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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?

#601

Post by mcguire »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #206
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…

>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…

I hate to point this out but as a regular user, recommendation engines and search have not gotten better in the last, say, 10 years. (Although that may not be true in terms of selling advertising and propaganda, both of which I tend not to pay a lot of attention to.)

Likewise, speech to text and language translation are more available, but they're still pretty bad. And computer vision is much better than 10 years ago, but I wouldn't bet anyone's life on it.

And yet, the hype train is still gaining momentum. Having been through more than my share of AI winters, I can feel another one coming and it's going to be bad.

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

#602

Post by eric_cc »

codegeek wrote: post #362
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…

My worry with AI is that even though it is very impressive and useful in many ways for real world applications, the Hype may end up making it another crypto. Crypto was a great promise when it was invented and one can make the argument that it could have so many real world uses but it failed to live upto that expectation and one of the reasons is that it was over hyped way too quickly and ultimately became a tool for…

> crypto.. failed

You realize it’s still here, adoption is increasing, utility is increasing, etc

Just because it’s not a hype cycle does not mean it’s dead or even close to dead.

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

#603

Post by gochi »

tlogan wrote: post #579
bigger_inside wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>you could input all your previous writings and the instruct gpt to mimic your style—even down to the grammar mistakes.

This requires having a massive amount of previous writings to input, otherwise gpt struggles actually differentiating styles enough to generate it consistently in the same way a human would. Most students do not have enough personal writing data to train from.

This also excludes other strategies, such as getting every student to write on paper in a supervised environment and using this to guide your pattern assessments of submitted electronic works. It's very difficult for people to remain consistent and implement their own style in gpt generation. You can ask the many creative writers who are trying to use gpt for stories, and how many of them have to treat generation as an extreme rough draft of plot points at best.

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

#604

Post by eric_cc »

xyzelement wrote: post #520
kmarc wrote: post #92

FWIW I have the exact opposite experience: people around me, who are _NOT_ in tech, keep talking about AI and lately especially ChatGPT, whereas serious (not only senior) IT professionals don't really. Besides the science behind it, currently it feels like the same hype as crypto a couple years before.

// currently it feels like the same hype as crypto I keep seeing this take and it doesn't make any sense to me. Some tech has obvious utility and some doesn't. For example, I knew internet (web, email) were valuable when I discovered them because accessing information and communicating with people were already things I did - the internet unequivocally made them faster and easier and often cheaper. chatGPT / bard gave…

Bitcoins user experience has taken time to evolve for the better. The real draw is that it’s immutable decentralized money with a predictable print schedule. When it reaches user experience parity with the dollar then it comes down to the true fundamentals of the currency and I suspect that bitcoin wins out.

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

#605

Post by datavirtue »

parineum wrote: post #582
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure there are plenty of ghost towns with housing sitting empty that could be had for a song too. That probably doesn’t help if your job, family, and friends are somewhere else.

And remote work is more common than ever. Regardless, Columbus, Ohio has a very reasonable cost of living for the salaries available in the region.

Shhhh...don't need any more people here.

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

#606

Post by horsawlarway »

tlogan wrote: post #579
bigger_inside wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This was my take.

I think absolutely anyone claiming that detecting LLM generated text is easy is flat out lying to themselves, or has only spent a few tokens and very little time playing with it.

Take semi-decent output, give it a single proof read and a few edits... and I don't fucking believe anyone who says they'll detect it. They absolutely will detect some of the most egregious examples of it, but assuming that's all of it is near willfully naive at this point.

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

#607

Post by CyberDildonics »

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.

Lets see it and lets see the prompts you used.

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

#608

Post by mannykannot »

mikhmha wrote: post #330
mannykannot wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing wrong about the specific objection but, to borrow an analogy from Scott Aaronson, it is rather like dismissing the Wrights’ early airplanes as being slower than a train and only carrying one passenger. What is missing is an appreciation for how intractable the problem seemed five years before.

Can we stop making analogies like this. It’s so bizarre. The circumstances around each invention are completely different. To always reference the conditions of some past technology is to be stuck in this bizarre form of thinking. A few days ago some poster tried to compare denying LLM’s to being a naysayer in Gallileos time. Is this all we can do? Make references to past events and fail to evaluate the present prope…

Of course every case of anything is different in detail. On the other hand, identifying patterns is often useful in understanding human reactions to change. Do you disagree with this, or do you think there is something special about inventions?

My analysis here is that the young person in question appeared to focus only on current utility. You have not yet explained why you say it is a failed analysis of why that response may seem surprising.

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

#609

Post by alpaca128 »

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.

> You are living in fantasy land if you think we will be writing lines of code in 10 years.

I was with you until that sentence. No, LLMs will not write all our code and the reason is very simple: coding is easier than reviewing code. Not to mention the additional complexities and weirdness that we've always dealt with without even thinking about it.

We can see in Photoshop what's coming for developers: context-sensitive AI autocompletion and gap filling. Copilot but more mature and integrated, perhaps with additional checks that prevent some bugs being inserted. And troubleshooting, the area where I think we can profit the most.

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