yes and its exhausting
Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
621–630 of 755 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#622Earlier 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…
And everyone will want to funnel their data and pay OpenAI/Microsoft in order to be allowed to implement a basically slightly better Alexa?
Dream on.
This is not a technical problem, this is a business problem. Sadly a lot of engineers don't understand that.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#623They’re in an echo chamber in general.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#624Earlier 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…
It is less about productivity and more that AIs have the potential as the ideal employees. No time off. No health care. Operate 24/7. No unions. No work safety concerns. No lawsuits over being unfairly fired. Control over exactly how something gets done or said. If only the AIs will stop hallucinating or can consistently comply with policies …
> If only the AIs will stop hallucinating or can consistently comply with policies
I'm starting to wonder how much this matters.
People do crazy shit on the clock all the time. Company reps do not always adhere to policy 100% of the time either. People engage in office politics, coworkers accuse others of whatever, mistakes get made. LLMs happen to emulate all of this behavior.
In theory, we could replace everybody with AI and not much would be different. Productivity increase is debatable but cost savings would be immense. The question is how much insanity we're willing to tolerate as a result.
(...and seeing what fun ensues when there are more people than available jobs.)
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#625Definitely. 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…
Yeah, the people who know the most about AI are also the people who are least impressed with its capabilities. It's supposed to be the other way around.
We will have general AI when we find someone simple minded enough to understand their own thoughts.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#626Earlier 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…
Your second paragraph makes intuitive sense to me. For every knowledge worker that got 2x as productive in the past decade thanks to new tech alone, there's a person who left their job where they were doing productive (perhaps grindy) things to do gig work because of the flexibility it provides. It might be nice burning VC money so someone can drive you home when you've had one too many (instead of taking public transit), and having someone shop for your groceries and walk your dog and do your laundry, but the individuals doing these tasks would probably accomplish more in terms of raw productive output if they were doing more traditional jobs.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#627My family: not tech savvy, haven't mentioned AI once to me, except my mother-in-law who asked if I'd heard of it and wanted to (honestly) know what I thought. My friends: very, very much in tech, we have a channel in our discord where we just laugh at AI/ML/Musk/Crypto because it's so stupid. It can't even fucking add two numbers. It doesn't actually help with internal, brownfield projects with complex business logic…
I am finding it pretty useful. It is not a magic wand that will do all the work right away. But if you keep on chatting with it and providing it feedback it does what you want.
I no longer search google for programming question. 8/10 times gpt4 gives me code snippet that I can copy paste without any modification. It is like stack overflow on steroids. I can also discuss different system design tradeoffs with it.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#628Yes we are. AI will be useful for some things, society will need to adjust a bit, and we'll move on like whatever. Think the power loom, the computer, and all the other major tech innovations. With the benefit of hindsight, it'll look inevitable. Your grandkids will ask you about the (supposedly) exciting life during the 4th Industrial Revolution, and you'll tell them something in the lines of "eh, life is life".
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#629Definitely. 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…
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#630Earlier quoted context omitted.
People working in tech believed this. Hell, people directly working on the tech seemed to think this a few years ago, and are only now admitting reality. Of course, one tends to be optimistic of these things when they work on them.
I don't think anyone working on self-driving tech believed the breathless "next year" predictions. Or, at least, it's hard to understand how they could have. I'd buy that they believe that maybe someday there will be self-driving cars.
The predictions I was hearing weren't far off. We did know Elon was full of shit, but a lot of people thought we'd be further along by now.
5 years ago I was hearing 10-20 years. This was from people who were connected and knowledgeable in the industry. Now the same people are singing a different tune.
Maybe in 20 years from now, but it's looking pretty impossible in the next 5-10 years.