using ChatGPT is to be a personal tutor to correct me when learning foreign languages, it's pretty easy to create a prompt asking ChatGPT to have a conversation with me in a given language while correcting any mistakes it believes I made, I've been getting feedback from these corrections from some native speakers and so far haven't got any case of "this is absurd and wrong", unsure why it works so well to correct my broken grammar but it does and without a fault.

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

#53

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

Given ChatGPT reached 100M users shortly after launch, it must have a broader reach than just techies.

There are regular articles on it in mainstream news. Most of the people I know have tried it. Some of them can't see it will be useful, and some of them already find it useful. Some of them are techies and some aren't. Some techies are in the set that don't think it is useful.

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

#55

Post by jpgvm »

p-e-w wrote: post #42
jpgvm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. AI -might- kill us if there is some quantum leap that makes it sentient. Climate change -will- kill us if we do nothing. For now one is simply not like the other, it may change but there is no guarantee we every breach that barrier.

> Climate change -will- kill us if we do nothing. Horseshit. There is not a single scientific model that predicts human extinction from climate change. Parts of humanity, yes. All of humanity, no chance. There a plenty of models that predict human extinction from AGI.

Climate change will kill millions in the next ~40-60 years and if course isn't corrected 100s of millions will follow. Seems like it will do a pretty damn good job of killing us even if it fails to kill all of us.

I agree AGI would be horrendously dangerous and if achieved has a higher chance of complete extinction. However, we don't have AGI and it's still not clear we ever will.

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

#56

Post by ftxbro »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #23
ftxbro wrote: post #5

I saw other waves and this one is different. This is the first time we can unlock increasing cognitive capabilities by just basically letting capital grow its own ai. It's at the level of like invention of internet or currency or printing press or writing or maybe even human language.

I don’t see any evidence that it’s there yet. I do see that potential if AI were to improve dramatically, but I think we’re tricking ourselves into thinking it’s already here because what we’re seeing is so compelling. The reality as far as I can tell is that we still have an incredible distance to go to have anything comparable to unlocking spoken or written language.

I guess it's your right to believe that as long as you want, the evidence is that it's beating people at every exam like AP exams and GRE exams and bar exams and medical certification exams and not only like regurgitating facts but it's also superhuman level in theory of mind. And all that comes from just an architecture that reads every text and uses a lot of GPU power.

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

#57

Post by sam_lowry_ »

adrianN wrote: post #36
samuellevy wrote: post #31

There's definitely a few echo chambers around AI, but it's definitely not something that "just techies" are onto. ChatGPT made some waves at the end of last year. My in-laws were wanting to talk to (at) me about it at Christmas. There's plenty of awareness outside of the tech circles, but most of the discussion (both out and in of the tech world) seems to miss what LLMs actually _are_. The reason why ChatGPT was impr…

AlphaGo is not aware that it’s playing a game either, but it’s better than humans at it. Awareness is not necessary to make people lose their jobs.

> Awareness is not necessary

Wasn't it the plot of a sci-fi novel by Vernor Vinge or someone at least as popular?

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

#58

Post by fiveg »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #57
adrianN wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AlphaGo is not aware that it’s playing a game either, but it’s better than humans at it. Awareness is not necessary to make people lose their jobs.

> Awareness is not necessary Wasn't it the plot of a sci-fi novel by Vernor Vinge or someone at least as popular?

You might be thinking of Blindsight by Peter Watts. Great book.

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

#60

Post by flangola7 »

bigmattystyles wrote: post #19
flangola7 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been said about countless tasks that are now done by machines. Computer was a job title. Printer was a job title. Very important jobs that didn't have room to risk errors.

Even computer used to be a job.

That's what I just said...
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