I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype • Hacker News Board

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#121

Post by ianbutler » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 2:28 AM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #101

Nition wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> For example say you have a complex medical problem. Or you go to a doctor instead of imagining answers.

You put too much faith in doctors. Pretty much every woman I know has been waived off for issues that turned serious later and even as a guy I have to do above average leg work to get them to care about anything.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#122

Post by Animats » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 2:30 AM UTC

It's not as bad as battery hype.

Remember all those articles about some minor advance in surface chemistry which was then hyped into Trillion Dollar Industry Real Soon Now? They usually appeared in one of Nature's off-brand journals, or just arxiv, not in Chemical Engineering News or IEEE Trans. on Power Engineering. Such articles usually lacked the usual performance numbers (Wh/L, Wh/Kg, and Wh/$).

Then there's Javascript framework hype, which makes everyone run very hard to stay in the same place.

AI is at least making rapid progress. It's been less than three years since ChatGPT came out. Having lived and worked through the "AI Winter" (1984-2005), this is an improvement. The main problem now remains "hallucinations", or worse, "agentic" systems which act on hallucinations.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#123

Post by bdangubic » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 2:30 AM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #101

Nition wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> For example say you have a complex medical problem. Or you go to a doctor instead of imagining answers.

literally the LAST place I would go (I am American)

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#124

Post by ecb_penguin » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 2:36 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #102

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…

> Who, in databases, has claimed that "in the next 10, 15 years we can actually have a real crack at solving all disease"? I doubt anyone claimed 10-15 years specifically, but it does actually seem like a pretty reasonable claim that without databases progress will be a snails pace and with databases it will be more of a horses trot. I imagine the human body requires a fair amount of data to be organised to analyse a…

> but it does actually seem like a pretty reasonable claim that without databases progress will be a snails pace and with databases it will be more of a horses trot.

This isn't what anyone is saying

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#125

Post by famouswaffles » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 2:43 AM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #118

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 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 sig…

Large Language Models are not 8 years old. GPT-3 or arguably GPT-2 is the first LLM.

Moreover, I can think of 0 revolutionary technologies that did what you've said in such timelines. The Internet, Smartphones, The Steam Engine - the idea that revolutionary technology is created and everything changes in an instant is bizarre fiction.

And how well would you know really? Not everyone using LLMs internally is screaming about it from the rooftops.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#126

Post by re-thc » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 2:43 AM UTC

dclowd9901 wrote: post #103

mjr00 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It feels a bit like LLMs rely a lot on _us_ to be useful. Which is a big point to the author's article about how companies are trimming off staff for AI.

> how companies are trimming off staff for AI

But they're not. That's just the excuse. The real truth is somewhere along pandemic over hire and bad / unstable economy.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#127

Post by kukkeliskuu » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 2:46 AM UTC

pesus wrote: post #112

spiderice wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It is more probable that people who have used it more have a more realistic and balanced view of their capabilities, based on the experience. Unless their livelihood depends on not having a relalistic view of the capabilities.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#128

Post by Guthur » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 2:46 AM UTC

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…

There are issues with our current economic model and it blows down to rent. The service need model is allowing the owners and controllers of capital to set up systems that allow them to extract as much rent as possible, AI is just another approach to this.

And then if it is successful for building, as you say we'll have yet another production issue as that building is essentially completely automatic. Read how over production has affect society for pretty much ever and then ask yourself will it really be good for the masses.

Additionally all the media is so thoroughly captured that we're in "1984" yet so few people seem to realise it. The elites will start wars, crush people's livelihoods and brainwash everyone into being true believers as they march their sons to war while living in poverty.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#129

Post by tedunangst » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 2:49 AM UTC

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.…

I'd say it was closer to 25 years from the invention of the personal computer to the point it made an impact on everyday life.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#130

Post by jimmaswell » Sat, Apr 19, 2025, 2:50 AM UTC

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…

Hype is good. Hype is the explosion of exploration that comes in the wake of something new and interesting. We wouldn't be on this website of no one was ever hyped about transistors or networking or programming languages. Myriad people tried myriad ideas each time, and most of them didn't pan out, but here we are with the ideas that stuck. An armchair-naysayer like the author declaring others fools for getting excited and putting in work to explore new ideas is the only true fool involved.