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What it feels like to work in AI right now

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Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#11

Huge crypto vibes Every single person I know working in AI these days ... has been sparked by the ChatGPT moment.

Popular things = crypto ? I’d say the differentiator is that in addition to hype scammers, you have people like Stephen Wolfram excited.

The absolutely-not-hype-susceptible man who has been claiming for the past 20 years to have produced a fundamental theory of everything based on his research into finite-state automata?

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#12
I work on a research team in FAANG. What it really feels like is one company made everyone else obsolete. And we are going to work working on NLP models that underperform ChatGPT by a huge margin. Twiddling my thumbs and keeping quiet while no one wants to recognize the elephant in the room.

Also, there is no "working in AI", a few thousand people are doing real AI at most. The rest of us are calling an API.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#13

Huge crypto vibes Every single person I know working in AI these days ... has been sparked by the ChatGPT moment.

I see what you mean; but as external observer to both, I see crypto as having failed to provide or prove any particularly productive use; and chatGPT, for all its flaws, has been useful to me daily for last 2 months - and not in some crazy make-money-in-suspicious-ways sense, but like learning french and python and figuring out new concepts and stuff. But that's sample n=1 I suppose, there are both people that believ…

It's like an improved search engine that sometimes invents plausible results.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#15
post #8

Huge crypto vibes Every single person I know working in AI these days ... has been sparked by the ChatGPT moment.

Pretty much, you can take any article hyping up AI/ChatGPT/etc and replace those words with crypto stuff and it's virtually indistinguishable from the crypto spam of yesteryear. I wonder what the next "get rich quick" techbro fad will be.

Replace crypto with cloud

replace cloud with big data

replace big data with web scale

It's all just a hype and crash cycle

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#16
Probably not the right place to post this, but I really want someone to build a ChatGPT service that reviews consumer EULAs and highlights the important stuff, and can tell me what changes with them each time I have to reaccept or get notified. It's a subset of making legalese digestible, but bringing more visibility into the density of them would be wondrous.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#17
I think this depends a lot on where you are working.

I've talked to academics who are getting discouraged that they don't see how their approach to AI is going to be possible any more, with so much funding going toward the largest models from industry. On the other hand I've talked to startup founders building AI products whose business is booming because ChatGPT brought so much attention to the entire space.

We are certainly living in interesting times ;-)

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#18
post #8

Huge crypto vibes Every single person I know working in AI these days ... has been sparked by the ChatGPT moment.

Pretty much, you can take any article hyping up AI/ChatGPT/etc and replace those words with crypto stuff and it's virtually indistinguishable from the crypto spam of yesteryear. I wonder what the next "get rich quick" techbro fad will be.

Honestly, it's different. ChatGPT is a consumer product that is used by end-users, with low barrier to entry. The "Bitcoin as the new money for regular people" moment never came.

With crypto, my 70+ Korean mother in law asked me how she could make money with it. With ChatGPT, she's using it daily.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#19

Probably not the right place to post this, but I really want someone to build a ChatGPT service that reviews consumer EULAs and highlights the important stuff, and can tell me what changes with them each time I have to reaccept or get notified. It's a subset of making legalese digestible, but bringing more visibility into the density of them would be wondrous.

Would you expect them to take legal liability? If not, would you still pay for it? If not, how would it make money?

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#20

I work on a research team in FAANG. What it really feels like is one company made everyone else obsolete. And we are going to work working on NLP models that underperform ChatGPT by a huge margin. Twiddling my thumbs and keeping quiet while no one wants to recognize the elephant in the room. Also, there is no "working in AI", a few thousand people are doing real AI at most. The rest of us are calling an API.

This reminds me of back in the mid 2000's, there were a lot of smart people working on search algorithms at different companies. But eventually, you'd talk to someone smart working on Yahoo Search, and they would just be kind of beaten down by the frustration of working on a competing search engine when Google was considered to be by far the best. It got harder for them to recruit, and eventually they just gave up.

So... I don't know where you're working. But don't twiddle your thumbs for too long! It's no fun to be in the last half of people to leave the sinking ship.

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