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

The Generative AI Con

wheresyoured.at

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 503 posts

Re: The Generative AI Con

#281

Post by famouswaffles »

camdenreslink wrote: post #209
xnx wrote: post #27

Plenty of AI companies that are cons or extremely overvalued, but the technology is the real deal and delivering huge improvements over previous techniques in all kinds of domains: language translation, weather prediction, code completion, self driving, etc.

LLMs can do weather prediction? There is no way that is true. Considering ChatGPT sometimes insists 2+2=5, I sincerely doubt it is solving PDEs used to model weather systems.

Transformers can do weather prediction yes. https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.03876

Re: The Generative AI Con

#282

Post by [deleted] »

rsynnott wrote: post #246
n2d4 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's an unfair comparison. If the IBM Simon disappeared in 1994, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have cared. If search engines disappeared in 1992, you'd have felt the same. Also, (what later became) AWS probably didn't interface much with you in 2003. It takes some time for technology to mature, usually at least a decade or two. Even once the iPhone was released it took a few years until it became indispensab…

If IBM had been spending hundreds of billions on its phone thing in 1994, though, well, there would probably have been no IBM by the early-noughties when smartphones that people wanted to use started to become practical. "It may or may not produce something useful, in a few decades" cannot justify the present level of spending; that's just not going to fly. Without concrete results _soon_, the whole thing is in very…

[deleted]

Re: The Generative AI Con

#283

Post by gmays »

fullshark wrote: post #250

A refreshing read, the take down of OpenAI's 300m users is very weak though and the hand waving "I know GenAI has use cases" could be fleshed out. It's a bubble obviously and some useful software will get written, which has happened in every other bubble and will continue to happen. It's just this bubble is so public, rapidly moving, and capital intensive.

The hard thing is that it's both a bubble and not.

It's a bubble in the respect that the hype around integrating into existing companies/software is likely often falling flat.

It may not be a bubble in that all of the best/useful/valuable use cases of AI are in new software, which have yet to prove themselves in the enterprise. This makes sense because you can't just bolt it onto existing software/organizations and expect it to work because they're built around the way things used to be, similar how when factories first tried to integrate electricity.

For example, I'm sure Palantir is doing some good stuff, but I just have doubts about how useful AI can be in the context of existing companies. And their valuation seems insane, which screams bubble, especially since they're an older companies and less 'AI-native' than the newer ones, like the clunky ways Salesforce and Microsoft implement AI.

But do I expect startups to continue to emerge that approach problems in AI-native ways that help companies reorganize? Yes, it's just a question about how long it takes these companies to work their way into the enterprise and earn enough credibility to drive organizational change and restructuring.

The 'bubble' question is really about whether this latent/potential productivity will be enough to inflate the bubble before it bursts.

My money is on yes, but rather than picking a winner at the app layer and trying to win the lottery I'm heavily invested in the boring stuff like chips (NVDA) and those building data centers with low P/Es (back when I bought them), thus a lot of room to grow even conservatively.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#284

Post by spamizbad »

n2d4 wrote: post #104
levkk wrote: post #91

If my Android (or IPhone) disappeared tomorrow, I would feel like I time traveled back a century. If Google search was gone, I wouldn't be able to do my job anymore. If the cloud disappeared, I wouldn't be able to build apps anymore. There are no workarounds, unless you feel like going to a library...? If ChatGPT disappeared tomorrow (or derivatives like Copilot, etc.), I would be mildly inconvenienced. Then I'd go b…

I think that's an unfair comparison. If the IBM Simon disappeared in 1994, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have cared. If search engines disappeared in 1992, you'd have felt the same. Also, (what later became) AWS probably didn't interface much with you in 2003. It takes some time for technology to mature, usually at least a decade or two. Even once the iPhone was released it took a few years until it became indispensab…

But the AI-public Internet timeline is more like 1995. if all web search disappeared in 1995 it would've been a massive loss, despite how primitive search engines were back then.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#285

Post by lblume »

camdenreslink wrote: post #209
xnx wrote: post #27

Plenty of AI companies that are cons or extremely overvalued, but the technology is the real deal and delivering huge improvements over previous techniques in all kinds of domains: language translation, weather prediction, code completion, self driving, etc.

LLMs can do weather prediction? There is no way that is true. Considering ChatGPT sometimes insists 2+2=5, I sincerely doubt it is solving PDEs used to model weather systems.

Think base models. LLMs are extremely good at predicting the future when applied to human languages, as this is literally their only optimization goal. Why couldn't they also be good at predicting the future when applied to other complex forecasting tasks?

Of course what can be mathematically calculated without inference is going to be. LLMs may however be able to interpret the results of these calculations better than humans or current stochastical evaluations.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#286

Post by highfrequency »

Article seems to have 3 main complaints:

1. LLMs are not very useful

2. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are losing tons of money

3. There is a lot of hype around them

The first seems objectively untrue - lots of people find them useful especially for coding. Not to mention the fact that they get significantly better every year.

The second is completely true but it's not clear how much that matters. Our products are being subsidized by VC firms while costs are falling by 3x-10x every year. Seems great to me.

There is a lot of hype because hype helps capitalists get rich faster. Annoying, but a small price to pay for useful technology.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#287

Post by skydhash »

jack_pp wrote: post #65
cmdtab wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they? I find Agentic mode on most editors barely useful. Autocomplete and inline editing is great though. To use these tools properly, you need to know how to build the same thing precisely.

Nah you don't to know to build the same thing precisely. Just the other day I wanted to write a vanilla JS component that could let you select a picture from something like a carousel and be able to blow up the selected picture when clicked. I know JS / HTML but am not used to working with vanilla JS. Copilot didn't write it all by itself but it did teach me things I didn't know like making a custom tag in vanilla JS…

> Copilot didn't write it all by itself but it did teach me things I didn't know like making a custom tag in vanilla JS by extending an HTMLElement.

> This is a simple component for a 5 page landing page build with astro

You're already in the over-engineered section there.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#288

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

pavlov wrote: post #105
levkk wrote: post #91

If my Android (or IPhone) disappeared tomorrow, I would feel like I time traveled back a century. If Google search was gone, I wouldn't be able to do my job anymore. If the cloud disappeared, I wouldn't be able to build apps anymore. There are no workarounds, unless you feel like going to a library...? If ChatGPT disappeared tomorrow (or derivatives like Copilot, etc.), I would be mildly inconvenienced. Then I'd go b…

If Google search disappeared, I would still remember the names of several sites like Stack Overflow that are always at the top of the results, and I’d just go directly there. Maybe the original Yahoo! style curated list of categorized links would actually be more useful for me at this point than Google with all the SEO spam. That kind of high-quality directory combined with ChatGPT would probably replace Google for m…

Does anyone maintain a Yahoo-like directory anymore? I used to love browsing the internet that way, and I feel like it would be a really interesting way to find websites rather than content.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#289

Post by giancarlostoro »

levkk wrote: post #91

If my Android (or IPhone) disappeared tomorrow, I would feel like I time traveled back a century. If Google search was gone, I wouldn't be able to do my job anymore. If the cloud disappeared, I wouldn't be able to build apps anymore. There are no workarounds, unless you feel like going to a library...? If ChatGPT disappeared tomorrow (or derivatives like Copilot, etc.), I would be mildly inconvenienced. Then I'd go b…

For me Google search (and YouTube) feels like its downgraded in recent years, even before the AI craze. Maybe people aren't using SO as much as they used to.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#290

Post by smeeger »

heres a quote from the article

Altman uses his digital baba yaga as a means to stoke the hearts of weak-handed and weak-hearted narcissists that would sooner shoot a man dead than lose a dollar, even if it means making their product that much worse.

the only correction i would offer for the entire article is that instead of saying “shoot a man dead,” it would be more accurate to say “smother a baby with a pillow.”

Post reply on HN