Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’ • Hacker News Board

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#131

Post by kubb » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 8:57 AM UTC

trashtester wrote: post #85

kubb wrote: post #12

Modern "economy". There are a bunch of thousands of guys with a couple to a couple hundred billion each. There are millions of people desperate to own a house and afford life. The rich guys want to be more rich. They're hiring some of the poor suckers to check how others got richer in the past. The answer is tech! New tech is created every couple of years. People hype it up as much as they can. The rich guys give a f…

How do you define "poor"? Net worth of less than $10M? Income less than $1M? Unless you set very strict limits for "poor" like that, the people that the ultra rich hire tend to be rather well off, or at least comfortable, themselves ( by that I mean net worth of >$1M OR income of >$100k. Actual poor people don't built state of the art tech. At best, they work as cleaning staff or in the cafeteria of those companies.…

It's common to project resentment towards individuals onto someone who expresses dissatisfaction with systemic issues. We want to think on our small human scale, but our societies got so big that we can't make sense of them in those terms anymore.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#132

Post by vineyardmike » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:00 AM UTC

qsort wrote: post #106

Animats wrote: post #88

The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite. Look at self-driving cars. The first tries were in the late 1950s, with GM's Firebird 3, guided by wires in the road. By the 1980s, the first self-driving vehicles were moving around CMU, very slowly. By the early 1990s, experimental highway driving had been demoed. In the early 2000s, we had the DARPA Grand Challenge, which had of…

Does Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0 stop working in the presence of traffic cones? More seriously, the distance between "sort of works" and "works" might not be infinite, but it most likely involves fundamentally unpredictable future developments of the current technology. There is no straight line of incremental improvements that gets us there. It's fairly straightforward to imagine that if you have a 4.77mhz CPU and…

> Does Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0 stop working in the presence of traffic cones?

I think if you put a traffic cone on my IRL managers head she’d stop working too. Maybe a bit different… but maybe not.

I don’t think the poster was saying we’re within arms reach of it, but that there’s a path that takes us from here to there. A MSFT AI manager obviously wouldn’t behave exactly like a real human, but a tool that aggregates and summarizes information from many reports for a high level manager, and helps negotiate priorities is something potentially doable with some prompt engineering and advancements in models.

I respect many of my past managers, and some of them were great mentors and materially improved my life but 50+% of the value managers provide to an organization can be done with a bit of glue between GPT-x and Jira. It’d free up a lot of their time for the remaining 50% too.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#133

Post by mrweasel » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:02 AM UTC

doctor_eval wrote: post #28

JimDabell wrote: post #21

Investors who do nothing but follow the crowd dumped a tonne of money into cryptocurrency / blockchain startups regardless of merit. Now they are doing the same with AI. But AI actually has clear, immediate, and lasting value. Articles like this seem to be written by people who don’t understand the basic concepts about people who don’t understand the basic concepts. Both sets of people just seem to identify the trend…

Couldn’t agree more. Crypto was a monetizable solution in search of a problem. AI solves real problems, and has been doing so for many years. Generative AI is just the latest and most accessible instantiating of it. My first company was a dialup ISP in the 90s. I look at GPT4 and I see the 56K modem of AI. There is so much upside to be discovered, we have barely started.

My concern would be that the investors can't tell the good from the bad and will throw money at anything that has "AI" checkbox on the box. So money won't necessarily to the projects where it's could generate the most value. Large amounts of money is going to go to those who promise the most amazing things and really hype the AI.

In the end I doubt that those who are able to use AI most effectively will need to slap the "AI" label on their products, they'll just be the better products.

As much as I believe crypto-currencies to be mostly a scam, blockchain technology exists in products most of us aren't even aware of, because it's a neat solution to a certain set of problems. It's just not all that sexy.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#134

Post by vineyardmike » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:08 AM UTC

doctor_eval wrote: post #84

darkwater wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Couldn’t agree more. Crypto was a monetizable solution in search of a problem. True > AI solves real problems AI research and real products, most probably. All those new companies/startups that are wrappers around ChatGPT? Not that much. Maybe someone will do something that really brings value but most of them sound and act like the Blockchain startups we had til 12 months ago.

GPT wrapper products are the equivalent of static corporate HTML pages from the 90s. We build them because we are the early adopters of a brand new technology and we’re working out how it works. I’m working with such a company and yes, the first product is a (very nuanced and very domain specific) wrapper around GPT. But as we gain experience, we expect to develop far more complex and interesting products. But we got…

> 2 years ago, nobody even knew about ChatGPT

So chatGPT isn’t 2 years old, but i recently discovered that if you search HN for GPT-2, you’ll discover years of people discussing it, below hype levels. You’ll find “did GPT2 write this” type comments that we see today with 3,4. You’ll see people train it against their texts to talk to themselves. A lot of the ChatGPT induced hype hypotheticals were already done.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#135

Post by mihaic » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:13 AM UTC

trashtester wrote: post #96

mihaic wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only very few people are asking for a completely different system, they usually demand fine-tuning the system so that it improves median life quality. It used to be that the philosophy before was to have the least amount of intervention on the free market, and it's now that there should be no interventions whatsoever. Isn't that an extreme position?

There is probably no country in the world with no intervention, or even close. In fact, there are massive intervention in pretty much every country. Actual lassez-faire economies was mostly a thing in the 19th century. Since then, regulatations have been accumulating constantly, and total government spending increased to GDP increased from about 10% to 35-75% in most if not all western countries.

Yes, but many of these have one form or another of "take from the middle class and give to everyone else".

I wasn't arguing that governments don't do anything, it's that they don't do enough to limit the size if the parasitic rich class, while the original post was saying that this is the best system we've got.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#136

Post by Ekaros » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:13 AM UTC

drawfloat wrote: post #103

Animats wrote: post #88

The distance between "sort of works" and "works" for AI is considerable. Not infinite. Look at self-driving cars. The first tries were in the late 1950s, with GM's Firebird 3, guided by wires in the road. By the 1980s, the first self-driving vehicles were moving around CMU, very slowly. By the early 1990s, experimental highway driving had been demoed. In the early 2000s, we had the DARPA Grand Challenge, which had of…

Being able to take a cab in a single tiny part of the world remains firmly in “sort of works” camp.

Also when you start to get in more extreme but not actually extreme scenarios. I wonder how well will these do with let's say 5cm of fresh snow. With no other traffic yet meaning no road markings are visible, and in bad case signs could be covered. Probably a yearly scenario in many parts of the world.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#137

Post by vineyardmike » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:16 AM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #73

apexalpha wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen the new AI photoshop where you can just AI fill anything? And it just works? The amount of people who can edit photo's is now basically unlimited. That's thanks to generative AI. Same like how the computers enabled billions to do the most complex calculations within a second, while before you needed to learn that skill over years or practise.

> Have you seen the new AI photoshop where you can just AI fill anything? And it just works? > The amount of people who can edit photo's is now basically unlimited. That's thanks to generative AI. It's also available at zero cost, thanks to the ecosystem around Stable Diffusion. You probably know the meme that gets parroted randomly about OpenAI needing a moat; well, what's Adobe's moat, now that this exists?

Well stable diffusion’s parent company is nearly dead due to funding issues. So competing isn’t something they’re succeeding at.

The moat memo misses the truth that google knows: you need existing customers. Ideally paying customers.

Firefly has doesn’t have a moat, it has a well. It has a way to sustain and fund development and growth and servers. That’s why google doesn’t need a moat. They have the funds to take on anyone, and probably win.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#138

Post by ben_w » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:19 AM UTC

stale2002 wrote: post #86

ben_w wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you seen the new AI photoshop where you can just AI fill anything? And it just works? > The amount of people who can edit photo's is now basically unlimited. That's thanks to generative AI. It's also available at zero cost, thanks to the ecosystem around Stable Diffusion. You probably know the meme that gets parroted randomly about OpenAI needing a moat; well, what's Adobe's moat, now that this exists?

> well, what's Adobe's moat, now that this exists? Although this is debatable, lets accept it for the sake of argument that adobe has no moat. If this is the case, this may be bad for adobe, but it is amazing for the design world. Producing more art for cheaper is real value. And we may not know who specifically will capture that value, but it is undeniably value none the less that will go somewhere . That still bene…

> That still benefits the economy as a whole, even if we can't guess which AI startup will win the race.

One possible outcome is that the entire economy benefits without any AI startup winning — even if Stability AI goes under for whatever reason, the various Stable Diffusion models are still out there getting used to make pictures.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#139

Post by harry8 » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:20 AM UTC

olalonde wrote: post #80

harry8 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is another way of saying "If you invested in the first one to be successful." Well yeah. Obviously. Time machines work great for investment decisions. edit: Whether it was first or not the nokia N95 was a smartphone and was definitely before the iphone. Forgotten like every earlier loser I guess.

The point is that there is no way to tell whether a company will become one of the "early failed companies" vs "the first one to be successful". Your strategy is not actionable.

"Don't throw money at a new sector of transformative tech looking for first mover advantage because you'll lose."

Seems actionable to me, was it not clear?

You've got to do a lot more, you've got to pick ford will win. Even if you're 100% the tech is massively transformstive. The winners to pick may not exist yet.

Re: Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’

#140

Post by abainbridge » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:26 AM UTC

jstx1 wrote: post #123

intended wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-driving is never going to happen, and its also sitting in some sort of informational blind spot for the people working on it - I have no idea why. There is no such thing as "driving" there is no physical force, or particle. There is no force preventing you from driving in the opposite direction of traffic, or through glass panes. "Driving" is entirely a social phenomnon, the confluence of societal self impositio…

I don't understand the leap from "it's difficult and there are many special circumstances" to "it's never going to happen". I don't get why you think that any of these problems are unsolvable given enough time.

Here's one way to get to the "it's never going to happen" outcome:

The grand-parent comment argues that we need AI that works in a much broader set of circumstances to "solve" self driving. In particular it would need to understand how other humans would react to its actions in novel situations. That is approximately a description of having a Theory of Mind. Some argue that you can't have a Theory of Mind without being conscious. We might ban captive conciousnesses for ethical reasons.

I think you could invent lots of other scenarios that yield the "never going to happen" outcome. They probably all sound ludicrous, because having an AI that understands the workings of human minds sounds ludicrous (and frightening).