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’

#141

Post by pjc50 » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:32 AM UTC

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…

> Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0

I think we've found the common thread between AI and crypto: the dumping of externalities and increase in energy usage.

Do people really want to work for Microsoft Middle Manager? Have we not seen enough horror stories about metric-slavery in Amazon warehouses and the gig economy? It might be cheaper, but it's also worse, for a class of people who don't get any input in the decision. Similarly self-driving unleashes a new class of poorly behaved "learner" drivers on the road, who may be less aggressive but are also capable of causing problems from that very timidity and lack of general competence.

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

#142

Post by gremlinsinc » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:33 AM UTC

intended wrote: post #104

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…

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…

it'll happen but the car won't really be self driving, I think a literal ai robot cheaufer is more likely. AGI will be able to do everything a human can do, including driving. We're IMHO less than a decade, if not less than half a decade from that.

If you don't believe me name a scatter chart showing ai papers since 2017. Notice how this year dwarfs all previous years and last year blew the water out of the previous ones but the ones before generative art models were a bit slower and more regular.

If we can perfect ai agents and automated LLMs, we could create personified agents of varying backgrounds in a virtual computer lab tasked with doing ai research 24/7. We could put 60 ai scientists in the lab and just watch them work.

Maybe the lab is vr such that human scientists could enter and collaborate with ai counter parts. imagine applying this to cancer research, etc.

When an LLM can train itself, program children(next version), and submit orders or plans for new hardware fabs to a factory to breach current limitations, then we basically have von Neumann probes that multiply, grow, learn, and don't need human intervention.

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

#143

Post by apexalpha » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:40 AM UTC

harry8 wrote: post #64

apexalpha wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems wrong, though? For cars the inventor is (Mercedes) Benz, the people who first mass produced it was Ford. Both seem like good investments. PC: Who is this early mover you talk about? I guess not Apple in your mind, since that would've been a fantastic investment. Hard to think of any better. Plus, there are hundreds if not thousands of companies along the way you could've invested in that were swallowed up…

Survivor bias is massive here, watch out for it. Osborne beat apple to personal computing. Facebook did not exist during the dotcom boom. So very many early car companies went broke. "But if you'd only got ford it would have been sweet as." But they weren't first. Panhard et Levassor in 1889, ford in 1901 sayeth wikipedia.[1] So now you're waiting and picking winners in the sector which is very much harder without th…

Of course this is survivor bias, and of course many companies went bust.

But that's what investing is. Even in a mature sector of the economy companies can go bust. That doesn't mean it's always a bad idea to invest in new and upcoming technologies.

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

#144

Post by gremlinsinc » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:40 AM UTC

floucky wrote: post #33

padolsey wrote: post #9

Summary: Investors don't know where to put their money and they're scared

At least I can see more concrete applications than I did with the Web 3.0 bullshit (NFT, metaverse and other buzzwords).

I feel like everyone was jumping at the bit for x, y, z technologies to be the best big ground floor thing, then chatGPT came along, the x,y,z techs were getting hit hard the past year by bad luck, regulatory concerns, etc, and now that people lost their asses on that they're afraid ai will be the same, except I never really got value from nft, Blockchain, etc.... most people I know don't even know what all that is (non tech people, anyways).

I know plenty of computer barely literate people who use chatGPT and other generative ai tools daily.

The biggest problems I see though are openai and Microsoft essentially competing with people using the API to create products. If you build an app using openai and they add every feature that sets your app apart, you might as well throw in the towel. investors who bought into your startup when you thought there was a moat will lose.

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

#145

Post by gremlinsinc » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:44 AM UTC

ramesh31 wrote: post #75

The skeptics will be wrong this time. LLMs will be the biggest tech revolution since smartphones. It's something that literally every single person can find a use for.

I don't think LLMs will be, LLMs are entry level, embodied multi modal systems even if the body is just virtual or a simulation. LLMs, stable diffusion, text to speech and vice versa, image recognition, tactile understanding, other 'senses'we could imbue in it. LLMs definitely are amazing but they're only a piece of the real revolution coming.

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

#146

Post by gremlinsinc » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:47 AM UTC

ggm wrote: post #35

Firmly in the skeptic camp, here to say people are love bombing AI to make money, not because LLM are a gateway to AGI and AGI doesn't have to appear for people to make money. Belief in AGI is useful to sell stock and IPO. Few serious researchers in academia see AGI in what's going on, or even roadsigns. Look at the language Hinton uses more closely.

he compared the latest AI advances to the invention of the wheel or discovery of fire. That sounds pretty cut and dry to me. This isn't a Nutjob, this is basically the father of AI saying even he's afraid of what might be wrought.

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

#147

Post by poulpy123 » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:52 AM UTC

I'm not a skeptic per se (I'm impressed by generative AI and LLMs) but I can't avoid to notice that the coding AI of these last months didn't lead to an explosion of software. AFAIK I haven't see any non trivial software that have been programmed either completely by AI or with the majority of the work done by AI.

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

#148

Post by yMMe2WYE_D » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:53 AM UTC

TMWNN wrote: post #129

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…

>It may take a while to get from GPT-3 to Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0. But the path is clear now. I was intrigued by the announced Business Chat feature for Microsoft Teams https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/11swyeu/introd... >, but learned that it is just summaries of conversations. That's not quite what I'd imagined, which is something like this: ---- A: ... and that is why I think we should go with opt…

It might be more an issue of "if" than "when". Can LLM even go beyond being "interactive textbook"? On the other hand, looking at constant complaints from data scientists, ChatGPT can replace them here and now. It might not be able to understand the problems, but supplying boss with arguments that support their decision is the matter of weeks, maybe just an extra preamble/prompt will be enough.

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

#149

Post by Kaibeezy » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:54 AM UTC

martin_a wrote: post #76

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.

I'm regularly using the Photoshop function to test its limits and applications to our printing business. It's kind of impressive at first but it lacks quality where it matters, especially with the more complicated jobs. Also "editing photos" is more than what the AI does. We have solutions for that, on another level though, for the last 15-20 years already.

> It's kind of impressive at first but it lacks quality where it matters, especially with the more complicated jobs.

Same with the higher-complexity written tasks I’ve been chipping away at. The quality dropoff is a cliff. Crossing that chasm feels like it will take more than incremental improvement of current tools; it feels like an entirely new technology is needed.

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

#150

Post by Kaibeezy » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 10:02 AM UTC

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #97

I was a complete believer in AI when chatGPT first dropped. The tech seemed revolutionary. GPT-4 even helped me write a ton of code for an app. But if you ask me now, I feel that the AI revolution is a little overstated. The tech, while incredibly good, is not really ready for large scale adoption. Individuals and hobbyists might benefit from it, but for large enterprises and serious applications, it's too inconsiste…

Agree, and would add that I’m sensing the bigger value will be in analysis of huge, complex, noisy data sets. Most people don’t have those, so it’s not a widely accessible benefit.

Sorting through legal discovery documents is a good example. A team of smart, trained, observant JDs will do a pretty good job given a few weeks to plough through it all; a reasonably tuned AI should be able produce similar value (even if not identical results) for a fraction of the cost and do it overnight.