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?

#571

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

Zambyte wrote: post #549

andsoitis wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Digital event tickets could be sold directly from the venue to the attendee without any of the hassle of TM. And venues could do that (they’re not limited to selling tickets via Ticketmaster), but then they have to maintain technical and operational expertise which is a distraction.

And there could be an OTS Free Software solution with far less operating costs than TM.

> And there could be an OTS Free Software solution with far less operating costs than TM.

Sounds like you've spotted a business opportunity!

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

#572

Post by ben_w » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:00 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…

> 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 far as I'm concerned.

Fair.

I'm definitely big on where it will be in the future (Iain M. Banks quote about Minds being the next thing to gods and on the other side), but there are a lot of grifters who are easy to spot with the following thought experiment:

If ChatGPT could actually, to use an example I've seen, "write a best selling novel", why is OpenAI selling you access to the API instead of writing all those books and selling them directly?

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

#573

Post by hinkley » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:01 PM UTC

not_alexb wrote: post #454

jjgreen wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... can be counted on my middle finger Fabulous, I'll be stealing that ...

Probably an extremely large number of companies can be counted on something as ginormous as the average human middle finger; I could probably fit 20 if I write really tiny and could fit a lot more with access to other devices.

Someday, cosmetic geneticists will offer to sell you extra middle fingers.

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

#574

Post by parineum » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:01 PM UTC

The best and most common uses of it I've found so far is finding recipes. GPT 3.5 is good at it but you generally need to find an actual recipe once you get an idea from it but GPT4 does a much better job of giving you a coherent recipe from the start (trust but verify though).

I give it some restrictions and a few preferences and ask it to suggest 20 things for me to cook. It's very helpful.

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

#575

Post by enigmurl » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:02 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #572

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 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 far as I'm concerned. Fair. I'm definitely big on where it will be in the future (Iain M. Banks quote about Minds being the next thing to gods and on the other side), but there are a lot of grifters who are easy to spot with the following thought experiment: If…

You could argue that for any service provider then. Why is Intel selling CPUs when it could be making profit from the cloud data centers themselves?

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

#576

Post by softwaredoug » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:02 PM UTC

In my experience, investors and secondarily tech execs are in the bubble. From porta-potties to snack chop manufacturers, every CEO is being asked what they’re doing about AI by their board.

The actual developers range from enthusiastic to skeptical. Actual developers take a practical perspective IMO.

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

#577

Post by gustavus » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:03 PM UTC

evrydayhustling wrote: post #309

runlaszlorun wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everywhere?? That’s exactly the hype talk that’s going to burst this bubble. Here’s tech’s dirty little secret. Despite all the screams about automation and universal basic income… the exact numbers where job replacement would show are in the labor productivity numbers. If GDP stays flat or grows while the number of jobs is reduced… bingo… you’d see that number climb. Productivity has actually stayed flat or gone dow…

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…

My thought has been that most of the IT revolution hasn't been able to produce much extra goods, its all about Information, all it can do is help us optimize existing goods producing processes. As a result much of the productivity within the Information Technology advancement, has done little in the way of actual wealth creation, apart from optimizing existing processes, which hits a limit pretty fast.

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

#578

Post by noisy_boy » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:03 PM UTC

NikolaNovak wrote: post #236

All you can get in a survey like this is anecdotes and opinions. This may be sufficient for your purposes - here's my story:-) My sister is not technically minded. She has used chatgpt to create a request for permit for a backyard deck to city Hall, a letter to her boss requesting attendance to a conference, and her performance reviews. Another non techie and I use chatgpt to help us learn French and music theory. My…

Some of us techies are also using it a tool, which is what it is, basically. E.g. I had to write a bunch of Groovy and since I don't write a lot of it all the time, I need to occasionally lookup some syntax etc. So I have the ChatGPT window open on the side and its answers, while not entirely perfect, are more than enough to keep me going at a brisk pace. No speedbreakers like having to scroll through bunch of non-sense search results and reading through answers on Stackoverflow to find what I'm looking for. 80-90% of the time, I don't even need to ask a follow-up question - the first answer is enough.

It is basically like a lubricant for my thought process.

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

#579

Post by tlogan » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:04 PM UTC

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…

It might be that you do not know what you do not know. Yes, you’ll notice some stupid cheaters, but you might not catch everything.

I can see why you believe identifying GPT-generated text is easy. This is because techniques like prompt engineering, few-shot learning, and fine-tuning aren't known and used extensively yet. For instance, with a 32k model, you could input all your previous writings and the instruct gpt to mimic your style—even down to the grammar mistakes.

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

#580

Post by MatthiasPortzel » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 5:05 PM UTC

valval wrote: post #547

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…

What would you prefer to talk about? We don’t have to make predictions and discuss their potential, or at least you don’t have to join those discussions.

A lot of these comments aren’t predictions. They’re assuming that openAI will create AGI in the next 5 years and they want to discuss the implications of that.

Personally, I think LLMs are a step forward, but I suspect that GTP-4 is close to the limit of what’s possible with LLMs. I don’t think we’re going to see AGI from the same approach.