Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber? • Hacker News Board

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

#691

Post by ouraf » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 10:55 PM UTC

Not really. Mainstream media publishes something about AI at least once a week. It might not have adoption in the everyday life, just like most tools are known, but only fully explored by their niche.

There's a lot of overhype, A LOT. And many startups are reinventing the wheel in a more expensive way just to ride the wave, but unlike crypto, LLMs are tools that can solve more "dev/user" level problems, unlike crypto, that was supposed to solve a "global financial system" problem, and since that's too hard to grasp, people used it as investments, because it's closer to their real lives and needs.

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

#692

Post by JohnFen » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 10:59 PM UTC

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.

I think that people who are fine with buying crappy products don't care about crappy translations.

Others, however, do care. I, for one, will pass on something that has bad translation because I take that as a proxy for the quality of the product overall.

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

#693

Post by adriand » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:28 PM UTC

adregan wrote: post #619

adriand wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another explanation that I find persuasive, put forward by Ezra Klein, is that productivity-sapping uses of technology grew along with the productivity-boosting ones: social media, for example, is a powerful mechanism for distracting people and destroying their attention spans. If this is a good explanation, it begs the question of what AI might do to destroy productivity as well. If you’re constantly sexting with yo…

> put forward by Ezra Klein The explanation sounds pretty familiar, so I might have already read/heard this from Klein, but would you mind sharing a link?

I believe he has mentioned it more than once, but one podcast that includes that discussion IIRC, and many other AI-related topics, is the April 7 episode “Why A.I. Might Not Take Your Job or Supercharge the Economy”. If you’re on iOS:

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id...

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

#694

Post by fwungy » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 11:37 PM UTC

andsoitis wrote: post #591

fwungy wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>make agreement with company in developing world >how do we get the payment?

> a) accept their local currency? where? what then? what will it be worth by the time we exchange it? > b) take btc. transaction registers publicly on the blockchain. smart contracts can execute if desired, e.g. when payment x is received to address y initiate a sequence that starts delivery. currency risk is now in btc and that can be instantly mitigated by converting to your chosen currency, as the btc market is liquid. > c) require counterparty to pay in your currency, which means they pay exchange fees, increasing their costs.

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

#695

Post by steve_adams_86 » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 12:00 AM UTC

ftxbro wrote: post #56

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see any evidence that it’s there yet. I do see that potential if AI were to improve dramatically, but I think we’re tricking ourselves into thinking it’s already here because what we’re seeing is so compelling. The reality as far as I can tell is that we still have an incredible distance to go to have anything comparable to unlocking spoken or written language.

I guess it's your right to believe that as long as you want, the evidence is that it's beating people at every exam like AP exams and GRE exams and bar exams and medical certification exams and not only like regurgitating facts but it's also superhuman level in theory of mind. And all that comes from just an architecture that reads every text and uses a lot of GPU power.

I think these things are amazing, but I don’t think they’re comprehensively intelligent nor do I think we can easily reproduce this spark in other domains of intelligence.

When we can, we will be creating something superhuman in the truest sense. What we have now isn’t that at all. I think it appears magical because we’re so enthralled by language. It’s a major interface into our world and we’re extremely stimulated by it. It conveys so much meaning to us with so little. In fact, when it conveys too little meaning we begin to search for it and fill in the gaps! Our brains are extremely eager to engage with language.

I’m excited about this stuff, but what the models are doing isn’t as incredible as all of that seems.

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

#696

Post by nelox » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 12:31 AM UTC

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 see a lot of people praising it as the next coming of Christ (this thread included)

We're still waiting ...

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

#697

Post by anotherman554 » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 1:06 AM UTC

throwaway675309 wrote: post #681

anotherman554 wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

You're missing the point. The writing is not what's being critiqued here. If we were grading this purely from a prosaic perspective, GPT would easily fly under the radar. The issue is the substance of the generated content - devoid of even the most minimal novelty.

You are confused. In an undergraduate English literature class a student is not expected to come up with a novel interpretation of a well known book in order to pass.

Depending on the assignment you aren't necessarily expected to read anyone else's take on a book and you aren't expected to make sure you are saying something that hasn't been said before or anything like that.

You are simply expected to analyze the book and offer an interpretation.

And it's not like that's the only way to use the AI. With a few minutes of effort, I just got CHATGPT to write an essay using "post-colonial theory" to interpret the Wizard of Oz, which was pretty interesting.

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

#698

Post by Falkon1313 » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 1:13 AM UTC

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #626

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…

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 tran…

Those are all traditional jobs though.

Driving, picking/packing, animal care, doing laundry - Absolutely nothing you mention is in any way some new 21st century job that didn't exist before. They're all just normal traditional jobs.

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

#699

Post by Falkon1313 » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 1:19 AM UTC

parineum wrote: post #584

f-securus wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is homelessness trending down or up? Why?

It's easier than ever to be homeless and it's generally frowned upon to forcefully institutionalize the mentally ill these days.

Wish I'd known that it was difficult to become homeless back when I was. It seemed really easy at the time, all you had to do was get evicted. Not sure how it could be easier now.

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

#700

Post by Falkon1313 » Tue, Jul 04, 2023, 1:24 AM UTC

jstarfish wrote: post #624

hosh wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

>The question is how much insanity we're willing to tolerate as a result.

Given our elected representatives, I don't think that's a problem. No offense to any party or person. But we've consistently proven that we can tolerate and welcome way more insanity than seems reasonable.