Very good piece. It really does feel different this time. Lots of McKinsey BS about job creation...but where?
LLM Wisperers
This time, it feels different
111–120 of 249 posts
Re: This time, it feels different
#112He (and most people on HN) are still underestimating the impact of this. Everything points at AI soon becoming far more intelligent than any human. That's not science fiction about the remote future in a hundred years. We are talking about something in the order of ten years. We are actually at the brink of the "technological singularity". It's happening. It's happening.
I would wager in 10 years time we're all looking back in dismay about how AI has just been used to produce an endless stream of fake news, empty-feeling generated content, spam, ads and other forms of monetisation that make our lives miserable. Some menial administrative jobs that have virtually no value but aren't yet fully automated will be wiped out by conglomerates who offer their white label AI solutions at scal…
> I would wager in 10 years time we're all looking back in dismay about how AI has just been used to produce an endless stream of fake news, empty-feeling generated content, spam, ads and other forms of monetisation that make our lives miserable.
I don't think we will have wait 10 months for that, let alone 10 years.
Re: This time, it feels different
#113I have begun to expect every text box I use has a copilot type autocomplete custom tailored to the context.
Surprised they haven't added it to HN comments.
Re: This time, it feels different
#114Geez another article on the AI Spookiness? How many is that this month now? Most of these articles border on science fiction and involve a lot of projection. While I am concerned in some ways with AI, particularly in mass surveillance and public manipulation via bots, what else can we do other than be reactive to _real_ AI applications when _deployed_? Then we start to discuss proper policy towards AI. Until we see s…
> Most of these articles border on science fiction and involve a lot of projection.
Given that the author stuck mostly to their own experiences of the here-and-now, I'm not sure I understand how the rest of your critique (which, overall, I agree with) applies to this content.
Re: This time, it feels different
#115He (and most people on HN) are still underestimating the impact of this. Everything points at AI soon becoming far more intelligent than any human. That's not science fiction about the remote future in a hundred years. We are talking about something in the order of ten years. We are actually at the brink of the "technological singularity". It's happening. It's happening.
Nothing points to this I'm afraid. All we have with LLMs is a probabilistic word salad generator that is realistic enough to get people who should / should not know better very excited.
It is better than Google search because it puts the results into a realistic sounding piece of text. It is worse than Google search because it does not provide sources or context. Both will steal the information you feed in.
Exactly no progress has been made in understanding or creating real intelligence in any meaningful sense, and we should have no expectation of any progress anytime soon while everyone is so focused on purely syntactical learning environments. Nobody learns anything by feeding them a dictionary.
Re: This time, it feels different
#116>LangChain[13] enters the chat! Imagine the horror stories of automated online account blocks and Kafkaesque customer support mazes that are all too common, manifesting at a societal level. I can imagine this to be a problem. But I can also imagine it to solve a problem. Right now, customer support is often "dehumanised" and Kafkaesque because no single human has the full picture and all the permissions required to r…
I agree. 90% of the experiences I've had with modern "support" makes me wish I was talking to GPT-4, instead.
The exceptions are either lucky breaks that feel about as good - and random - as finding a $20 bill on the ground and those experiences I've paid a lot of money for because I'm a relatively wealthy software engineer and have chosen to "opt in" to kinder, more competent service with cash. First class travel and premium banking services come to mind.
AI has the power to make everyone's experience with support more pleasant, which isn't to say that it won't have a cost.
Re: This time, it feels different
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> my sense of security in said standard of living has taken a nosedive While it's hard to say, that might be the news you read, rather than reality.
Eh. Depends on which part. I definitely have fallen into doomscrolling on occasion, but I have reasons to believe our society is less stable than it was. This has good and bad aspects - the 'stability' offered was in many ways the stability of a less rich way of living (think people without plumbing or with dirt floors), but at the same time the lack of security is a major stressor and that's not good for your mental…
Yep, agreed. Well thought through response.
What's your opinion on the following assertion: countries (such as mine) with socialised medicine make sure everyone has a certain standard of care, but that standard only goes so far. The US lets people pay for any possible treatment, and so people who would be put on palliative care in, say, the UK, would be bankrupted in the US by trying to beat cancer with expensive drugs.
It's phrased as an assertion, but it's really just something I've been thinking about. What do you think?
Re: This time, it feels different
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've also lived through many technologies that failed to achieve mainstream adoption despite demonstrating comparable levels of hype.
I'm constantly resisting the urge to write "MongoDB is webscale" whenever these threads show up. For the uninitiated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636198 . The original video is gone but it lives on YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs .
It's funny you mention that because one of many concerns I can see with OpenAI might be, "... but is it web scale?" in that I could envision tight rate limits being imposed and then businesses having to pay exponentially more to get higher limits and passing those costs on to someone and these costs climb over time on some scale. New tech often operate at a loss until they get businesses dependent on their service.
Re: This time, it feels different
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> my sense of security in said standard of living has taken a nosedive. Doesn’t that imply a decrease in standard of living? Not easy to quantify one. I personally see not living in fear as a staple of standard of living.
I agree with you, but a reasonable case could be made for viewing standard of living as material access so I think that's where a lot of us talk past one another. Also American society is pretty disdainful of security, historically.
Isn’t housing part of that material access which has become harder to maintain and access by more and more? People living paycheck to paycheck to pay huge rents, people living in tents and so on seems to indicate some decrease in the standard of living.
Re: This time, it feels different
#120Geez people. Please learn to identify hypes, but most importantly the causes of hypes.
LLM is fundamentally information processing technology. Not the path to AGI, not an emerging sentience.
The reason "this time" feels so amazing is that the unwashed masses suddenly got access to new information processing technology in a context where their tools been stagnant for decades.
Not because it was not possible, but because there was no money in it.
To understand my argument and its implications, humor me for a moment and imagine a universe in which everyone was already using linux computers and for a decade now published papers of ML/DL were available for people to use. So there were various crowdsourced indices and models of all sorts, which people incrementally embedded in their information processing workflows.
In that universe there would be no room for the delirious reaction we have here. It would be incremental evolution of search, knowledge bases, algorithmic content generation etc.
What we have experienced instead in these past decades is information tool starvation. These incrementally improving tools, while nothing but known and ultimately mundane algorithms were not available except within a tiny elite.
In fact, people's information processing capability arguably declined as the desktop platforms got downgraded, adtech toxic waste covered the information landscape etc.
What is happening now is that a socioeconomic and artificially induced scarcity is now being broken (for reasons that require serious piecing together of events).
So while on the surface this hype is as distastful as any illustration of human lemming behaviour, there is enormous silver lining if we succeed to read its causes.
These tools are here, have been here for a while and they can be inserted into our ever growing information processing toolkit. The risks are there to match the opportunities.
The biggest risk of them all is precisely what has led to the current situation. Technology not diffusing normally, but controlled by gatekeepers.