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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

#41

Post by dgfitz »

ssl-3 wrote: post #39
tdeck wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're paying for ChatGPT is not likely covering their expenses, let alone making up their massive R&D investment. People paid for Sprig and Munchery too, but those companies went out of business. Obviously what they developed wasn't nearly as significant as what OpenAI has developed, but the question is: where will their pricing land once they need to turn a profit? It may well end up in a place where it's not…

I paid money to Amazon for most of a decade before they had a profitable year.

You realize they had razor thing margins on purpose, right?

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

#42

Post by teleforce »

dismalaf wrote: post #40
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…

Well AI probably is the future. Might not necessarily be LLMs (I personally don't rate LLMs) but enough people are interested in it nowadays that it's almost certain AGI will happen in our lifetimes.

Honestly I'm intrigued on why you don't rate LLM. Arguably the main reason AI got out from its winter is the emergence of LLM.

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

#43

Post by dismalaf »

teleforce wrote: post #42
dismalaf wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well AI probably is the future. Might not necessarily be LLMs (I personally don't rate LLMs) but enough people are interested in it nowadays that it's almost certain AGI will happen in our lifetimes.

Honestly I'm intrigued on why you don't rate LLM. Arguably the main reason AI got out from its winter is the emergence of LLM.

Because I can't see current techniques for creating LLMs fixing the pre-training problem. Right now big tech companies are training LLMs on, well, pretty much all human knowledge ever assembled, and they're still pretty dumb. They're wrong far too often and they don't have the capacity to learn and figure out things with a limited amount of data as humans do. Also, it's pretty clear that LLMs are flatlining.

Now, they are good text interfaces. They're good for parsing and creating text. There even seems to be very, very basic thought and maybe even creativity (at a very, very basic level). At this point though, I can't see them improving much more without a major change in technology, techniques, something. The first time I saw them I thought they were just regression analysis on steroids, and not going to lie, they still have that vibe considering tech companies have clusters up to 350k H100s and LLMs still are dumber than the average person for most tasks.

I'm currently creating an app that uses an LLM as an interface and it's definitely interesting, but most of the heavy lifting of the app will be the functions it calls and a knowledge database since it needs to have more concrete and current knowledge. But hey, it's nicer than implementing search from scratch I guess.

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

#44

Post by n_ary »

tdeck wrote: post #26
svara wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t understand how a business model that makes money pops out on the other end. What issues do you see? I pay for ChatGPT and for cursor and to me that's money very well spent. I imagine tools like cursor will become common for other text intensive industries, like law, soon. Agreed that the hype can be over the top, but these are valuable productivity tools, so I have some trouble understanding where you're co…

What you're paying for ChatGPT is not likely covering their expenses, let alone making up their massive R&D investment. People paid for Sprig and Munchery too, but those companies went out of business. Obviously what they developed wasn't nearly as significant as what OpenAI has developed, but the question is: where will their pricing land once they need to turn a profit? It may well end up in a place where it's not…

Looking at history, anything in its first few iterations costs insane and stay as luxury or is sold at massive loss. Once the research goes on for several years, the costs keep coming down first very slowly and then in avalanche . The question always remains to which one can continue “selling at a loss” long enough to last the point until the costs continue going down while people are used to paying standard price(see smartphones), or the product is so market dominant that competition does not have resources to compete and cost can be raised(see Netflix).

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

#45

Post by n_ary »

xarope wrote: post #38
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

+1. The other concern is that AI is potentially removing junior level jobs that are often a way for people to gain experience before stepping up into positions with more agency and autonomy. Which means in future we will be dealing with the next generation of "AI told me to do this", but "I have no experience to know whether this is good or not", so "let's do it".

On the contrary, Junior positions will be more and growing because now you do not have the fear of Juniors being liability for a while as with very little guidance they can get stuff done while Seniors keep an eye on bigger things and have free time not being spammed by n00b queries.

Also, given the saturation of STEM graduates now, you have proven group of juniors who can learn themselves over expensive lottery of bootcampers who might bail out the moment it is no longer the surface level React anymore.

With AI, more tiny businesses can launch into market and hire juniors and part time expertise to guide the product slowly without the massive VC money requirement.

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

#46

Post by tincholio »

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 been a common problem with HN. I remember when NodeJS came out, it was exactly the same, and then with all the crypto-craze.

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

#47

Post by n_ary »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #20
gorjusborg wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> I use Claude and Chatgpt EVERY DAY […] What other innovation in the last decade has been this disruptive?

I use some sort of IDE everyday. Previously at my early days, I was a “true-hacker” and using Vim in console to type out massive code bases, we had waterfall development practices, I would fumble through source codes of various poorly documented features of the language or libraries for hours to figure out about needed function/method/attribute and how anything really worked and the quirks of strange error messages needing to call up the vendor or buy a book on the topic and hope it had answers… and of course, I practiced typing every weekend to speed up my typing speed.

Now, I just type something and the IDE reads my mind and shows appropriate suggestions and also helpfully imports the packages for me while also constantly formatting my codebase on save and raising red/yellow squigglies to suggest my mistakes. I copy paste any quirky errors in a search engine and immediately find other human beings reporting the problem and solutions, I can happily continue developing on the same codebase and parallel features while other teams can continue with their features and we’ll know soon if we have stepped on each others’ toes shortly in CI pipeline. What took me weeks now takes like few hours and if someone told me to do the same in Vim, I’d be blankly looking at them because that is arcane. Of course my IDE misguesses sometimes and I can correct it, but I am insanely productive now compared to decades back. What other innovation has made this kind of gains?

Also I could take a horse and go to a duty travel in another continent for a several month or even year journey, but now I can take a flight and be there in hour and I am saving insane amount of time.

The examples can go on, we have new novelties which are ground breaking, but AI is too much hype, and it is not well deserved. All the hype comes because the VC money burning on it and needs the prep the market for massive return. Too much of hype can turn sour if that topic had been seen to rise and die a fee times, hence it is natural that a lot of HN audience do not feel great to look at this anymore.

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

#48

Post by tokioyoyo »

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…

Because almost once a quarter there's a big release that raises the expectations for top AI companies. Which brings up discussions, new articles and eventually posts in the front page.

2020-2022 HN front page was full of crypto news, mostly in negative light, but still. And before that there was more hot bubble topics. It's very usual.

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

#49

Post by defanor »

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…

Do you mean that cryptocurrency submissions were penalized that way? I recall them being about as annoying and similarly filling the front page with uninformative submissions, but have not heard of such penalties. Same as with other subjects during their hype waves.

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

#50

Post by Kbelicius »

n_ary wrote: post #47
SubiculumCode wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I use Claude and Chatgpt EVERY DAY […] What other innovation in the last decade has been this disruptive? I use some sort of IDE everyday. Previously at my early days, I was a “true-hacker” and using Vim in console to type out massive code bases, we had waterfall development practices, I would fumble through source codes of various poorly documented features of the language or libraries for hours to figure out abou…

Last decade... GP said last decade. IDEs and airplanes are older.

> The examples can go on

Since the examples never started not sure how they could go on.

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