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?

#561

Post by mullingitover » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:52 PM UTC

Roark66 wrote: post #452

scarface_74 wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use ChatGPT to help me quickly write simple AWS SDK based helper scripts. I’ve also recently been involved in designing a DevOps /Docker deployment pipeline for a customer. They use Java and I haven’t used Java in decades. Before I would have just done my POC using a Python or Node container and rely on the fact that they knew Java well enough to get the concepts. But I used Java and started the chain of questions…

Watch out, I'm doing devops too and I've caught chatgpt on such obviously stupid behaviors it hurts to even think about it. It's not just hallucinations problem (edge cases or doing unusual stuff). It seems to give answers that are 100% incorrect and when told so says "of course you're right, here is the right answer". The only stuff I'd use it for is if I already know exactly how to write the script and I'm just usi…

My trick is to get second and third opinions - sometimes ChatGPT gets it wrong, but bard is right, or 3.5 is right when 4 is wrong. So I just copy the same question to all available chatbots and compare. Asking them to provide sources for the answers is also a good way to keep them honest.

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

#562

Post by mattkrause » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:53 PM UTC

plutonorm wrote: post #379

MatthiasPortzel wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a perfect example of an AI-hype comment. You’re treating it as a fact that LLM are going to replace existing products, at some unknown future date. “In 5 years, all code will be written by AI” “In 5 years, LLM will replace Siri and Alexa” “In 5 years, AI will replace [sector of jobs]” The thing that frustrates me about these statements is that you don’t know what AI technology is going to look like in 5 years…

GPT4 just wrote a python script for me that downloaded a star catalogue, created a fish eye camera model, and then calculated the position of the camera relative to the stars by back propagating the camera position and camera parameters to match the star positions. All I did was hold it's hand, it wrote every line of code. You are living in fantasy land if you think we will be writing lines of code in 10 years.

Do you know if it works?

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

#563

Post by carlosjobim » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:53 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #514

carlosjobim wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction Do you understand what a massive impact that has been? It has disrupted one of the largest industries on the planet, which is drug trafficking.

So what fraction of all drugs are now paid for with cryptocurrency at retail? Over 50%? 25%? Presumably you must know the figure, if you're asserting the industry has been disrupted.

You are at liberty to believe what pleases you the most. If you're interested in finding the truth, you'll have to first understand that drug markets are underground, which means you will not find any verified accounting. The UN estimated [1] in 2020 the size of the darknet drug trade to about $315 million per year or at most $725 million per year - which is nothing compared to the overall drug trade, but disruptive for certain categories of drugs that are easily sent by mail.

People are buying drugs on the darknet, who would never buy it on the streets or want to be associated with regular drug users.

[1] https://www.unodc.org/res/wdr2021/field/WDR21_Booklet_2.pdf

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

#564

Post by carlosjobim » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:54 PM UTC

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #240

carlosjobim wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction Do you understand what a massive impact that has been? It has disrupted one of the largest industries on the planet, which is drug trafficking.

Did it disrupt the whole industry? Only the payment part of it, no?

With crypto people can buy drugs anonymously. You couldn't do that before.

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

#565

Post by parineum » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:54 PM UTC

welshwelsh wrote: post #319

rsynnott wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I’d be inclined to agree with your friend here, to an extent. A machine for confidently being wrong has rather limited practical applications.

I was just about to comment something similar to this: "Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a 60 minutes interview, 'one Google AI program adapted on its own after it was prompted in the language of Bangladesh, which it was not trained to know'. This is obviously wrong, so does that mean Pichai was hallucinating?" At the last second I fact-checked myself, and found that it actually wasn't Pichai who said that. Crazy how…

You just described exactly why you're vastly superior to an LLM. You identified a possible knowledge gap and looked for more data to fill it in.

I don't think it's impossible for an LLM to do that but they currently don't.

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

#566

Post by jdlyga » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:55 PM UTC

It's a bit different, since we're early adopters. The average person hasn't spent dozens of hours with GPT-4 yet, and doesn't realize how useful it is to everyday life.

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

#567

Post by ben_w » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:56 PM UTC

afavour wrote: post #496

adriand wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm sure I've seen a headlock that someone connected their screen reader to GPT and it totally could do that kind of thing…

No idea how well, so I assume "badly"; but the API is already there.

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

#568

Post by alpaca128 » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:56 PM UTC

bobthepanda wrote: post #415

DonHopkins wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you live in a monolinguistic bubble, or speak every language fluently, but when is the last time you hired a human being to translate a language you don't understand instead of using AI like Google Translate? AI is already so ubiquitous and useful that you blindly take it for granted without even thinking.

Most companies will at least hire a human to check translation work, or at least contract one. Bad translations are something that can quickly destroy a brand in a market, and translation tools are not so fine grained to take into account dialect. Spanish, for example, has many examples of words that are innocuous in one dialect and profane in another.

> Bad translations are something that can quickly destroy a brand in a market

Bad translations are present in product names & descriptions of at least 70% of all products on Amazon and Ebay I've seen, and it doesn't look like it hurts the business in any way.

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

#569

Post by st-angel » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:57 PM UTC

retendo wrote: post #457

healthyusa wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-4 writes 100% of my code now. Staring at a monitor, hunched over, tapping on a keyboard? Stone ages. That’s not 5 years from now. That’s today.

Can you elaborate what your process is? Some context would be nice as well. Like, what kind of language, what kind of project? I'm genuinely interested.

Pretty sure they're joking

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

#570

Post by parineum » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 4:57 PM UTC

kieckerjan wrote: post #86

demarq wrote: post #81

Same experience, talked to a young, highly educated person about ChatGPT… they had no clue what I was going on about. But the more surprising thing is that even after I explained what it could do, they weren’t even slightly impressed. “So it tells you wrong answers? Sounds utterly pointless” I was flabbergasted. I think we do live in a bubble. I’m sure architects and surgeons have equally exciting advances in their f…

Same here. My girlfriend is not impressed by GPT and its ilk at all. But I guess that for a non-technical person most things digital are a form of magic, and it is probably hard to tell the difference between the common magic of (say) a game on her phone and the heavy voodoo of an LLM.

I think the better perspective is that LLMs give that magic feel to technologists that aren't really used to it. It certainly did for me until I learned much more about them and used them a bunch. Now it just feels like a tool I can ask to help me build a docker container so I don't have to read docs.