101–110 of 125 posts
Can't wait for most of these companies to disappear once the hype dies down and the money dries up. Generative AI in its current form is a huge letdown.
Typical HN pessimism, but I strongly disagree with anyone characterizing it as a huge letdown. Even if you personally don't get much use out of it (honestly hard for me to believe if you give it a fair try), there are tons of uses that will be impacting you significantly within the next year. Contrast that with crypto.
Typical Sequoia "think piece" meant to bring in tier-2 and tier-3 VCs onto the AI hype train, further bolstering their own position. I don't even think Sequoia believes in AI per se , they're just chasing the next shiny ball. It's genius if you really think about it. A year ago, they were gushing over SBF. There's no due diligence here, there's no product market fit. It's a legal pump and dump. Much like crypto, ther…
They do seem to be getting high on their own supply.
Can't wait for most of these companies to disappear once the hype dies down and the money dries up. Generative AI in its current form is a huge letdown.
Have you tried coding with it yet? Easy to see how you could get that impression from just playing with ChatGPT, but copilot/cursor/dropping stack traces into gpt4 is transformational.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typical HN pessimism, but I strongly disagree with anyone characterizing it as a huge letdown. Even if you personally don't get much use out of it (honestly hard for me to believe if you give it a fair try), there are tons of uses that will be impacting you significantly within the next year. Contrast that with crypto.
I paid for ChatGPT for a few months and finally cancelled yesterday. As a code generator it’s a frustrating assistant that gets it wrong most of the time. I guess that’s good from a selfish developer point of view.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't the takeaway : "holy shit, these things are advanced enough to make people like Blake Lemoine believe they are sentient?"
HFRL is literally just training the AI to be convincing. That's what these systems are optimized for.
The current batch of AI can be trained by giving it a handful of "description of a task -> result of the task" mappings - and then it will not just learn how to perform those tasks, it will also generalize across tasks, so you can give itva description for a completely novel task and it will know how to do that as well.
Something like this is completely new. For previous ML algorithms, you meeded vast amounts of training data specifically annotated for a single task, to get a decent generalisation performance inside that task. There was no way how to learn new tasks from thin air.
The moment that generative AI became something crazy for me was when I said "holy shit, maybe Blake Lemoine was right". Lemoine was the Google engineer who made a big fuss saying that Google had a sentient AI in development and he felt there were ethical issues to consider. And at the time we all sort of chuckled- of course Google doesn't have a true AGI in there. No one can do that. And it wasn't much later I had my…
Or more generally that Star Wars of all things now looks like a more accurate predictor of our tech development than The Martian - the franchise that is so far on the "soft" side of the "hard/soft SciFi" spectrum that it's commonly not seen as "Science Fiction" at all but mostly as Fantasy with space ships. And yet here we are:
- For Protocol Druids, there are still some building blocks missing, mostly persistent memory and the ability to understand real-life events and interact with the real world. However, those are now mostly technical problems which are already being tackled, as opposed to the obvious Fantasy tropes they were until a few years ago. Even the way that current LLMs often sound more confident and knowledgeable than they really are would match the impression of protocol druids we get from the movies pretty well.
- Star Wars has lots of machines which seem to have some degree of sentience even though it makes little practical sense - battle droids, space ships, etc - and it used to be just an obvious application of the rule of cool/rule of funny. Yet suddenly you could imagine pretty well that manufactures will be tempted by hype to stuff an LLM into all kinds of devices, so we indeed might be surrounded by seemingly "sentient" machines in a few years.
- Machines communicating with each other using human language (or a bitstream that has a 1-1 mapping to human language) likewise used to be a cute space opera idea. Suddenly it became a feasible (if inefficient and insecure) way to design an API. People are already writing OpenAPI documentations whete the intended audience are not human developers but ChatGPT.
The moment that generative AI became something crazy for me was when I said "holy shit, maybe Blake Lemoine was right". Lemoine was the Google engineer who made a big fuss saying that Google had a sentient AI in development and he felt there were ethical issues to consider. And at the time we all sort of chuckled- of course Google doesn't have a true AGI in there. No one can do that. And it wasn't much later I had my…
The counterpoint to this is always "models work with numerical vectors and we translate those to/from words" These things feel sentient because they talk like us, but if I told you that I have a machine that takes 1 20k-dimensional vector and turns it into another meaningful 20k-dimensional vector, you definitely wouldn't call that sentience.
The brain can't see, hear, smell, etc directly and neither can it talk or move hands or feet. "All" it does is receive incoming nerve signals from sensor neurons (which are connected to our sensory organs) and emit outgoing nerve signals through motor neurons (which are connected to our muscles).
So the "data format" is really not that different.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if I told you I have a machine that takes 1 20k-dimensional vector and turns it into another meaningful 20k-dimensional vector, but the machine is made of a bunch of proteins and fats and liquids and gels? Would you be willing to call it sentient now?
Bro, I can't even do 5 dimensional vector math. EDIT: I couldn't help but make the joke, but I am certain my brain is doing zero dot products as a type this. What these models do is just different. We should consider what that means, and the 'sentience' jump is just lazy thinking to avoid that.