It's crazy to think Sequoia was started by Valentine who invested in so many iconic companies. And now just look at Sequoia. The bottom of the barrel with the worst takes in technology. How much a company can fall.
Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI
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Re: Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI
#22Re: Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wrong. Too many people do anthropomorphize LLMs. And few people actually understand how LLMs work, or how to detect errors and hallucinations. Calling LLM autocomplete "AI" deliberately conflates the tech with sci-fi tropes that many people already confuse with reality. Numerous examples, from ELIZA to Watson, internet-based scams and frauds, full self-driving, to all of crypto demonstrate human credulity and gullibi…
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You don't need expertise building LLMs to interpret the hype and see who has financial interests in promoting non-existent technology, calling it AI and allowing people to get excited and/or scared because the same terminology gets used in 2001 and Terminator. How LLMs actually work has very little to do with how people perceive them, or how they might affect daily life, to say nothing of how they might affect share prices.
> it's the actually the experts who started the extinction AI petition
Some experts, and lots of people who have not themselves built LLMs, such as Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari, Steve Wozniak. Look at the foundation behind the letter and show me all the AI experts who know how to build LLMs [1]. Alan Alda? Morgan Freeman? Sure, some people with respected names in the field did sign, as did some VCs and executives most likely trying to buy time for their own products.
Some experts who didn't sign the letter: Stephen Wolfram [2], Juergen "father of AI" Schmidhuber [3], Rodney Brooks [4], Donald Knuth [5]. I think I can safely state that no consensus exists among the "experts" who do know how LLMs work, and how other things that got called "AI" in the past work. You can find just as much skepticism as FUD. Rather conveniently the AI hype-train makes forgetting about Web3, the metaverse, and crypto easier, even if you see the same names come up.
> Anyway an hour with chatGPT and reading some articles on LLMs is enough for anyone to know the boundaries of LLMs.
No, that isn't enough time, not even for someone who knows a little about what they're looking at.
You seem to make two inconsistent rebuttals: Most people can quickly figure out the limitations of LLMs like ChatGPT, and critics who haven't made LLMs don't know what they're talking about and should shut up. As for the first claim, I'll point out that people have used microwave ovens for five decades and way too many everyday users associate microwave ovens with radioactivity. People drive cars every day and can't explain the first thing about the technology. I think you grossly overestimate how deeply people understand technology they use every day. Just ask a cell phone user how cellular communications works.
Dr. Johnson punctured the second argument a long time ago: "You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables."
> Mind you, there will be stories of people that are fooled but those people are obviously a huge minority of chatGPT users.
ChatGPT is already plugged into the Bing search engine, and into Windows, MS Office, and other products. New integrations and plugins get announced every day. The technology is rolling out behind other products and applications, and very soon (if not already) regular users will interact with ChatGPT or something like it without knowing that. They may spend hours with a chatbot and not interpret bad information as a hallucination or error. As so many experts have already talked about, the danger from what we're calling AI this decade isn't SkyNet or getting turned into paperclips, but people fooling themselves, or getting deliberately tricked and scammed, by a technology that they don't understand and have attached sci-fi capabilities to. People with financial interests like Sam Altman out there promoting fantasies of AI threatening humanity perpetuate the ignorance by pretending we're on the edge of the sci-fi dystopia, when actually LLMs are nowhere near AGI, and Altman knows that. "Look over there, watch out for the killer robots while I pick your pocket." Ker-ching.
[1] https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experime...
[2] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hessiejones/2023/05/23/juergen-...
[4] https://spectrum.ieee.org/gpt-4-calm-down
[5] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/chatGPT20.txt
Re: Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI
#24What is this guys tech credentials
Re: Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI
#25It's crazy to think Sequoia was started by Valentine who invested in so many iconic companies. And now just look at Sequoia. The bottom of the barrel with the worst takes in technology. How much a company can fall.
Re: Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I believe much of what you argue is correct, I do unfortunately also believe that ultimately you are incorrect: For the non-techy part of the population, and certainly eve a percentage of the techy part of the population, there will be those who don't have an hour out of their daily lives to play around and discover the limits of chatgpt etc. Worse still, an even larger portion of that crowd, even if they have…
That's just your opinion. I say we need to prove this out. If a significant portion of the tech and non techy population anthropomorphized LLMs to the point where they don't understand that LLMs hallucinate then surely some of those people exist on HN. If one of you readers is one such person who honestly has no idea what it means for chatGPT to "hallucinate" then let us know (and be honest, please don't troll). My b…
I have referred to ChatGPT hallucinations with multiple friends and family, some in tech and some not (like my parents and my kids), and with one exception none of them knew what I was talking about. Like most people they think computers can't make mistakes, so it follows logically (for them) that an (apparently) intelligent machine can't make mistakes, i.e. hallucinate. I have a couple of my own ChatGPT transcripts that include hallucinations and when I show those to people they say that I deliberately misled the AI, because how could it make a mistake?
In my own experience, which includes people who work in the software field and people who don't, including a couple of friends who work with neural networks and LLMs, almost no one understands how LLMs work, or what limitations they might have, or what "hallucinate" means in the context of ChatGPT. Almost everyone I know is much more likely to believe AIs have already or will soon put them out of a job and start turning us into slaves or launching nuclear strikes, because that's the nonsense they get fed my the media.
Re: Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I believe much of what you argue is correct, I do unfortunately also believe that ultimately you are incorrect: For the non-techy part of the population, and certainly eve a percentage of the techy part of the population, there will be those who don't have an hour out of their daily lives to play around and discover the limits of chatgpt etc. Worse still, an even larger portion of that crowd, even if they have…
Couldn't "proving to them that the LLMs are far from perfect" be accomplished by showing a few examples of LLM hallucination? This does not seem very difficult.
Everyone alive has been exposed for decades to both sci-fi tropes and media hype around AI, and the ideas that stick in their heads tend to be those repeated and reinforced by media, not by direct experience. When LLMs get rolled out to everyday users who aren't experts it will come in the form of chatbots or plugins or text summarizers or code writers, not in the form of carefully fact-checked conversations with ChatGPT. Lots of people already use ChatGPT through Bing, and they aren't likely to check what it tells them.
We see people misled and scammed every day because of their own ignorance and misinformation promulgated by both mainstream and social media. I can't begin to understand how anyone would think -- contrary to all evidence -- that the huge population of non-experts will figure out the limitations of an opaque technology on their own after a few interactions with it.
Re: Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI
#28I do like this quote: "Don’t want to worry anyone, but I just asked ChatGPT to build me a better paperclip." Given the means, would it kill anyone who gets in the way of more paperclips?
This quote is referencing a famous hypothetical example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence?wprov...
Re: Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI
#29Re: Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> If you think you're superior because you're in software or IT or you've done ML in different contexts? I'm here to tell you, that unless you're not a layman and actually build LLMs, you're not because all your info is from the same place as all the other people outside of tech. You don't need expertise building LLMs to interpret the hype and see who has financial interests in promoting non-existent technology, call…
Never denied this. I did not intentionally hide this. I will say your statement did not mention that one of the signers is the premier expert. The person who reignited interest in neural networks, Geoffrey Hinton.
It's not "some" experts. It's many many preeminent experts. It's more accurate to say, not "all" experts. That is the more fair characterization.
> People drive cars every day and can't explain the first thing about the technology. I think you grossly overestimate how deeply people understand technology they use every day. Just ask a cell phone user how cellular communications works.
Nobody fully understands these networks. Not even the people who build them. The "experts" admit this. What everyone understands is that these networks hallucinate. The hallucinations aren't deep things to understand, it's on the level of driving cars.
You misunderstand how trivial it is to use this technology and figure out the limitations just like you figure out how to drive a car. We are all talking about user level phenomenons. You don't even have to describe what a neuron is or what backpropagation is to understand "hallucinations". Hallucinations aren't technical level concepts.
>ChatGPT is already plugged into the Bing search engine, and into Windows, MS Office, and other products. New integrations and plugins get announced every day.
Yeah pretty much everyone I know has used LLMs in some form or manner. And none of them were fooled. I'm sure the same goes for the people you know. Yeah you characterized how popular LLMs are. What you failed to characterize is the proportion of people who are using the tool and getting fooled by it.
It is fact that the tool is popular and getting more popular but this says nothing about the topic at hand. How many people are getting fooled by chatGPT? Your just speculating the outcome based on how popular the tool is. Speculations prove nothing.
I'm still waiting for that one guy to come to this thread and tell everyone chatGPT is sentient. If one guy claims this then you're right I completely misunderstood how dumb people can get.
I mean don't even focus on this thread under my post. Let's focus on the entire thread under the main article. Is there even one person who completely thinks the AI is sentient?
Find one guy on this entire thread who is honestly fooled by chatGPT and I'll concede to your argument. If you can't find even one guy... Then if you're rational you'll see that my argument is true: nearly no one is fooled by chatGPT.
This is literally a data driven conclusion. Let's use some amateur science to get to the bottom of this.