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Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM

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Re: Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM

#11

Post by dgfitz »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #8
dgfitz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, it’s not just you. AI is really neat. I don’t understand how a business model that makes money pops out on the other end. At least crypto cashed out on NFTs for a while.

good point about the business model. probably AI has more even the ones reaping the rewards are only 4 or 5 big corps. It seems with crypto the business "benefits" were mostly adversarial (winners were those doing crimes on the darknet, or to allow ransomware operators to get paid). The underlying blockchain Tech itself though failed to replace transactions in a database. The main value for AI today seems to be gener…

I agree with you. I just don't see the AI "summer" happening.

Re: Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM

#12

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

auggierose wrote: post #6
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #2

every other article these days on this site is about AI. And it's incredibly tedious and annoying. Isn't it enough that clueless marketers who get their Tech knowledge from businessinsider and bloomberg are constantly harping on about AI. Seems we as a community have resigned or given up in this battle against common sense. Maybe long ago. Still there should be some form of moderation penalizing these shill posts tha…

It's a CACM article. Without having read this one, I'd say CACM articles on HN are absolutely appropriate.

that's not really a justification in my view. The entire education industry is complicit in this circus. It's not just engineers hoping to get a payday it's academics too that are hoping to get funding and tenure.

CACM was totally complicit in spreading the blockchain hype: https://cacm.acm.org/?s=blockchain

That said, I'm not hating the player, people gotta eat. But I totally lack appreciation for the game.

Re: Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM

#13

Post by dgfitz »

gopalv wrote: post #4
dgfitz wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, it’s not just you. AI is really neat. I don’t understand how a business model that makes money pops out on the other end. At least crypto cashed out on NFTs for a while.

> I don’t understand how a business model that makes money pops out on the other end Tractors and farming. By turning what is traditionally a labour intensive product into a capital intensive one. For now, the farmers who own tractors will beat the farmers who need to hire, house and retain workers (or half a dozen children). This goes well for quite some time, where you can have 3 people handle acres & acres. I'll b…

I may be mistaken, but I was under the impression that, largely, farmers do not own their equipment. They lease it, and it costs a lot.

Edit: Also, 3 people can handle 100 acres of land, given the crop. That happens today.

Re: Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM

#15

Post by gorjusborg »

swatcoder wrote: post #9
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #2

every other article these days on this site is about AI. And it's incredibly tedious and annoying. Isn't it enough that clueless marketers who get their Tech knowledge from businessinsider and bloomberg are constantly harping on about AI. Seems we as a community have resigned or given up in this battle against common sense. Maybe long ago. Still there should be some form of moderation penalizing these shill posts tha…

It's you. The AI discussions can indeed be repetitive and tiresome here, especially for regulars, but they already seem to be downweighted and clear off the front page quite fast. But it's a major focus of the industry right now, involving a genuinely novel and promising new class of tools, so the posts belong here and the high engagement that props them up seems expected.

> It's you.

Not just him.

> But it's a major focus of the industry right now, involving a genuinely novel and promising new class of tools, so the posts belong here and the high engagement that props them up seems expected.

In your opinion (and admittedly others), but that doesn't make the overhype any less tiresome. Yes it is novel technology, but there's alway novel technology, and it isn't all in one area, but you wouldn't know it by what hits the front page these days.

Anyway, it's useless to shake fists at the clouds. This hype will pass, just like all the others before it, and the discussion can again be proportional to the relevance of the topic.

Re: Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM

#16

Post by Animats »

jekude wrote: post #7

> Artificial life fizzled as a meta discipline I've wondered for a while if Artificial Life is in its own winter, waiting for someone to apply the lessons of scale we learned from neural nets.

We're seeing artificial life come back as non-player characters in video games.

Re: Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM

#18

Post by nyrikki »

Animats wrote: post #14

The 1980s AI "boom" was tiny. In the 1980s, AI was a few people at Stanford, a few people at CMU, a few people at MIT, and a scattering of people elsewhere. There were maybe a half dozen startups and none of them got very big.

Quite incorrect, even smaller colleges like in Greeley Colorado had Symbolics machines and there are threads of Expert Systems all throughout the industry.

The industry as a whole was smaller though.

The word sense disambiguation problem did kill a lot of it pretty quickly though.

Re: Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM

#19

Post by Animats »

nyrikki wrote: post #18
Animats wrote: post #14

The 1980s AI "boom" was tiny. In the 1980s, AI was a few people at Stanford, a few people at CMU, a few people at MIT, and a scattering of people elsewhere. There were maybe a half dozen startups and none of them got very big.

Quite incorrect, even smaller colleges like in Greeley Colorado had Symbolics machines and there are threads of Expert Systems all throughout the industry. The industry as a whole was smaller though. The word sense disambiguation problem did kill a lot of it pretty quickly though.

Threads, yes. We had one Symbolics 3600, the infamous refrigerator-sized personal computer, at the aerospace company. But it wasn't worth the trouble. Real work was done with Franz LISP on a VAX and then on Sun workstations.

There were a lot of places that tried a bit of '80s "AI", but didn't accomplish much.

Re: Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM

#20

Post by SubiculumCode »

gorjusborg wrote: post #15
swatcoder wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's you. The AI discussions can indeed be repetitive and tiresome here, especially for regulars, but they already seem to be downweighted and clear off the front page quite fast. But it's a major focus of the industry right now, involving a genuinely novel and promising new class of tools, so the posts belong here and the high engagement that props them up seems expected.

> It's you. Not just him. > But it's a major focus of the industry right now, involving a genuinely novel and promising new class of tools, so the posts belong here and the high engagement that props them up seems expected. In your opinion (and admittedly others), but that doesn't make the overhype any less tiresome. Yes it is novel technology, but there's alway novel technology, and it isn't all in one area, but you…

I don't know about the professional professionals, but as a science professor, I have to wear a lot of hats, which has required me to gain skills in a multitude of areas outside my area of deep expertise.

I use Claude and Chatgpt EVERY DAY.

Those services help me run out scripts for data munging, etc etc very quickly. I don't use it for high expertise writing, as I find it takes more than I get back, but I do use it to put words on a page for more general things. If your deep expertise is programming, you may not use it much either for that. But man oh man has it magnified my output on the constellation of things I need to get done.

What other innovation in the last decade has been this disruptive? Two years ago, I didn't use this. Now I do as part of my regular routine, and I am more valuable for it. So yes, there is hype, but man oh man, is the hype deserved. Even if AI winter started right now, the productivity boom from Claude level LLMs is nothing short of huge.

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