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

301–310 of 503 posts

Re: The Generative AI Con

#301

Post by staticman2 »

hnthrow90348765 wrote: post #293
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 and ChatGPT was still around, you could replace Google search with ChatGPT and still do your job That's why it's not a completely product hype driven bubble since there is a useful product there

I think the above poster was comparing search engines to LLMs and just using Google as a generic example.

LLMs very obviously aren't a replacement for live human written information which is findable with a search engine.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#302

Post by camdenreslink »

famouswaffles wrote: post #281
camdenreslink wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This thread is about large language models and generative AI. AFAIK LLMs perform pretty badly at time series prediction.

Maybe some specially trained weather prediction neural network could perform well, but that isn’t really what we’re talking about here.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#303

Post by advael »

famouswaffles wrote: post #272
advael wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay so because of the ambiguity of the other reply I'm just gonna say, I don't think we should be surprised that someone is trying to use LLMs to do basically anything. That's basically what prints funding money right now, so long as you're the kind of company or guy the VCs or whoever will believe in. The signal here is "does it do something to appreciably advance the state of the art over previous methods"?

Seems to be the case to me, reading this and waymo's attempts. There's paper on EMMA here - https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.23262 And there are state of the art weather prediction transformers. https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.03876

Yeah so like, this is a cool result, and it uses a transformer architecture. I actually do think that it's fair to say that transformers have proven widely useful, especially in tasks that look like sequence modeling. It's a step change akin to the now-pervasive use of convolutional neural networks that started in the 2010s, and is deeply significant of course. This is also really different from "this is an LLM"

The reason I want to specifically harp on this is because a lot of people are selling this narrative where "AI is becoming superintelligent" or whatever by making an amorphous blob out of a bunch of separate advances that use machine learning techniques. This has been happening for a while, is a great thing for science, and it's clear that machine learning methods are here to stay in science. I'm a machine learning researcher. I've understood, celebrated, and tried to help with this as best I can manage over the last 9 years of my life. And it's been going on for a lot longer than the general public has been in this AI hype wave. The entire modern field of bioinformatics is arguably built on the backbone of machine learning, and has been since before I went to grad school.

This is really different from "We fed everything into a language model and now it's superintelligent and is making scientific advances all by itself" or even "scientists just ask chatGPT shit and it figures it out for them". The breathless tech press really makes it sound like anything that happens in AI research, which increasingly includes the entire usage of ML toolkits in the sciences (Which is pervasive, and expectedly so! ML is an extension of statistics and statistics has been the basis of science for like a century) is just some amorphous force called "AI" that's suddenly gained this aggregate body of competency. Imagine if we anthropomorphized statistics that way. Or Math for that matter. This kind of narrative gives me the overall impression that this is not being talked about honestly, and it's clear that this is profitable to do. I don't have to use charged words like "con" or "fraud" to think this deceptive framing is not a great thing

Re: The Generative AI Con

#304

Post by jcgrillo »

scotty79 wrote: post #253
jcgrillo wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they’ll keep being used How? I get that many devs like using them for writing code. Personally I don't, but maybe someday someone will invent a UX for this that I don't despise, and I could be convinced. So what? That's a tiny market. Where in the landscape of b2b and b2c software do LLMs actually find market fit? Do you have even one example? All the ideas I've heard so far are either science fiction (just wait an…

> What is this shit for? Various minor thing so far. For example I heard about ChatGPT being evaluated as a tool for providing answers for patients in therapy. ChatGPT answers were evaluated as more empathetic, more human and more aligned with guidelines of therapy than answers given by human therapists. Providing companionship to lonely people is another potential market. It's not as good as people at solving proble…

Are people actually satisfied by that? I personally find "chatting" with an LLM grating and dissatisfying because it often makes very obvious and incongruous errors, and it can't reason. It has no logical abilities at all, really. I think you're really underestimating what a therapist actually does, and what human communication actually is. It's more than word patterns.

I could see this being useful in a "dark pattern" sense, but only if it's incredibly cheap, to increase the cost to the user of engaging with customer support. If you have to argue with the LLM for an hour before being connected to an actual person who can help you, then very few calls will make it to the support staff and you can therefore have a much smaller team. But that only works if you hate your users.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#305

Post by varelse »

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…

[dead]

Re: The Generative AI Con

#306

Post by bigstrat2003 »

lukevp wrote: post #12

I’m a little shocked at how much negativity there is around LLMs among developers. It’s a new tool that requires some learning, and it’s sometimes not so great, but if you’ve used an IDE with real coding assistance built in (eg. VS Code in Edit with Copilot mode - NOT Chat mode, using Claude 3.5), it’s honestly not much worse than a junior dev and 100x faster. And if the code is bad you throw it away and try again 10…

I disagree. Tools which need to be babysat, the way LLMs do, slow you down rather than speed you up. It's like having to mentor a junior team member, except a human will eventually learn and you can just let him work. LLMs are incapable of learning, so you can't ever leave the phase where they are a drain.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#307

Post by ablation »

JimDabell wrote: post #55
anothermathbozo wrote: post #3

This is one of the most tilted pieces I’ve ever read. For months Ed has predicted The AI Bubble will burst “any day now” frequently citing ai company’s revenue as a sign the product is not viable and the valuations are too high. The valuations seem to be primarily based on the R&D progress instead of on a theory that widespread adoption of the existing product will experience an uptick. The current landscape imho sho…

> This is one of the most tilted pieces I’ve ever read. He comes across as just a ludicrously unpleasant, spite-filled person. > I'm fucking tired of having to write this sentence. > I am so very bored of having this conversation > I don't care about this number! > Shut the fuck up! > This isn't the early days of shit . > Didn't we just talk about this? Fine, fine. > $3.25 billion a quarter is absolutely pathetic. >…

Indignation and fulmination is his shtick and gets him shared across social and the like.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#308

Post by jcgrillo »

wanderingstan wrote: post #256
jcgrillo wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they’ll keep being used How? I get that many devs like using them for writing code. Personally I don't, but maybe someday someone will invent a UX for this that I don't despise, and I could be convinced. So what? That's a tiny market. Where in the landscape of b2b and b2c software do LLMs actually find market fit? Do you have even one example? All the ideas I've heard so far are either science fiction (just wait an…

Anecdotally, almost every day I’ll overhear conversations at my local coffee shop of non-developers gushing about how much ChatGPT has revolutionized their work: church workers for writing bulletins and sermons, small business owners for writing loan applications or questions about taxes, writers using it for proofreading, etc. And this is small town Colorado. Not since the advent of Google have I heard people rave s…

These are not the sort of uses we need to make this thing valuable. To be worthwhile it needs to add value to existing products. Can it do that meaningfully well? If not it's nothing more than a curiosity.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#309

Post by kurige »

ChatGPT and LLMs have had a significant impact on my wife's life. She's a second language speaker, and having ChatGPT available to draft and proofread professional sounding emails and text messages has drastically increased her self-confidence and ability to communicate with colleagues. I think that's amazing.

That's also the only use of LLMs we've found.

Re: The Generative AI Con

#310

Post by fullshark »

tiborsaas wrote: post #59

> And when this all falls apart — and I believe it will — there will be a very public reckoning for the tech industry. I shocked he really believes it in his closing thought. Maybe his rant would be bit more digestible if it contained sections with: "here's what I tried and it did not work". But that would make it not a rant but actual research with value.

He's wrong, there's no other sector of the economy with growth potential and there's so much capital desperately seeking returns. Also anxious capital terrified of being disrupted. The tech industry will just move on to the next hype cycle when this one burns out.
Post reply on HN