I work for a Fortune 100 company. Recently an email was sent to all 100,000 employees saying that nobody was allowed to use DALL-E 2, ChatGPT, Codex, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Microsoft’s Copilot, and GitHub Copilot, etc. due to concerns about those tools using other people’s IP (meaning our company might end up illegally using their IP) or the potential that the tools might get a hold of our IP through our use of the tools and share it with others. I kind of wondered at the time how many non-tech employees read the email and had no idea what it was talking about.
Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
91–100 of 755 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#92FWIW I have the exact opposite experience: people around me, who are _NOT_ in tech, keep talking about AI and lately especially ChatGPT, whereas serious (not only senior) IT professionals don't really.
Besides the science behind it, currently it feels like the same hype as crypto a couple years before.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#93I spoke to my 70-year-old step-aunt about this yesterday for exactly this reason. She's a self-employed piano teacher with zero technical interest or knowledge, but a generally astute and clued-up kind of person.
She said she's heard a lot about it, but it all sounds like marketing hype, tabloid sensationalism, or open alarmism from people who don't seem to know what they're talking about.
She said some of her students had used ChatGPT for creating revision materials for their exams, and that they'd found it useful for that, but she found the assertion that mass unemployment is 6-12 months away 'pure speculation'.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have yet to see someone apply ChatGPT or other LLM in this way and not regret it or ditch it later. Honestly i'm more worried about the ones who will use it this way and assume it's always correct. It is too often incorrect for anything I've ever done with it.
> i'm more worried about the ones who will use it this way and assume it's always correct There are plenty of folks who don't fall into this trap. Example: Me. I am fully aware that LLM generated code can be wrong or worse, contain disastrous errors. But being aware of that, and looking for the things I know from experience it commonly gets wrong, allows me to use it as an incredibly powerful tool in my workflow.
I guess it’s a matter of taste, I’d find that fucking horrible.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#95A few months ago I heard some mention of ChatGPT on some standard afternoon radio, so I dont think we're in an echo chamber. I think we probably hear about it far more than others but that should be obvious, I'm aware of things outside this industry but almost certainly nowhere near the same awareness as those who work in the industry.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yep, the "chinese room" is the classic thought experiment, but I feel like it fails to get the point across because the characters still represent language, so you could conceivably "learn" the language. I prefer the idea of symbols that aren't inherently language, as it really nails in the idea that it doesn't matter how long you spend, there's not something that you can ever learn to "speak" fluently.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#97There are 8 billion people on this planet. No matter how big or well known anything is, the people who know or care about it is a small fraction of the population. I’m not sure that’s what “echo chamber” is intended to represent.
People are unavoidably ignorant of vast swathes of “probably relevant to them” things. No one has time, inclination, or actual ability to keep up with it all. That reinforces the above but I am again doubtful that it is an “echo chamber” per se.
Hacker News regulars, especially those engaged with comments, are operating within an echo chamber, sure.
Outside of a couple of 70+ folks and some bikers, everyone I know is at least conversationally aware of recent “AI” developments so it’s most likely a function of your particular uselessly small sample size. :)
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#98There's definitely a few echo chambers around AI, but it's definitely not something that "just techies" are onto. ChatGPT made some waves at the end of last year. My in-laws were wanting to talk to (at) me about it at Christmas. There's plenty of awareness outside of the tech circles, but most of the discussion (both out and in of the tech world) seems to miss what LLMs actually _are_. The reason why ChatGPT was impr…
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…
> how does the "hallucination" issue differ from the same behaviour we see in humans?
In humans “hallucination” means observing false inputs. In GTP it means creating false outputs.
Completely different with massively different connotations.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#99Based on the recently released round 3 of Hotz and Fridman - YES!
I kept think that the entire conversation sounded like two vocal transcription bots reading through r/AI and HN with a sprinkling of Twitter.
Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?
#100There's definitely a few echo chambers around AI, but it's definitely not something that "just techies" are onto. ChatGPT made some waves at the end of last year. My in-laws were wanting to talk to (at) me about it at Christmas. There's plenty of awareness outside of the tech circles, but most of the discussion (both out and in of the tech world) seems to miss what LLMs actually _are_. The reason why ChatGPT was impr…
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…
> In your opinion, how does the "hallucination" issue differ from the same behaviour we see in humans?
I feel like if you have any belief in philosophy then LLMs can only be interpreted as a parlour trick (on steroids). Perhaps we are fanciful in believing we are something greater than LLMs but there is the idea that we respond using rhetoric based on trying to find reason within in what we have learned and observed. From my primitive understanding, LLMs rhetoric and reasoning is entirely implied based on an effectively (compared to the limitations of human capacity to store information) infinite amount of knowledge they've consumed.
I think if LLMs were equivalent to human thinking then we'd all be a hell of a lot stupider, given our lack of "infinite" knowledge compared to LLMs.