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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?

#741

Post by pksebben »

janoc wrote: post #622
pksebben wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Oh, I think you've misunderstood me. Business problems are someone else's gig - I have no intention in making this a product or making money off it. It's for me.

The thing is, I've managed to get this working as an interface for a whole segment of stuff that was a pain in the ass before. My task list is all in one place for the first time, and it talks! With words! I have a pair programmer, who is excited to do stuff, on the command line, 24/7. They also have encyclopedic knowledge of anything that isn't a super deep cut, so I can move through more spaces and find solutions that I never would have dreamed of due to the cognitive load of sifting through textbooks and documentation just to create a [ insert more or less anything here].

If you're looking at the folks here who are getting excited and wondering "What's up with *them*?, this is it. It's not about the Next Big Thing so much as it's about "Holy shit, computers are magic again". For themselves.

Of course, I can speak for some of us. For sure, the hungry lets-make-a-startup folks exist and are currently working on doing that - and that's fine. But to me that's boring. Commerce and markets and economies are toxic to creativity. I've tried Bing-with-GPT and it's AWFUL compared to GPT-4, despite being sorta the same underlying thing.

I'm perfectly happy paying OpenAI to use the thing they built, for myself, for now. I am seriously looking forward to migrating to locally run models, once we get there (and we will).

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

#742

Post by pksebben »

aarong11 wrote: post #732
pksebben wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Just before the point they built this, I was already chaining queries together to do this. I built a plugin system with bits of JS code that are eval'd and arguments injected. They couldn't have released this at a better time, I have about 30 plugins and i'd say it manages to get the right one about 90% of the time as opposed to about 70 with my hacked together version (but I guess I wrote it and know what to say so…

I've found that GPT really like "google style" python documentation. You need to have a chunk of system prompt explain that it should be 'using the tools according to their documentation etc etc', but once you've dialed that in a little stuff like this works a charm (the docstring is what the LLM sees):

@Tool

def add_todo(title, project=None) -> str:

    """
    Add a new TODO.

    Args:
        title (str): A brief description of the task
        project (str, optional): A project to add the todo to, if requested
    """

    logger.debug(f"Adding task: {title}")
    task = Task(tw, description=title, project=project)
    task.save()
    return f"Added [ {title} ] to the { project + ' ' if project else '' }TODO list."

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

#743

Post by kazinator »

MatthiasPortzel wrote: post #308
blitz_skull wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This—100%. The AI revolution with LLMs is creating a new type of interface with computers—the AI interface. Will it kill us all? Eh, probably not. Will it completely change human civilization forever? Eh... maybe not? (But also maybe). But what it already has begun to do, and will continue to do is change the way we interact with computers. The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and…

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…

LLM is obviously useful for something like Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant, or so you would think.

There doesn't seem to be a rush because it makes the implementation a lot more expensive, and those things are, I suspect, not profitable products (revenue sources) to their respective companies. They are a kind of enhancement to a layer of products and services; people take them for granted now and so you can't take them away.

A smarter Google Assistant would do nothing for Google's bottom line, and in fact it would cost more money to operate.

If it's not done right, it could ruin the experience. For instance, it cannot have worse latency on common queries than the old assistant.

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

#744

Post by eterevsky »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #739
eterevsky wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit curious. I was supposing that all the hedge funds should have incorporated LLMs in their models by now, since it should give them such a huge advantage. Is it not so?

I don't think there is a basis for this reasoning LLMs don't know what's right automagically, a model fine tuned by a hedge fund is definitely better than just an LLM's hallucinating something

Of course I mean LLMs fine-tuned by the hedge funds, not something off-the-shelf. My reasoning is that sentiment analysis and similar techniques have been used for a while, and LLMs raise them to the next level, so they are bound to be beneficial.

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

#746

Post by blitz_skull »

MatthiasPortzel wrote: post #308
blitz_skull wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This—100%. The AI revolution with LLMs is creating a new type of interface with computers—the AI interface. Will it kill us all? Eh, probably not. Will it completely change human civilization forever? Eh... maybe not? (But also maybe). But what it already has begun to do, and will continue to do is change the way we interact with computers. The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and…

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…

I do know, for a fact, that having a more capable and powerful voice assistant than, the already fairly capable, Siri, will be a game-changer (for me at a bare minimum, but I’m not that special so I think it’s safe to extrapolate that to more people).

That’s a fact.

I also know that voice-interfaces to date have been incredibly stiff and there is ample room for improvement. I know, for a fact, that having AI enable better voice interfaces will make computing better and more accessible. I have a hard time understanding how those are hype-driven comments and/or opinions.

We do know these things for a fact. Not being able to articulate exactly which breakthroughs will be most important doesn’t make it hype.

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

#748

Post by rossdavidh »

olalonde wrote: post #596
rossdavidh wrote: post #298

In the late 90's I got a Master's degree, specializing in neural networks. This caused me to learn about the hype cycle in AI, and since then I have seen it continue. Remember Watson, IBM's AI technology that was going to drive its growth? IBM got lots of press by making computers that could play chess and Jeopardy, which seemed impressive to people at the time, but they never found a way to make money from it. "AI w…

It's funny you say that because ChatGPT knows how to play chess although it wasn't explicitly trained for that[0]. The "if it can do this, soon it will be able to do that" is actually becoming real. [0] https://villekuosmanen.medium.com/i-played-chess-against-cha...

The AI that I was referring to, that played chess, was a predecessor to ChatGPT. I believe it was called Deep Blue.

By the way, ChatGPT, as of May of this year at least, cannot play tic-tac-toe, but it thinks it knows how: https://www.aiweirdness.com/optimum-tic-tac-toe/

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

#749

Post by rvba »

eric_cc wrote: post #675
notahacker wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comically low transaction rate, obscenely high power consumption, extreme concentration of BTC holdings in the hands of a small number of people (and companies who have very little influence of global politics), arbitrary growth rate and cap with no correspondence to economic growth, extreme volatility , inconsequentially small use for legal trade, but above all the complete and utter disinterest in it as a reserve c…

Easy to prove every point you’ve dropped here wrong. But your TL/DR is: you don’t like bitcoin.

Please proove it, since it is so easy.

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

#750

Post by rvba »

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.

Dont know how it works in USA but the schools I knew wanted you to write down no novelties or thought of your own, you were supposed to repeat the 'accepted' interpretation of a book. You were graded for memorizing or recognizing the themes that you were supposed to mention.

Also big chance to get a C or a D when you came up with a "novel" approach that the shitty and boring book is actually shitty and boring.

Hell no school was there to stop making your own interpetations different than the official one.

Damn, even on the fucking retarded drawing lesseons (where probably half of stuff was drawn by parents) the teachers would deduct points for any individual style.

I was thinking of getting an MBA, but does it even get any better for "adults"? Arent you just tought to repeat some schematics, which often are bullshit.

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