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This time, it feels different

nadh.in

141–150 of 249 posts

Re: This time, it feels different

#141
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your timeline is interesting. I've heard people complain about nothing new happening. So I like seeing it laid out like that, so regularly every five years. Then not for fourteen. I still think it's rubbish for people to demand two revolutions a decade or they get bored but I understand the scope a bit better.

People have been flailing around for the "next thing" for a while. First there was crypto, then the metaverse, but now it seems like it will be generative AI. The real world uses I've seen people using it for already outstrip crypto or the metaverse.

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Re: This time, it feels different

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The size of my chat log with ChatGPT speaks against that. The vast majority of the conversations were productive. Of the remainder, most were highly entertaining—-which is a form of productivity in itself.

I don't know what you were responding to. We're not talking about personal experiences, we are talking about people using this stuff to annoy others.

Misunderstanding, maybe? You were responding to an absolute. I’m pointing out there’s plenty of use cases besides that.

Re: This time, it feels different

#143

>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…

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Re: This time, it feels different

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concern with the Web and mobile was mental health, obsolete jobs, etc. No one was making existencial risk comparisons with nuclear weapons. Jobs and Berners-Lee didn’t think there was at least a 10% chance of the iPhone or Web ending civilization, like half of AI researchers do. Like the author said, it’s different this time.

Careful. That claim about half of AI researchers was probably overestimating: To summarize: The claim—that half of AI researchers believe that there is at least a 10% chance that rogue AI will kill us all—is based on a survey question that included 162 respondents. All we know about these respondents is that they were authors on papers published at 2021 machine learning conferences. Possible confounding issues are va…

Can you imagine someone even considering this question regarding PCs, Web, mobile? You'd be rightly laughed out of the room.

Re: This time, it feels different

#145
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dru…

It's probably accurate, and of course there are issues with socialized medicine as well. I have an interesting POV because I actually had my first relapse while I was living in Canada - I wasn't allowed to stay due to my disability but I have some experience with both systems. The waiting is definitely a problem - I didn't get into a neuro before I had to leave the country 9 months later, but at the same time I never worried about paying for treatment and I went to the ER when I couldn't feel half my body/couldn't walk without being concerned.

It isn't just socialized healthcare, though. It's also things like the US not mandating time off - for instance, I haven't had my Ocreveus infusion because I literally can't afford to take the time off to go to the infusion center. And the US is also very binary: Either you work full time or you get nothing benefits wise. For those of us who could comfortably work ~25-30 hours a week this results in either us overworking ourselves to the detriment of our health or not working at all. I'd love to work and just have a little bit of help for when I have a bad week or month, but that doesn't happen here.

The other problem with the American healthcare system is that it siphons off wealth from those in their end of life. Good luck planning a good life for your children: The government will take everything you own for your nursing home. That also has major impacts in term of stability.

But of course in socialized healthcare you do need to decide what is and isn't worth treating in some way and when cuts are needed you end up in dark places like Canada is with MAiD.

It's hard to say. I'm inclined to believe there are benefits and drawbacks to each approach.

Re: This time, it feels different

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

This is how you know it is different. Because the people that were not treating mongo, graphql, microservices, the block chain, and web 3 as miracles are impressed by llm. Just like people that are not tech saavy.

There's hype and then there's overhype. We are clearly in the overhype category for LLMs, but there's absolutely no doubt they are going to change things.

Re: This time, it feels different

#147

Geez 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 beca…

Why not? I believe we are this close: >It probably should rely on its neurons less, and use symbolic reasoning more. That, and learn and grow, either maintain a fact database, or retrain its neurons or add more neurons for new facts.

Re: This time, it feels different

#148
post #42
post #39

> I have come across people who do programming, legal work, business, accountancy and finance, fashion design, architecture, graphic design, research, teaching, cooking, travel planning, event management etc., all of whom have started using the same tool, ChatGPT if I found out my lawyer/account/tax advisor/broker had fed my privileged information into ChatGPT I'd be reporting them to their regulator and they'd be st…

You can use ChatGPT without feeding a clients personal data to it. You can ask hypothetical questions about a certain situation. Like in coding, you don't have to copy paste in source code be able to get some useful feedback on how to proceed.

I mean, Lexis-Nexis just made their own LLM and trained it with their database. This isn't even about OpenAI anymore. Lexis-Nexis is well-known to legal firms, I'd wager and they have well-established guidelines for what client information can be processed.

https://www.lexisnexis.com/en-us/products/lexis-plus-ai.page

Re: This time, it feels different

#149

Geez 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 beca…

> LLM is fundamentally information processing technology. Not the path to AGI, not an emerging sentience.

This logic doesn't follow - AGI will be, fundamentally, information processing technology, just as the human brain is, fundamentally, information processing technology.

Re: This time, it feels different

#150

Geez 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 beca…

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