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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?

#81

Post by demarq »

Same experience, talked to a young, highly educated person about ChatGPT… they had no clue what I was going on about.

But the more surprising thing is that even after I explained what it could do, they weren’t even slightly impressed. “So it tells you wrong answers? Sounds utterly pointless”

I was flabbergasted. I think we do live in a bubble. I’m sure architects and surgeons have equally exciting advances in their fields that no one else cares about.

I also think the medias sensationalist phrases should be taken with a pinch of salt: “The tech everyone is talking about”, “here’s the news that got everyone buzzing. etc

I do think LLM are a significant event, but that will only be realised by building on top of it and “showing rather than telling”.

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

#82

Post by PurpleRamen »

Define tech. AI-awareness is not limited to software-developers and tech-nerds. Anyone who has some software/internet-awarness and follows the news or social gossip, knows about them, or even uses them. So I'd say the echo chamber is more about your general mindset and social bubble.

> maybe AI mainstream adoption will take longer than we anticipate.

Everything always takes long than we anticipate. And it's not like AI today is the holy grail yet. It's still slow, expensive, with too many errors, and we are just less than a year in the real hype. Legal systems are busy with working out the corners and acceptance. We are still in the exploring-phase, and this can go on for several years. There will be significant changes in the next years, but the big bang is still upon us, and until then it will a locally fast, but globally average slow change.

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

#83

Post by captainbland »

solardev wrote: post #51
sp332 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can it replace 90% of your Googling if you have to go check everything it tells you afterward?

It's not like Googling typically gives you truthful answers either.

The difference to me is that with search you can explicitly search only in trusted sources (with e.g. site:...) if you choose to and you get transparency about where the data is coming from.

New Bing is a slight improvement in that you get some transparency about where it's getting information from and can tell it to prioritise accuracy, but can't actually explicitly tell it to use a subset of the web that you personally trust.

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

#84

Post by camillomiller »

Yizahi wrote: post #74

All professions who need to write a lot of bullshit text are adopting NNs. So basically any advertisements, corporate news and emails etc. And parsing and responses to such ads or corpoletters, if they are required. Another area to be taken over - translations and language learning. Half a year ago my teacher had been suggesting different resources for different issues, like this online translator for this task, that…

Bullshit text is the right definition. ChatGPT can replace writers only in the head of those who’ve never actually written, don’t understand what writing actually is, and don’t care about a skillset that is not just summed up by being able to spit out coherent sentences. In my view, companies who fire their writers or believe that chatGPT can take their place already will experience a very harsh reckoning in the medium term.

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

#86

Post by kieckerjan »

demarq wrote: post #81

Same experience, talked to a young, highly educated person about ChatGPT… they had no clue what I was going on about. But the more surprising thing is that even after I explained what it could do, they weren’t even slightly impressed. “So it tells you wrong answers? Sounds utterly pointless” I was flabbergasted. I think we do live in a bubble. I’m sure architects and surgeons have equally exciting advances in their f…

Same here. My girlfriend is not impressed by GPT and its ilk at all. But I guess that for a non-technical person most things digital are a form of magic, and it is probably hard to tell the difference between the common magic of (say) a game on her phone and the heavy voodoo of an LLM.

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

#88

Post by hashhar »

samuellevy wrote: post #65
InvertedRhodium wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your opinion, how does the "hallucination" issue differ from the same behaviour we see in humans? I don't claim or believe that any LLM is actually intelligent. It just seems that we (at least on an individual basis) can also meet the criteria outlined above. I know plenty of people who are confidently incorrect and appear unwilling to learn or accept their own limitations, myself included. In my opinion, even if…

So humans have a level of knowledge, understanding, and reasoning ability that LLMs simply don't have. I'm writing a response to you right now, and I "know" a certain amount of information about the world. That knowledge has limits, and I can expand it, I can forget it, all sorts of things... "Hallucination" is a term that works well for actual intelligence - when you "know" something that isn't true, and has no path…

What you're describing is very close to what the thought experiment of Chinese Room (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room).

But yes, it's unfortunate that when the next tokens are joined token and laid out in the form of a sentence it appears "intelligent" to people. However if you instead lay out the individual probabilities of each token instead then it'll be more obvious what ChatGPT/LLMs actually do.

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

#89

Post by azangru »

demarq wrote: post #81

Same experience, talked to a young, highly educated person about ChatGPT… they had no clue what I was going on about. But the more surprising thing is that even after I explained what it could do, they weren’t even slightly impressed. “So it tells you wrong answers? Sounds utterly pointless” I was flabbergasted. I think we do live in a bubble. I’m sure architects and surgeons have equally exciting advances in their f…

> “So it tells you wrong answers? Sounds utterly pointless”. I was flabbergasted.

Could you tell a bit more about why this objection surprised you so much? I am often seeing this in the same tech circles that rejected the web3 craze; and I have to confess, it does sound reasonable to me. There is a recent PR opened in the MDN docs repository after MDN added the "AI explain" button, pointing out how utterly useless a AI guide is if it gives you incorrect answers and you do not have enough knowledge to catch it [0].

[0] - https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9208

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