Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#251

Post by QuadmasterXLII » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 2:04 PM UTC

carlosjobim wrote: post #226

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #103

Engineers are always building things that are incredible, then turning their back on it as ordinary once the problem is solved, “oh that’s so normal, it was just a little math, a little tweak, no big deal”. AI has gone through a lot of stages of “only X can be done by a human”-> “X is done by AI” -> “oh, that’s just some engineering, that’s not really human” or “no longer in the category of mystical things we can’t e…

> The human is computation also, unless you believe in souls or other worldly mysticism. I think it is incredibly sad that a person can be reduced to believing humans don't have souls. Do something different with yourself so you can discover the miracle of life. If you don't believe there is anything more to people and to the world than mechanical processes, I would challenge you to do a powerful spiritual activity.

What is a powerful spiritual activity you’d recommend?

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#252

Post by codeptualize » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 2:04 PM UTC

NobleLie wrote: post #165

chx wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPT-3 it's good at generative writing made up bullshit > summarization except you can't possibly know the output has any relation whatsoever to the text being summarized > information search and extraction except you can't possibly know the output has any relation whatsoever to the information being extracted people still fall for this crap?

Agreed. Been testing out responses to parsing complex genomics papers (say, a methodology section describing parameters of some algorithm) and its mostly rephrasing rather than digesting and responding with useful information / interpretation. And it will use so many words and imbue so little to the conversation, yet appear like it's helping because ... words.

> complex genomics papers

I think it's fair to say this is not one of the use cases where it shines. It's not great at logic, it's also not that smart.

That's exactly what the hype does. Too big claims and then it gets dismissed when it inevitably doesn't live up to the hype.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#253

Post by cardosof » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 2:05 PM UTC

I understand the sentiment, but I'm trying actively to get away from all the hype and focus on the capabilities it has today. It's being useful for a bunch of people, there are some threads on it such as: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34589001

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#254

Post by brookst » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 2:05 PM UTC

maweaver wrote: post #223

brookst wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest thing I’ve learned from chatGPT is that real people struggle with the difference between intelligence, understanding, and consciousness / sentience.

Which should be no surprise, as people have been grappling with these ideas for centuries, and we still don't have any definitive idea of what consciousness/sentience truly is. What I find interesting is that at one point the Turing test seemed to be the gold standard for intelligence, but chatGPT could pass that with flying colors. So how exactly will we know if/when true intelligence does emerge?

Well, my point wasn’t that there is a good definition of consciousness.

My point was that “consciousness” and “intelligence” are very different things. One does not imply the other.

Consciousness is about self reflection. Intelligence is about insight and/or problem solving. The two are often correlated, especially in animals, especially in humans, but they’re not the same thing at all.

“Is chatgpt consciousness” is a totally different question than “is chatgpt intelligent”.

We will know chatgpt is intelligent when it passes our tests of intelligence, which are imperfect but at least directionally correct.

I have no idea if/when we we know whether chatgpt is conscious, because we don’t really have good definitions of consciousness, let along tests, as you note.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#255

Post by HarHarVeryFunny » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 2:06 PM UTC

NobleLie wrote: post #159

BulgarianIdiot wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“It’s just statistics” is an evergreen way to dismiss AI. The problem is you’re also just statistics.

Source for consciousness / intelligence to be "statistics"? I don't think there is any because there is no functional model for what organic intelligence is or how it operates. There are plethora of fascinating attempts / models but only a subset implore that it is solely "statistical". And even if it was statistical, the implementation of the wet system is absolutely not like a gigantic list of vectorized (stripped…

That's like saying that airplanes aren't flying since they're not flapping their wings. Intelligence is a capability - not a specific mechanism.

Consciousness is a subjective experience (regardless of what you believe/understand to be responsible for that experience), so discussing "consciousness/intelligence" is rather like discussing "cabbages/automobiles".

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#256

Post by tyfon » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 2:06 PM UTC

While I agree the name AI is pretentious, I personally and professionally embrace the technology.

Personally I enjoy creating language models and agent networks, at work I make predictive models so.. :)

Even if I didn't find the tech fascinating and especially the new emergent features of the big LMs, I would be left in the dust professionally if I ignored it. The tech really works for a lot of stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#257

Post by alach11 » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 2:07 PM UTC

I’m not. I’ve been using OpenAI’s API a lot for work and it’s made tasks easy that would previously have been very challenging. Some examples:

- Embedding free text data on safety observations, clustering them together, using text completion to automatically label the clusters, and identifying trends

- Embedding free text data on equipment failures. Some of our equipment failures have been classified manually by humans into various categories. I use the embeddings to train a model to predict those categories for uncategorized failures.

- Analyzing employee development goals and locating common themes. Then using this to identify where there are gaps we can fill in training offerings.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#258

Post by blueblob » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 2:07 PM UTC

sfpotter wrote: post #248

blueblob wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people I know that like it use artificial and the people that won't try it use fake.

Fascinating. Not all people are the same. Who’d have thought?

Definitely. Quirks like this are also what makes AI difficult.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#259

Post by rxhernandez » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 2:07 PM UTC

billythemaniam wrote: post #232

rxhernandez wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak to the rest of what you wrote because I couldn't be further from the field of civil engineering but if you feel impressed with it on chess, ask it to play game of tic tac toe; for me it didn't seem to understand the very simple rules or even keep track of my position on the grid. There are so few permutations in tac tac toe that it's lack of memory and lack of ability to understand extremely simple rule…

Let's talk about what ChatGPT (or fine-tuned GPT-3) actually is and what it is not. It is a zero-shot or few-shot model that is pretty good at a variety of NLP tasks. Playing tic tac toe or chess is not a traditional NLP task so shouldn't expect it to be good at that. But board games can be completely played in a text format so it is not unexpected either that it can kinda play a board game. If GPT-3 was listed on Hu…

That's a core problem with this. If people with expertise can't even tell us clear boundaries of its truth, how is anyone else going to come to rely on this for that purpose. I mean, you could say you defined a fuzzy boundary and I shouldn't trend towards that boundary from the wrong direction (re: text games that use different tokens than the ones it was trained on) but, how will I know if I'm too close to this boundary when I'm trending from a direction of doing things it's supposed to be good at?

It can't play tic tac toe, fine. But I know it gets concepts wrong on things I'm good at. I've seen it generate a lot of sentences that are correct on their own, but when you combine them to form a bigger picture, it paints something fundamentally different than what's going on.

Moreover, I've had terrible results with it as something to generate creative writing; to the extent that it's on par with a lazy secondary school student that only knows a rudimentary outline of what they're writing about. For example, I asked it to generate a debate between Chomsky and Trump and it gives me a basic debate format around a vague outline of their beliefs where they argue respectfully and blandly (both of which Trump is not known for).

It's entirely possible I haven't exercised it enough and that it requires more than the hours I put into it or it just doesn't work for anything I find interesting.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

#260

Post by zetalyrae » Thu, Feb 09, 2023, 2:07 PM UTC

Every time I read people dismissing AI for the same tired old reasons, I am reminded of this line from the Psalms: “the Lord knows the thoughts of men, that they are vanity”.

The only thing we can definitely do better than machines is sad, proud sophistry. “Not real understanding, not real intelligence, just a stochastic parrot”. Sure, keep telling yourself that.