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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

#111
The reason for this AI hype is how bullshit Western economies have become. I write an AI email which you summarise and we can both be happy that we contributed to the GDP through spending tokens.

In the meantime, nothing tangible has been produced. We’re just hyping ourselves over selling snake oil faster.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It makes sense that people who don't believe the (current wave of generative) AI hype aren't using it and those who do are.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#114
> In technology, AI is currently the new big hype. Before AI, it was "The Cloud", which unfortunately has still not settled, but are now also being interwoven with AI.

Cloud computing is a multi-billion dollar industry and it underpins many of the largest internet companies out there. I fail to see how that's hype.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#116

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…

I guess it works if you replace the internet with email and if people don't include spammers.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#117

To me, AI hype seems to be the most tangible/real hype in a decade. Ever since mobile & cloud era at their peaks in 2012 or 2014, we’ve had Crypto, AR, VR, and now AI. I have some pocket change bitcoin, ethereum, played around for 2 minutes on my dust-gathering Oculus & Vision Pro; but man, oh man! Am I hooked to ChatGpt or what! It’s truly remarkably useful! You just can’t get this type of thing in one click before.…

It's astonishing how the two camps of LLM believers vs LLM doubters has evolved even though we as people are largely very similar, doing similar work.

Why is it that e.g. you believe LLMs are truly revolutionary, whereas e.g. I think they are not? What are the things you are doing with LLMs day to day that are life changing, which I am not doing? I'm so curious.

When I think of things that would be revolutionary for my job, I imagine: something that could input a description + a few resources, and write all the code, docs, etc for me - creating an application that is correct, maintainable, efficient, and scalable. That would solve 80% of my job. From my trials of LLMs, they are nowhere near that level, and barely pass the "correct" requirement.

Further, the cynic in me wonders what work we can possibly be doing where text generation is revolutionary. Keeping in mind that most of our jobs are ultimately largely pointless anyway, so that implies a limit on the true usefulness of any tool. Why does it matter if I can make a website in 1/10th the time if the website doesn't contribute meaningfully to society?

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#118

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 at this point almost 8 years old (dating from the Attention is All You Need paper). If it's truly a revolutionary technology, you should be able to point me to a company leveraging LLMs to make absolute bank, leaving all of its non-LLM-based competitors in the dust.

But instead, what I see in this thread in defense of the revolutionary ideals of LLMs, is how good future LLMs are going to be. That's not a sign of a revolutionary technology, that's a sign of hype. If you want to convince me otherwise, point to how good they are right now.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#119
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…

Some issues with this "hype":

- Company hires tens of people to build an undefined problem. They have a solution (and even that is rather nebulous) and are looking for a problem to solve.

- Company pushes the thing down your throat. The goal is not clear. They make authoritative-sounding statements on how it improves productivity, or throughput, or some other metric, only to retract later when you pull off those people into a private meeting.

- People who claim what all the things that nebulous solution can accomplish when, in fact, nobody really knows because the thing is in a research phase. These are likely the "charlatans" OP is referring to, and s/he's not wrong.

- Learning "next hot thing" instead of the principles that lead to it and, worse still, apply "next hot thing" in the wrong context when the trade-offs have reversed. My own example: writing a single-page web application with "next hot JS framework" when you haven't even understood the trade-off between client-side and server-side rendering (this is just my example, not OP's, but you can probably relate.)

etc. etc. Perhaps the post isn't very well articulated, but it does make several points. If you haven't experienced any of the above, then you're just not in the kind of company that OP probably has worked at. But the things they describe are very real.

I agree there is nothing wrong with "hype" per se, but the author is using the word in a very particular context.

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