Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 755 posts

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

#501

Post by Kiro »

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 get that you think it's overhyped but how can you be thoroughly unimpressed? This stuff was pure science-fiction just a couple of years ago.

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

#502

Post by boredemployee »

I have many friends that don't care about it, others that never heard about it.

Anyway, call it AI, ML, statistics, the truth is: all these algorithms are helping us get rid of the boring stuff in tech.

ie.: I won't waste my time reading a regex documentation to learn how to remove every white space after a combination of characters, because I'll completely forget it two days later. and the examples goes on and on.

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

#503

Post by parineum »

oblio wrote: post #444
evrydayhustling wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The missing productivity paradox is something that should interest everyone in tech! Like any macroeconomic observation, there is plenty of uncertainty in both the measurements (GDP ain't perfect) and the context (2 financial crises and a pandemic). But even pro-status-quo institutions like Brookings agree that Something Is Up. Their 2021 review on the topic is both a decent summary and a good source of further refs…

How do those distinct lifestyles" match with rising inequality and people having a hard time buying a house or paying rent?

Inequality is a red herring. Poverty is down.

Have you looked for housing in Columbus, Ohio?

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

#504

Post by bigger_inside »

tootie wrote: post #491
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…

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.

That description goes for college students, too. Though the blandness isn't lack of skill; it's fear and powerlessness.

Michael Berubé has this story where he says, he once came early to class and overheard the students make great arguments about movies and shows they saw last night, discussing them heatedly. Then, when the lesson started, all the arguments turned bland, banal, reproductive.

Obvious conclusion: They -can- very well produce good insight, but the college and school systems discourage it. They reward them for repeating ideas they read in books about their things, or what the teacher said; an original idea is dangerous, because they're responsible for it themselves, and if the teacher doesn't like it, they'll get punished for it. Safer to say, "Miller said..." and shove off accountability to someone published.

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

#506

Post by kjkjadksj »

buro9 wrote: post #445

I see more people outside of tech talking about it than within tech. Within tech the biggest constraint I'm seeing is a failure of our imagination on how this tech could be used, so far we've limited our interactions to that which we've been shown... chat bots, and if that's all we can imagine then this is definitely a hype cycle. But when I speak to those outside of tech, who are not constrained to imagine what they…

The Halo games and lore had a pretty interesting storyline with military AI, some going rogue, others being built to counter the rogue ones.

https://www.halopedia.org/Offensive_Bias

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

#507

Post by tudorw »

yes, it is the most impressive tool to have zero documentation, zero affordance and get less capable over time... if they had launched Lotus the same way we would still be using paper ledgers... massive disconnect.

The things it is good for are being obscured by promises of a waterfall of tasks performed all by AI ending up in something usable. If you tell me you have a neat programme that does exactly what you expect 99.4% of the time yet you have no knowledge of why the 0.6% fail you will have to demonstrate that is has some very desirable properties not offered by other solutions. Hammer, looking for nuts, what is nuts is people taking £100 mill to wrap some langchain... the burn rate to get noticed is going to be half your spend, the other half is subsidising loss making operations with the idea that there is some pie to win here.

It's a novel database. Fun, creative, unpredictable in interesting ways, like my cousin.

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

#508

Post by joshstrange »

justsocrateasin wrote: post #477
educaysean wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

We must have met very different humans. Are there humans that do that this? Absolutely! Are they in the majority? Absolutely not. Now if you change that framing to "teachers" then I think on average you are going to get more people like that but I've heard many many people say things with complete confidence/certainty that was absolutely wrong. Then again, I've had teachers that have made predictions/statements that they state as facts so I don't know. Dunning-Kruger can account for part of it but still.

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

#509

Post by parineum »

veidr wrote: post #304
edgyquant wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anymore. At the top of bubble they were way more than bitcoin has ever been >e best of tulips cost upwards of $1 million in today’s money (but with many bulbs trading in the $50,000–$150,000 range https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dutch_tulip_bulb_market...

right, but now a great tulip is $15

What's a satoshi of Bitcoin worth?

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

#510

Post by xyzelement »

Surprising places I've heard of ChatGPT recently:

My sister in law (an orthodontist) had chatGPT draft a job ad when hiring an assistant.

My wife just graduated with a non-tech master's degree. On her graduation, the head of the program made humorous references to chatGPT and cited it ln a few topics in her speech.

To be honest it's a no brainier. It's helpful tech with a low barrier to entry, and free. People will use it.

Post reply on HN