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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

#91

Post by the_af »

dingnuts wrote: post #76
simonw wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The stories we wrote and fantasised were about AI you could blindly rely on, trust, and reason about." Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey - some of the earliest mainstream AI science fiction (1968, before even the Apollo moon landing!) was very much about an AI you couldn't trust.

that's a different kind of distrust, though, that was an AI that was capable of malice. In that case, "trust" had to do with loyalty. The GP means "trust" in the sense of consistency. I trust that my steering wheel doesn't fly off, because it is well-made. I trust that you won't drive into traffic while I'm in the passenger seat, because I don't think you will be malicious towards us. These are not the same.

Going on a tangent here: not sure 2001's HAL was a case of outright malice. It was probably a malfunction (he incorrectly predict a failure) and then conflicting mission parameters that placed higher value on the mission than the crew (the crew discussed shutting down HAL because it seemed unreliable, and he reasoned it would jeopardize the mission and the right course of action was killing the crew). HAL was capable of deceit in order to ensure his own survival, that much is true.

In the followup 2010, when HAL's mission parameters are clarified and de-conflicted, he doesn't attempt to harm the crew anymore.

I... actually can see the 2001's scenario happening with ChatGPT if it was connected to ship peripherals and told mission > crew and that this principle overrides all else.

In modern terms it was about both unreliability (hallucinations?) and a badly specified prompt!

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#92

Post by noosphr »

latexr wrote: post #51
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.

The point is that the upside of investing in a technology before everyone else does is huge.

The downside is whatever you end up investing it in.

Hype is then technologies fighting for that slice of the pie.

The upside to current AI is that we've solved natural language interaction with computers. We have the Star Trek computer you can talk to. You probably don't want to because natural language is naturally terrible at exactness which is why humans have endless meetings to discuss the next meeting about next quarters targets.

This was science fiction in 2020. Today I can do it on a top end consumer grade GPU.

By comparison blockchain is bullshit - to find out why just ask what the clearance rate is of the bitcoin network. You won't change the world at 7 transactions a second. If someone manages to build a block chain that can clear 10 million transactions a second you'd have something on par with the current AI hype train because it would be a legitimately useful finance tool and it will be worth investing billions in.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#93

Post by alganet »

bananalychee wrote: post #73
alganet wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What makes you think the years so far may not continue into the future? The same thing that makes me think that it could: I do not have a crystal ball. It's a simple test. Have patience. With your tone, even if you are right and it stands the test of time, you will look like a tool.

It's those with your attitude, in a state of constant smug denial, who look like tools right now. We'll see how it goes in a few years, but I doubt that will change. The constant goalpost-shifting as LLMs keep getting better and better is becoming embarrassing, and even if they stopped getting better from now on, which is certainly not the case, their impact on communications is on the same order of magnitude as that…

I am ok looking like a tool right now.

That is the goal of a hype trend. To make even healthy skeptics feel like they are missing a great thing.

I am actually an early adopter though. I just don't like bragging around.

Researchers know that most "goal posts moved" are actually great challenges. It would be sad if they saw it as pessimism.

Think of it as a more creative way to engage in the hype.

Skeptics are more valuable than blind believers. You want a blind believer testing your airbag or a skeptic that will move some goal posts to try and sniff out any bugs?

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#94

Post by layman51 »

nl wrote: post #74
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"? Are you saying someone hyped ... databases? In the same way as AI is hyped today? This is a tweet from Sam Altman, dated April 18 2025: https://x.com/sama/status/1913320105804730518 Whence I quote: i think this is gonna be more like…

Sure, databases didn't get as much hype but that's partly because they are old. Look at something more recent: "cloud", "social networking", "blockchain", "mobile". Plenty of hype! Some delivered, some didn't.

I’m not sure how hyped up databases were during their advent, but what do you mean “by partly because they are old?” The phonograph prototypes that were made by Thomas Alva Edison are old and they were hyped in a way. People called him the “Wizard of Menlo Park” for his work because they were seeing machines that could talk (or at least reproduce sounds in the same way photographs let you reproduce sights.)

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#95

Post by alganet »

SecretDreams wrote: post #71
alganet wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To define what a breakthrough is, is hard. A "gaming PC" defines how GPUs are important. General people know something there ticks different, specialists know, industries know. It matters. It matters for a long time now. "Broadband" was a hype, temporary. Once people understood that the speed is the thing, not any name, it stopped mattering. Now every couple of years there's a mini "new broadband tech" but it's all t…

I think the easiest way to define it would be to take it a way for a bit and see how the world changes. If we sent people back to dial up, the world would probably stop working. If we took away LLMs, GPUs, the base world will probably keep chugging along outside of financial markets. Just IMO.

So, the test of time then? Sounds good to me!

Hey, COBOL stood the test of time. In software, it was revolutionary.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#96

Post by Nition »

mjr00 wrote: post #54
latexr wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

One type of question that a 20%-failure-rate AI can still be very useful for is ones that are hard to answer but easy to verify.

For example say you have a complex medical problem. It can be difficult to do a direct Internet search that covers the history and symptoms. If you ask AI though, it'll be able to give you some ideas for specific things to search. They might be wrong answers, but now you can easily search specific conditions and check them.

Sort of P vs. NP for questions.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#97

Post by agarren »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #67
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…

>> Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"? Are you saying someone hyped ... databases? In the same way as AI is hyped today? This is a tweet from Sam Altman, dated April 18 2025: https://x.com/sama/status/1913320105804730518 Whence I quote: i think this is gonna be more like…

My favorite that I’ve heard a couple times is “solve math” and/or “solve physics”

Altman’s claimed LLMs will figure out climate change. Solid stuff.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#98

Post by spiderice »

eschaton wrote: post #90
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…

Sounds like you bought the hype about LLMs without any understanding anything about LLMs and are now upset that the hype train is crashing because it was based on promises that not only wouldn’t but couldn’t be kept.

> hype train is crashing

According to who? Perhaps the people who aren't paying attention. People who use AI frequently and see the rate of progress are still quite hyped.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#99

Post by dclowd9901 »

alganet wrote: post #85
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"? Are you saying someone hyped ... databases? In the same way as AI is hyped today? This is a tweet from Sam Altman, dated April 18 2025: https://x.com/sama/status/1913320105804730518 Whence I quote: i think this is gonna be more like…

The use of semantic web and linked data (a type of distributed database and ontology map) for protein folding (therefore, medical research too) was predicted by many and even used by some. Databases were of key interest. Namely, the problem of relating different schemas. So, yes. _It was claimed_ that database tech could help. And it probably did so already. To what extent I really don't know. Those consortiums inclu…

You're taking a sliver of truth as though it dismantles their entire argument. The point was, nobody was _claiming_ databases would cure all diseases. That's the argument around the hype of AI here.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#100

Post by manoDev »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #7

Sure there's plenty of hype. But its justified to some extent at least. LLMs are one of the biggest advances in technology in human history. In computing the big ones are: * creation of computers * personal computers * the Internet and world wide web * LLMs So the hype is at some level entirely warranted - its a revolutionary technology with real impact. As opposed to for example the hype around crypto or NFTs or blo…

> LLMs are one of the biggest advances in technology in human history.

See, that’s what the article is about.

Saying LLM is on the same level of steam power, the computer, the internet, airplanes, etc. when the technology hasn’t even been around enough to have real impact, and all I read is extrapolation about how everything will be based on it “in the future” — that’s the definition of hype.

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