Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What it feels like to work in AI right now

robotic.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 768 posts

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

#231

Post by danenania »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #183
cgearhart wrote: post #152

From my perspective it’s just _confusing_ to work in AI right now. We have some massive models that are doing some really neat stuff, and apparently hundreds of millions of people are using them—but I keep wondering: to do _what_, exactly? I’m not asking what the models can do, I’m asking what people want the models to do every day, all the time. I’ve been shown some neat pictures people made that they thought were c…

>I’ve seen “write a snippet of code” demos. I've used this part of ChatGPT before. Incredibly useful for getting the syntax of some library that you're going to use once in your life, then never again. Had a sysadmin mate do something similar to generate a simple Chrome plugin for internal use at his work. That alone justifies the price for ChatGPT Plus, IMO.

Agreed. It’s also great for things like “zip up all the files in this folder, upload the zip file to s3, and output a progress bar while uploading”. It’s not difficult in an architectural or algorithmic sense, but it takes time to refresh on the APIs, find a progress bar library, and how do presigned s3 posts work again? And you can make little mistakes, forget error handling, etc. You could easily spend an hour or more on something like this, especially if you haven’t done it before in x language.

With ChatGPT it takes a few minutes. It can add up quite dramatically when you have a bunch of these kinds of tasks on the todo list. It does feel revolutionary to me as a productivity enhancer.

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

#232

Post by maxilevi »

MVissers wrote: post #198
maxilevi wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming everything else stays static. Maybe if this happens, the ability to do everything in as half as much time will increase competition in a lot of areas bringing prices down and increasing your purchasing power.

That’s not what’s happening in the US. Too much concentration of wealth (not just tech), leading to almost 3rd world country health outcomes, education levels plummeting and unaffordability to live. Will backfire at one point if it continues.

I would argue that is caused by regulatory capture and government interference (e.g. zoning laws) and not technological progress

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

#233

Post by unit_circle »

cgearhart wrote: post #152

From my perspective it’s just _confusing_ to work in AI right now. We have some massive models that are doing some really neat stuff, and apparently hundreds of millions of people are using them—but I keep wondering: to do _what_, exactly? I’m not asking what the models can do, I’m asking what people want the models to do every day, all the time. I’ve been shown some neat pictures people made that they thought were c…

- Amazing translations (this alone is a game changer)

- Language learning... The ability to improvise realistic conversations is huge. I can ask to talk about cooking a specific dish or a sport!

- As others have noted, refining documents similar to grammarly

- Looking for a product with extremely specific features (though it isn't very good at comparing yet)

- Searches that are too vague and complicated to articulate to a search engine or use exact matching ...

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

#234

Post by cgearhart »

joe_the_user wrote: post #213
cgearhart wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm…no, I’m not doubting the value of the interface. I’m asking what’s the “killer app”. Maybe I should just ask ChatGPT to explain it to me…

It seems like the use of ChatGPT is something like "microtasks". Little things a given person could do but would rather not and so is able to delegate to an automatic thing whose output they can verify. It seems like it's potential as of today is increasing or seeming to increase the productivity of a segment of white collar workers in the fashion that email and the web did (or might not have). A lot of researchers m…

Thanks for your comment, I think this is actually very helpful framing! It at least gives me something more tangible to think about—“micro tasks”.

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

#235

Post by terpimost »

cgearhart wrote: post #152

From my perspective it’s just _confusing_ to work in AI right now. We have some massive models that are doing some really neat stuff, and apparently hundreds of millions of people are using them—but I keep wondering: to do _what_, exactly? I’m not asking what the models can do, I’m asking what people want the models to do every day, all the time. I’ve been shown some neat pictures people made that they thought were c…

We are going to have almost on the fly translation of video and audio. We are going to understand and write code faster. Knowledge management will change so instead of being partly a tool which searches the web we will get human readable responses. Language model is about to improve language related things for us, how killer it could be?

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

#236

Post by maxilevi »

TheMode wrote: post #179
maxilevi wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if people are paying for the product then they value it more than the money right? Tech might bring more inequality, but what is the problem with it if it substantially increases everyones standard of living?

I do not believe that standard of living should be compared in a vacuum. Since I assume that this is what you are referring to, I am firmly convinced that happiness is relative. What this means is that improving the standard of living of the average person by 5% while improving it by 50% for a smaller population will hurt more than it helps.

Why would it hurt?

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

#237

Post by JBiserkov »

burlesona wrote: post #222
cgearhart wrote: post #152

From my perspective it’s just _confusing_ to work in AI right now. We have some massive models that are doing some really neat stuff, and apparently hundreds of millions of people are using them—but I keep wondering: to do _what_, exactly? I’m not asking what the models can do, I’m asking what people want the models to do every day, all the time. I’ve been shown some neat pictures people made that they thought were c…

I don’t think you’re missing anything. I like the “calculator for words” analogy that was posted on HN a few days ago. It doesn’t seem like a revolutionary product, but it does seem like a fundamental innovation which will then unlock many more complex things in subtle ways. Calculators were arguably the predecessor to computers, which are kind of a big deal :)

> Calculators were arguably the predecessor to computers, which are kind of a big deal :)

"A computer is a machine that moves data around and only occasionally performs computation on it." ;-)

Computers aren't great, because they can compute numbers faster, they're great because we've managed to encode text, audio, video, geospatial, etc. information as numbers, which allowed us to perform complex text, audio, video, geospatial, etc. operations.

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

#238

Post by csomar »

zarzavat wrote: post #224
csomar wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not missing anything. It's a bubble. This is tech 101 and all over again. You gotta hype some new thing whether it's Web 2.0, Crypto or AI. LLM have proven to be great as a gimmick or making rather okay localized approximations. You can create a good enough image without any designing skills, or have auto-completion on steroids. However, there is no proof that this same tech can extrapolate to the next level.…

I believe that you are half right. AI is going to radically change the world, but not now, maybe in 10 years. The pace of research is slower than the expectations of investors. This will lead to the perception of a boom and bust and AI winter, but in reality there will be slow steady improvements. It’s just been commercialized too soon.

There is also the other (very high in my opinion) possibility that LLM will hit a wall in regards to performance and a new model is required. It's unfortunate that the current VC landscape encourages this single shot mentality instead of diversification. This will not help in the AI winter since most people will be invested in the same thing.

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

#239

Post by sashank_1509 »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #227
sashank_1509 wrote: post #194

This sub and blog post are all talking about ChatGPT which is no doubt amazing and far ahead of the curve. However I would also point to Metas new vision model: SAM (Segment Anything): it is so far beyond any other vision model, I actually believe vision will be solved in a few years now. People don’t realize that there was an industry of publishing paper with incremental improvements in small datasets in CVPR that h…

There seem to be a lot of breakthroughs being announced right now. My guess is that after ChatGPT, companies like Meta pushed their teams to get their own projects out the door which they'd already been working on for some time. SAM and Zero-1-to-3 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35242193 ) are incredibly impressive new projects in the image comprehension side. Then of course there's all the stuff happening wi…

I’d say after ChatGPT’s success every other company is focusing far more on scaling up than coming up with new methods. SAM is basically the method they came up with in 2021, but scaled up to 1 billion masks, which was not something Meta might have been willing to do before ChatGPT

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

#240

Post by terpimost »

brookst wrote: post #186
fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont work at Google, I think other FAANGS underinvested in this area as they didnt think it was promising. But I will admit, I am suspicious that Google is incompetent. Probably they can come back given how much money they will be forced to throw at it. But Bard is clearly behind and I dont believe their "abundance of caution" arguments for why Bard cant even code.

Google was built by brilliant people whose mission was to make any information available to anyone, instantly. Google is run by smart people whose mission is to maximize clicks on ads. If a user finds what they’re looking for quickly, that’s lost revenue. Google’s profit motives are not aligned with useful AI. The better AI is, the less people need to click through to lots of web pages and ads, the less revenue for G…

FAANG companies have distribution. They can sell anything. Give them a bit of time. They are not companies of a single product, they milk people better than governments.
Post reply on HN