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AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

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Re: AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

#31

Post by rqtwteye »

There is the old quote “we overestimate the impact of technology in the short-term and underestimate the effect in the long run”. I watched this with the internet. First it was a toy (before maybe 1991}, then it was massively overhyped (1992-2001), then disillusionment kicked, in the end it transformed a lot of business, maybe not in the way predicted but the impact is undeniable. Same with AI, right now we are probably at the 1992 internet stage. There will be a lot of wrong paths but it’s pretty clear this will have a massive impact.

People were right to be skeptical about blockchain and cryptic, but AI is on a totally different level of usefulness.

Re: AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

#32

Post by hermitcrab »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #19
yawnxyz wrote: post #10

That's a lot of words from someone who doesn't seem to have tried using these tools yet? The Hype is smoke and mirrors, but there are tons of real use cases where things were MUCH easier than before. Things like text to speech or image recognition previously required a team of 10 ML engineers a couple of years to build now take a weekend. It's smoke and mirrors to the "business world" because none of these translate…

I'm just kinda sad at how cynical so many of us have become. I mean, I see tons of comments "But it hallucinates!!!!!" Yeah, no shit. At the same time, you're having a perfectly grammatically correct, natural, sensical conversation with a computer . Just a couple years ago that was purely the realm of Star Trek.

I'm 58. It is hard not to be cynical when you've seen as many hype cycles as I have. Especially when you suspect the person hyping LLMs is the same person that was hyping blockchain and NFTs.

Re: AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

#33

Post by whimsicalism »

mlyle wrote: post #29
lambdaba wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion shifts every other day it seems, recently, Roon, the "famous" anon X account that works at OpenAI, and presumably has access to some unreleased info, said, in response to "are we plateauing soon", "not even close". I honestly don't know what to think.

I feel like for LLM's at least, we've not seen a lot of progress on the high end for a year or so. GPT4-Turbo is a little better than GPT4, but mainly only for things that can benefit from huge contexts.

We have seen progress, but mostly price progress.

Re: AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

#35

Post by hermitcrab »

ramesh31 wrote: post #30
whimsicalism wrote: post #4

No matter how much the chattering class wants to portray this as a "fad" and not an inevitability, those of us who can type and read can see the reality for ourselves.

>No matter how much the chattering class wants to portray this as a "fad" and not an inevitability, those of us who can type and read can see the reality for ourselves. Right. Regardless of any "superhuman" abilities, we can talk to our computers now, and they can talk back. The decades old holy grail of HCI has been achieved. That fact alone is going to change everything.

Unfortunately human language remains ambiguous and imprecise. That's why we invented programming languages.

Re: AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

#36

Post by spaceguillotine »

I do think they are right about AI corrupting infrastructure of the internet, Google is pretty much useless if you aren't trying to buy a product and is full of SEO'd to hell AI generated content that is just terrible or completely lacking information.

It has made job seeking a pain in the ass and is leading to tools of manipulation on every side, nothing is real, everything is a grift now seeking short term gains while playing scorched earth with everything long term.

Re: AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

#37

Post by bongodongobob »

cdme wrote: post #20
GaggiX wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, chatbots have completely changed the way I program, and I'm not a "self-mythologizing executive and founder in Silicon Valley", also it's not only very useful but also entertaining, quite a lot of fun creating stuff with my friends using Suno or text-to-image models.

I’ve yet to find its programming help useful. ChatGPT and Copilot routinely offer bad or outright incorrect advice.

Try telling it it's a project manager and get it to write a scope of work/spec document first that you agree with. Then send it to a "software architect" to define the frameworks and architecture, and then to a "developer" to write specific files or modules.

Re: AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

#38

Post by whimsicalism »

hermitcrab wrote: post #32
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just kinda sad at how cynical so many of us have become. I mean, I see tons of comments "But it hallucinates!!!!!" Yeah, no shit. At the same time, you're having a perfectly grammatically correct, natural, sensical conversation with a computer . Just a couple years ago that was purely the realm of Star Trek.

I'm 58. It is hard not to be cynical when you've seen as many hype cycles as I have. Especially when you suspect the person hyping LLMs is the same person that was hyping blockchain and NFTs.

In my personal experience, cynicism seems more like a fixed personality trait people have than one that is rationally borne out of experience.

If you had been holding a representative basket of tech stocks right before the dot-com bust (a classic "hype cycle"), you would be beating the S&P 500 today if you just held on to them, even after most of those companies went bankrupt. Even on crypto, it is too early to call.

The fact that you bridge so easily from crypto to LLM suggests to me you're not really considering these things on the merits and are over-focused on the who and cultural alignment of the people behind various inventions, rather than the creations themselves. /2c

Re: AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

#39

Post by mattnewton »

hermitcrab wrote: post #32
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just kinda sad at how cynical so many of us have become. I mean, I see tons of comments "But it hallucinates!!!!!" Yeah, no shit. At the same time, you're having a perfectly grammatically correct, natural, sensical conversation with a computer . Just a couple years ago that was purely the realm of Star Trek.

I'm 58. It is hard not to be cynical when you've seen as many hype cycles as I have. Especially when you suspect the person hyping LLMs is the same person that was hyping blockchain and NFTs.

I really blame crypto, especially NFTs for this.

Re: AI Is Smoke and Mirrors

#40

Post by mjhay »

lambdaba wrote: post #21
mlyle wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yah-- what we have now is enough to be enormously disruptive as it is absorbed. The big question is how much better it's going to get. We may be plateauing in capability-- or at least slowing in capability growth-- or we may not be. But it doesn't need to get better for it to eat a lot of peoples' lunch.

My opinion shifts every other day it seems, recently, Roon, the "famous" anon X account that works at OpenAI, and presumably has access to some unreleased info, said, in response to "are we plateauing soon", "not even close". I honestly don't know what to think.

Of course somebody working for OpenAI would say that.
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