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

Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 575 posts

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#221

Post by foobar10000 »

foobarian wrote: post #164
almostdeadguy wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm less sure of the fact that ending subsidized token consumption (in isolation) will happen and change this. I think we've seen this play out before with other tech companies where discounting early use ends up entrenching demand and allowing the company to build larger and more efficient infrastructure. I'm slightly _more_ convinced (still not all that strongly) that the rising cost of memory and chips, data cente…

> I think we've seen this play out before with other tech companies where discounting early use ends up entrenching demand and allowing the company to build larger and more efficient infrastructure. We've also seen failures who were convinced "they would make it up in volume." I guess the bet is that infra will get that much more efficient, but it's not clear how much slack there is.

A lot - and over the coming 2 years, even more. Utilization rates are under 50% across the board, and special and cheaper chips are coming out all the time for inference. And a truckload of research - TurboQuant, HC (deepseek), etc, etc..

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#222

Post by naravara »

al_borland wrote: post #218
kolinko wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which, one might argue, shows he believes it. He's putting money where his mouth is.

Up until the reality of the technology doesn’t align to the expectations and promises. That’s when true belief shifts to hype and lies in an effort to salvage the investment. I think that’s where we’re at now.

For people like Schmidt I think the hype is a true belief. You can see it in his posture and tone while being booed by the entire crowd. I’ve only seen that kind of self-satisfied smugness from evangelical religious nuts right before they tell someone they clearly regard with disgust that they’ll “pray for them.”

Their view of what AI promises is some kind of secular eschatological fantasy that’s only partly rooted in anything the technology or methods do.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#223

Post by crispyambulance »

joe_mamba wrote: post #217
crispyambulance wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From which would you take advice, the successful entrepreneur/investor, or the nice hacker geek [?] The nice hacker geek? By the way, the Woz has a net-worth of 140MM, so he's more wealthy that the vast majority of "successful entrepreneur/investors", and also vastly more beloved than virtually all of them. In any case, that's a false dichotomy and actually the wrong question entirely.

>By the way, the Woz has a net-worth of 140MM, so he's more wealthy that the vast majority of "successful entrepreneur/investors", So are a lot of people who invested(gambled) early in Bitcoin and Tesla, that doesn't mean people should take career advice from them just because they managed to make a lot of money. But if you design and developed several successful tech products in your career, I think people should at…

  > When I look for people to take advice from I want to see a pattern of home runs, that they can deliver repeatedly...
That's fine, I guess, if your idea of "success" is apple-scale product home-runs (good luck with that).

For those of us with more modest aspirations, listening to a cool person talk about cool stuff is a far better of use of time and attention.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#224

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

holtkam2 wrote: post #98
limflick wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Auto-complete on steroids, is still my favorite analogy for AI. I don't mean that in a negative way either. Autocomplete is very good, but that never stopped me from learning English grammar and spelling.

The way I think of it has evolved a lot over the last 5 years. At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think. For all the hype, I think LLMs are actually more , not less, intelligent than that average person realizes. I think it’s legit, actual intelligence, not just “artificial” intelligence. That may be a hot take but it’s just my perception.

> At this point I think human brains probably do something analogous to next token prediction when we think

That's reasonable, but it doesn't mean that LLMs are close to being brains.

For a start, when humans think/talk, we often think ABOUT something - whatever is swirling about in our mind, or what we are currently seeing/feeling/etc. An LLM generating tokens/words is doing so only based on it's weights and the word sequence it is currently generating ... the human parallel would be more like a rapper spitting out words based on prior words, essentially on auto-pilot, or when we get triggered into spitting out stock phrases like "have a nice day".

If you want to compare an LLM to a human brain, it's basically equivalent to our language cortex if you ripped out all the external connections and ripped out all the feedback paths that make it capable of learning.

Of course there is a lot more to our brain than just our language cortex, but that alone should make you realize there is no real comparison beyond the fact that our language generation is also going to be based on prediction, and partly auto-regressive.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#225

Post by al_borland »

itsalwaysgood wrote: post #172
baxtr wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you be sure Eric Schmidt is telling “the truth” and Wozniak is lying? What’s your rationale and on the basis for such a claim?

The economy

The economy looked really good before the dotcom crash too. The crash didn’t make the internet go away, but it damped the hype and blind, unchecked optimism that was leading to some rather short-sighted decisions.

Right now so many companies are trying to use AI just to use AI, rather than using it when and where it actually makes sense. This is the big thing that drives me, and I think many others, a bit crazy. I don’t expect a bubble pop to make us go back in time to 2022, but I expect it will put an end these the AI mandates, token maxing, and other foolish behavior.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#226

Post by lr4444lr »

joe_mamba wrote: post #160
alsetmusic wrote: post #90

The man is hailed as a brilliant nerd in our circles. I didn't realize he's a great public speaker. He really read the room. The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after t…

* * *

I can't upvote this enough. As has been attributed to the Roman stoic Seneca: “An enemy is a bad witness to your merits, but a good one to your defects.”

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#227

Post by watwut »

rowanG077 wrote: post #166
joe_mamba wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* * *

TBH this is also how I feel. There is no way to put the AI genie back in the bottle. There will be sweeping changes in society because of it. Fighting against it is seems like a fools errand imo.

Trying to limit harm of something that is likely to happen 100% makes sense.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#228

Post by jjulius »

crispyambulance wrote: post #223
joe_mamba wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>By the way, the Woz has a net-worth of 140MM, so he's more wealthy that the vast majority of "successful entrepreneur/investors", So are a lot of people who invested(gambled) early in Bitcoin and Tesla, that doesn't mean people should take career advice from them just because they managed to make a lot of money. But if you design and developed several successful tech products in your career, I think people should at…

> When I look for people to take advice from I want to see a pattern of home runs, that they can deliver repeatedly... That's fine, I guess, if your idea of "success" is apple-scale product home-runs (good luck with that). For those of us with more modest aspirations, listening to a cool person talk about cool stuff is a far better of use of time and attention.

Right? OP asked a very subjective question on a public forum and is bristling that other's worldviews/desires/goals are different from his.

Re: Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence

#229

Post by watwut »

joe_mamba wrote: post #180
baxtr wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you be sure Eric Schmidt is telling “the truth” and Wozniak is lying? What’s your rationale and on the basis for such a claim?

Economic, market and product results. Schmidt took Google to the moon financially, speareding projects like Chrome and Android that cemented Google as THE tech titan(couch monopoly cough), whereas Woz was a top HW engineer of his time, but Apple would have quickly failed if he was at the helm calling the shots, instead of Jobs. From which would you take advice, the successful entrepreneur/investor, or the nice hacker…

Google turned from company that at least pretends to not do evil ... into one who does it without care.

I think that taking advice from a sociopath able to amass a lot of money is usually bad idea. Their advice is designed to make you make him a lot of money. His advice is not about what is good for you - he does not care. And if you succeed you are his competitor.

Post reply on HN