Analysis: true, six months ago
Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’
11–20 of 112 posts
Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’
#12The key way I try to distinguish "Snake Oil" is: Is anyone actually using this routinely , and are the problems it solves self-evident to new non-zealot users after a demo? Take blockchain for example; people spent years and millions of dollars looking for additional usages for the technology beside coins/coin-contracts; and aside from the forementioned usages it didn't really gain routine adoption. That was why the…
Another test is whether kids use it w/o being forced to. My kids are obsessed with both MidJourney and ChatGPT. They have found use cases w/o any profit motive and w/o any outside pressure.
No amount of Blockchain "Webinars" would have convinced my kids to use the blockchain.
Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’
#13The key way I try to distinguish "Snake Oil" is: Is anyone actually using this routinely , and are the problems it solves self-evident to new non-zealot users after a demo? Take blockchain for example; people spent years and millions of dollars looking for additional usages for the technology beside coins/coin-contracts; and aside from the forementioned usages it didn't really gain routine adoption. That was why the…
I'm routinely using LLMs in place of search engines. Would you rather type in a cocktail and instantly get a recipe? or do you want to open google, scroll past 50 ads, click through a bunch of blogspam that gives you the history of cocktails, the prohibition, the chemical formula for ethanol and their life story, followed by a recipe that was itself generated by a substandard AI model anyway edit: I'm prepared for th…
If you pay for search you get some of those benefits already
Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’
#14Everyone should read this Reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/121lhfq/i_lost_eve...
This is happening, and the reddit thread is just a single instance of a wide phenomenon. I wonder how one can square "snakeoil" theories against reality like this.
Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’
#15The key way I try to distinguish "Snake Oil" is: Is anyone actually using this routinely , and are the problems it solves self-evident to new non-zealot users after a demo? Take blockchain for example; people spent years and millions of dollars looking for additional usages for the technology beside coins/coin-contracts; and aside from the forementioned usages it didn't really gain routine adoption. That was why the…
Another test is whether kids use it w/o being forced to. My kids are obsessed with both MidJourney and ChatGPT. They have found use cases w/o any profit motive and w/o any outside pressure. No amount of Blockchain "Webinars" would have convinced my kids to use the blockchain.
If blockchain did fulfill the claims of it revolutionizing the world of finance, it's still unlikely your kids would have become obsessed and regular users of it. If room temperature and pressure superconducting or nuclear fusion became viable, your kids might also be unlikely to play around with them on their own. Kids apparently love Roblox and most adults think the metaverse is dead. What kids like seems pretty orthogonal to what is legit or snake oil.
Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’
#16The key way I try to distinguish "Snake Oil" is: Is anyone actually using this routinely , and are the problems it solves self-evident to new non-zealot users after a demo? Take blockchain for example; people spent years and millions of dollars looking for additional usages for the technology beside coins/coin-contracts; and aside from the forementioned usages it didn't really gain routine adoption. That was why the…
I'm routinely using LLMs in place of search engines. Would you rather type in a cocktail and instantly get a recipe? or do you want to open google, scroll past 50 ads, click through a bunch of blogspam that gives you the history of cocktails, the prohibition, the chemical formula for ethanol and their life story, followed by a recipe that was itself generated by a substandard AI model anyway edit: I'm prepared for th…
I have two concerns when people tell me they're using this stuff like a search engine:
1. How expensive are these to operate when compared to search engines? If search engines are about as good at information retrieval, but are much cheaper, what does that mean for the future of these services?
2. How good are these systems actually when compared to search engines? I get that for things like code, you can immediately verify results through testing, but GPT was trained on what looks good to humans thanks to HFRL, not necessarily for correctness.
I really wonder what's going to happen with this comparison in the near future. I think there's two possibilities:
1. Running inference on models and keeping the models relevant by introducing new data remains extremely expensive and companies like OpenAI operate at massive losses. Eventually this leads to their products getting worse.
2. Models get cheaper to run and efficient enough to run on mobile hardware without losing much fidelity. OpenAI still might be in trouble in this scenario if "open source" models like Llama2 get popular.
Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’
#17The key way I try to distinguish "Snake Oil" is: Is anyone actually using this routinely , and are the problems it solves self-evident to new non-zealot users after a demo? Take blockchain for example; people spent years and millions of dollars looking for additional usages for the technology beside coins/coin-contracts; and aside from the forementioned usages it didn't really gain routine adoption. That was why the…
> Heck, my mom discovered it herself on Bing's homepage and was telling me I should check it out.
Sounds like grade A Microsoft marketing speak. But wait, there's more!
Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’
#18The key way I try to distinguish "Snake Oil" is: Is anyone actually using this routinely , and are the problems it solves self-evident to new non-zealot users after a demo? Take blockchain for example; people spent years and millions of dollars looking for additional usages for the technology beside coins/coin-contracts; and aside from the forementioned usages it didn't really gain routine adoption. That was why the…
NFTs as domain names is novel, interesting, and non-financial.
Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’
#19The key way I try to distinguish "Snake Oil" is: Is anyone actually using this routinely , and are the problems it solves self-evident to new non-zealot users after a demo? Take blockchain for example; people spent years and millions of dollars looking for additional usages for the technology beside coins/coin-contracts; and aside from the forementioned usages it didn't really gain routine adoption. That was why the…
Another test is whether kids use it w/o being forced to. My kids are obsessed with both MidJourney and ChatGPT. They have found use cases w/o any profit motive and w/o any outside pressure. No amount of Blockchain "Webinars" would have convinced my kids to use the blockchain.
Not a great test, teens in the last few years sometimes get into crypto.
Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’
#20Everyone should read this Reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/121lhfq/i_lost_eve... This is happening, and the reddit thread is just a single instance of a wide phenomenon. I wonder how one can square "snakeoil" theories against reality like this.
My company has openly bragged they predicted they would need to hire over 200 employees this year, and AI systems meant they only had to hire 45.