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Everyone in Seattle hates AI

jonready.com

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Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#881

Post by [deleted] »

basscomm wrote: post #841
ajkjk wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

disagree completely. You're doing the thing I described: assuming it's all ultimately about personal benefit when they're telling you directly that it's not. The same people could trivially capitalize on the shifting climate and have a good career in the new world. But they'd still be pissed about it. I'm one of these people. So is everyone I know. The grievance is moral, not utilitarian. I don't care about executive…

> You're doing the thing I described: assuming it's all ultimately about personal benefit when they're telling you directly that it's not. It doesn't matter how much astroturf I read, I can see what's happening with my own eyes. > The grievance is moral, not utilitarian. Nope, it's both. Businesses have no morals. (Most) people do. Everything that a business does is in service of the bottom line. They aren't pushing…

[deleted]

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#882

Post by nutjob2 »

senordevnyc wrote: post #252
zzzeek wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the list of people who write code, use high quality LLM agents (not chatbots) like Claude, and report not just having success with the tools but watching the tools change how they think about programming, continues to grow. The sudden appearance of LLMs has had a really destabilizing effect on everything, and a vast portion of what LLMs can do and/or are being used for runs from intellectually stifling (using LLMs to…

The last few years has revealed the extent to which HN is packed with middle-aged, conservative engineers who are letting their fear and anxiety drive their engineering decisions. It’s sad, I always thought of my fellow engineers as more open-minded.

Do you mean people who have been through several hype cycles and know their nature and how new novel tech, no matter how useful, takes time to be integrated and understood?

Get over yourself, and try to tone down the bigotry and stereotyping.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#883

Post by runarberg »

Rebuff5007 wrote: post #760
p0w3n3d wrote: post #752

Someone wrote on HN the (IMO) main reason why people do not accept AI. AI is about centralisation of power So basically, only a few companies that hold on the large models will have all the knowledge required to do things, and will lend you your computer collecting monthly fees. Also see https://be-clippy.com/ for more arguments (like Adobe moving to cloud to teach their model on your work). For me AI is just a natur…

But why not? AI also has very powerful open models (that can actually be fine-tuned for personal use) that can compete against the flagship proprietary models. As an average consumer, I actually feel like i'm less locked into gemini/chatgpt/claude than I am to Apple or Google for other tech (i.e. photos).

There is a case that the indices owned by the major search engines are a form of centralization of power. Normal people and smaller companies would have to pay a lot of money to get indices for their new competing search engine. However the analogy falls apart when you look at a) the scale of the investments involved and b) the pervasiveness of the technology.

Creating a search engine index requires several orders of magnitude less computing power then creating the weights of an LLM model. Like it is theoretically possible for somebody with a lot of money to spare to create a new search index, but only the richest of the rich can do that with an LLM model.

And search engines are there to fulfill exactly one technical niche, albeit an important one. LLMs are stuffed into everything, whether you like it or not. Like if you want to use Zoom, you are not told to “enrich your experience with web search”, you are told, “here is an AI summary of your conversation”.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#884

Post by nutjob2 »

FrancisMoodie wrote: post #720
triceratops wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue even dogshit has more practical use than Bitcoin, if no one paid money for Bitcoin. You can throw it for self-defence, compost it (under high heat to kill the germs), put it on your property to scare away raccoons (it works sometimes).

Bitcoin and other crypto coins have a practical use. You can use them to buy whatever is being sold on the darkweb with the main product categories being drugs and guns. I honestly believe much of the valuation of Crypto is tied to these marketplaces.

Don't forget scamming people out of billions of dollars of their hard earned life savings.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#885

Post by nutjob2 »

senordevnyc wrote: post #256
binary132 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is at 93k so I don’t think it’s entirely accurate to say blockchain is insubstantive or without value

You’re wasting your breath. Bitcoin will be at a million in 2050 and you’ll still get downvoted here for suggesting it’s anything other than a stupid bubble that’s about to burst any day now.

Quite the opposite, if you need to defend a technical idea with its price in the in a largely speculative market, you've already lost the argument.

That people are greedy and ignorant and bid up BTC doesn't prove anything about its value.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#886

Post by troyvit »

Rebuff5007 wrote: post #760
p0w3n3d wrote: post #752

Someone wrote on HN the (IMO) main reason why people do not accept AI. AI is about centralisation of power So basically, only a few companies that hold on the large models will have all the knowledge required to do things, and will lend you your computer collecting monthly fees. Also see https://be-clippy.com/ for more arguments (like Adobe moving to cloud to teach their model on your work). For me AI is just a natur…

But why not? AI also has very powerful open models (that can actually be fine-tuned for personal use) that can compete against the flagship proprietary models. As an average consumer, I actually feel like i'm less locked into gemini/chatgpt/claude than I am to Apple or Google for other tech (i.e. photos).

That's what I was thinking as I was listening to the "be like clippy" video linked in the parent. Those local models probably won't be able to match the quality of the big guys' for a long time to come, but for now the local, open models have a lot of potential for us to escape this power consolidation before it's complete and still get their users 75-80% of the functionality. That remaining 20-25%, combined with the new skill of managing an LLM, is where the self-value comes in, the bit that says, "I do own what I built or learned or drew."

The hardest part with that IMO will be democratizing the hardware so that everybody can afford it.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#887

Post by nutjob2 »

r0m4n0 wrote: post #404

I feel like there is an absurd amount of negative rhetoric about how AI doesn't have any real world use cases in this comment thread. I do believe that the product leadership is shoehorning it into every nook and cranny of the world right now and there are reasons to be annoyed by that but there are also countless incredible use cases that are mind blowing, that you can use it every day for. I need to write about som…

Its not about the tech, the negativity is due to the mismatch between hype and reality. LLMs are incredibly useful, for certain things, like the ones you have found. Others simply don't work.

Is it going to deliver on even 1% of the hype any time soon? Unlikely.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#888

Post by bwfan123 »

balamatom wrote: post #257
bwfan123 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a dichotomy in the software world between real products (which have customers and use cases and make money by giving people things they need) and hype product I think there is a broader dichotomy between the people-persuation-plane, and the real-world-facts plane. In the people-persuation plane, it is all about convincing someone of something, and hype plays here, and marketing, religion and political persu…

>a broader dichotomy between the people-persuation-plane, and the real-world-facts plane This right here is the real thing which AI is deployed to upset. The Enlightenment values which brought us the Industrial Revolution imply that the disparity between the people-persuasion-plane and the real-world-facts-plane should naturally decrease . The implicit expectation here is that as civilization as a whole learns more a…

> people would naturally become more rational, and thus more persuadable by reality-compliant arguments and less persuadable by reality-denying ones.

likely not. Our natural state tuned by evolution is one of an emotional creature persuaded by pleasing rhetoric - like a bird which responds to another bird's call.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#889

Post by ModernMech »

futuraperdita wrote: post #776
Rebuff5007 wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why not? AI also has very powerful open models (that can actually be fine-tuned for personal use) that can compete against the flagship proprietary models. As an average consumer, I actually feel like i'm less locked into gemini/chatgpt/claude than I am to Apple or Google for other tech (i.e. photos).

> AI also has very powerful open models (that can actually be fine-tuned for personal use) that can compete against the flagship proprietary models. It was already tough to run flagship-class local models and it's only getting worse with the demand for datacenter-scale compute from those specific big players. What happens when the model that works best needs 1TB of HBM and specialized TPUs? AI computation looks a lot…

It appears to me the early exponential gains from new models have plateaued. Current gains seem very marginal, it could be the future model best model that needs "1TB of HBM and specialized TPUs" won't be all that better than the models we have today. All we need to do is wait for commodity hardware that can run current models, and OpenAI / Anthropic et al are done if their whole plan to monetize this is to inject ads into the responses. That is, unless they can actually create AGI that requires infrastructure they control, or some other advancement.

Re: Everyone in Seattle hates AI

#890

Post by WorldMaker »

nutjob2 wrote: post #824
hatefulheart wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry but your SQL comparison is way off. SQL is deterministic, has a defined implementation that databases must follow and when you run a statement it presents a query plan. This is the absolute opposite to using an LLM. Please stop using this comparison and perhaps look for others, like for example, a randomised search engine.

You're missing the point entirely. He's saying it's horses for courses, each tool has its use and you use the right tool for the job. And he's right. LLMs are fancy text query engines and work very well as such. The problem is when people try to shoehorn everything into LLMs. That's a disaster yet being perused vigorously by some.

I think the conflicting point you missed is that "right tool for the job" also implies "right tool". If you don't think that probabilistic output counts as "query response" then LLMs are the "wrong tool" for any text query engine. If a database engine returned the right answer only X% of the time, you would say the database engine is faulty and find another. LLMs are probabilistic algorithms that by their very nature cannot hit 100% accuracy. (Especially as you get into the specifics of things like the lossy "compression" mechanics of tokenization and vectorization. The training set isn't 100% represented without some loss, either.) That doesn't seem like a good fit for a "query engine" tool in a database sense to some of us.

In practice they seem to work well for that at a surface level, most of the time. The complaint is not that LLMs are not a tool for the job of "fancy text query engine", the complaint is that at scale and in the long run, LLMs are not a good tool for that.

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