Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 755 posts

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

#641

Post by joeframbach »

anotherman554 wrote: post #638
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…

This isn't true and it's odd you believe it. I just asked Chat GPT 4 to explain the religious significance of the Wizard of Oz as a literary critic. Here's some of what it gave me, it doesn't write anything like you claim it does: "Moreover, Dorothy's companions -- the Scarecrow seeking a brain (wisdom), the Tin Man seeking a heart (love/compassion), and the Lion seeking courage (strength) -- symbolize spiritual virt…

Genuinely curious - what religions are being described here? It doesn't match my limited understanding of any religions I'm familiar with.

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

#642

Post by nostrademons »

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…

The thing is that the specific technologies behind all of those very practical improvements are not what's being hyped up this bubble. Speech recognition, for example, usually involves a lot of audio preprocessing, followed by some form of RNN/LSTM/Transformer to generate candidates, followed by beam search to score and choose from candidates.

If you are a machine-learning practitioner, you should be familiar with all of those techniques and how they are used so that you can solve practical problems with them. But if you just read about AI in the news and figure you're going to found the next great startup and make a billion off it, you'll probably start by feeding a whole bunch of data into Tensorflow and then getting useless garbage out of it.

This hype bubble is specifically about LLMs, extremely large-parameter transformers that are trained on all the data OpenAI or Google can get their hands on. And then supposedly if you ask them the right questions, you will get useful answers back. For people that put in the time and experimentation to actually find the right questions and the right applications, that will probably be true - but the hype is that this will change everything, and it most certainly will not, just in the same way that beam search is frequently useful but it definitely does not change everything.

But slick promoters will nevertheless manage to use people's lack of knowledge to redirect billions of dollars in capital into their and their employees' pockets, the same way that slick promoters used crypto to redirect billions of dollars in capital into their and their employees' pockets.

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

#643

Post by codegeek »

eric_cc wrote: post #602
codegeek wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"adoption is increasing, utility is increasing"

Genuinely curious. Where ? Remember it's been 15 years already. Few anecdotal examples are not good enough.

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

#644

Post by formulatwo »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #542
formulatwo wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there have been so many hyped up stuff in the tech world that it's trained a lot of people to point at everything and call it part of the hype cycle. But this causes people to literally fail to notice that there are many things in tech that Aren't just hype. I mean literally think about it, the internet wasn't just hype, the smart phone wasn't just hype. There's millions of things that weren't just hype. >I h…

Science went from something where you needed to have a physical library of journals into something much easier, where scientists the world over can now parse these repositories online. This massive increase in efficiency did not result in fewer scientists, it resulted in a lot more scientists as it became easier for more people to do research thanks to the internet.

Farming went from something where you manually had to plant stuff and take care of crops to where now a machine handles volumes of work. In feudal society, basically almost everyone farmed, not few people do.

So you gave me an example where technology caused the employment of more people. I gave you an example of where technology caused the employment of less people. Does either example have anything to do with what chatGPT will do to employment? Likely not.

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

#645

Post by ben_w »

ben_w wrote: post #567
afavour wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

(headline, not headlock; and now too late to edit)

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

#646

Post by bbor »

JW_00000 wrote: post #271
rvense wrote: post #68

On October 17th, 1979, VisiCalc was released. I'm sure pretty much every accountant in the world got up and went to work that day exactly like they'd been doing all of their career. It probably didn't feel different for that many of them. Most of them had probably never used a computer then, and a lot of them probably didn't feel any particular need to, at least until they tried it. There were probably more than a fe…

Agreed. On my Twitter timeline lots of people are saying "the world will be completely different in 6-12 months' time". On October 17th, 1980, most accountants' work day still looked the same as a year before. It took decades for spreadsheets to get widespread adoption. I think LLMs are revolutionary, but the (r)evolution will take decades to materialize. Our work days will look completely different... in 2043.

Throwing out the hot take (for HN) that computer intuition is about to be a much stronger destabilizing force than spreadsheets were. And that’s really where change comes from, IMO - the status quo showing cracks

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

#647

Post by hollandheese »

anotherman554 wrote: post #638
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…

This isn't true and it's odd you believe it. I just asked Chat GPT 4 to explain the religious significance of the Wizard of Oz as a literary critic. Here's some of what it gave me, it doesn't write anything like you claim it does: "Moreover, Dorothy's companions -- the Scarecrow seeking a brain (wisdom), the Tin Man seeking a heart (love/compassion), and the Lion seeking courage (strength) -- symbolize spiritual virt…

That sounds like a bad 8th grader's essay, just pure bullcrap. These ideas would get an F in any English 101 course.

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

#648

Post by hunter2_ »

tome wrote: post #524
zirgs wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But by hodling fiat long term - you are just losing money. Real interest rates are typically positive, so no, you are not.

The concept of hodling fiat could mean cash under the mattress or could mean an interest-bearing account. It's ambiguous.

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

#649

Post by vGPU »

My mom, who is so non-techy that she needs me to walk her through plugging in an Ethernet cable, uses Chatgpt to help her respond to emails and to write advertising descriptions for stuff she’s selling.

She uses AI more than me, who’s hunting for deals on gpu’s to train my own DRL model.

I was honestly shocked when I found out. I had figured that it was a tech echo chamber too.

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

#650

Post by vGPU »

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…

I don’t know about actually writing papers, but I’ve had surprisingly good results having chatgpt rewrite things for me.
Post reply on HN