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

AI Crap

drewdevault.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 260 posts

Re: AI Crap

#181

Post by nojvek »

> In case you need to hear it: do not (TW: suicide) seek out OpenAI’s services to help with your depression. Finding and setting up an appointment with a therapist can be difficult for a lot of people – it’s okay for it to feel hard. Talk to your friends and ask them to help you find the right care for your needs.

In US healthcare including therapists are quite expensive.

Back in the day I was an indie dev and that was really hard on me. In my lows I thought I’d seek a therapist but at $500/half hour appointment that felt like a gut punch. Didn’t have any insurance then.

ChatGPT is instantly available and free. Yes, it’s not perfect but it’s better than nothing.

For a large part of US, mental therapists are not really accessible when they most need it.

Re: AI Crap

#182

Post by danielbln »

ben_w wrote: post #84
squarefoot wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free. For free meaning that it is paid by quietly slipping ads into prescriptions or lessons?

If the OpenAI pricing is indicative, reading 16k token of medical history and giving a 4k token response will cost $1.50 on GPT-4 and 6.4¢ on GPT-3.5-turbo. The lower of those two is roughly what someone at the UN abject poverty threshold will spend in 48 minutes 30 seconds on "not literally starving to death".

And if you use fine tuning and RAG you can cut the cost by an order of magnitude. Also, how much did it cost 2 years ago?

Re: AI Crap

#183

Post by nottorp »

mort96 wrote: post #175
RufusJacksons wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked in customer service before, the only time customers tried to reason with me was when they were wrong. For at least a large portion of customer service calls, the ability to reason is a negative. Customer calls to say the product is faulty, and with a simple question they admit they didn’t connect the ground wire. They then try to reason with me that they deserve a warranty replacement because their mum…

I'm not talking about a customer arguing that they deserve warranty. I mean if the human CS agent misunderstands the problem, the customer can explain the problem better and try to make the human CS agent understand. If the "AI" CS agent misunderstands the problem, there is no recourse.

Not to mention when you have a problem the AI hasn't been trained for.

With humans you have a chance to escalate. With a chatbot, you might as well take your business somewhere else.

Re: AI Crap

#184

Post by zirgs »

marcinzm wrote: post #128
zirgs wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is the only way for small countries to compete with Hollywood. I'm sick and tired of all those glorified stage plays that my country produces simply because we have no access to Hollywood money. Meanwhile Hollywood has so much money that they don't know what to do with it - they give it to directors like Michael Bay to create all those pointless cgi-fests.

My question to you is: why do people spend money on those glorified stage plays and not just spend all their money on Hollywood movies? It's likely that Hollywood movies just don't align perfectly with the local culture due to limits/costs on localization. Now imagine if Hollywood movies had perfect dubbing (including changing scenes and lip movements), local references and jokes, removed cultural mismatches, etc. Wo…

We watch mostly Hollywood movies. Local output has a pretty low market share. Both due to low budgets and the fact that Hollywood can make a lot more movies per year.

Re: AI Crap

#185

Post by danielbln »

namaria wrote: post #133
danielbln wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doctor, therapist, teacher, coach - and with the advent of private, fine-tunable models those can be private, local and in the hand of the people.

I don't know where this idea comes from that we can get more from language models then what we put inside. Thinking we can process any amount of data and get a competent surrogate mind out of it borders on magical thinking.

Who is we? The model creator or the user? Getting out what we put in is kind of par for the course in education, yes?

Re: AI Crap

#186

Post by tharne »

Jack000 wrote: post #10
sph wrote: post #4

I am another AI pessimist. Can I please ask the optimists to list the good things LLMs can do for humanity as a whole ? I don't mean banal stuff like Copilot, which is a double-edged sword that might be used against junior developers. I mean world-changing benefits, one step closer to the techno-utopia. Because on paper, the net benefits vs net negatives, for me and other AI pessimists like the author, are not worth…

A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free.

> A doctor for every person, a teacher for every child, available any time and for free.

You clearly don't have a deep understanding of what doctors and teachers do.

Re: AI Crap

#187

Post by zirgs »

meheleventyone wrote: post #55
zirgs wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is the only way for small countries to compete with Hollywood. I'm sick and tired of all those glorified stage plays that my country produces simply because we have no access to Hollywood money. Meanwhile Hollywood has so much money that they don't know what to do with it - they give it to directors like Michael Bay to create all those pointless cgi-fests.

If it comes to pass that AI dramatically reduces the cost of making a movie that works for Hollywood as well as small countries and probably doesn't result in the small countries being able to compete as a result? In the same sense that the revolution that occurred in the digital distribution of games and general improvements in the accessibility of tooling meant the market for games expanded into more niches rather…

If a local director could make a movie with comparable quality to Hollywood movies - I would watch his movie. Hollywood only dominates, because their movies have way higher production quality.

There is only so much you can do with shoestring budgets that our directors have.

Re: AI Crap

#188

Post by ben_w »

danielbln wrote: post #182
ben_w wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the OpenAI pricing is indicative, reading 16k token of medical history and giving a 4k token response will cost $1.50 on GPT-4 and 6.4¢ on GPT-3.5-turbo. The lower of those two is roughly what someone at the UN abject poverty threshold will spend in 48 minutes 30 seconds on "not literally starving to death".

And if you use fine tuning and RAG you can cut the cost by an order of magnitude. Also, how much did it cost 2 years ago?

Was it[0] available at any price 2 years ago?

(Assuming you mean literally an order of magnitude: 0.64¢ is, judging by Amazon.com, less than the bulk price of a single sheet of unused printer paper, or two thirds of a paperclip).

[0] 3 or anything equivalent to it, given 4 obviously wasn't

Re: AI Crap

#189

Post by sph »

danleshem wrote: post #106
sph wrote: post #4

I am another AI pessimist. Can I please ask the optimists to list the good things LLMs can do for humanity as a whole ? I don't mean banal stuff like Copilot, which is a double-edged sword that might be used against junior developers. I mean world-changing benefits, one step closer to the techno-utopia. Because on paper, the net benefits vs net negatives, for me and other AI pessimists like the author, are not worth…

I think AI has the potential to level up the plain field. Speaking from an entrepreneur's POV, AI gives me an unfair advantage with respect to the large whales. It lets us complete projects (specifically, software projects) 10 times faster and achieve things before I had to raise millions to achieve them. I can't tell if the net negative/positive is + or -, but it's not clear-cut for sure.

I... don't believe you.

I'm building a product as an experienced engineer with 17 years in the field, and the only place LLMs would be useful without slowing me down is writing copy, whereas I would pay for a copywriter, which I will probably do.

LLM making you 10 times faster to build a product (of which coding is like 20%) needs better sources and proof, as it's a ludicrous number, and a whale with billions has access to much better tools than ChatGPT (i.e actual paid humans).

If by building product you mean "create a basic landing page in HTML", sure. But a landing page is not a company, nor a product you can sell.

Re: AI Crap

#190

Post by danielbln »

rvz wrote: post #88

> AI companies will continue to generate waste and CO2 emissions at a huge scale as they aggressively scrape all internet content they can find, externalizing costs onto the world’s digital infrastructure, and feed their hoard into GPU farms to generate their models. They might keep humans in the loop to help with tagging content, seeking out the cheapest markets with the weakest labor laws to build human sweatshops…

What a load of snide hogwash. First of all, how are LLMs snake oil? There is actual usefulness to be had.

And I can run inference on my laptop, transferring capabilities to smaller models is a thing, quantization is a thing, optimization is a thing. And, DL has been feasible for barely a decade, LLMs for a few years.

Are you talking about crypto by any chance?

Post reply on HN