I'm working on a project that uses GPT-3 and similar stuff, even before the hype. I think the overhype is really tiring. Just like with most of these hype cycles there is an actual useful interesting technology, but the hype beasts take it way overboard and present it as if it's the holy grail or whatever. It's not. That's tiring, and really annoying. It's incredibly cool technology, it is great at certain use cases,…
Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?
351–360 of 379 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 boun…
For example, let's say you have a website that sells clothes and you want to make the site search engine better. Let's also say that a lot of work has been done to make the top 100 queries return relevant results. But the effort required to get the same relevance for the long tail of unique queries, think misspellings and unusual keywords, doesn't make sense. However you still want to provide a good search experience so you can turn to ML for that. Even if the model only has a 60% accuracy, that's still a lot better than 0% accuracy. So applying ML queries outside the top 100, should improve the overall search experience.
ChatGPT/GPT-3 has an increased the number of areas where ML can be used but it still has plenty of limitations.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?
#353I'm working on a project that uses GPT-3 and similar stuff, even before the hype. I think the overhype is really tiring. Just like with most of these hype cycles there is an actual useful interesting technology, but the hype beasts take it way overboard and present it as if it's the holy grail or whatever. It's not. That's tiring, and really annoying. It's incredibly cool technology, it is great at certain use cases,…
Which has happened before. The original semantic/heuristic AI, most notably expert systems, over-promised and ultimately under-delivered. This led directly to the so-called "AI winter" which lasted more than two decades and didn't end until quite recently. It's a very real concern, especially among people who want to push the technology forward and not just profit from it.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is such a bullshit answer. No, I don't use it daily because I tried it for a couple hours and it suggested nothing useful and several harmful. Why would I keep using it?
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Copilot is not like autocomplete. It only works in the second mode, because any nontrivial code it generates needs to be read, considered, and understood. (And any trivial code it generates can be done by autocomplete or long-existing non-AI tools.) This is especially true given LLMs' hallucinatory behavior - by definition it will often spit out something that "looks right" even if it's absolutely not - and such code is harder to review than code that looks obviously wrong.
So if you do use autocomplete in the second mode, maybe you find Copilot a super-powered version of that. And if you have the same weaknesses as Copilot, reviewing its code after it's done writing it is probably not any different than reviewing your own code after writing it, so for you it takes the same amount of time. For me, that's not the case.
When I used it, and when I see others use it, Copilot is like an impossibly overenthusiastic junior developer I will never be able to teach better habits to.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>Instead of AI making machines smarter, it seems that computers are making humans dumber. Perhaps the AI revolution is about dropping the level of average human intelligence to match the level of a computer. A mental race to the bottom? I came here to make this comment. Thank you for doing it for me. I remember feeling shocked when this article appeared in the Atlantic in 2008, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?": https:/…
> perhaps we were never as intelligent as we suspected? Yeah, I think you're right. Intelligence is just something our species has evolved as a strategy for survival. It isn't about intelligence, it's about survival. The cognitive skills needed to survive/navigate/thrive in the digital era are very different than the cognitive skills required to survive in the pre-digital era. We're biologically programmed through mi…
I forgot to add something to my original post. >>"I remember feeling shocked when this article appeared in the Atlantic in 2008..."
At the time I was shocked that the question was even being asked!
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are right, I'm playing fast and loose with some assumptions and opinions without citations. I just don't like falling into the other trap of wasting my day to write a complete paper with citations for some loosely defined internet argument on a subject that is already stacked on a pile of controversy and misunderstandings. I think I could easily find a number of citations that have conflated vocabulary, or re-def…
The point isn’t that you need citations - it’s that there is nothing to cite that can credibly inform us as to the size of the remaining gap.
Or more to the main post, a lot of head down engineers cranking out solutions do loose sight of how far they are moving.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think what the commenter is saying is that, in time, language models too will do a lot more than string words together. If it's large enough, and you train it well enough to respond to “what's the best next move in this chess position?” prompts with good moves, it will inevitably learn chess.
I don't think that follows, necessarily. Chess has an unfathomable amount of states. While the LLM might be able to play chess competently, I would not say it has learned chess unless it is able to judge the relative strength of various moves. From my understanding, an LLM will not judge future states of a chess game when responding to such a prompt. Without that ability, it's no different than someone receiving anal…
The expressiveness of language lets this be true of almost everything.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?
#358Engineers 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…
First off, I'm not sure why this is the most upvoted comment. The OP explicitly praises AI, he just smells the same grifters gathering around like they did to crypto and he's absolutely right, it is the exact same folks. He isn't claiming the mind is metaphysical or whatever. On your claim that the mind is metaphysical OR it is a NN, you have to understand that this extremely false dichotomy is quite the stretch itse…
Like maybe the hype is not misplaced. There are grifters, and there are companies with products that are basically "IF" statement, and the hype is pretty nutz.
On other hand, some of this stuff is amazing. Don't let the hype and smarmy sales people take away from the amazing advancements that are happening. Just a few years ago some of this would have been considered impossible, only possible in the province of the 'mystery of the human mind'. And yet, here we are, and what it is to be human is being chipped away more every month, and yeah a lot of people want to profit.
Or more to the my main thought, a lot of heads down engineers that are cranking out solutions, do loose sight of how far they are moving. So don't get discouraged by the hype, marketing is in every industry, so why not stay in this cool one that is doing all the amazing things.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?
#359Earlier 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?
I think this is sort of the other side of the hype, totally dismissing it is also incorrect imo. Yes, it's overhyped, but it's not useless, it actually does work quite well if you apply it to the right use cases in a correct way. In terms of accuracy, in ChatGPT the hallucination issue is quite bad, for GPT3 it's a lot less and you can reduce it even further by good prompt writing, fine tuning, and settings. Can we j…
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?
#360Machine Learning research isn't "for us." Let the researchers do what they do, and toil away in boring rooms, and eventually, like the internet slowly did, it will be all around us and will be useful.