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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

#151

Post by ryandrake »

mcdeltat wrote: post #117
cafed00d wrote: post #16

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…

I think the difference is between people who accept nondeterministic behavior from their computers and those who don’t. If you accept your computer being confidently wrong some unknowable percentage of the time, then LLMs are miraculous and game changing software. If you don’t, then the same LLMs are defective and unreliable toys, not suitable as serious tools.

People have different expectations out of computers, and that accounts for the wildly different views on current AI capabilities.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#152

Post by bredren »

mcdeltat wrote: post #117
cafed00d wrote: post #16

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…

> I imagine: something that could input a description + a few resources, and write all the code, docs, etc for me

It could be that you’re falling into a complete solution fallacy. LLMs can already be great at working each of these problems. It helps to work on a small piece of these problems. It does take practice and any sufficiently complicated problem will require practice and multiple attempts.

But the more you practice with them, you start getting a feel for it and these things start to eat away at this 80% you’re describing.

It is not self driving, if anything, software engineering, automation is only accessible to those who nerd out at it, the same way using a PC used to be sending email or programming.

A lot of the attention is on being able to run increasingly capablemodels on machines with less resources. But there’s not much use to fuss over Gemini 2.5 Pro if you don’t already have a pretty good feel for deep interaction with sonnet or GPT 4o.

It is already impressive and can seriously accelerate software engineering.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#153

Post by roywiggins »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #82
nl wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which of those things claimed it would be "like the renaissance" or that we'd cure all diseases? In the clip I link above Hassabis says he hopes that in 10-15 years' time we'll be looking back on the way we do medicine today like the way they did it in the middle ages. In 10-15 years time. Modern medicine - you know, antibiotics, vaccines, transplants, radiotherapy, anti-retrovirals, the whole shebang, like medieval…

Ray Kurzweil?

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#154

Post by sidrag22 »

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.

when dial up was initially the new thing you could also take that away and the world would keep chugging, same for phone lines, same for electricity. but you take away something the world has had time to become dependent on and suddenly the world has a harder time.

The worlds dependency on LLM tools just hasnt had time to develop and that doesnt mean it wont. most people here are likely on the bleeding edge of utilizing them. most people not paying attention will just use it like they use google or not at all, until tools are built and they dont even realize they are using an LLM, or using a service that is dependent on an LLM.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#155

Post by Centigonal »

chewbacha wrote: post #143
sgustard wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess OP hated it when Bill Gates said "personal computers have become the most empowering tool we've ever created." Or Vint Cerf, "The Internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world."

Yea, and the internet never went through a hype bubble that ultimately burst ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The thing is, the dot com hypesters were right about the impact of the Internet. Their timing was wrong, and they didn't pick the right winners mostly, but the one thing they were right about was that the Internet would change the world significantly and drive massive economic transformation.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#156

Post by parineum »

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…

Even though the Internet has displaced fax machines, fax machines enabled instant, worldwide, legal (signing contracts and such) communication.

That's not insignificant. They're stupid now because we have the Internet but they were a major leap in conducting business.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#157

Post by roywiggins »

1over137 wrote: post #78
nl wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AI is old too.

“In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.” (Minsky, 1970)

https://aiws.net/the-history-of-ai/this-week-in-the-history-...

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#159

Post by doginasuit »

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…

It is an interesting comparison. Databases are objectively the more important technology, if we somehow lost AI the world would be equal parts disappointed and relieved. If we somehow lost database technology we'd be facing a dystopian nightmare.

If we cure all disease in the next 10-15 years, databases will be just as important as AI to that outcome. Databases supported a technology renaissance that reshaped the world on a level that is difficult to comprehend. But because most of the world doesn't interact directly with databases, as a technology it is not the focus of enthusiastic rhetoric.

LLMs are further along tech-chain and they might be an important part of world-changing human achievements, we won't know until we get there. In contrast, we can be certain databases were important. I imagine the people who were influential in their advancement understood how important the tech would be, even if they didn't breathlessly go on about it.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#160

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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