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Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

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Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#201

Post by mensetmanusman »

sensanaty wrote: post #138

Definitely. The tech is impressive but anyone I've spoken to thinks of it as Cleverbot 2.0, and among the more technically minded I've found that people mostly are indifferent. Hell, IRL most people I know don't think much of it, though on HN and elsewhere online I see a lot of people praising it as the next coming of Christ (this thread included) which puts it in a similar tier as crypto and other Web3 hypetrains as…

Certain personalities and communication styles are able to generate useful prompts.

A 10% efficiency boost that some programmers are experiencing could translate into an extra 5 weeks off if you are smart about it, so it is quite life changing for some.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#202

Post by natch »

threeseed wrote: post #27
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #8

This isn't just a tech echo chamber, it's the YC/SV echo chamber. Nobody is seriously looking at AI for normal products, because it's not trustworthy. Never really will be. Why do you think subways still have human operators? The combined investment & risk of full automation aren't worth it. It'll be useful for customer support bots, and backend things like spam filtering and other statistical analysis. But otherwise…

It's not just about it being trustworthy but about quality. AI looks to be great for ideation and development. But it's not there if you value a high quality output.

If you see specific aspects of a chat reply where quality is bad, tell it.

It will improve the answer.

Iterating this you can get way beyond the quality of the first answer. You have full control over the quality but you have to bring something to the collaboration.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#203

Post by rchaud »

monero-xmr wrote: post #180
laurent123456 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hype, maybe, but it's obviously not a passing fad like crypto was. Back then many people were trying to figure out what to do with it and we still don't really know. A week after ChatGPT was out and plenty of people were already using it for writing code, emails, and plenty of other tasks. It would be weird to argue that AI is not going to have a massive impact at many levels.

How is crypto a passing fad? ETH is $2k and BTC $30k. Shouldn’t this be 0 by now?

It would be, but crypto sits outside the real economy, and can only be traded by passing around stablecoins, which can be printed out of thin air. It won't reach zero if there are always enough stablecoin-denominated purchases to prop it up.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#205

Post by sdflhasjd »

sensanaty wrote: post #138

Definitely. The tech is impressive but anyone I've spoken to thinks of it as Cleverbot 2.0, and among the more technically minded I've found that people mostly are indifferent. Hell, IRL most people I know don't think much of it, though on HN and elsewhere online I see a lot of people praising it as the next coming of Christ (this thread included) which puts it in a similar tier as crypto and other Web3 hypetrains as…

> And a funny personal anecdote, a colleague of mine tried to use ChatGPT4 when answering a customer question (they work support). The customer instantly knew it was AI-generated and was quite pissed about it, so the support team has an unofficial rule to not do that any more.

My team raised a support issue with one of our suppliers due to some unexpected API behaviour and got an unusually flowery reply that completely contradicted the API documentation... fairly sure that was ChatGPT.

Honestly not that bothered about LLMs as they could be helpful in customer support particularly when agents might not be fluent English speakers (or just help when you're trying to be polite in adverse circumstances), but some basic proofreading would help. And don't let it hallucinate APIs.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#206

Post by DebtDeflation »

sensanaty wrote: post #138

Definitely. The tech is impressive but anyone I've spoken to thinks of it as Cleverbot 2.0, and among the more technically minded I've found that people mostly are indifferent. Hell, IRL most people I know don't think much of it, though on HN and elsewhere online I see a lot of people praising it as the next coming of Christ (this thread included) which puts it in a similar tier as crypto and other Web3 hypetrains as…

>puts it in a similar tier as crypto

Comparisons between AI and crypto are horribly misguided IMO.

Is AI overhyped? Sure. However -

AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day.

Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction, a vehicle for speculation, and a platform for creating financial scams.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#207

Post by rchaud »

laurent123456 wrote: post #123
kmarc wrote: post #92

FWIW I have the exact opposite experience: people around me, who are _NOT_ in tech, keep talking about AI and lately especially ChatGPT, whereas serious (not only senior) IT professionals don't really. Besides the science behind it, currently it feels like the same hype as crypto a couple years before.

Hype, maybe, but it's obviously not a passing fad like crypto was. Back then many people were trying to figure out what to do with it and we still don't really know. A week after ChatGPT was out and plenty of people were already using it for writing code, emails, and plenty of other tasks. It would be weird to argue that AI is not going to have a massive impact at many levels.

> Hype, maybe, but it's obviously not a passing fad like crypto was.

Currently, nobody is talking about ChatGPT more than the crypto/NFT hustlers who now need a new angle.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#208

Post by simpli »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #201
sensanaty wrote: post #138

Definitely. The tech is impressive but anyone I've spoken to thinks of it as Cleverbot 2.0, and among the more technically minded I've found that people mostly are indifferent. Hell, IRL most people I know don't think much of it, though on HN and elsewhere online I see a lot of people praising it as the next coming of Christ (this thread included) which puts it in a similar tier as crypto and other Web3 hypetrains as…

Certain personalities and communication styles are able to generate useful prompts. A 10% efficiency boost that some programmers are experiencing could translate into an extra 5 weeks off if you are smart about it, so it is quite life changing for some.

Increased efficiency doesn't translate to increased time off, just increased expectations from our bosses :)

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#209

Post by mensetmanusman »

Just met a rando marketing college student and she was using 3.5 for business homework. Wouldn't have been someone I expected to be an early adopter.

Also the high school student I am mentoring has told me that he knows people feeding chat gpt their essay writing styles and asking it to write about other topics with the same style.

This is in the Midwest.

Re: Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

#210

Post by mensetmanusman »

simpli wrote: post #208
mensetmanusman wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certain personalities and communication styles are able to generate useful prompts. A 10% efficiency boost that some programmers are experiencing could translate into an extra 5 weeks off if you are smart about it, so it is quite life changing for some.

Increased efficiency doesn't translate to increased time off, just increased expectations from our bosses :)

There are ways to get way faster at completing tasks without increasing the expectations with no change in pay.
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