181–190 of 227 posts
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You put too much faith in doctors. Pretty much every woman I know has been waived off for issues that turned serious later and even as a guy I have to do above average leg work to get them to care about anything.
Doctors are still better than LLMs, by a lot.
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I think the difference is between people who accept nondeterministic behavior from their computers and those who don’t. If you accept your computer being confidently wrong some unknowable percentage of the time, then LLMs are miraculous and game changing software. If you don’t, then the same LLMs are defective and unreliable toys, not suitable as serious tools. People have different expectations out of computers, and…
Perhaps. Then how do you handle the computer being confidently wrong a large proportion of the time? From my experience it's inaccurate in proportion to the significance of the task. So by the time it's writing real code it's more wrong than right. How can you turn that into something useful? I don't think the system around us is configured to handle such an unreliable agent. I don't want things in my life to be less…
If you take the current trend of the cost of inference and assume that’s going to continue for even a few more cycles, then we already have sufficient accuracy in current models to more than satisfy the hype.
“Modern tech hype mirrors medieval charlatans.” Ah, yes, the classic “this thing I don’t like is medieval alchemy” comparison. Because if you can’t refute the tools, just compare it to snake oil. It’s cute how this guy thinks he’s the only one who’s noticed not every AI startup is curing cancer. The tech world has always had grifters. That doesn’t mean the tools themselves are fake—it means some people are dumb and o…
The Enlightenment age brought about an increased interest in occultism right next to an increased interest in science, often by the same people.
When a new knowledge area is starting out, it can be pretty hard to discriminate between the real and the imaginary.
Sure there's plenty of hype. But its justified to some extent at least. LLMs are one of the biggest advances in technology in human history. In computing the big ones are: * creation of computers * personal computers * the Internet and world wide web * LLMs So the hype is at some level entirely warranted - its a revolutionary technology with real impact. As opposed to for example the hype around crypto or NFTs or blo…
LLMs are at this point almost 8 years old (dating from the Attention is All You Need paper). If it's truly a revolutionary technology, you should be able to point me to a company leveraging LLMs to make absolute bank, leaving all of its non-LLM-based competitors in the dust. But instead, what I see in this thread in defense of the revolutionary ideals of LLMs, is how good future LLMs are going to be. That's not a sig…
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> I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI It was never this level of AI. The stories we wrote and fantasised were about AI you could blindly rely on, trust, and reason about. No one ever fantasised about AI which couldn’t accurately count the number of letters in a common word or that would give you provably wrong information in an assertive autho…
>It was never this level of AI. You're completely out of it. We couldn't even get AI to hold a freaking conversation. It was so bad we came up with this thing called the turing test and that was the benchmark. Now people like you are all, like "well it's obvious the turing test was garbage". No. It's not obvious. It's the hype got to your head. If we found a way to travel at light speed for 3 dollars the hype would b…
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The amount of misuse this quote gets is as absurd as it is tiresome. People were using it to defend NFTs too. Someone’s opinion on one thing says nothing about someone else’s opinion about a different thing.
The point is that the upside of investing in a technology before everyone else does is huge. The downside is whatever you end up investing it in. Hype is then technologies fighting for that slice of the pie. The upside to current AI is that we've solved natural language interaction with computers. We have the Star Trek computer you can talk to. You probably don't want to because natural language is naturally terrible…
We certainly do not. I haven’t watched all of Star Trek, but from what I did the computer always understood the question and either executed it perfectly or was unable to comply for some reason outside of its control and broke down exactly what it was so the characters could fix it or find an alternative. Characters didn’t regularly have to verify the computer’s work, they just knew it was correct.
There's three types of people w.r.t hype: smart people who resist hype, smart people who want to profit off of it, and dumb people who like it. The first type of person already agrees with you. The second type knows but doesn't care. The third isn't going to read this article.
I’ll do whatever shit the industry wants me to do, I don’t particularly care if it’s dumb. I mean, it doesn’t FEEL great to work on dumb things, but at the end of the day, I’m around to help implement whatever the paycheck writer wants to see. I genuinely don’t mean that negatively either, I feel like I’m just describing… employment? Software just isn’t a core part of my identity. I like building it, I like most of t…
I tend to agree with the author, but I think the real problem with hype is the opportunity cost. Somewhere along the way we bought into this idea that "the promise of X" is worth more than "the reality of X". The longer the hype goes on - which is to say the longer it takes to demonstrate the hype is actually reality - the more people become more heavily invested in it. If the hype never materialises, you basically b…
If the hype materializes, it can still change course. Learned some classical ASP to join the web dev hype? Well, tough luck. The hype was good but materialized in another vessel. If you learned enough fundamentals, you could still jump ship. But what are the fundamentals for LLM? Hype rarely reveals them right away. For LLMs, tough luck. You can't learn fundamentals with your toy PC yet. You need to be rich and have…
> But what are the fundamentals for LLM? Hype rarely reveals them right away.
I think this is true, and that it is actually a core component of hype: it is not interested in fundamentals. This is true for hype of unproven things, but is also true for hype of proven things (e.g. the iPhone). When I compare the hype around AI to Crypto I see AI has having a much stronger case for "there are fundamentals here". However when I compare them BOTH to the iPhone, it's a different story.
The iPhone already existed when its hype intensified. In this way the hype doesn't really need to "materialise", the thing is already proven, and the hype is the world exploring a thing that exists, not a thing that is promised (e.g. Crypto) or partially-proven (e.g. AI).
> If it doesn't get acessible, well, it probably will be some niche tech like COBOL. Pays awesomelly, but not my jam. That is winning for some people.
I agree, and this is not dissimilar from:
> So, I will fucking learn what I can learn, what I like to learn, and I will hope I can survive on what it pays. That is winning in my books (at least on such narrow economic definition of it).
This sounds to me a lot like the acting profession. People do it because they love it, even though getting gigs is hard, stable income is hard, callbacks are rare, there are skill and relationship and economic ceilings everywhere, but breaking through implies large wins in all of those domains and more.
I don't at all begrudge people for making low-odds bets - I have a number of them myself, just in other places - but I think assessing your bets is important.
> Premise, reality, etc. So maleable.
This is where I pretty strongly disagree. [Assuming you mean "promise"] promises are extremely malleable, but that doesn't make them valuable. In fact I would say it reduces their value, and not realising this is exactly what grifters and dodgy salespeople (etc) hope for.
Reality is not malleable. This is the reason many people who have not bought into the hype keep asking for examples of where AI has is useful. They're not necessarily trying to suggest that it won't ever reach the heights the hype claims (though some certainly are suggesting that). But hype is presented as value NOW, and while reality may change over time, I think a lot of people RIGHT NOW see AI as either not helpful to them, or detrimental to industries broadly (visual art in particular).
It's worth noting though that these two views are somewhat contradictory: we say that it is detrimental right now but also that it is not useful right now. It can be both but the argument is naturally weak.
For my part: I'm starting to find AI enormously useful for search and self-instruction purposes. It's essentially replaced StackOverflow and related sites for me.
But that reality for me doesn't match what the hype says is currently happening. So I consider it a high risk area until the situation changes. The fact that it IS hyped so much is a counter-signal to me that suggests I shouldn't believe everything that is being said until I start seeing strong evidence.
What a shallow, negative post. "Hype" is tautologically bad. Being negative and "above the hype" makes you sound smart, but this post adds nothing to the discussion and is just as fuzzy as the hype it criticizes. > It is a real shame that some of the most beneficial tools ever invented, such as computers, modern databases, data centers, etc. exist in an industry that has become so obsessed with hype and trends that i…