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AI is different

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Re: AI is different

#811

Post by MichaelZuo »

nprateem wrote: post #652
MichaelZuo wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the fundamental issue with most “analysis”, and most discussions really, on HN. Since the vast vast majority of writers and commentators are not literal geniuses… they can’t reliably produce high quality synthetic analysis, outside of very narrow niches. Even though for most comment chains on HN to make sense, readers certainly have to pretend some meaningful text was produced beyond happenstance. Partly becau…

Oh come on. I may not be a genius but I can turn my mind to most things. "I may not be a gynecologist, but I'll have a look."

Turning your mind to something doesn’t automatically lead to producing high quality synthetic analysis?

It doesn’t even seem relevant how good you are at step 1 for something so many steps later.

Re: AI is different

#812

Post by skinnymuch »

chrisco255 wrote: post #45
skinnymuch wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did it not go well for the avg person? The status quo does not go well for the avg person.

You should read French history more closely, they went through hell and changed governments at least 5 or 6 times in the 1800s.

The status quo of the hegemonic structure of society is hell but because it has the semblance of authoritarian law and order people can look at that and say “that’s not hell”

Re: AI is different

#813

Post by skinnymuch »

dragonwriter wrote: post #267
skinnymuch wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did it not go well for the avg person? The status quo does not go well for the avg person.

> How did it not go well for the avg person? You might want to look at the etymology of the word “terrorism” (despite the most popular current use, it wasn't coined for non-state violence) and what class suffered the most in terms of both judicial and non-judicial violent deaths during the revolutionary period.

Yeah, I am aware of how the word revolved evolved. I don’t find terrorism necessarily a bad thing. Though I’m not as revolutionary as before.

Re: AI is different

#814

Post by [deleted] »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #61
skinnymuch wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did it not go well for the avg person? The status quo does not go well for the avg person.

Most of the people who died in The Terror were commoners who had merely not been sympathetic enough to the revolution. And then that sloppiness lead to reactionary violence and there was a lot of back and forth until Napoleon took power and was pretty much a king in all but heritage. Hopefully we can be a bit more precise this time around.

[deleted]

Re: AI is different

#815

Post by tymscar »

srcreigh wrote: post #657
_jab wrote: post #59

I'm skeptical of arguments like this. If we look at most impactful technologies since the year 2000, AI is not even in my top 3. Social networking, mobile computing, and cloud computing have all done more to alter society and daily life than has AI. And yes, I recognize that AI has already created profound change, in that every software engineer now depends heavily on copilots, in that education faces a major integri…

> Could we get there? Absolutely. We just haven't yet. What else is needed then?

I don’t know what the answer to the Collatz conjecture is, but I know it’s not “carrot”.

Re: AI is different

#816

Post by mdaniel »

dragonwriter wrote: post #701
mdaniel wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall the kerfuffle about (IIRC) llama where the engineer lost his mind thinking they had spawned life in a machine and felt it was "too dangerous to release," so it's not a ludicrous take. I would hope that the first person to ask "LLM Jesus" how many Rs are in strawberry would have torpedoed the religion, but (a) I've seen dumber mind viruses (b) it hasn't yet

It wasn't Llama (Meta), it was LaMDA (Google). https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/google-engineer-c...

Ah, thank you. While reading up on it, I found this juicy bit that I did not recall hearing at the time:

> He further revealed that he had been dismissed by Google after he hired an attorney on LaMDA's behalf after the chatbot requested that Lemoine do so.[18][19]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaMDA#Sentience_claims

Then again, it's plausible that if I asked GPT-5 "do you want me to get you an asylum lawyer?" it may very well say yes

Re: AI is different

#817

Post by arcastroe »

forgotTheLast wrote: post #768
jdoliner wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I see these two opposite behaviors. People who formed an opinion about AI from an older model and haven't updated it. And people who have an opinion about what AI will be able to do in the future and refuse to acknowledge that it doesn't do that in the present. And often when the two are arguing it's tricky to tell which is which, because whether or not it does something isn't totally black and white, the…

I.e. people who look at f(now) and assume it'll be like this forever against people who look at f'(now) and assume it'll improve like this forever

What is f''(now) looking like?

Re: AI is different

#818

Post by svara »

the8472 wrote: post #741
svara wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exposure adjustment is constrained by frame rate, that doesn't buy you very much dynamic range. A system that replicates the human eye's rapid aperture adjustment and integration of images taken at quickly changing aperture/ filter settings is very much not what Tesla is putting in their cars. But again, the argument is fine in principle. It's just that you can't buy a camera that performs like the human visual syste…

Human eyes are unlikely the only thing in parameter-space that's sufficient for driving. Cameras can do IR, 360° coverage, higher frame rates, wider stereo separation... but of course nothing says Teslas sit at a good point in that space.

Yes, agreed, but that's a different point - I was reacting to this specifically:

> Humans use only cameras.

Which in this or similar forms is sometimes used to argue that L4/5 Teslas are just a software update away.

Re: AI is different

#819

Post by nchmy »

jdoliner wrote: post #671
gdubs wrote: post #622

AI has been improving at a very rapid pace, which means that a lot of people have really outdated priors. I see this all the time online where people are dismissive about AI in a way that suggests it's been a while since they last checked-in on the capabilities of models. They wrote off the coding ability of ChatGPT on version 3.5, for instance, and have missed all the advancements that have happened since. Or they t…

I feel like I see these two opposite behaviors. People who formed an opinion about AI from an older model and haven't updated it. And people who have an opinion about what AI will be able to do in the future and refuse to acknowledge that it doesn't do that in the present. And often when the two are arguing it's tricky to tell which is which, because whether or not it does something isn't totally black and white, the…

Another very significant cohort is people who formed a negative opinion without even the slightest interest in genuinely trying to learn how to use it (or even trying at all)

Re: AI is different

#820

Post by crote »

xwowsersx wrote: post #696
thegrim33 wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil's advocate, how is your argument not a 'no true scottsman' argument? As in, "oh, they had a negative view of X, well that's of course because they weren't testing the new and improved X2 model which is different". Fast forward a year .. "Oh, they have a negative view on X2, well silly them, they need to be using the Y24 model, that's where it's at, the X2 model isn't good anymore". Fast forward a year .…

It's not a No True Scotsman. That fallacy redefines the group to dismiss counterexamples. The point here is different: when the thing itself keeps changing, evidence from older versions naturally goes stale. Criticisms of GPT-3.5 don't necessarily hold against GPT-4, just like reviews of Windows XP don't apply to Windows 11.

> The point here is different: when the thing itself keeps changing, evidence from older versions naturally goes stale.

Yes, but the claims do not. When the hypemen were shouting that GPT-3 was near-AGI, it still turned out to be absolute shit. When the hypemen were claiming that GPT-3.5 was thousands of times better than GPT-3 and beating all highschool students, it turned out to be a massive exaggeration. When the hypemen claimed that GPT-4 was a groundbreaking innovation and going to replace every single programmer, it still wasn't any good.

Sure, AI is improving. Nobody is doubting that. But you can only claim to have a magical unicorn so many times before people stop believing that this time you might have something different than a horse with an ice cream cone glued to its head. I'm not going to waste a significant amount of my time evaluating Unicorn 5.0 when I already know I'll almost certainly end up disappointed.

Perhaps it'll be something impressive in a decade or two, but in the meantime the fact that Big Tech keeps trying to shove it down my throat even when it clearly isn't ready yet is a pretty good indicator to me that it is still primarily just a hype bubble.

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