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

Do AI companies work?

benn.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 457 posts

Re: Do AI companies work?

#211

Post by WhyOhWhyQ »

jfoster wrote: post #110
martin_drapeau wrote: post #101

The fundamental question is how to monetize AI? I see 2 paths: - Consumers - the Google way: search and advertise to consumers - Businesses - the AWS way: attrack businesses to use your API and lock them in The first is fickle. Will OpenAI become the door to the Internet? You'll need people to stop using Google Search and rely on ChatGPT for that to happen. Will become a commodity. Short term you can charge a subscri…

That's like saying "how do you monetize the internet?" There are so many ways, it makes the question seem nonsensical. Ways to monetize AI so far: Metered APIs (OpenAI and others) Subscription products built on it (Copilot, ChatGPT, etc.) Using it as a feature to give products a competitive edge (Apple Intelligence, Tesla FSD) Selling the hardware (Nvidia)

They'll be selling overpriced licenses per computer to every fortune 500 company.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#212

Post by troupo »

LASR wrote: post #147

I lead an applied AI research team where I work - which is a mid-sized public enterprise products company. I've been saying this in my professional circles quite often. We talk about scaling laws, superintelligence, AGI etc. But there is another threshold - the ability for humans to leverage super-intelligence. It's just incredibly hard to innovate on products that fully leverage superintelligence. At some point, AI…

> In my mind, already with GPT-4, we're not generating ideas fast enough on how best to leverage it.

It's a token prediction machine. We've already generated most of the ideas for it, and hardly any of them work because see below

> Getting AI to do work involves getting AI to understand what needs to be done from highly bandwidth constrained humans using mouse / keyboard / voice to communicate.

No. Gettin AI to work you need to make an AI, and not a token prediction machine which, however wonderful:

- does not understand what it is it's generating, and approaches generating code the same way it approaches generating haikus

- hallucinates and generates invalid data

> Anyone using a chatbot already has felt the frustration of "it doesn't get what I want". And also "I have to explain so much that I might as well just do it myself"

Indeed. Instead of asking why, you're wildly fantasizing about running out of ideas and pretending you can make this work through other means of communication.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#213

Post by Apocryphon »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #194
torginus wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber is not really a tech company though - its moat is not technology but market domination. If it, along with all of its competitors were to disappear tomorrow, the power vacuum would be filled in very short order, as the core technology is not very hard to master. It's a fundamentally different beast from AI companies.

How is it not a tech company? They're literally trying to approximate TSP in the way that makes them money. In addition, they're constantly optimizing for surge pricing to maximize ROI. What kind of problems do you think those are?

A good meditation on that: https://www.readmargins.com/p/-the-zombie-apocalypse-scale

> I call this scale the Zombie Apocalypse Scale. It is a measure of how many days a company could run for it all its employees were turned to zombies overnight. The more days you can operate without any humans the more of a tech company you are.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#214

Post by aaron695 »

LASR wrote: post #147

I lead an applied AI research team where I work - which is a mid-sized public enterprise products company. I've been saying this in my professional circles quite often. We talk about scaling laws, superintelligence, AGI etc. But there is another threshold - the ability for humans to leverage super-intelligence. It's just incredibly hard to innovate on products that fully leverage superintelligence. At some point, AI…

This comment goes a long way to explaining Jonestown to me.

We have a new god (superintelligence) but only the special can see it because it's too intelligent for people to interact with it.

It's so advanced all the common ways humans communicate "using mouse / keyboard / voice" don't work

The reason we've never seen it help us is we need more ideas (prayers) first.

NPC brains are really hard to understand I will say that and they use a lot of electricity.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#215

Post by ForHackernews »

pavlov wrote: post #140
ActionHank wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The car wasn't a horse that was better, but a car has not changed drastically since they went mainstream. They've gotten better, more efficient, loaded with tech, but are still roughly 4 seats, 4 doors, 4 wheels, driven by petroleum. I know that this is a massive oversimplification, but I think we have seen the "shape" of LLMs\Gen AI\AI products already and it's all incremental improvements from here on out with more…

Feels like someone might have said this in 1981 about personal computers. "We've pretty much seen their shape. The IBM PC isn't fundamentally very different from the Apple II. Probably it's just all incremental improvements from here on out."

And that's more or less true? By 1989 certainly, we had word processors, spreadsheets, email, BBSes. We have better versions of everything today, but fundamentally, yes, the "shape" of the personal computer was firmly established by the late 1980s.

Anyone comfortable with MS-DOS Shell would not be totally lost on a modern desktop.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#216

Post by yibg »

LASR wrote: post #147

I lead an applied AI research team where I work - which is a mid-sized public enterprise products company. I've been saying this in my professional circles quite often. We talk about scaling laws, superintelligence, AGI etc. But there is another threshold - the ability for humans to leverage super-intelligence. It's just incredibly hard to innovate on products that fully leverage superintelligence. At some point, AI…

* We're seeing much less of "it's making mistakes" these days.*

Perhaps less than before, but still making very fundamental errors. Anything involving number I'm automatically suspicious. Pretty frequently I'd get different answers for the same question (to a human).

e.g. ChatGPT will give an effective tax rate of n for some income amount. Then when asked to break down the calculation will come up with an effective tax rate of m instead. When asked how much tax is owed on that income will come up with a different number such that the effective rate is not n or m.

Until this is addressed to a sufficient degree, it seems difficult to apply to anything that involves numbers and can't be quickly verified by a human.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#217

Post by kibwen »

felideon wrote: post #159
adamc wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think hasn't been? I think the big game changer in the PC space was graphics cards, but since their introduction, it has all been incremental improvement -- at first, pretty fast, then... slower. Much like CPU improvements, although those started earlier. I can't think of a point where the next generation of PCs was astoundingly different from the prior one... just better. It used to be that they were rel…

Arguably form factor, i.e. smartphones and tablets. Whether you think that's incremental or not is subjective, I guess. I would say incremental, but it does solve a different set of problems (connectedness, mobility) than the PC.

Smartphones and tablets aren't PC replacements, they're TV replacements. Even we, deep into the throes of the smartphone age, still need to use real computers to do the tasks we were using them for in 1995, e.g. programming and word processing.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#218

Post by analog31 »

sapphicsnail wrote: post #177
lostphilosopher wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PhD itself is an abbreviation for "Doctor of Philosophy." The title is more about the original Greek "lover of wisdom" than about the modern academic discipline of philosophy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy Doctor is similar - in the US, when someone says "Doctor" they usually mean "Medical Doctor" but "Doctor" just comes from the Greek "teacher" / "scholar" which is more broad and the title can s…

Just a little correction. Doctor is Latin and roughly means "someone who has learned a lot." Science also originally referred to knowledge. What we think of as "science" used to be called the natural sciences. Sometimes people get confused because I have a B.S. in Classics because science has lost that broader meaning.

Indeed, in the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas asks if theology is a science, and concludes that it is. He also gave lip service to logical rigor and falsifiability, in the latter case by encouraging the discipline of asking contrary questions and answering them. What he didn't do was appeal to empirical data, to any great extent.

I think the reasoning behind "doctor of philosophy" may be lost to history. All knowing Wikipedia suggests that it didn't happen at once. My take was that the requirements for a modern PhD were added long after the title was adopted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy

I suspect there was a time when a person could be well versed in multiple of what are now separated fields, and that you had to be a philosopher to make sense of science and math. Also, as science was flexing its own wings, claiming to be a philosopher might have been a way to gain an air of respectability, just like calling a physician "doctor" when the main impact of medicine was to kill rich people.

Disclosure: PhD, but ambivalent about titles.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#219

Post by digging »

OJFord wrote: post #41
llm_trw wrote: post #31

I've found that everything that works stops being called AI. Logic programming? AI until SQL came out. Now it's not AI. OCR, computer algebra systems, voice recognition, checkers, machine translation, go, natural language search. All solved, all not AI any more yet all were AI before they got solved by AI researchers. There's even a name for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect?utm_source=perplex...

We've kind of done it in reverse with AI though - 'chatbots' have been universally shit for ages, and now we have good ones, but they're 'AI'.

Chatbot is the form factor; LLMs are what is being called AI. SmarterChild wasn't an LLM.

Re: Do AI companies work?

#220

Post by kibwen »

alexashka wrote: post #191
christianqchung wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this satire? All of those industries listed significant disputes. If this is serious it's a concerning view of how science actually works.

Please name me these 'significant' disputes. Start with math.

Let's start with an easy one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_choice
Post reply on HN