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Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

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Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

#31

Post by phillipcarter »

The authors' substack is great. They're sort of like investigative journalists who pick a topic that's got a lot of hype and then dissect it to (often very quickly) find that the hyped up topic was just hot air. Some examples:

The claims of "liberal bias" being just a completely bunk study: https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/does-chatgpt-have-a-liberal-bia...

No evidence of GPT-4 getting worse over time: https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/is-gpt-4-getting-worse-over-tim...

The analyses are measured and well written. I always enjoy when a new one comes out.

Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

#32

Post by arcticbull »

jamilton wrote: post #19
TuringNYC wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Trading it on a centralized exchange to speculate on its future value doesn’t involve using it at all, it’s just a MySQL database at Coinbase tracking your bids and balances.

I’d wager the biggest non-speculative use case is pig butchering scams and ransomware.

Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

#33

Post by riku_iki »

lIIllIIllIIllII wrote: post #10
Someone1234 wrote: post #8

The 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…

> 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

I think in this aspect the difference between GPT vs Google not in level of tech, but because GPT took text from copyright owners and distributes it without their consent and without showing their ads, which is being challenged legally in my understanding.

Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

#34

Post by slfnflctd »

TuringNYC wrote: post #14

Everyone 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.

> just a single instance of a wide phenomenon

Another instance is the 'hey pi' chatbot. For some people it's a superior experience to BetterHelp, or even a lot of so-called professional therapists out there.

The lack of actual human presence is a bit deflating for me, but I still got a good session out of it once. It feels like it has the potential to be at least better than nothing for some of the lonely people out there. The option for different voices is a nice touch that adds to the illusion.

There are so many possibilities. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with everything from NPCs in video games to robotics (among other things, to actually explain what they're doing & why, and converse). Not to mention the applications in education and health care. Anyone who thinks this is a flash in the pan has not observed enough of what's going on.

Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

#35

Post by chargingmarmot »

danmur wrote: post #13
lIIllIIllIIllII wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sincere question: what paid search do you have in mind?

How conceptually could a paid search engine solve the problem of SEO and spam? (Curation seems economically infeasible?)

Is what you're actually proposing ad-free search results? (I'd be willing to pay Google approximately $0.01 per search for this. I suspect this is probably more than they get from anything but the most expensive ads (pharma ads that confused old people will click on).)

What I would really love is a browsing-assistance agent based on something like an LLM that can summarize and de-cruft search results for me and show me content extracted from web pages in a standard format without any Javascript. (I don't need an LLM to be the arbiter of truth, I just want it to be good at summarizing documents.)

(Because Google is so wedded to the ad ecosystem I'm not sure I trust them to be the steward of technology that is basically about removing ads from my life.)

Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

#36

Post by throwawaylinux »

Someone1234 wrote: post #8

The 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…

Well that's a bad criteria. A lot of people get hooked on "snake oil", and will even try to seek it out. Astrology, alternative medicines, crystals, vibes, etc., cults and other such religious beliefs, various social, economic, political and other beliefs that aren't supported by evidence. Lots of them aren't "zealots", they're pushed by fear, misconception, misinformation, desperation, FOMO, hype, etc.

Also, even if some people in some usages get benefit out of it, does not mean that fuels hype and snake oil to try to sell it to uninformed people to use in inappropriate places. Baking soda is good for making bread, lots of people use it for that with great success. It is snake oil for curing cancer, however.

Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

#37

Post by satvikpendem »

TuringNYC wrote: post #14

Everyone 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.

Most jobs in human history were not labors of passion, it is only in very recent history that it is so. We should not expect it to be the case that people will love their job, as not all loves are employable, as OP in the thread is finding out. While OP might dislike it, there are many others who will fill their space if OP leaves that job or industry, those that actually enjoy what they do.

Contrast that to the people on https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion, where people willingly experiment with multiple approaches to media generation. At least some of those people will be interested in 3D modeling and will willingly take OP's job, because they genuinely enjoy it and OP now does not.

In the end, adapt, or others who do will take over. That's been the historical precedent for millennia, and it will not stop now.

Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

#38

Post by lumost »

riku_iki wrote: post #30
lumost wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're likely way too early to call this one. Based on current hardware trends, GPT-4 will run on your phone within 6-10 years. Right now, folks are feeling out the edges of what makes sense and what doesn't make sense at extreme R&D and opex expense. In 10 years, we'd expect the winners of today to still be winners and have great margins due to declining compute costs. Granted, if you are spending 10x the future valu…

> Based on current hardware trends, GPT-4 will run on your phone within 6-10 years they quantized model from 16 bits to 4 bits which was low hanging fruit, and looks like they can't quantize it anymore to 2 bits..

CPU/GPUs are general purpose, if enough workload demand exists specialized Transformer cores will be designed. Likewise, its not at all clear that current O(N^2) self-attention is the ideal setup for larger context lengths. All to say, I'd believe we have another 8-10x algorithmic improvement in inference costs over the next 10 years. In addition to whatever Moore's law brings.

Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

#39

Post by girvo »

arcticbull wrote: post #32
jamilton wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a great test, teens in the last few years sometimes get into crypto.

Trading it on a centralized exchange to speculate on its future value doesn’t involve using it at all, it’s just a MySQL database at Coinbase tracking your bids and balances. I’d wager the biggest non-speculative use case is pig butchering scams and ransomware.

> I’d wager the biggest non-speculative use case is pig butchering scams and ransomware.

Probably, but drugs are also a big use-case (and I don't just mean retail, its used in wholesale for transferring sums of money internationally to buy precursors, for example)

Re: Princeton ‘AI Snake Oil’ authors say GenAI hype has ‘spiraled out of control’

#40

Post by girvo »

danmur wrote: post #13
lIIllIIllIIllII wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Who do I pay for better search? Honest question, I'd love a recommendation.
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