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?

#521

Post by slotrans » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:19 PM UTC

> as we’re all quite aware that AI will play an increasing role in our lives (in & out of the office)

I am not aware of that!

I am definitely inside the tech echo chamber but I do not use ChatGPT, will not do so, don't care about it, and frankly don't respect people who do. It is not a useful thing, and all the "AI" (it isn't) garbage that's popping up right now is equally useless.

I say this on HN often and people come back with "but it reached 1M users so fast!" I don't care. Millions of people smoke cigarettes, that doesn't prove they're useful.

I am going to sit this hype cycle out. Maybe it will eventually be useful for something. I am clearly not the one to try to imagine what that will be.

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

#522

Post by LinuxBender » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:19 PM UTC

Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

I don't think so. Anecdotally I have had numerous non tech friends ask me about AI. The first thing they always seem to ask is if it will harm people to which I explain its just a tool and more specifically a big-data chat bot that can be manipulated just like the social media algorithms but give more confident and realistic sounding answers using language models to simulate human mimicry. The risk would be based on what entities tune it and the fact it can't or won't show it's work. A tool will do what a tool can do. The intentions of the tool operators and users determine what they tool will be doing.

Some of my non-tech friends are trying to find ways that tool can make them money and I have no doubt they will come up with clever uses for it until such time that the walled garden around these tools becomes to cost prohibitive for the average person to afford. After the masses have helped tune the tools I suspect they will be exclusively for large corporations and government entities to rent. I predict that prior to the walls going up, the public interfaces may appear to have lower quality results so that there isn't an uproar when the interface becomes cost prohibitive. This is why I warn them not to base an entire business on this service but rather to augment something.

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

#523

Post by Spooky23 » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:21 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…

It’s funny you say that, once you see a bit of of gpt content, it stands out.

One thing I will say is that it is a decent editor. If you feed it a document, it will produce pretty good suggestions about improvements etc.

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

#524

Post by tome » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:22 PM UTC

zirgs wrote: post #407

hunter2_ wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saving more than spending has also been popular advice for fiat, at times. More for medium/long-term personal purposes at the expense of immediate macro purposes, but I think that applies to both systems.

Central banks inflate their currencies on purpose to discourage hodling. Short term savings for emergencies are good. But by hodling fiat long term - you are just losing money. Cryptobros thought that they are smarter than central banks and didn't bother to implement proper monetary policy in the Bitcoin protocol to prevent its volatility.

> But by hodling fiat long term - you are just losing money.

Real interest rates are typically positive, so no, you are not.

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

#525

Post by 8note » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:22 PM UTC

My sister is decidedly non-tech, and can to visit a few weeks back while working remote, and she used chat gpt over and over and over again for different small tasks.

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

#526

Post by unsigner » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:23 PM UTC

jes5199 wrote: post #341

unsigner wrote: post #188

Teachers around me are freaked out about the end of homeworks, they can't stop talking about it. And their students anywhere between 8 and 18 are generating all assignments they can using ChatGPT (and then manually or DeepL-translating into our native language, which is not English and for which ChatGPT is still ridiculously funny). So it's not just tech.

homework never had much value, anyway, it’s nice to see students fighting back

Hard disagree on that, at least in the educational system I'm familiar with. The meagre time allocated in school schedules allows the teachers to barely introduce the students to concepts and techniques, and actual skill needs to be developed on your own.

(I can agree with a weaker version of that statement: homework that can be done by ChatGPT doesn't have any value and should be done away with.)

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

#527

Post by valbaca » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:24 PM UTC

My family: not tech savvy, haven't mentioned AI once to me, except my mother-in-law who asked if I'd heard of it and wanted to (honestly) know what I thought.

My friends: very, very much in tech, we have a channel in our discord where we just laugh at AI/ML/Musk/Crypto because it's so stupid. It can't even fucking add two numbers. It doesn't actually help with internal, brownfield projects with complex business logic and custom internal integrations. It can't summarize legal documents or answer technical questions without completely making crap up. It's just sparkling auto-complete.

My work: I've been put on an LLM project. The purpose? Dunno. The goal? Dunno. Our VPs are on the hype train and I'm along for the ride as long as my paycheck keeps clearing (and interviewing in the meantime). They're literally taking tech and trying to find a use for it. It's just the blockchain hype all over again.

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

#528

Post by fwungy » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:25 PM UTC

zaphar wrote: post #402

fwungy wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Btc is a genuine intranational and international currency in the developing world. It is more trustworthy than many sovereign currencies. The fx applications of btc alone are enough to grant it legitimacy and fx is a the biggest of all the markets. In a de-dollarizing world btc is a genuine factor. The stable coins are an issue but stable coins aren't a necessity for btc transactions, they're a utility for traders. B…

If your nation's currency is so mismanaged that Btc looks like an appealing alternative that says more about your nation's monetary policy than it says about Btc.

There are plenty of developing countries where people don't trust the government currency and use alternatives. It's quite common in Africa where many transactions were done in USD.

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

#529

Post by gnopgnip » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:26 PM UTC

Have you used mid journey or stable diffusion? It’s a huge change for what is required to make whatever images you can think of

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

#530

Post by f-securus » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:27 PM UTC

parineum wrote: post #503

oblio wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Is homelessness trending down or up? Why?