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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?

#651

Post by vGPU »

hollandheese wrote: post #647
anotherman554 wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you exaggerate. I’ve turned in worse in English 104 and gotten an A. Quality goes out the window when you have 75 minutes and a 12 page paper to write.

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

#652

Post by vGPU »

tootie wrote: post #491
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…

I likened ChatGPT's style to an 8th grade honors student. It has consistently solid grammar and diction but it's incredibly bland and incapable of insight. I think it's value for writing with clarity is excellent but it's worthless at coming up with ideas.

A simple prompt to “rewrite, but more engaging” will work wonders.

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

#653

Post by hinkley »

jjgreen wrote: post #631
hinkley wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Robotic extra thumbs available now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKSCmkCE5og

It takes more muscles to frown than to smile, but it takes more parts to make a thumbs up than to flip someone off.

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

#654

Post by anotherman554 »

joeframbach wrote: post #641
anotherman554 wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't ask GPT to describe any particular religion. My prompt was

"As a literary critic, describe how Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz is a religious figure."

The divine being contained within I would think would match Buddhism pretty well.

The reference to relics is too vague to pin down to any religion, there's probably lots of examples of it in lots of religions. If I had to defend it off the top if my head I'd compare the Ruby slippers to the "holy moly" herb Athena gives Odysseus to defend him from Circe.

If anything I think GPT went wrong saying strength is one of the virtues associated with the Lion. It would be much easier to focus on courage and say he needs to learn to be like a brave apostle who says things like "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me:"

My point wasn't that this essay was particularly good, necessarily, only that it was was good enough for undergraduate work.

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

#655

Post by hmrtn »

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…

What an asinine thing to say and it exhibits your lack of willingness or ability or willingness to understand both AI and cryptocurrency.

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

#656

Post by rsynnott »

P_I_Staker wrote: post #630
rsynnott wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

10-20 years as a prediction in tech, though, generally means "shrug who knows maybe never". Historically, predictions that far ahead are virtually useless.

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

#657

Post by RibbetRick »

p-e-w wrote: post #42
jpgvm wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. AI -might- kill us if there is some quantum leap that makes it sentient. Climate change -will- kill us if we do nothing. For now one is simply not like the other, it may change but there is no guarantee we every breach that barrier.

> Climate change -will- kill us if we do nothing. Horseshit. There is not a single scientific model that predicts human extinction from climate change. Parts of humanity, yes. All of humanity, no chance. There a plenty of models that predict human extinction from AGI.

These idiots will believe anything if you put “climate change” in front of it…

“Let’s block out the sun, it will be good for global warming” says the billionaire as plants and animals freeze and die. WE NEED THE SUN THEY ARE TRYING TO KILL US OFF. Duh if this is not self evident then you are already dead.

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

#658

Post by Tainnor »

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.

that's all stuff that would be impressive for a single human to be able to produce instantly (because nobody remembers all these APIs), but that's still formulaic enough that it's not hard to imagine why ChatGPT succeeds at it

but will ChatGPT help you debug and fix a production issue that came about due to a Kafka misconfiguration? will it be able to find the deadlock in your code that is causing requests to be dropped? will it suggest a path forward when you need to replace an obscure library that hasn't been updated in 5 years? will it be able to make sense of seemingly contradictory business requirements?

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

#659

Post by anotherman554 »

hollandheese wrote: post #647
anotherman554 wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd say it would be good enough to pass an undergraduate class if it was expanded. Did you ever teach a class? I have not but as I understand it you'll have some students that aren't so good at writing, and some that are good. You don't want to discourage the weaker students from growing by giving them F's.

This isn't a field like engineering where there are objective right and wrong answers and anyone dies if you pass the students who are not so great at writing essays on literature.

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

#660

Post by notahacker »

alpaca128 wrote: post #568
bobthepanda wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most companies will at least hire a human to check translation work, or at least contract one. Bad translations are something that can quickly destroy a brand in a market, and translation tools are not so fine grained to take into account dialect. Spanish, for example, has many examples of words that are innocuous in one dialect and profane in another.

> Bad translations are something that can quickly destroy a brand in a market Bad translations are present in product names & descriptions of at least 70% of all products on Amazon and Ebay I've seen, and it doesn't look like it hurts the business in any way.

Have you seen their sales revenues?

Big difference between "buy this $5 plastic crap widget despite its product description being barely coherent because there's only so many seconds you're willing to spare searching for 'Plastic Crap Widget' because Familiar Tech Company's algorithm puts CBSPOO ahead of VRIENGLU in this particuar search parameter combo" and "hello professionals in niche market. You will recognise the name of our product whenever you next have $xx,xxx to spend on these services, because we were the one whose ad was inadvertently extremely sexist"

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