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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

#171

Post by Izkata »

noosphr wrote: post #92
latexr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're almost describing the lightning network, which depending on where you get your numbers can handle around 10-40x the transactions per second of Visa or MasterCard, neither of which are above 70k in anything I found with a quick search.

Granted it sounds like the lightning network has other issues.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#172

Post by roenxi »

ecb_penguin wrote: post #166
roenxi wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point; let me put it this way: Database hype was relatively muted and databases made a massive impact on our ability to cure diseases. AI hype is wildly higher and there is a reasonable chance it will lead to the curing of all diseases - it is going to have a much bigger impact than databases did. The 10-15 year timeframe is obviously impossible for logistic reasons if nothing else - but the end goal is plausibl…

> there is a reasonable chance it will lead to the curing of all diseases This is complete nonsense. AI might help with the _identification_ of diseases, but there is nothing to support the idea that every human ailment is curable. Perhaps AI can help find cures, but the idea that it can cure every human ailment deserves to be mocked. > I'd rather be standing with Hassabis in the push to end disease than with naysaye…

> but there is nothing to support the idea that every human ailment is curable.

There is; we can conceivably cure everything we know about right now. There isn't a law of nature that says organisms have to live less than centuries and we can start talking seriously about brain-in-jar or consciousness uploading now that we appear to be developing the computing tech to support it.

Everything that exists stops eventually but we're on the cusp of some pretty massive changes here. We're moving from a world with 8 1-in-a-billion people wandering around to one with an arbitrary number of superhuman intelligences. That is going to have a major impact larger than anything we've seen to date. A bunch of science fiction stuff is manifesting in real time.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#174

Post by serverlessmania »

“Hype is harmful and deceptive.”

Congratulations on identifying marketing exists. What’s next? You gonna blow the whistle on toothpaste commercials? Of course hype is driven by profit. That’s literally the point of business. But you know what else was hyped once? The internet. And electricity. And antibiotics. Being annoyed that people are excited about tech is not a worldview—it's a vibe. A really boring one.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#175

Post by serverlessmania »

“Modern tech hype mirrors medieval charlatans.”

Ah, yes, the classic “this thing I don’t like is medieval alchemy” comparison. Because if you can’t refute the tools, just compare it to snake oil. It’s cute how this guy thinks he’s the only one who’s noticed not every AI startup is curing cancer. The tech world has always had grifters. That doesn’t mean the tools themselves are fake—it means some people are dumb and others are greedy, which is kind of how humanity works.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#176

Post by serverlessmania »

“AI is misleading, there’s no actual intelligence.”

Oh wow, you figured out “Artificial Intelligence” isn’t literal. You should tell the rest of the planet. Maybe we should rename it “Statistical Pattern Prediction Machines That Are Better at Your Job Than You Are.” It’s a mouthful, but more honest.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#177

Post by manoDev »

kadushka wrote: post #163
manoDev wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

LLMs do about half of my work for me. Today I spent most of my time interacting with o3 and 2.5-pro and I have accomplished what would take me 3 days to accomplish in the past. That’s real impact.

LLMs can’t do anything for my work besides being an alternative to Google, and even then I need to double check on another source.

You get a lot of positive reinforcement from positive opinions online, but the people who don’t depend on this to work won’t be vocal about it.

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#178

Post by mcdeltat »

ryandrake wrote: post #151
mcdeltat wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Perhaps. Then how do you handle the computer being confidently wrong a large proportion of the time? From my experience it's inaccurate in proportion to the significance of the task. So by the time it's writing real code it's more wrong than right. How can you turn that into something useful? I don't think the system around us is configured to handle such an unreliable agent. I don't want things in my life to be less reliable, I want them to be more reliable.

(Also if you exist in an ecosystem where being confidently wrong 70% of the time is acceptable, that's kinda suspect and I'll return to the argument of "useless jobs")

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#179

Post by mcdeltat »

bredren wrote: post #152
mcdeltat wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

But the complete solution fallacy is what the believers are claiming will occur, isn't it? I'm 100% with you that LLMs will make subsets of problems easier. Similar to how great progress in image recognition has been made with other ML techniques. That seems like a very reasonable take. However, that wouldn't be "revolutionary", I don't think. That's not "fire all your developers because most jobs will be replaced by AI in a few years" (a legitimate sentiment shared to me from an AI-hyped colleague).

Re: I passionately hate hype, especially the AI hype

#180

Post by ninetyninenine »

kadushka wrote: post #146
ninetyninenine wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It was never this level of AI. You're completely out of it. We couldn't even get AI to hold a freaking conversation. It was so bad we came up with this thing called the turing test and that was the benchmark. Now people like you are all, like "well it's obvious the turing test was garbage". No. It's not obvious. It's the hype got to your head. If we found a way to travel at light speed for 3 dollars the hype would b…

I remember how ~5 years ago I said - here on HN - that AI will pass TT within 2 years. I was downvoted into oblivion. People said I was delusional and that it won’t happen in their lifetime.

Dig that quote up, find anyone who gave you a negative reply, and just randomly reply to them with a link to what you just posted here (along with the link to your old prediction) lol. Be like "told you so"
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