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I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

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Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#51

Post by latexr »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #44

A winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Paul Krugman wrote in 1998, “The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the econo…

The amount of misuse this quote gets is as absurd as it is tiresome. People were using it to defend NFTs too. Someone’s opinion on one thing says nothing about someone else’s opinion about a different thing.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#52

Post by kylecazar »

I typically disagree with the practice of hating things just because they are trending, this is the stuff hipsters are made of.

But, there is a such thing as negative hype. A seller of AI models telling the world he's not hiring engineers anymore (and they too can cut their workforce) because his models are that good would be negative hype.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#53

Post by SecretDreams »

alganet wrote: post #46
SecretDreams wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A simple test that cannot be rushed by more datacenters. So you're saying we need more datacenters ~ Jensen Huang, probably

GPUs might actually make the list before LLMs. One could argue that it is the fourth item on that list, since it is a technology that is standing for a long time by now.

There are so many items I'd put on the list before LLMs tbh. It's not even worth the time having the conversation. My quality of life went up much more in the dial up to dsl transition. I wouldn't say DSL to fibre was as much of a jump, e.g.

Anywho, that quality of life jump to DSL ultimately led to the enshitification of the internet I knew and loved and now I'm stuck talking about LLMs I wish didn't exist - I would trade the conveniences of today for the internet of the 2000s any day. I genuinely view us on a downwards QOL trajectory re: technology, even if it feels more novel and useful in the moment. Every new novelty in tech that makes life easier for us seems to actually further degraded the human experience of the internet. I don't know how to reconcile this trend with LLMs as being "great".

It really feels like the more we do "good" to "progress" information technology breakthroughs, the worse the entire field feels. Much shallower, less personal, and dumber.

Sorry for the rant.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#54

Post by mjr00 »

latexr wrote: post #45
ninetyninenine wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one of the stupidest concepts on the face of the earth and tons of people ascribe to it unknowingly: hype = bad. AI is one of the most revolutionary things to ever happen in the last couple of years. But with enough hype tons of people now think it's complete garbage. I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI, only to be bored of it in two year…

> I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI It was never this level of AI. The stories we wrote and fantasised were about AI you could blindly rely on, trust, and reason about. No one ever fantasised about AI which couldn’t accurately count the number of letters in a common word or that would give you provably wrong information in an assertive autho…

> No one longed for a level of AI where you have to double check everything.

This has basically been why it's a non-starter in a lot of (most?) business applications.

If your dishwasher failed to clean anything 20% of the time, would you rely on it? No, you'd just wash the dishes by hand, because you'd at least have a consistent result.

That's been the result of AI experimentation I've seen: it works ~80% of the time, which sounds great... except there's surprisingly few tasks where a 20% fail rate is acceptable. Even "prompt engineering" your way to a 5% failure/inaccuracy rate is unacceptable for a fully automated solution.

So now we're moving to workflows where AI generates stuff and a human double checks. Or the AI parses human text into a well-defined gRPC method with known behavior. Which can definitely be helpful, but is a far cry from the fantasized AI in sci-fi literature.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#55

Post by shikon7 »

asdfman123 wrote: post #5

There's three types of people w.r.t hype: smart people who resist hype, smart people who want to profit off of it, and dumb people who like it. The first type of person already agrees with you. The second type knows but doesn't care. The third isn't going to read this article.

The really smart people are those who figure out which part of the hype is real and which is exaggerated.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#56

Post by alganet »

Uehreka wrote: post #32
mcdeltat wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty arbitrary list, no? You could replace "LLMs" with various technologies that seem important (particularly at the beginning of their existence before their true value is determined). Why not: C, cloud computing, neural networks, Dijkstra's algorithm, WiFi, FFT, etc?

5 years after Dijkstra’s algorithm was invented, could non-tech people look back and see a huge impact on their everyday lives? No. Of the things in your list, WiFi is the closest to rising to this level, but even WiFi can’t claim to be as big of a deal as the Internet (unless you’re being extremely cute). Your list is all A- and B-Tier stuff. Definitely important, but not on the level of like, the personal computer.…

wifi is radio though

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#57

Post by latexr »

Uehreka wrote: post #32
mcdeltat wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty arbitrary list, no? You could replace "LLMs" with various technologies that seem important (particularly at the beginning of their existence before their true value is determined). Why not: C, cloud computing, neural networks, Dijkstra's algorithm, WiFi, FFT, etc?

5 years after Dijkstra’s algorithm was invented, could non-tech people look back and see a huge impact on their everyday lives? No. Of the things in your list, WiFi is the closest to rising to this level, but even WiFi can’t claim to be as big of a deal as the Internet (unless you’re being extremely cute). Your list is all A- and B-Tier stuff. Definitely important, but not on the level of like, the personal computer.…

Smartphones deserve to be on that list as a technology which fundamentally affected the way we interact, and once you realise that you also understand how important WiFi is.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#58

Post by shikon7 »

alganet wrote: post #8

Rather, let's look for things in tech that never hyped but are very useful. If hype is bad, then there must be something good, and unhyped to such high proportions. Something unhypable. Otherwise it's all crap, isn't it? It can't be like that.

Probably these things exist, but if they are truly unhypeable, only a select few will ever know of it, and their economic and societal impact will remain negligible.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#59

Post by calmbell »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #27
sqs wrote: post #17

What a shallow, negative post. "Hype" is tautologically bad. Being negative and "above the hype" makes you sound smart, but this post adds nothing to the discussion and is just as fuzzy as the hype it criticizes. > It is a real shame that some of the most beneficial tools ever invented, such as computers, modern databases, data centers, etc. exist in an industry that has become so obsessed with hype and trends that i…

It's one of the stupidest concepts on the face of the earth and tons of people ascribe to it unknowingly: hype = bad. AI is one of the most revolutionary things to ever happen in the last couple of years. But with enough hype tons of people now think it's complete garbage. I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI, only to be bored of it in two year…

Please find me someone with any background in technology who thinks AI is complete garbage (zero value or close to it). The author doesn't think so, they assert that "perhaps 10% of the AI hype is based upon useful facts" and "AI functions greatly as a "search engine" replacement". There is a big difference between thinking something is garbage and thinking something is a massive bubble (in the case of AI, this could be the technology is worth hundreds of billions rather than trillions).
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