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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?

#551

Post by SoftTalker »

voidfunc wrote: post #312
perrygeo wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. My friends in other white-collar-ish jobs, which require lots of writing, are smitten with ChatGPT and think it's amazing. Friends in tech are largely dismissive/critical of it's abilities while being skeptical/fearful of its impact. My take is that, for most non-tech people, this is their first experience directing a computer to perform a precise task - ie programming. They're accustomed to using applications,…

This reason makes sense, but that's insanely powerful (and valuable) if it ends up working out. It basically democratizes programming.

Except the essential difficulty with programming is not typing the code or even understanding the syntax and idioms of a particular language.

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

#552

Post by ben_w »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #538
kolinko wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDP is not productivity. If I manage to produce/sell a hundred gizmos for $1 each, displacing my competition who were producing/selling 50 gizmos for a price of $5 each, I just halvened gdp produced even though both me and people using the gizmo are more productive than before.

But your customers now have money to spend on something else. The money didn’t disappear.

I think precisely the point is that money isn't wealth.

Government can print as much of the latter as they want; wealth goes up when we can collectively buy more and down when we can collectively buy less, regardless of how many dollarpounds that is.

But GDP is measured in money, and can only connect to wealth if we get get inflation right, but that's really hard because inflation depends on what you want to buy — childcare costs don't matter if you have no kids of that age.

That said, I trust the domain experts to get this right, even though the various governments may be incentivised to claim their own preferred numbers. Even at worst, they'll have thought of vastly more influences than I can even imagine.

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

#553

Post by parineum »

joshstrange wrote: post #508
justsocrateasin wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

There are good teachers and bad teachers. LLMs are at best, bad teachers.

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

#554

Post by 23B1 »

smt88 wrote: post #489
23B1 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 underst…

Note my use of scare quotes around 'hallucinate'

The user of an LLM still gets a vote, right or wrong. If we have a good understanding of how the human mind works - empathy - we can gain a better understanding on how to clarify the very semantic confusion of which you speak!

Here's another example that just popped up in my feed: https://kottke.org/23/07/will-ai-change-our-memories

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

#555

Post by Zambyte »

cromulent wrote: post #223
Zambyte wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People love to claim that NFTs can only be used for signed pictures of gorillas, but imo they are probably one of the most interesting utilities on a blockchain. Have you ever tried to buy a ticket through ticket master? It's not a wonderful experience. Digital event tickets could be sold directly from the venue to the attendee without any of the hassle of TM. Tickets that are non-fungible (ie an assigned seat at an…

Sure, but is there any reason this cannot happen without NFTs? I have bought assigned seat tickets online direct from venues without TM nor NFTs, worked fine. I have also bought tickets to exhibitions (no seats nor assigned time) direct from venues online without TM nor NFTs, worked fine. Seems that the only problem is TM and you won't make them go way with NFTs.

> Sure, but is there any reason this cannot happen without NFTs?

There is no fundamental difference if you swap the TM brand for another. By using an NFT-based solution, the middleman can be cut out entirely, while maintaining feature parity, and without introducing extra burden on venues. An OTS Free Software application can expose the same functionality to venues without needing to maintain any infrastructure, and without dealing with TM.

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

#556

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

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…

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

#557

Post by SoftTalker »

perrygeo wrote: post #426
ozim wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not see a way where you can tell AI “make me a crud app for storing database of my post stamp collection” and it executes that. It is quite a stretch to say that lay people can effortlessly write application only with AI whatever it is copilot or chatgpt. You still have to know a lot of things to build simple crud to store data about stamp collection. LLMs are not changing that.

LLMs are not changing that, yet. But well over a decade ago, we had high-level frameworks for translating "models" into all the gritty details of a crud app. Model description goes in. API endpoints, database migrations, admin UI, all auto-generated. I even developed something like it based on Django 0.96 (now abandoned). It's not a stretch of the imagination to generate your model.py with model.txt containing the pr…

Do you know any real professional software developers who actually use these modeling tools of their own volition and not because some manager fell for a golf-and-steak-dinner sales pitch from the vendor?

My experience with every one of them is that getting the model to the point where it will generate something useful is more work than just writing the useful part myself.

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

#558

Post by amanaplanacanal »

pksebben wrote: post #416
janoc wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that actually anyone wants? Google and Amazon have tried to sell theirs for a long time. And none were actually selling much. Amazon admitted to be selling theirs at a loss. Facebook has tried their own - and quickly cancelled them. Google's is in every Android device - and yet pretty much nobody uses them. Even Apple's Siri is more annoyance than help. That something can be built doesn't mean it will sell or tha…

> Hoping for one of these with an open API that anyone could integrate whatever they want with, I am not holding my breath here. OpenAI is already on it. The latest gen of GPT-3 and -4 are finetuned to respond to "do this thing" commands with JSON structured to: - provide the name of a given function call - provide arguments to that function call it's "early stage", which in this case probably means "good enough to b…

Early stage might mean good enough to use in a month or two or it might mean “full self driving this year”. There isn’t any way to tell until it happens.

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

#559

Post by Zambyte »

edgyquant wrote: post #347
Zambyte wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People love to claim that NFTs can only be used for signed pictures of gorillas, but imo they are probably one of the most interesting utilities on a blockchain. Have you ever tried to buy a ticket through ticket master? It's not a wonderful experience. Digital event tickets could be sold directly from the venue to the attendee without any of the hassle of TM. Tickets that are non-fungible (ie an assigned seat at an…

Things like ticket master exist to solve the problem of every venue having to take care of ticket sales as well. This is again a feature out of touch people treat as a bug to fix.

That's exactly what an NFT-based ticket system would do also.

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

#560

Post by parineum »

bondarchuk wrote: post #425
nerdbert wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that people could explain how you could make an airplane faster and larger. Nobody can explain how you can make an LLM understand what it's saying.

A lot depends on the definition of "understand" you want to use. According to some definitions there is already some kind of understanding going on in the current generation of LLMs, according to others true understanding requires a soul in the Christian sense and thus it is unattainable an LLM, and of course there is a spectrum of opinions in-between.

If you want to limit your range of opinions to credible domain experts speaking scientifically, the range goes from "definitely not" to "maybe a little if you have a very loose definition".
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