28 ms·

“The current climate in AI has so many parallels to 2021 Web3”

119 points by szemy2 4y ago

Kaotique 4y ago
The difference for me personally: Web3/NFT/Crypto: what? why? DALL-E/ChatGPT: wow!
- dgb23 4y ago
  The main driver is technological advancement and the generated value is _obviously_ net positive. Not saying that there aren't issues that need to be discussed, nor am I saying that there isn't any (unnecessary) hype. But the comparison to Web3 is a stretch. The author addresses this: > One last thought -- don't overindex on the web3 <> LLMs comparison. Of course web3 was pure hot air while LLMs is real tech with actual applications -- that's not the parallel I'm making. The parallel is in the bubble formation social dynamics, especially in the VC crowd. So aren't they just saying "hype is hype"? (edited an incomplete sentence)
- lm28469 4y ago
  I agree, but it can be "wow that's good" without "wow that's going to replace very single creative job in the world by 2024" which a lot of people seem to expect It's a bit like thinking autonomous parallel parking will automatically bring you fully autonomous cars soon
  - pigsty 4y ago
    I don’t think it’s that people expect it. It’s that some people absolutely despise the idea of artists and have some irrational desire to erase their jobs and automate it all. These people usually aren’t people signing checks—just angry people online, and oftentimes tied in with political motivations. I don’t think many companies are licking their lips at the idea of firing artists (yet). They’re probably thinking about how they can use this to assist artists to get more done faster and at higher quality.
    - MontyCarloHall 4y ago
      >It’s that some people absolutely despise the idea of artists and have some irrational desire to erase their jobs and automate it all. I’ve seen very few people who believe this. On the contrary, most prognostications about Stable Diffusion et al. killing artists’ livelihoods have come from artists themselves, e.g. https://waxy.org/2022/11/invasive-diffusion-how-one-unwilling-illustrator-found-herself-turned-into-an-ai-model/ https://waxy.org/2022/11/invasive-diffusion-how-one-unwillin...
      - williamcotton 4y ago
        > I talked to Hollie Mengert about her experience last week. “My initial reaction was that it felt invasive that my name was on this tool, I didn’t know anything about it and wasn’t asked about it,” she said. “If I had been asked if they could do this, I wouldn’t have said yes.” The main issue here is that someone is using her name. Luckily she does have legal protections available to her! She can trademark her name! > “I feel like AI can kind of mimic brush textures and rendering, and pick up on some colors and shapes, but that’s not necessarily what makes you really hireable as an illustrator or designer. If you think about it, the rendering, brushstrokes, and colors are the most surface-level area of art. I think what people will ultimately connect to in art is a lovable, relatable character. And I’m seeing AI struggling with that.” Which is spot on! AI is fantastic at rendering (which tends to be everyone's least favorite part of the process) and not so great at everything else. > “As far as the characters, I didn’t see myself in it. I didn’t personally see the AI making decisions that that I would make, so I did feel distance from the results. Some of that frustrated me because it feels like it isn’t actually mimicking my style, and yet my name is still part of the tool.” Good art is and will always be about the end result after a series of creative decisions made by the artist. Professional artists have had assistants that paint large portions of their works since at least the Renaissance. In these cases they rely on their assistants for basic rendering tasks like backgrounds and folds on clothing. What makes it their painting is that they made the creative decisions.
    - fwsgonzo 4y ago
      I come from a very creative family, but even I can see the writing on the wall. Join any Discord server for a high quality image network and you will see incredible art pieces appear all the time based on someones description on what they want. Here is a random image I found: https://cloud.nwcs.no/index.php/s/TmzWzBW6fae4pkp https://cloud.nwcs.no/index.php/s/TmzWzBW6fae4pkp And this is very important: We haven't had these for a very long time. Imagine what they can do in 10 years? Or 6 months? What about ChatGPT, imagine it in 10 years? Every single task that simply requires reiterating known information can be replaced if desired. That doesn't mean I desire it. But I also know what kind of world we live in. The economy comes first, people second. That people are angry I can completely understand. I can also understand trying to argue that "this means nothing", and "its a grift", like someone working in oil hearing about climate change. Personally I am in awe that this is possible, but also sad at what will inevitably happen.
- mrtksn 4y ago
  Web3/NFT/Crypto promises: Very clever and advanced tech, People will stop using the old stuff because they hate the government and want to save pennies. Web3/NFT/Crypto realities: using it is expensive and hard, scams left and right and the government actually arrives but doesn't remedy the damages. People are not in to save pennies on transactions but to get rich quick. DALL-E/ChatGPT promises: A statistical model that can generate text and images that are impressive but not always accurate. Also, the tech is not that magical, we just used so much data to train it. DALL-E/ChatGPT reality: Wows everyone, people actually use it tirelessly for writing code, creating artwork, recreationally etc. We will probably hit the limits soon and won't have GAI next year but the stuff already delivered is already useful. The crypto stuff might become useful but its nowhere near the hype.
  - bmitc 4y ago
    > DALL-E/ChatGPT promises: A statistical model that can generate text and images that are impressive but not always accurate. Also, the tech is not that magical, we just used so much data to train it. > DALL-E/ChatGPT reality: Wows everyone, people actually use it tirelessly for writing code, creating artwork, recreationally etc. That's a pretty generous if not biased take, is it not? For me personally, ChatGPT is underwhelming and hasn't done anything remotely impressive when I have used it. And there's a lot of fervor around people using it, but are there interesting use cases outside of advertising? And are there not a ton of harmful use cases? The internet is going to be absolutely filled to the brim with GPT generated junk.
    - monk_e_boy 4y ago
      We all (students and staff) use it a lot. It'll write lectures, help think up interesting worksheet ideas, help students code, help them think of things to write about, how to structure assignments. I needed a lecture on regex, ChatGPT wrote it for my in 30 seconds. Then I asked it for some problems for the students to solve and it wrote those too. It may not be relevant to you, but for some of us it is changing the way we work. That hasn't happened since the dawn of the internet, or social media, or mobile phones. The next generation are using it, and using it a lot.
rafaelero 4y ago
I find it hard to overhype the immense progress we had in the last two years in AI. All that hype is deserved.
labrador 4y ago
If they mean as an investment or game in the tech stock casino then I'd agree
marginalia_nu 4y ago
It's more or less a grifting industry at this point. The topic changes as people grow wise to the con, but the tactics stay the same.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
In this analogy, would OpenAI be the Ethereum-equivalent of AI space - actually innovative tech and some real world utility with a strong team of developers?
- wellanyway 4y ago
  > Ethereum-equivalent What non-scam/non-marketing-bullshit-and-no-product-in-sight came out of Ethereum? I know a few people that work in related field and it's shady money managed by people with exorbitant personality issues doing endless POC that will be sold... one day... to someone... totally, dude, like, radically expensive...
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    A very first-world perspective. I live in the third world. My currency keeps crashing every year. There are currency controls over how much foreign currency I can own. My government also randomly enacts haphazard financial policies, such as outlawing 86% of all circulating cash. Crypto, especially stablecoins, has actually helped me protect my wealth. Real use case for me at least, and many others like me in the third world. The world is bigger than you think, and their problems are more varied than you realize.
mikerg87 4y ago
Crooks and swindlers will find there way into anything where big money is likely to be hyped. Unlike web3 I actually see products being built from LLM.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Possibly. I'm certainly excited by it, but unless there are patents involved (for all I know there might be, but I've not heard anything about that either way), I'd say 2022's headline AI look like they will be the next spreadsheet or the next spell-check/grammar-check rather than the next Google: any software that takes less than a few million to implement, is a race to the bottom with regard to monetisation.
- cactusplant7374 4y ago
  Very skeptical of this because the AI is so strong that safety and quality will always be an issue and if safety isn’t an issue the output may not be that interesting because the model is strongly curbed. For example, I saw a Twitter post where a podcaster said the AI generated introduction for his podcast was better than anything he could write. I think the takeaway is that his writing isn’t that good and he also thinks boilerplate is impressive.
  - yao420 4y ago
    To me that is excellent. I hate emails and I’m admittedly not good at writing them. I now type “write an email that says it was was nice meeting and getting to know the team. Send me the scope docs which I’ll fill out and return. Let’s schedule a status in two weeks” It gives me a great email which I proofread and send in less than 2mins.
    - cactusplant7374 4y ago
      Is that something that could be accomplished with a template?
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      So now instead of you spending a few minutes putting together a minimal email with just the required info that takes me only a little time to read and understand, you will generate a blob of whatever content and length, and basically force me to either ignore your email, or waste a bunch of time reading it to try and tease out useful info. Doesn't that mean you are basically offloading work to me?
birdymcbird 4y ago
> “The fact that investment is being driven by pure hype, by data-free narratives rather than actual revenue data or first-principles analysis. The circularity of it all -- hype drives investment which drives hype which drives investment. The influx of influencer engagement bait.” Think this cynical. author good to see ads or marketing using hype for clicks. people do stuff to make money on latest trend, just nature. but me dont know anything productive in web3. it hype through all way. English not me first language. writing use almost feel magic to have chatgpt clean and rewrite my posts. also used for coding examples. dont think this equal to web3. maybe need time to mature to billion dollar scale but me wouldnt bet money against
anotheryou 4y ago
and yet AI has actual use cases %)
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Most of them hinge upon incredible yet highly nebulous improvements to the technology to solve as-yet unsolved problems based on a lot of extrapolation based on hype and "dude trust me the next thing is gonna be great"'s from AI companies, and a generally poor understanding of how the technology works and what its limitations are. The central logic error is something along the lines of "I don't understand the limitations of this technology, therefore it must have no limitations".
  - anotheryou 4y ago
    There is enough non-nebulous problems it will solve.
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      The operative word in hype cycles is always will. Blockchains will revolutionize this, web3 will revolutionize that, stable diffusion will do this, ChatGPT will do that. Talk to me about what it actually has changed and you may convince me.
      - veridies 4y ago
        I had to write 40 individualized reports this weekend. I fed my notes into GPT, along with a few directions about style, and it spit out competent reports that mostly only required tweaking. It saved me from losing my Sunday too.
        zB2sj38WHAjYnvm 4y ago
        I see people saying things like this online, and I have to wonder what their standards for "good" or "competent" or whatever are. I'm not going to ask you to post those reports so I can "judge" them. You shouldn't and none of us cares that deeply anyway, but I'm still waiting for a good example of actual useful work done by these things. I'm replying to you randomly, there are other posts like this in this thread. On the art front, every single piece of art that I see is bad. Not bad like a human not being able to draw, but bad in a different but still obvious (to me, at least) way. On a personal front, I had a lot of fun generating funny pictures based on inside jokes with my friends a few weeks ago, but lately it barely makes us smile. I think the novelty is wearing off, so even that is gone. Ultimately, it's not going to matter what I think, enough people think this is good content that it will be flooding the internet soon. It's all so tiresome.
qabqabaca 4y ago
As far as consumer interest goes, the problem with Web3 is it sells the means rather than the end. Nobody cares if your Twitter/Substack/Spotify Web3 alternative is decentralised or you own your own data on the platform. To win it has to be immediately useful and/or better than alternatives. Content generation AI is so obviously useful to the majority of people and it does not require an understanding of how it works in order to be impressed by it.
- ryanbrunner 4y ago
  Impressive for sure. Usefulness is still being explored (outside of a few early things like Copilot). The majority of people are still interacting with this stuff primarily as a toy, and while it's a much, much smaller leap to imagine how you'd use it in everyday life vs. something like web3, most people aren't yet, and I don't think it's an absolute certainty that they will (or at the very least, how universally they will).
marban 4y ago
My TikTok stream has been hijacked by pseudo-tech grifters who are promising the usual $1k/day by selling GPT-generated books on Amazon. Go figure.
- rchaud 4y ago
  as has my Twitter with a giant wave of influencer bros who are all of sudden AI course experts and conveniently have discount codes for me to use.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
api 4y ago
"We tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term." The comparison with web3 is very excessive though. This AI stuff is at least somewhat actually useful. Web3 was a gigantic billion dollar bubble that produced very little in the way of things that are useful for any purpose, even playing around. It's one of the most vapid bubbles in history outside pure financial instrument bubbles.
snowwrestler 4y ago
Generative AI is good for SEO copy because it’s an AI talking to an AI. Google looks at text generated by ChatGPT and is like “wow, that’s exactly how I think about things.” They were trained on much of the same content: the web. The biggest challenge for generative AI is its willingness to make things up. It’s fine when you’re playing around. Not so fine when you’re expecting it to actually help you in a real way. I suspect this is why Google has not debuted such an interface despite literally decades of work on AI. You have to be able to bolt a “truth filter” onto the AI, which seems difficult.
- wellanyway 4y ago
  Imagine training it on Vatican library. Butlerian jihad here we go.
superkuh 4y ago
Yep. The value/utility of the underlying technology doesn't really matter. The scammers will just switch to using whatever buzzwords are most hip and eventually people will associate the buzzword more with the scammers than the technology itself. This was taken to the extreme with cryptocurrency post-2015 where most people never even had an actual interaction with cryptocurrency but believe they know what it is from all the tangentially related scams they heard ads or news about. The utility of AI can be real, just as the utility of bitcoin is, but it'll be drowned under things like "Quantum AI trading platform" or "NFT"s in the public perception.
- WhiteNoiz3 4y ago
  I blame much of the hype around the "metaverse" on crypto scammers. VR was arguably in a slow but steady growth phase centered around games until it got tied up with the overhyped and poorly defined buzz word, which also includes every hyped up technology in existence (AI, AR, Blockchain, etc). As a long time VR developer going back to 2015, it was hard to watch it happen.
klelatti 4y ago
Something can be both technically incredibly impressive, genuinely useful and yet at the same dramatically over-hyped. That may be the case for AI today although the range of possible outcomes makes the latter point genuinely unclear. The difference for me is that Web3 was never shown to be at all useful.
- password54321 4y ago
  The comparison is between the level of hype not the technology itself. If you take the time to read the thread he is more than well aware of the practical aspects of AI.
  - klelatti 4y ago
    I know that - I read the thread - and I respect Chollet and the fact that he knows an awful lot more about AI than I do. I personally don't think though that the comparison to Web3 is helpful even with the clarification deep in the thread.
- loveparade 4y ago
  > The difference for me is that Web3 was never shown to be at all useful. Because nobody agrees what web3 even means, it's a totally useless term, not that dissimilar to AGI or consciousness, which nobody can properly define. People who hate crypto define web3 in terms of all the negative stuff, while people who have a vested interested in pumping token prices (like VCs) will define web3 in terms of all the potentially positive stuff. I believe that the that fundamentals of crypto are incredibly useful and will eventually be adopted, and have been in meany places, but all the web3/NFT/etc stuff (whatever that means) is just useless hype and ponzi schemes. Crypto has a much more negative image because it's full of scams, but that doesn't mean anything. It's just significantly easier to create scams with crypto because money is at the very base layer, than it is to create scams with AI. But that doesn't imply anything about the usefulness of these technologies.
  - CipherThrowaway 4y ago
    >I believe that the that fundamentals of crypto are incredibly useful and will eventually be adopted, and have been in meany places, but all the web3/NFT/etc stuff (whatever that means) is just useless hype and ponzi schemes. Could you elaborate? It's been 15 years since the bitcoin paper and I still don't see where the game changing commercial applications of crypto are beyond the black/grey market uses for which it has already been adopted.
michaelcampbell 4y ago
Can AI predict when people will start writing longer form articles on a platform that doesn't artificially restrict you to paragraphs?
- readingnews 4y ago
  I was going to ask that too, but now I wonder, is 280 characters actually a paragraph?
NDizzle 4y ago
Maybe I slept through it, but what was Web3 in 2021?!
- mandis 4y ago
  any points serious enough to merit a reply?
- wellanyway 4y ago
  Little part of twitter was very excited. I guess we are supposed to be very impressed.
WinstonSmith84 4y ago
The problem is people and their expectations after a sudden technology jump: - 15 years ago we got smartphones and people expected laptops and desktop computer to go away (within the next few years) - we got web3 and people expected suddenly banks, tradfi, etc. to go away - we got ChatGPT 2 months ago and now what? Google dead? School / university irrelevant? Threat to humanity? There will be incremental improvements for AI, it will slowly become more part of our life, like it happens for these other techs
- Mystery-Machine 4y ago
  When you say "people" I hope that you mean "minority of people". Yes, I've heard people saying that laptops will go away. Some people said that. Yes. Some people. Web3 is just laughable. Again, some people. Google is obviously not dead. However, I think with AI, there's a huge potential. It will change the world, the way some things are done and some jobs are gonna go away and new jobs will appear. Much more disrupting than a f web3 joke.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    Laptops sort of have gone away, in the sense that the smartphone has become many people's first computing device over the past decade. Adults who did not own a computing device before the smartphone, may choose to continue living their lives without a laptop/desktop. Kids who have grown up with iPads and Chromebooks at school may look for mobile options in college first instead of a standard Mac/Windows laptop.
mihaic 4y ago
I actually think AI is much more like VR or 3D-cinema tech than Web3: it sounds like it might be a game changer, but nobody actually likes the new medium that much after the initial cool factor. AI generated images are much more impressive though, and some things will be unique. In the next decade, I see AI to tackle a special category of problems: those that shouldn't be solved, or else the system as a whole gets worse -- chat bots for customer support, absurd amount of content creation. There's much more content today than 20 years ago, and yet my enjoyment has gone down. If I were a member of congress, I'd be surely thinking about ways to slow this down.
version_five 4y ago
What I find interesting is there has been a (percieved) massive change in the popular opinion re "AI". If you got an AI story on HN 6 months ago, there were all kinds of "it's just statistics" comments (also incorrect). Now the mood has changed and all the laypeople are gushing about how great it is. Otoh, my impression is people who have been involved in ML for a while didn't have any sea change in their opinion of the technology based on the recent advances. These were predictable, but cool, extensions of things that were already known, and represent a fundamental advance in polish and marketing, rather than technology. My point is that the public discourse is now mostly dominated by people looking to profit from hype, not people who actually have experience in the technology, which is of course going to lead to a web3 type feel Incidentally, below is my prediction for 2023 from new year's eve. I didn't think it would start becoming apparent so quick: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34197033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34197033
- rchaud 4y ago
  > My point is that the public discourse is now mostly dominated by people looking to profit from hype Precisely, and they will do untold damage when it comes to educating normal people about what AI can and cannot do.
  - izzygonzalez 4y ago
    Can you elaborate on what sort of damage you’re imagining, or give an example?
theknocker 4y ago
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jackmott42 4y ago
Every day I see one or two new thought pieces on how AI is not actually good/capable/impressive or how AI is overhyped. I have seen zero thought pieces on how AI is amazing and hyped. Meanwhile a lot of people are having fun with, or doing useful things with, StableDiffusion and ChatGPT. The negative takes are mostly correct in all the limitations they talk about, but what they miss is how amazing these things are despite these limitations. These things are remarkably simple and limited yet they can generate realistic photos of myself in places I've never been, wearing clothes I've never worn, doing things I've never done, with a quick text sentence. Or nearly pass the bar exam. On top of that a lot of the limitations have straightforward ways to address, many of which are already in progress. It is going to get really interesting. StableDiffusion knows nothing about the images it is produces, its just repeated denoising with image targets. It doesn't really understand anything about your text either, its just matching up tags. But both of those things can easily change. Put a big language model in front of it to better understand text. Already variants of these image models have depth information. Next up 3d object information, maybe next models of physics so it can understand how things would actually work in the scene, and so on. going to get wild.
- arcturus17 4y ago
  > but what they miss is how amazing these things are despite these limitations The author of this Twitter thread is François Chollet, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, creator of Keras and major contributor to TensorFlow, and author of Deep Learning in Python, considered by many a seminal book in introductory DL... I'd say he understands how amazing these things are despite the limitations, and he specifically says in the thread that it's an amazing time to be building DL apps.
  - logicchains 4y ago
    >The author of this Twitter thread is François Chollet, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, creator of Keras and major contributor to TensorFlow, and author of Deep Learning by Python, considered by many a seminal book in introductory DL... That sounds like someone who's great at API design, not a deep learning researcher.
a4isms 4y ago
Having lived through hype wave after hype wave after hype wave in tech over the last forty-fifty years, the commentary about the behaviour of VCs resonated. I wonder if part of why VCs back so many copycat companies in hype cycles is a structural incentive to just invest money in things that are getting press, raising the VCs profile and attracting more deal flow and limited partners. This led to idle speculation: If it was possible to short early-stage startups that VCs were backing, there would be as much incentive for the media to discuss a startup’s shortcomings and vapourware promises as there is to repeat their breathless braggadocio.
- hackitup7 4y ago
  I think there is some truth to the statement, although many VCs that I've met are really sharp and thoughtful. Not at all the caricature of greasy tech illiterates that sometimes gets thrown around. You kind of can't generate good returns if you aren't able to think about the long-term trajectories of industries. But I think that with the bubble times of 2018-2021 a lot of people entered the industry or changed their behavior because it was trendy and cool, and they have been way more down to ride the hype cycle rodeo.
  - a4isms 4y ago
    I have also met many intelligent and thoughtful investors. I am speaking only to the systemic effects of a kind of marketplace for information that overvalues hype, and undervalues criticism. My speculative musing is that if people could take short positions in startups and not just coattail on as one of a group of investors, I wonder if we’d get a lot fewer breathless PR puff-pieces and a lot more cases for pessimism around certain types of hype cycle investments, backed by investors betting their own moeny against the hype.
    - hackitup7 4y ago
      I think that that's very possible, and I completely agree with you on the phenomenon. There are also few limitations on your ability to talk your own book in the private markets which further turbocharges the hype cycle.
ackbar03 4y ago
Powell needs to keep raising rates
thedonkeycometh 4y ago
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juujian 4y ago
What's annoying is that I have seen not one realistic idea come out of this. This is not some kind of alien technology, it is a concrete algorithm. You cannot just say 'this will revolutionize everything' and then refuse to elaborate. It is hard to integrate this into an existing project, and it does not solve the agency issue that we already had, which is that AI can talk, but it cannot make decisions for you. So more emasculated chat bots that nobody wants to talk to. And how big a market is copy editing really? To publish something based on chatgpd you still need to put in a ton of work, because it does not check its sources and makes stuff up. So how is AI really better than 5 years ago other than that it's a better writer with a better style? That wasn't the problem 5 years ago, and it is not today.
- sharemywin 4y ago
  In it's current iteration I go to it before I go to google for a lot questions(mostly coding questions) I like that I can ask specific questions and get specific answers to my questions. Not samples that may or may not be close to what I'm looking for. if it it's wrong I can try to clarify it. Does it work 100% of the time no. But I feel like it adds value. The big question is what can GPT4 do.
- rchaud 4y ago
  > You cannot just say 'this will revolutionize everything' and then refuse to elaborate. This is intentional, as most of the low-hanging fruit of AI transformation are things people either don't care about, or think would be a net negative. Like replacing junior publicists with AI-written PR copy. What difference would that make to the consumer? Very little if any. On the other hand, replacing real human art (as you might see on The New Yorker cartoons or The Economist) with AI-generated images may make some readers unhappy.
- l33tman 4y ago
  The killer feature with ChatGPT is that you can interactively refine a result. Your skill as a writer for a magazine for example now can be that you're good at recognizing good writing and can articulate how it can be made better, but you don't need to be a good writer yourself anymore. This was absolutely not possible 5 years ago or even 1 year ago. ChatGPT doesn't need to be a "chat" product. It's an interactive stateful tool.
Isinlor 4y ago
People overestimate what's possible short-term and under-estimate what's possible long term. Current AI models have three main limitations: - rapid skill acquisition. Example: someone invents a new programming language. Something like Elm or Rust. Humans can start using it right after reading a "quick start" page and few tutorials from the authors of the new language. How much training data will GPT-style models need to start using that language? A lot, like output of hundreds or thousands of people. This needs to go down by a factor of 10x to 100x to match humans. - agency, or taking actions guided towards a goal. Example: Can you ask GPT-like model to book a flight ticket for you? Help it help you learning Photoshop? New IDE? Test your latest app or indie game and find bugs? No. The ability of current models is still not good enough to be useful to an average person with regard to interacting with outside world. - acting in the physical world. Example: An average human can learn to drive enough to pass a driving test in the order of 100 hours during a driving course. How far away are we from a system that can control humanoid-style robot to learn to drive in the order of 100h? Currently, we can't do it with billions of dollars with specially designed hardware. Using humanoid robot to control a car is not even useful as a benchmark for the state of the art machine learning systems. IMO the currently existing systems like ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion are worth all put together in the range of $10B to $100B in the next 3-5 years. Future systems that will address all 3 limitations mentioned above may be literally the whole reachable universe changing if we decide to build self-replicating space probes (Von Neumann probes). We know that there are physical systems that are not very intelligent but capable of exponential growth like viruses or bacteria (humans too). The main limitation of biological systems is their adaptability, especially to lack of water. If robots can build other robots avoiding bottlenecks of human intellectual and manual labor then the robots are limited only by resources and energy available. We have plenty of both on Earth and Solar system is full of it. Also, I'm just talking about human-like abilities. All of that is possible without involving concepts like superintelligence. Bacteria are not very smart, but they can multiply exponentially. The spread of possibilities is enormous. All of that hinges on your timelines on the 3 above mentioned limitations. It's like predicting when atomic bomb will be possible. It may not happen for decades, or there may be right this very moment someone with an idea that will make it all possible.
karmasimida 4y ago
I don't agree with this, like strongly. What is web3 actually? I don't think there is a definition people can agree on. So even bashing web3 as if it is anything other than at best a vaporware, worst case a scam, is fruitless and not grounded in reality. Let's talk about the current climate in AI part. From his tweet, he seems to point to Sam Altman's statement that GPT-3.5+ is going to 'civilization transformation'. Well, if you follow Altman's past statements, he likes to make grandiose statements like this, and at the end of day, it is more of his personal style of speech than anything else. So let's back to the comparison of web3 vs GPT style AI agents. I would argue, the latter is indeed, partially already a reality. Imagine if you have a multiple modular in-context learning agents, then here is the opportunity: A machine that is programmable through natural language and examples/demonstrations. The level of automation potential is going to insane, even scary. What if we hook it up with some robotic arms? If someone makes this work, we will have a factory that can make many many things, at the same time, in the same place, with little human involvement. This, of course, is going to fundamentally change wide range of industries, or capitalism itself and will have geopolitical implications.
Havoc 4y ago
Key difference I think is that Ai while overhyped will definitely have an enduring impact at least partially. With web3 etc that part was less clear
rayiner 4y ago
Seems like it has more parallels to the AI Winter of the 1970s. https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-winter https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-winter In particular the collapse of faith in the future of Tesla’s full self driving, and self-driving cars generally, has been palpable.
iambateman 4y ago
This is a lazy tweet. ChatGPT is trivially useful in a lot of cases...The other day I asked it to write marketing copy for a project and it wrote _better_ marketing copy than I could have written in an hour. On another project, I spent 10 minutes integrating the OpenAI library and was programmatically receiving incredible results with almost no effort. The nature of predicting the future means that there will be periods of overconfidence. In the case of Web3 (taken to mean blockchain/crypto/digital coins), the overconfidence was fueled by a core ponzi scheme combined with truly extraordinary returns for early speculators. But AI has no ponzi scheme attached to it so the comparison breaks down. My uncle cannot gamble his retirement on a mysterious promise of überwealth from a man with wild hair and no financial experience. AI companies will have lots of false starts but 2022 was a transformational year and we are only getting started.
- thesausageking 4y ago
  Read the whole thread. Francis is the creator of Keras and an AI engineer at Google. He knows his stuff. He calls out ads/marketing/copywriting as one area where ChatGPT is effective. His point is that the scope of things beyond that use case is probably a lot more limited than people are assuming.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - rapsey 4y ago
    Just because he is an engineer does not mean he can predict how near future AI products will turn out. Web3 was a circle jerk within the crypto community. It only convinced fools. Recent GPT/stable diffusion products universally blow people away with their output. Engineers and everyone else regularly dismiss new tech for its shortcomings and completely miss the forest for the trees.
    - chimprich 4y ago
      Chollet's view on this can't just be dismissed. There can't be many people better positioned to understand the current state of the art and the immediate prospects for advancement. It's fine to disagree with him, but most people doing so will be from a much less informed position.
netman21 4y ago
I too have lived through many hype cycles. I jumped on one in 1992 and created one of the first ISPs in Michigan. That changed my career path from automotive to tech. It was an exciting time as thousands of ISPs were launched. I completely ignored the hype around blockchain, NFTs, etc. I even block anyone who says they are a blockchain expert on Linkedin. But I am all in on leveraging LLM for new business use cases. My mind is blown at what we can do with DaVinci 3.5 and looking forward to evaluating 4.0. ChatGPT is a demonstrator. DaVinci is ushering in the next wave of innovation.
- Terretta 4y ago
  Jumped same time (the year it became legal to make money on the Internet, which I think was '93), co-founding an ISP and web agency. And fully agree with you, except that I think DLT (distributed ledger technology) has use cases, for instance, ATMs in grocery stores. Meanwhile Mid-Journey and text-davinci-003 are super impressive in making interesting things from probabilistic blends of other things. ChatGPT is like decades of Bayesian "reasoning" or probabilistic (aka "evidenced-based whatever") free association finally having a creative application and outlet.
peter-m80 4y ago
I find AI products incredibly useful and I save a lot of time by using them; I have paid subscriptions to MJ and OpenAI and I use them frequently. On the contrary, web3 is nothing more than empty promises.
sharemywin 4y ago
I still think social authentication and S3 replacements are valid use cases for web3. as for GPT I think it is revolutionary. And it is the first chatbot that I prefer to work with over google. Way easier to use than google. If it becomes a paid service(assuming the pricing is right) I feel it's incentives align better than googles with mine. Where things get messed up is recommending products and services. If it can stick to a no pay to rank type of service than it would revolutionize the economy. No assistant is perfect but seems to do better then a lot of human assistants. Will it be perfect in the future no, but I think if it can offer some kind of confidence factor to it's answers that would go a long way.
more_corn 4y ago
This is a dangerous assertion. Web3 never had any “there there” No coherent use case, no value add. Smart contracts? Maybe. No proposed use case actually requires or benefits from blockchain. The currencies were always blatant speculation. A cabdriver in OKC recently told me he was “invested” in diesel coin. A) wtf is that and B) in what way is that an investment (you know where you dedicate capital to a value engine and when value is created you get out more than you put in) AI as it exists TODAY has the potential (with a bit of prompt engineering and a free account) to assist everyone in their jobs. It will disrupt the software industry, art, writing, education, law, science. Specialized AI assistants already exist and work startlingly well. It can write at a college level. It can code at a college level. It can learn specialized knowledge worker skills in a trivial amount of time. (Law for example) It’s ok to not be optimistic. But if you discount it entirely you’re in for a bad time in the coming year, three years, five years. Actually no, do whatever you want. Ai will come as a surprise to something like 6 billion people. There’s no harm to me in you being part of that group. And frankly the existence of different opinions about the future is a great hedge every society makes.
nsm 4y ago
I am really looking forward to AI that can help us solve hard biology and engineering issues (say nuclear reactor design, materials science) practically. Or an AI that will help solve coordination problems by telling us exactly where to compromise and how to negotiate so that everyone will agree to say relax zoning regulations. I know there are things like AlphaFold and probably lots of proprietary things in niche industries I'll never hear about because no mainstream media is going to cover that. Are there such examples? I find the likes of ChatGPT wonderful, but in the end image and copy generation seems like a very first world/"content creator" use case that won't help us solve critical problems.

119 points by szemy2 4y ago

Kaotique 4y ago

The difference for me personally: Web3/NFT/Crypto: what? why? DALL-E/ChatGPT: wow!

dgb23 4y ago
The main driver is technological advancement and the generated value is _obviously_ net positive. Not saying that there aren't issues that need to be discussed, nor am I saying that there isn't any (unnecessary) hype. But the comparison to Web3 is a stretch. The author addresses this: > One last thought -- don't overindex on the web3 <> LLMs comparison. Of course web3 was pure hot air while LLMs is real tech with actual applications -- that's not the parallel I'm making. The parallel is in the bubble formation social dynamics, especially in the VC crowd. So aren't they just saying "hype is hype"? (edited an incomplete sentence)
lm28469 4y ago
I agree, but it can be "wow that's good" without "wow that's going to replace very single creative job in the world by 2024" which a lot of people seem to expect It's a bit like thinking autonomous parallel parking will automatically bring you fully autonomous cars soon
- pigsty 4y ago
  I don’t think it’s that people expect it. It’s that some people absolutely despise the idea of artists and have some irrational desire to erase their jobs and automate it all. These people usually aren’t people signing checks—just angry people online, and oftentimes tied in with political motivations. I don’t think many companies are licking their lips at the idea of firing artists (yet). They’re probably thinking about how they can use this to assist artists to get more done faster and at higher quality.
  - MontyCarloHall 4y ago
    >It’s that some people absolutely despise the idea of artists and have some irrational desire to erase their jobs and automate it all. I’ve seen very few people who believe this. On the contrary, most prognostications about Stable Diffusion et al. killing artists’ livelihoods have come from artists themselves, e.g. https://waxy.org/2022/11/invasive-diffusion-how-one-unwilling-illustrator-found-herself-turned-into-an-ai-model/ https://waxy.org/2022/11/invasive-diffusion-how-one-unwillin...
    - williamcotton 4y ago
      > I talked to Hollie Mengert about her experience last week. “My initial reaction was that it felt invasive that my name was on this tool, I didn’t know anything about it and wasn’t asked about it,” she said. “If I had been asked if they could do this, I wouldn’t have said yes.” The main issue here is that someone is using her name. Luckily she does have legal protections available to her! She can trademark her name! > “I feel like AI can kind of mimic brush textures and rendering, and pick up on some colors and shapes, but that’s not necessarily what makes you really hireable as an illustrator or designer. If you think about it, the rendering, brushstrokes, and colors are the most surface-level area of art. I think what people will ultimately connect to in art is a lovable, relatable character. And I’m seeing AI struggling with that.” Which is spot on! AI is fantastic at rendering (which tends to be everyone's least favorite part of the process) and not so great at everything else. > “As far as the characters, I didn’t see myself in it. I didn’t personally see the AI making decisions that that I would make, so I did feel distance from the results. Some of that frustrated me because it feels like it isn’t actually mimicking my style, and yet my name is still part of the tool.” Good art is and will always be about the end result after a series of creative decisions made by the artist. Professional artists have had assistants that paint large portions of their works since at least the Renaissance. In these cases they rely on their assistants for basic rendering tasks like backgrounds and folds on clothing. What makes it their painting is that they made the creative decisions.
  - fwsgonzo 4y ago
    I come from a very creative family, but even I can see the writing on the wall. Join any Discord server for a high quality image network and you will see incredible art pieces appear all the time based on someones description on what they want. Here is a random image I found: https://cloud.nwcs.no/index.php/s/TmzWzBW6fae4pkp https://cloud.nwcs.no/index.php/s/TmzWzBW6fae4pkp And this is very important: We haven't had these for a very long time. Imagine what they can do in 10 years? Or 6 months? What about ChatGPT, imagine it in 10 years? Every single task that simply requires reiterating known information can be replaced if desired. That doesn't mean I desire it. But I also know what kind of world we live in. The economy comes first, people second. That people are angry I can completely understand. I can also understand trying to argue that "this means nothing", and "its a grift", like someone working in oil hearing about climate change. Personally I am in awe that this is possible, but also sad at what will inevitably happen.
mrtksn 4y ago
Web3/NFT/Crypto promises: Very clever and advanced tech, People will stop using the old stuff because they hate the government and want to save pennies. Web3/NFT/Crypto realities: using it is expensive and hard, scams left and right and the government actually arrives but doesn't remedy the damages. People are not in to save pennies on transactions but to get rich quick. DALL-E/ChatGPT promises: A statistical model that can generate text and images that are impressive but not always accurate. Also, the tech is not that magical, we just used so much data to train it. DALL-E/ChatGPT reality: Wows everyone, people actually use it tirelessly for writing code, creating artwork, recreationally etc. We will probably hit the limits soon and won't have GAI next year but the stuff already delivered is already useful. The crypto stuff might become useful but its nowhere near the hype.
- bmitc 4y ago
  > DALL-E/ChatGPT promises: A statistical model that can generate text and images that are impressive but not always accurate. Also, the tech is not that magical, we just used so much data to train it. > DALL-E/ChatGPT reality: Wows everyone, people actually use it tirelessly for writing code, creating artwork, recreationally etc. That's a pretty generous if not biased take, is it not? For me personally, ChatGPT is underwhelming and hasn't done anything remotely impressive when I have used it. And there's a lot of fervor around people using it, but are there interesting use cases outside of advertising? And are there not a ton of harmful use cases? The internet is going to be absolutely filled to the brim with GPT generated junk.
  - monk_e_boy 4y ago
    We all (students and staff) use it a lot. It'll write lectures, help think up interesting worksheet ideas, help students code, help them think of things to write about, how to structure assignments. I needed a lecture on regex, ChatGPT wrote it for my in 30 seconds. Then I asked it for some problems for the students to solve and it wrote those too. It may not be relevant to you, but for some of us it is changing the way we work. That hasn't happened since the dawn of the internet, or social media, or mobile phones. The next generation are using it, and using it a lot.

rafaelero 4y ago

I find it hard to overhype the immense progress we had in the last two years in AI. All that hype is deserved.

labrador 4y ago

If they mean as an investment or game in the tech stock casino then I'd agree

marginalia_nu 4y ago

It's more or less a grifting industry at this point. The topic changes as people grow wise to the con, but the tactics stay the same.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

In this analogy, would OpenAI be the Ethereum-equivalent of AI space - actually innovative tech and some real world utility with a strong team of developers?

wellanyway 4y ago
> Ethereum-equivalent What non-scam/non-marketing-bullshit-and-no-product-in-sight came out of Ethereum? I know a few people that work in related field and it's shady money managed by people with exorbitant personality issues doing endless POC that will be sold... one day... to someone... totally, dude, like, radically expensive...
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  A very first-world perspective. I live in the third world. My currency keeps crashing every year. There are currency controls over how much foreign currency I can own. My government also randomly enacts haphazard financial policies, such as outlawing 86% of all circulating cash. Crypto, especially stablecoins, has actually helped me protect my wealth. Real use case for me at least, and many others like me in the third world. The world is bigger than you think, and their problems are more varied than you realize.

mikerg87 4y ago

Crooks and swindlers will find there way into anything where big money is likely to be hyped. Unlike web3 I actually see products being built from LLM.

ben_w 4y ago
Possibly. I'm certainly excited by it, but unless there are patents involved (for all I know there might be, but I've not heard anything about that either way), I'd say 2022's headline AI look like they will be the next spreadsheet or the next spell-check/grammar-check rather than the next Google: any software that takes less than a few million to implement, is a race to the bottom with regard to monetisation.
cactusplant7374 4y ago
Very skeptical of this because the AI is so strong that safety and quality will always be an issue and if safety isn’t an issue the output may not be that interesting because the model is strongly curbed. For example, I saw a Twitter post where a podcaster said the AI generated introduction for his podcast was better than anything he could write. I think the takeaway is that his writing isn’t that good and he also thinks boilerplate is impressive.
- yao420 4y ago
  To me that is excellent. I hate emails and I’m admittedly not good at writing them. I now type “write an email that says it was was nice meeting and getting to know the team. Send me the scope docs which I’ll fill out and return. Let’s schedule a status in two weeks” It gives me a great email which I proofread and send in less than 2mins.
  - cactusplant7374 4y ago
    Is that something that could be accomplished with a template?
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    So now instead of you spending a few minutes putting together a minimal email with just the required info that takes me only a little time to read and understand, you will generate a blob of whatever content and length, and basically force me to either ignore your email, or waste a bunch of time reading it to try and tease out useful info. Doesn't that mean you are basically offloading work to me?

birdymcbird 4y ago

> “The fact that investment is being driven by pure hype, by data-free narratives rather than actual revenue data or first-principles analysis. The circularity of it all -- hype drives investment which drives hype which drives investment. The influx of influencer engagement bait.” Think this cynical. author good to see ads or marketing using hype for clicks. people do stuff to make money on latest trend, just nature. but me dont know anything productive in web3. it hype through all way. English not me first language. writing use almost feel magic to have chatgpt clean and rewrite my posts. also used for coding examples. dont think this equal to web3. maybe need time to mature to billion dollar scale but me wouldnt bet money against

anotheryou 4y ago

and yet AI has actual use cases %)

marginalia_nu 4y ago
Most of them hinge upon incredible yet highly nebulous improvements to the technology to solve as-yet unsolved problems based on a lot of extrapolation based on hype and "dude trust me the next thing is gonna be great"'s from AI companies, and a generally poor understanding of how the technology works and what its limitations are. The central logic error is something along the lines of "I don't understand the limitations of this technology, therefore it must have no limitations".
- anotheryou 4y ago
  There is enough non-nebulous problems it will solve.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    The operative word in hype cycles is always will. Blockchains will revolutionize this, web3 will revolutionize that, stable diffusion will do this, ChatGPT will do that. Talk to me about what it actually has changed and you may convince me.
    - veridies 4y ago
      I had to write 40 individualized reports this weekend. I fed my notes into GPT, along with a few directions about style, and it spit out competent reports that mostly only required tweaking. It saved me from losing my Sunday too.
      - zB2sj38WHAjYnvm 4y ago
        I see people saying things like this online, and I have to wonder what their standards for "good" or "competent" or whatever are. I'm not going to ask you to post those reports so I can "judge" them. You shouldn't and none of us cares that deeply anyway, but I'm still waiting for a good example of actual useful work done by these things. I'm replying to you randomly, there are other posts like this in this thread. On the art front, every single piece of art that I see is bad. Not bad like a human not being able to draw, but bad in a different but still obvious (to me, at least) way. On a personal front, I had a lot of fun generating funny pictures based on inside jokes with my friends a few weeks ago, but lately it barely makes us smile. I think the novelty is wearing off, so even that is gone. Ultimately, it's not going to matter what I think, enough people think this is good content that it will be flooding the internet soon. It's all so tiresome.

qabqabaca 4y ago

As far as consumer interest goes, the problem with Web3 is it sells the means rather than the end. Nobody cares if your Twitter/Substack/Spotify Web3 alternative is decentralised or you own your own data on the platform. To win it has to be immediately useful and/or better than alternatives. Content generation AI is so obviously useful to the majority of people and it does not require an understanding of how it works in order to be impressed by it.

ryanbrunner 4y ago
Impressive for sure. Usefulness is still being explored (outside of a few early things like Copilot). The majority of people are still interacting with this stuff primarily as a toy, and while it's a much, much smaller leap to imagine how you'd use it in everyday life vs. something like web3, most people aren't yet, and I don't think it's an absolute certainty that they will (or at the very least, how universally they will).

marban 4y ago

My TikTok stream has been hijacked by pseudo-tech grifters who are promising the usual $1k/day by selling GPT-generated books on Amazon. Go figure.

rchaud 4y ago
as has my Twitter with a giant wave of influencer bros who are all of sudden AI course experts and conveniently have discount codes for me to use.

deleted 4y ago

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api 4y ago

"We tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term." The comparison with web3 is very excessive though. This AI stuff is at least somewhat actually useful. Web3 was a gigantic billion dollar bubble that produced very little in the way of things that are useful for any purpose, even playing around. It's one of the most vapid bubbles in history outside pure financial instrument bubbles.

snowwrestler 4y ago

Generative AI is good for SEO copy because it’s an AI talking to an AI. Google looks at text generated by ChatGPT and is like “wow, that’s exactly how I think about things.” They were trained on much of the same content: the web. The biggest challenge for generative AI is its willingness to make things up. It’s fine when you’re playing around. Not so fine when you’re expecting it to actually help you in a real way. I suspect this is why Google has not debuted such an interface despite literally decades of work on AI. You have to be able to bolt a “truth filter” onto the AI, which seems difficult.

wellanyway 4y ago
Imagine training it on Vatican library. Butlerian jihad here we go.

superkuh 4y ago

Yep. The value/utility of the underlying technology doesn't really matter. The scammers will just switch to using whatever buzzwords are most hip and eventually people will associate the buzzword more with the scammers than the technology itself. This was taken to the extreme with cryptocurrency post-2015 where most people never even had an actual interaction with cryptocurrency but believe they know what it is from all the tangentially related scams they heard ads or news about. The utility of AI can be real, just as the utility of bitcoin is, but it'll be drowned under things like "Quantum AI trading platform" or "NFT"s in the public perception.

WhiteNoiz3 4y ago
I blame much of the hype around the "metaverse" on crypto scammers. VR was arguably in a slow but steady growth phase centered around games until it got tied up with the overhyped and poorly defined buzz word, which also includes every hyped up technology in existence (AI, AR, Blockchain, etc). As a long time VR developer going back to 2015, it was hard to watch it happen.

klelatti 4y ago

Something can be both technically incredibly impressive, genuinely useful and yet at the same dramatically over-hyped. That may be the case for AI today although the range of possible outcomes makes the latter point genuinely unclear. The difference for me is that Web3 was never shown to be at all useful.

password54321 4y ago
The comparison is between the level of hype not the technology itself. If you take the time to read the thread he is more than well aware of the practical aspects of AI.
- klelatti 4y ago
  I know that - I read the thread - and I respect Chollet and the fact that he knows an awful lot more about AI than I do. I personally don't think though that the comparison to Web3 is helpful even with the clarification deep in the thread.
loveparade 4y ago
> The difference for me is that Web3 was never shown to be at all useful. Because nobody agrees what web3 even means, it's a totally useless term, not that dissimilar to AGI or consciousness, which nobody can properly define. People who hate crypto define web3 in terms of all the negative stuff, while people who have a vested interested in pumping token prices (like VCs) will define web3 in terms of all the potentially positive stuff. I believe that the that fundamentals of crypto are incredibly useful and will eventually be adopted, and have been in meany places, but all the web3/NFT/etc stuff (whatever that means) is just useless hype and ponzi schemes. Crypto has a much more negative image because it's full of scams, but that doesn't mean anything. It's just significantly easier to create scams with crypto because money is at the very base layer, than it is to create scams with AI. But that doesn't imply anything about the usefulness of these technologies.
- CipherThrowaway 4y ago
  >I believe that the that fundamentals of crypto are incredibly useful and will eventually be adopted, and have been in meany places, but all the web3/NFT/etc stuff (whatever that means) is just useless hype and ponzi schemes. Could you elaborate? It's been 15 years since the bitcoin paper and I still don't see where the game changing commercial applications of crypto are beyond the black/grey market uses for which it has already been adopted.

michaelcampbell 4y ago

Can AI predict when people will start writing longer form articles on a platform that doesn't artificially restrict you to paragraphs?

readingnews 4y ago
I was going to ask that too, but now I wonder, is 280 characters actually a paragraph?

NDizzle 4y ago

Maybe I slept through it, but what was Web3 in 2021?!

mandis 4y ago
any points serious enough to merit a reply?
wellanyway 4y ago
Little part of twitter was very excited. I guess we are supposed to be very impressed.

WinstonSmith84 4y ago

The problem is people and their expectations after a sudden technology jump: - 15 years ago we got smartphones and people expected laptops and desktop computer to go away (within the next few years) - we got web3 and people expected suddenly banks, tradfi, etc. to go away - we got ChatGPT 2 months ago and now what? Google dead? School / university irrelevant? Threat to humanity? There will be incremental improvements for AI, it will slowly become more part of our life, like it happens for these other techs

Mystery-Machine 4y ago
When you say "people" I hope that you mean "minority of people". Yes, I've heard people saying that laptops will go away. Some people said that. Yes. Some people. Web3 is just laughable. Again, some people. Google is obviously not dead. However, I think with AI, there's a huge potential. It will change the world, the way some things are done and some jobs are gonna go away and new jobs will appear. Much more disrupting than a f web3 joke.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Laptops sort of have gone away, in the sense that the smartphone has become many people's first computing device over the past decade. Adults who did not own a computing device before the smartphone, may choose to continue living their lives without a laptop/desktop. Kids who have grown up with iPads and Chromebooks at school may look for mobile options in college first instead of a standard Mac/Windows laptop.

mihaic 4y ago

I actually think AI is much more like VR or 3D-cinema tech than Web3: it sounds like it might be a game changer, but nobody actually likes the new medium that much after the initial cool factor. AI generated images are much more impressive though, and some things will be unique. In the next decade, I see AI to tackle a special category of problems: those that shouldn't be solved, or else the system as a whole gets worse -- chat bots for customer support, absurd amount of content creation. There's much more content today than 20 years ago, and yet my enjoyment has gone down. If I were a member of congress, I'd be surely thinking about ways to slow this down.

version_five 4y ago

What I find interesting is there has been a (percieved) massive change in the popular opinion re "AI". If you got an AI story on HN 6 months ago, there were all kinds of "it's just statistics" comments (also incorrect). Now the mood has changed and all the laypeople are gushing about how great it is. Otoh, my impression is people who have been involved in ML for a while didn't have any sea change in their opinion of the technology based on the recent advances. These were predictable, but cool, extensions of things that were already known, and represent a fundamental advance in polish and marketing, rather than technology. My point is that the public discourse is now mostly dominated by people looking to profit from hype, not people who actually have experience in the technology, which is of course going to lead to a web3 type feel Incidentally, below is my prediction for 2023 from new year's eve. I didn't think it would start becoming apparent so quick: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34197033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34197033

rchaud 4y ago
> My point is that the public discourse is now mostly dominated by people looking to profit from hype Precisely, and they will do untold damage when it comes to educating normal people about what AI can and cannot do.
- izzygonzalez 4y ago
  Can you elaborate on what sort of damage you’re imagining, or give an example?

theknocker 4y ago

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jackmott42 4y ago

Every day I see one or two new thought pieces on how AI is not actually good/capable/impressive or how AI is overhyped. I have seen zero thought pieces on how AI is amazing and hyped. Meanwhile a lot of people are having fun with, or doing useful things with, StableDiffusion and ChatGPT. The negative takes are mostly correct in all the limitations they talk about, but what they miss is how amazing these things are despite these limitations. These things are remarkably simple and limited yet they can generate realistic photos of myself in places I've never been, wearing clothes I've never worn, doing things I've never done, with a quick text sentence. Or nearly pass the bar exam. On top of that a lot of the limitations have straightforward ways to address, many of which are already in progress. It is going to get really interesting. StableDiffusion knows nothing about the images it is produces, its just repeated denoising with image targets. It doesn't really understand anything about your text either, its just matching up tags. But both of those things can easily change. Put a big language model in front of it to better understand text. Already variants of these image models have depth information. Next up 3d object information, maybe next models of physics so it can understand how things would actually work in the scene, and so on. going to get wild.

arcturus17 4y ago
> but what they miss is how amazing these things are despite these limitations The author of this Twitter thread is François Chollet, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, creator of Keras and major contributor to TensorFlow, and author of Deep Learning in Python, considered by many a seminal book in introductory DL... I'd say he understands how amazing these things are despite the limitations, and he specifically says in the thread that it's an amazing time to be building DL apps.
- logicchains 4y ago
  >The author of this Twitter thread is François Chollet, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, creator of Keras and major contributor to TensorFlow, and author of Deep Learning by Python, considered by many a seminal book in introductory DL... That sounds like someone who's great at API design, not a deep learning researcher.

a4isms 4y ago

Having lived through hype wave after hype wave after hype wave in tech over the last forty-fifty years, the commentary about the behaviour of VCs resonated. I wonder if part of why VCs back so many copycat companies in hype cycles is a structural incentive to just invest money in things that are getting press, raising the VCs profile and attracting more deal flow and limited partners. This led to idle speculation: If it was possible to short early-stage startups that VCs were backing, there would be as much incentive for the media to discuss a startup’s shortcomings and vapourware promises as there is to repeat their breathless braggadocio.

hackitup7 4y ago
I think there is some truth to the statement, although many VCs that I've met are really sharp and thoughtful. Not at all the caricature of greasy tech illiterates that sometimes gets thrown around. You kind of can't generate good returns if you aren't able to think about the long-term trajectories of industries. But I think that with the bubble times of 2018-2021 a lot of people entered the industry or changed their behavior because it was trendy and cool, and they have been way more down to ride the hype cycle rodeo.
- a4isms 4y ago
  I have also met many intelligent and thoughtful investors. I am speaking only to the systemic effects of a kind of marketplace for information that overvalues hype, and undervalues criticism. My speculative musing is that if people could take short positions in startups and not just coattail on as one of a group of investors, I wonder if we’d get a lot fewer breathless PR puff-pieces and a lot more cases for pessimism around certain types of hype cycle investments, backed by investors betting their own moeny against the hype.
  - hackitup7 4y ago
    I think that that's very possible, and I completely agree with you on the phenomenon. There are also few limitations on your ability to talk your own book in the private markets which further turbocharges the hype cycle.

ackbar03 4y ago

Powell needs to keep raising rates

thedonkeycometh 4y ago

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juujian 4y ago

What's annoying is that I have seen not one realistic idea come out of this. This is not some kind of alien technology, it is a concrete algorithm. You cannot just say 'this will revolutionize everything' and then refuse to elaborate. It is hard to integrate this into an existing project, and it does not solve the agency issue that we already had, which is that AI can talk, but it cannot make decisions for you. So more emasculated chat bots that nobody wants to talk to. And how big a market is copy editing really? To publish something based on chatgpd you still need to put in a ton of work, because it does not check its sources and makes stuff up. So how is AI really better than 5 years ago other than that it's a better writer with a better style? That wasn't the problem 5 years ago, and it is not today.

sharemywin 4y ago
In it's current iteration I go to it before I go to google for a lot questions(mostly coding questions) I like that I can ask specific questions and get specific answers to my questions. Not samples that may or may not be close to what I'm looking for. if it it's wrong I can try to clarify it. Does it work 100% of the time no. But I feel like it adds value. The big question is what can GPT4 do.
rchaud 4y ago
> You cannot just say 'this will revolutionize everything' and then refuse to elaborate. This is intentional, as most of the low-hanging fruit of AI transformation are things people either don't care about, or think would be a net negative. Like replacing junior publicists with AI-written PR copy. What difference would that make to the consumer? Very little if any. On the other hand, replacing real human art (as you might see on The New Yorker cartoons or The Economist) with AI-generated images may make some readers unhappy.
l33tman 4y ago
The killer feature with ChatGPT is that you can interactively refine a result. Your skill as a writer for a magazine for example now can be that you're good at recognizing good writing and can articulate how it can be made better, but you don't need to be a good writer yourself anymore. This was absolutely not possible 5 years ago or even 1 year ago. ChatGPT doesn't need to be a "chat" product. It's an interactive stateful tool.

Isinlor 4y ago

People overestimate what's possible short-term and under-estimate what's possible long term. Current AI models have three main limitations: - rapid skill acquisition. Example: someone invents a new programming language. Something like Elm or Rust. Humans can start using it right after reading a "quick start" page and few tutorials from the authors of the new language. How much training data will GPT-style models need to start using that language? A lot, like output of hundreds or thousands of people. This needs to go down by a factor of 10x to 100x to match humans. - agency, or taking actions guided towards a goal. Example: Can you ask GPT-like model to book a flight ticket for you? Help it help you learning Photoshop? New IDE? Test your latest app or indie game and find bugs? No. The ability of current models is still not good enough to be useful to an average person with regard to interacting with outside world. - acting in the physical world. Example: An average human can learn to drive enough to pass a driving test in the order of 100 hours during a driving course. How far away are we from a system that can control humanoid-style robot to learn to drive in the order of 100h? Currently, we can't do it with billions of dollars with specially designed hardware. Using humanoid robot to control a car is not even useful as a benchmark for the state of the art machine learning systems. IMO the currently existing systems like ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion are worth all put together in the range of $10B to $100B in the next 3-5 years. Future systems that will address all 3 limitations mentioned above may be literally the whole reachable universe changing if we decide to build self-replicating space probes (Von Neumann probes). We know that there are physical systems that are not very intelligent but capable of exponential growth like viruses or bacteria (humans too). The main limitation of biological systems is their adaptability, especially to lack of water. If robots can build other robots avoiding bottlenecks of human intellectual and manual labor then the robots are limited only by resources and energy available. We have plenty of both on Earth and Solar system is full of it. Also, I'm just talking about human-like abilities. All of that is possible without involving concepts like superintelligence. Bacteria are not very smart, but they can multiply exponentially. The spread of possibilities is enormous. All of that hinges on your timelines on the 3 above mentioned limitations. It's like predicting when atomic bomb will be possible. It may not happen for decades, or there may be right this very moment someone with an idea that will make it all possible.

karmasimida 4y ago

I don't agree with this, like strongly. What is web3 actually? I don't think there is a definition people can agree on. So even bashing web3 as if it is anything other than at best a vaporware, worst case a scam, is fruitless and not grounded in reality. Let's talk about the current climate in AI part. From his tweet, he seems to point to Sam Altman's statement that GPT-3.5+ is going to 'civilization transformation'. Well, if you follow Altman's past statements, he likes to make grandiose statements like this, and at the end of day, it is more of his personal style of speech than anything else. So let's back to the comparison of web3 vs GPT style AI agents. I would argue, the latter is indeed, partially already a reality. Imagine if you have a multiple modular in-context learning agents, then here is the opportunity: A machine that is programmable through natural language and examples/demonstrations. The level of automation potential is going to insane, even scary. What if we hook it up with some robotic arms? If someone makes this work, we will have a factory that can make many many things, at the same time, in the same place, with little human involvement. This, of course, is going to fundamentally change wide range of industries, or capitalism itself and will have geopolitical implications.

Havoc 4y ago

Key difference I think is that Ai while overhyped will definitely have an enduring impact at least partially. With web3 etc that part was less clear

rayiner 4y ago

Seems like it has more parallels to the AI Winter of the 1970s. https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-winter https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-winter In particular the collapse of faith in the future of Tesla’s full self driving, and self-driving cars generally, has been palpable.

iambateman 4y ago

This is a lazy tweet. ChatGPT is trivially useful in a lot of cases...The other day I asked it to write marketing copy for a project and it wrote _better_ marketing copy than I could have written in an hour. On another project, I spent 10 minutes integrating the OpenAI library and was programmatically receiving incredible results with almost no effort. The nature of predicting the future means that there will be periods of overconfidence. In the case of Web3 (taken to mean blockchain/crypto/digital coins), the overconfidence was fueled by a core ponzi scheme combined with truly extraordinary returns for early speculators. But AI has no ponzi scheme attached to it so the comparison breaks down. My uncle cannot gamble his retirement on a mysterious promise of überwealth from a man with wild hair and no financial experience. AI companies will have lots of false starts but 2022 was a transformational year and we are only getting started.

thesausageking 4y ago
Read the whole thread. Francis is the creator of Keras and an AI engineer at Google. He knows his stuff. He calls out ads/marketing/copywriting as one area where ChatGPT is effective. His point is that the scope of things beyond that use case is probably a lot more limited than people are assuming.
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- rapsey 4y ago
  Just because he is an engineer does not mean he can predict how near future AI products will turn out. Web3 was a circle jerk within the crypto community. It only convinced fools. Recent GPT/stable diffusion products universally blow people away with their output. Engineers and everyone else regularly dismiss new tech for its shortcomings and completely miss the forest for the trees.
  - chimprich 4y ago
    Chollet's view on this can't just be dismissed. There can't be many people better positioned to understand the current state of the art and the immediate prospects for advancement. It's fine to disagree with him, but most people doing so will be from a much less informed position.

netman21 4y ago

I too have lived through many hype cycles. I jumped on one in 1992 and created one of the first ISPs in Michigan. That changed my career path from automotive to tech. It was an exciting time as thousands of ISPs were launched. I completely ignored the hype around blockchain, NFTs, etc. I even block anyone who says they are a blockchain expert on Linkedin. But I am all in on leveraging LLM for new business use cases. My mind is blown at what we can do with DaVinci 3.5 and looking forward to evaluating 4.0. ChatGPT is a demonstrator. DaVinci is ushering in the next wave of innovation.

Terretta 4y ago
Jumped same time (the year it became legal to make money on the Internet, which I think was '93), co-founding an ISP and web agency. And fully agree with you, except that I think DLT (distributed ledger technology) has use cases, for instance, ATMs in grocery stores. Meanwhile Mid-Journey and text-davinci-003 are super impressive in making interesting things from probabilistic blends of other things. ChatGPT is like decades of Bayesian "reasoning" or probabilistic (aka "evidenced-based whatever") free association finally having a creative application and outlet.

peter-m80 4y ago

I find AI products incredibly useful and I save a lot of time by using them; I have paid subscriptions to MJ and OpenAI and I use them frequently. On the contrary, web3 is nothing more than empty promises.

sharemywin 4y ago

I still think social authentication and S3 replacements are valid use cases for web3. as for GPT I think it is revolutionary. And it is the first chatbot that I prefer to work with over google. Way easier to use than google. If it becomes a paid service(assuming the pricing is right) I feel it's incentives align better than googles with mine. Where things get messed up is recommending products and services. If it can stick to a no pay to rank type of service than it would revolutionize the economy. No assistant is perfect but seems to do better then a lot of human assistants. Will it be perfect in the future no, but I think if it can offer some kind of confidence factor to it's answers that would go a long way.

more_corn 4y ago

This is a dangerous assertion. Web3 never had any “there there” No coherent use case, no value add. Smart contracts? Maybe. No proposed use case actually requires or benefits from blockchain. The currencies were always blatant speculation. A cabdriver in OKC recently told me he was “invested” in diesel coin. A) wtf is that and B) in what way is that an investment (you know where you dedicate capital to a value engine and when value is created you get out more than you put in) AI as it exists TODAY has the potential (with a bit of prompt engineering and a free account) to assist everyone in their jobs. It will disrupt the software industry, art, writing, education, law, science. Specialized AI assistants already exist and work startlingly well. It can write at a college level. It can code at a college level. It can learn specialized knowledge worker skills in a trivial amount of time. (Law for example) It’s ok to not be optimistic. But if you discount it entirely you’re in for a bad time in the coming year, three years, five years. Actually no, do whatever you want. Ai will come as a surprise to something like 6 billion people. There’s no harm to me in you being part of that group. And frankly the existence of different opinions about the future is a great hedge every society makes.

nsm 4y ago

I am really looking forward to AI that can help us solve hard biology and engineering issues (say nuclear reactor design, materials science) practically. Or an AI that will help solve coordination problems by telling us exactly where to compromise and how to negotiate so that everyone will agree to say relax zoning regulations. I know there are things like AlphaFold and probably lots of proprietary things in niche industries I'll never hear about because no mainstream media is going to cover that. Are there such examples? I find the likes of ChatGPT wonderful, but in the end image and copy generation seems like a very first world/"content creator" use case that won't help us solve critical problems.