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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?

#701

Post by justinclift »

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…

So, you're pretty much saying:

    AI is just like crypto, but better!
Not sure that's reaaaaaaaaaally going to bring people around.

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

#702

Post by schwartzworld »

pophenat wrote: post #157
laurent123456 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hype, maybe, but it's obviously not a passing fad like crypto was. Back then many people were trying to figure out what to do with it and we still don't really know. A week after ChatGPT was out and plenty of people were already using it for writing code, emails, and plenty of other tasks. It would be weird to argue that AI is not going to have a massive impact at many levels.

Why obviously? It might as well be a passing fad, and all those uses oof ChatGPT might turn out to be a temporary amusement rather than real and lasting improvement of people's workflows. It's interesting how something comes out, and then all of a sudden so many people are immediately absolutely certain that it will have a massive impact at many levels, even before we've seen any meaningful ROI. To me it is a bit abs…

I don't think it's a passing fad, but the legitimate and lasting use cases are lost among the hype and bullshit.

There WILL be job losses but it's not going to be the kind of people who hang out on HN. I can't think of any reason why you wouldn't have an AI taking orders at the drive through, handling customer service calls / tech support, etc. Any job that consists mostly of having the same simple, repetitive conversations is going to eventually be cheaper to have a computer do.

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

#703

Post by 29_29 »

imdsm wrote: post #124
29_29 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friends I know who previously worked on crypto side projects are suddenly LLM experts.

With exception to the term experts, which I imagine is a term you've applied, I don't think there's anything inherently bad with people changing their focus to the latest tech. Could this perhaps be a you issue? How do you feel when you think about people changing from microservice architecture to blockchain to crypto and now to language models?

It could be a me issue. Or Crypto could be down?

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

#704

Post by protocolture »

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…

AI will end up as Clippy 2.0 just as Crypto ended up as an overly secure payment processing platform.

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

#705

Post by Slartie »

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 not exactly the complexity of typical software that must solve an actual, difficult, business problem.

Wake me up when ChatGPT is able to write and maintain a POS system, or an online store with attached fulfillment management. Anything that goes beyond a fancy 100-line script. Anything that people actually hire teams of senior devs, business analysts and software architects for.

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

#706

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

tim333 wrote: post #636
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dunno. Geoffrey Hinton's impressed. My mum's not interested. (Hinton https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6Sgp7y178k ) Wikipedia on Hinton: >Hinton received the 2018 Turing Award (often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing"), together with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, for their work on deep learning. They are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI" and "Godfathers of Deep Learning" Is there anyone at the…

By "impressed" I mean the guys perpetuating the hype cycle and itching to be "disrupted".

The story of 2023 is the CEO or another C-level boss rushing to their ML team and excitedly telling them to scrap all their plans because they need to integrate ChatGPT AI "yesterday", while the ML team roll their eyes and laugh behind his back.

I'm sure it happened to you too.

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

#707

Post by namaria »

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 parted ways with a team last year because I couldn't take the over complicated, jumble mess of "micro service" they were pushing. Redemption by pipeline and all that. A c-suite started gushing about ChatGPT by late 2022 and that was a red flag to me. A few months after I left they launched an "AI product". I looked into it. It was just a wrapper around OpenAI API. Lol. Glad I left.

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

#708

Post by stareatgoats »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #684
stareatgoats wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. I've been scratching my head about the belittlement in tech circles of the phenomenal breakthrough that chatGPT and other LLMs represents. I think it boils down to a conflation of a few different factors: 1. Our jobs are obviously (soon) replaceable or at least massively impacted - just like all the jobs we ourselves have replaced previously. We don't like that and throw stones at it to make it go away.…

I agree with all of these; not necessarily in order of importance, but yet, these are factors. I am at once astonished how useful LLM can be at its best, and how horrifyingly dangerous it can be if/when overused by those who don't understand its limitations.

You are very balanced :-) . Of course, there is valid criticisms of the hype and the way LLMs are, and will be, used but my annoyance at what I perceive as ignorant, self-interested and progress-hostile attitudes from my own industry sometimes gets the better of me.

When the dust settles, and the consensus concludes the obvious namely that: "yes, this thing actually does possess intelligence and knowledge, on an unprecedented level with vastly greater future potential" then maybe we can concentrate on steering education and professions into directions that will make the tech controllable and even more useful, and avoid the real pitfalls and dangers that lie ahead.

As long as we're stuck on the understanding that this is "just a hallucinating, stochastic parrot" and everything else is pure hype then we're not getting the right things done I'm afraid.

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

#709

Post by oblio »

scarface_74 wrote: post #662
oblio wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do those distinct lifestyles" match with rising inequality and people having a hard time buying a house or paying rent?

As far as I know, neither the rate of homelessness has gone up nor homeownership has gone down over the past decade.

The first one wouldn't cover rents increasing but people paying them, albeit struggling.

The second one is a lagging indicator. If lots of people bought their homes when they were cheap and are still alive, it will take time for the real impact to be visible.

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

#710

Post by oblio »

two_in_one wrote: post #595
oblio wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do those distinct lifestyles" match with rising inequality and people having a hard time buying a house or paying rent?

> having a hard time buying a house It's also much harder to get servants in that house. I wonder why...

I don't understand your comment.
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