Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Paul Graham calls A.I. ‘the exact opposite of a solution in search of a problem’

fortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 48 posts

Re: Paul Graham calls A.I. ‘the exact opposite of a solution in search of a problem’

#11

Post by saltcured »

injb wrote: post #2

Can't read the article. Does he mean it's a problem in search of a solution then? Or does he mean it's "the exact opposite of a solution, in search of a problem" (in other words, a problem in search of a problem)?

The exact opposite could be a non-solution trying to evade all problems. ;-)

And that's why I personally don't have much faith in the LLM approach. Natural language is too full of ambiguity to pretend it delivers meaning. It makes oblique references to meaning, based on awful assumptions about the audience and presumed mental context.

I see enough absurd miscommunication and word salad between native speakers. I really don't want a magic box to vaguely emulate this.

Re: Paul Graham calls A.I. ‘the exact opposite of a solution in search of a problem’

#12

Post by vidarh »

medler wrote: post #6

It feels like we are well on our way toward the Trough of Disillusionment in the Gartner hype cycle for ChatGPT. It’s losing users daily. People are saying that it’s gotten worse since launch (don’t know if this is true but it’s what I’m hearing). As far as I know, it hasn’t revolutionized anything except spam generation.

It's unsurprising if it's losing users, both because the hype was immense. My girlfriends flatmate used it to write a legal-sounding letter to their landlord. My 14yo son has used it to write fun stories to share with his friends. Seemingly "everyone" has tried it. And for most of them it doesn't solve a frequent real issue.

At the same time for many of those of us for whom it is useful, a lot of the initial use was experimentation to find the right use cases. I still use it, but I use it for the things where I know it works for me, and so I use it less than at the peak when use was dominated by learning.

Others will have found areas where alternatives like self-hosted LLMs are good enough.

Use will like grow again over time as people get more experience and build useful things on top of it. But it won't be the same rush.

Re: Paul Graham calls A.I. ‘the exact opposite of a solution in search of a problem’

#13

Post by VladimirGolovin »

medler wrote: post #6

It feels like we are well on our way toward the Trough of Disillusionment in the Gartner hype cycle for ChatGPT. It’s losing users daily. People are saying that it’s gotten worse since launch (don’t know if this is true but it’s what I’m hearing). As far as I know, it hasn’t revolutionized anything except spam generation.

Hype or not, I'm absolutely keeping my ChatGPT subscripion because it has proven to be consistently useful in my everyday life.

Re: Paul Graham calls A.I. ‘the exact opposite of a solution in search of a problem’

#14

Post by tracerbulletx »

bsder wrote: post #10
tracerbulletx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish people would just do some deeper investigation before forming opinions based on their biases. If you actually use it you know it's incredibly useful for learning, getting answers to general problems that 99% of the time work fine and it helps you understand those answers. The amount of times it's wrong or misleading is not significant enough to even be annoying during day to day use. Just talking about current…

> If you actually use it you know it's incredibly useful for learning, getting answers to general problems that 99% of the time work fine and helps you understand its answers. The amount of times it's wrong or misleading is not significant enough to even be annoying during day to day use. Just talking about current practical usefulness here not even speculating about the future, just want it's useful for today. We us…

I am having good conversations with the thing about books as I read them and having it summarize parts I want to keep notes on and make knowledge graphs, and construct new worked examples and diving into specific topics and having significantly enhanced learning experiences with it as a partner literally every day for the last few months. So you're entitled to your opinion but it's simply not the same thing as a search engine.

Re: Paul Graham calls A.I. ‘the exact opposite of a solution in search of a problem’

#15

Post by Spivak »

bsder wrote: post #10
tracerbulletx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish people would just do some deeper investigation before forming opinions based on their biases. If you actually use it you know it's incredibly useful for learning, getting answers to general problems that 99% of the time work fine and it helps you understand those answers. The amount of times it's wrong or misleading is not significant enough to even be annoying during day to day use. Just talking about current…

> If you actually use it you know it's incredibly useful for learning, getting answers to general problems that 99% of the time work fine and helps you understand its answers. The amount of times it's wrong or misleading is not significant enough to even be annoying during day to day use. Just talking about current practical usefulness here not even speculating about the future, just want it's useful for today. We us…

I see that an an incredibly high bar. Even with all the resources of Google they (and everyone else) are losing the SEO war. These algos at their core fundamentally can't handle adversarial input and we've been making faster horses since AltaVista. Even if the only thing LLms are useful for is search that's still great.

Re: Paul Graham calls A.I. ‘the exact opposite of a solution in search of a problem’

#16

Post by kalb_almas »

bsder wrote: post #10
tracerbulletx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish people would just do some deeper investigation before forming opinions based on their biases. If you actually use it you know it's incredibly useful for learning, getting answers to general problems that 99% of the time work fine and it helps you understand those answers. The amount of times it's wrong or misleading is not significant enough to even be annoying during day to day use. Just talking about current…

> If you actually use it you know it's incredibly useful for learning, getting answers to general problems that 99% of the time work fine and helps you understand its answers. The amount of times it's wrong or misleading is not significant enough to even be annoying during day to day use. Just talking about current practical usefulness here not even speculating about the future, just want it's useful for today. We us…

> Somebody would put up a website about their favorite pet topic and when the search engine unearthed it, that's what you got.

The difference is that reading someone's blog post forces you to take their trajectory through the material and it might not go over the exact points you're curious or confused about. With a forum like StackOverflow you often have to settle for problems that are merely close enough to your own that the solutions apply to it.

Models like ChatGPT allow you to ask for blog posts on any topic on demand and then ask for follow-up blog posts about whatever aspect of the previous blog post you want to elaborate.

Re: Paul Graham calls A.I. ‘the exact opposite of a solution in search of a problem’

#17

Post by JohnFen »

VladimirGolovin wrote: post #13
medler wrote: post #6

It feels like we are well on our way toward the Trough of Disillusionment in the Gartner hype cycle for ChatGPT. It’s losing users daily. People are saying that it’s gotten worse since launch (don’t know if this is true but it’s what I’m hearing). As far as I know, it hasn’t revolutionized anything except spam generation.

Hype or not, I'm absolutely keeping my ChatGPT subscripion because it has proven to be consistently useful in my everyday life.

I haven't found it to be more than very marginally useful in my life. It's interesting that some people think it's incredibly useful and others find it not worth the bother. I wonder what the difference is?

Re: Paul Graham calls A.I. ‘the exact opposite of a solution in search of a problem’

#18

Post by catchnear4321 »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #9
medler wrote: post #6

It feels like we are well on our way toward the Trough of Disillusionment in the Gartner hype cycle for ChatGPT. It’s losing users daily. People are saying that it’s gotten worse since launch (don’t know if this is true but it’s what I’m hearing). As far as I know, it hasn’t revolutionized anything except spam generation.

I wish people would just do some deeper investigation before forming opinions based on their biases. If you actually use it you know it's incredibly useful for learning, getting answers to general problems that 99% of the time work fine and it helps you understand those answers. The amount of times it's wrong or misleading is not significant enough to even be annoying during day to day use. Just talking about current…

> I wish people would just do some deeper investigation before forming opinions based on their biases.

well then they wouldn’t be people now, would they?

your reaction is fair. and rare.

Re: Paul Graham calls A.I. ‘the exact opposite of a solution in search of a problem’

#19

Post by mrguyorama »

JohnFen wrote: post #17
VladimirGolovin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hype or not, I'm absolutely keeping my ChatGPT subscripion because it has proven to be consistently useful in my everyday life.

I haven't found it to be more than very marginally useful in my life. It's interesting that some people think it's incredibly useful and others find it not worth the bother. I wonder what the difference is?

Some people have significantly more need for generating vacuous, meaningless textual content from very little initial seed content.

Re: Paul Graham calls A.I. ‘the exact opposite of a solution in search of a problem’

#20

Post by throw2020201 »

medler wrote: post #6

It feels like we are well on our way toward the Trough of Disillusionment in the Gartner hype cycle for ChatGPT. It’s losing users daily. People are saying that it’s gotten worse since launch (don’t know if this is true but it’s what I’m hearing). As far as I know, it hasn’t revolutionized anything except spam generation.

[flagged]
Post reply on HN