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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?

#591

Post by andsoitis »

fwungy wrote: post #539
andsoitis wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a de-dollarizing world btc is a genuine factor. In practice, dedollarisarion has been about shifting to other major national currencies, like the yuan. Bitcoin doesn’t really feature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedollarisation

It doesn't need to handle much to be a large market because international trade and foreign exchange are so huge. If btc replaces 1% of fx it's doing $50B/day of transactions. Market cap of btc is only about $600M, so 100x btc is not crazy. Is a p2p transaction system with an auditable record attractive to 1% of fx transaction parties? Seems reasonable, especially when corrupt states are a counterparty.

> especially when corrupt states are a counterparty

how does the integrity of your counterparty to a transaction affect the currency or medium of exchange you agree to?

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

#592

Post by mullingitover »

scarface_74 wrote: post #583
mullingitover wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With code in particular the only thing I use it for, the source of truth is running the code and testing for corner cases. I usually know what the right answer is. It can just get to it faster. I may not know always know the correct API or CloudFormation/CDK/Terraform syntax. But if it gets it wrong, I can read the docs and correct it. Providing sources doesn’t usually help. ChatGPT consistently makes up sources.

Vanilla ChatGPT can hallucinate sources, but with the web browsing plugin in Plus it'll produce real links. Bard and Bing AI browse and produce accurate links right out of the box.

Certainly with code the proof is in the pudding, but most recently my problem was "I need to create AWS monitors in Datadog to alert when a region is down." ChatGPT was hopeless but bard was able to point me to the exact doc explaining how to set it up.

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

#593

Post by oxfordmale »

chrischattin wrote: post #429
andsoitis wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I bought a car with Bitcoin while the banks were closed on the weekend. > There are tons of legitimate use cases. However, most of them aren’t immediately apparent to affluent people in the United States as it solves problems most of them don’t have. Are you implying that you cannot buy a car on a weekend in the US? If you Google, you’ll see that not only can you buy a car on the weekend, but there are articles fro…

Good luck effecting a wire transfer outside of banking hours.

This might be more indicative of poor US banking systems than anything else. I can initiate a wire transfer on my phone pretty much anytime of day.

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

#594

Post by eric_cc »

packetlost wrote: post #358
DebtDeflation wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>puts it in a similar tier as crypto Comparisons between AI and crypto are horribly misguided IMO. Is AI overhyped? Sure. However - AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day. Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency…

> speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision You know very well that that's not what GP is referring to. Speech to text, natural language translation, recommendation, and computer vision are all very useful things, but also were very much real and in consumer hands long before the current hype cycle. Generative AIs are in their hype cycle. IMO the tech i…

Bitcoin still has the potential to become the worlds reserve currency. That’s pretty legit.

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

#595

Post by two_in_one »

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?

> having a hard time buying a house

It's also much harder to get servants in that house. I wonder why...

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

#596

Post by olalonde »

rossdavidh wrote: post #298

In the late 90's I got a Master's degree, specializing in neural networks. This caused me to learn about the hype cycle in AI, and since then I have seen it continue. Remember Watson, IBM's AI technology that was going to drive its growth? IBM got lots of press by making computers that could play chess and Jeopardy, which seemed impressive to people at the time, but they never found a way to make money from it. "AI w…

It's funny you say that because ChatGPT knows how to play chess although it wasn't explicitly trained for that[0]. The "if it can do this, soon it will be able to do that" is actually becoming real.

[0] https://villekuosmanen.medium.com/i-played-chess-against-cha...

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

#597

Post by eric_cc »

zirgs wrote: post #307
BowBun wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not necessarily arguing that they're the same, but let's be honest with ourselves - crypto said the _same_ things as it was ramping up. Just replace all the applications of AI you listed with the many hypothetical use-cases crypto-pushers were listing out. As always, sounds cool. Actually do some of it and then let's talk more.

Crypto pushers pushed two contradictory messages: 1. hodl, don't sell, don't spend! 2. Try to replace fiat with crypto in your life! No wonder that its adoption for legal purposes didn't go anywhere.

Its adoption is growing every day. Read up on bitcoin lightning network growth.

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

#598

Post by alpaca128 »

rvz wrote: post #472
aenis wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to point out that humans, too, are not trustworthy in high risk situations. For this we have procedures, deterministic automation and so on. I like to think of capable LLMs as pf gifted interns. I can expect decent results if I explain well enough, but I need processes around them to make sure they are doing what they are told. In my industry thats enough to produce a noticeable productivity gain, and likely…

> I'd like to point out that humans, too, are not trustworthy in high risk situations. For this we have procedures, deterministic automation and so on. Except humans can transparently explain themselves and someone can be held to account when something goes wrong. Humans have the ability to have differing opinions and approaches to solve unseen problems. An AI however cannot explain itself transparently and just reso…

> Except humans can transparently explain themselves and someone can be held to account when something goes wrong

Except humans are excellent at finding excuses to avoid explaining themselves and being held to account, or to justify some misguided belief based on whatever output they have been "trained on" in their past.

People often seem to apply standards to AI in terms of rationality and reliability which even many humans cannot achieve, using terms like "hallucination" when we've seen humans do the exact same by confidently talking about things they know nothing about. Everyone laughed at Bing insisting on a wrong date to avoid admitting it's wrong about the Avatar 2 release, when that's very typical behaviour of humans in certain situations.

I'm not trying to make LLMs seem better than they are, but parts of its weaknesses are not surprising given the training data.

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

#599

Post by two_in_one »

gustavus wrote: post #577
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…

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.

> IT revolution hasn't been able to produce much extra goods

Measuring "Goods" in units or tons is bit simplistic. Almost everything is much better that it was 15-20 years back. TV, cars, phones, computers. This difference probably should be counted as 'extra', shouldn't it?

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

#600

Post by eric_cc »

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.

“Proper monetary policy”

Want to elaborate? Bitcoins monetary policy is beautiful in its simplicity and predictability. In that sense, it stands in stark contrast to fiat.

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