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Ask HN: Is anyone else getting AI fatigue?

• shantnutiwari 4y ago
  As tired as of Cryptocoins/Nfts/whatever... but it keeps popping to the top of HN anyway
• reportgunner 4y ago
  AI is the NFT of 2023.
• atemerev 4y ago
  We are not there yet. And crypto is not dead, too.
  • RamblingCTO 4y ago
    * not yet
    • atemerev 4y ago
      Well, eventually either the governments will survive, or crypto will. Governments (as nation states) exist longer than crypto, but they have their share of problems as of lately.
      • qsort 4y ago
        Are you seriously trying to imply that Bitcoin has a greater chance of survival than the concept of a nation state? Is this a real opinion you're holding in your head?
        • atemerev 4y ago
          The concept of a nation state exists for around 300 years, and currently in a crisis. Crypto exists for 15 years (also currently in a crisis, to be fair). I think both governments and crypto will survive somehow, but not in their current forms. There might be distributed states, corporate states, fiat states, confederations etc; the “nation” aspect of the nation-state will not survive too long in my opinion (i.e. some people who are alive now will see the end of nation-states). Crypto will be transformed too, perhaps becoming more utilitarian and less reliant on competitive adversarial selection. This is all speculative, of course, but I have seen the fall of the Soviet system, and I am well aware that forms of government are not eternal. tl;dr but yes. Crypto of the future will look more or less similar to the crypto of today. Governments of the future will look nothing like today’s nation-states.
  • api 4y ago
    How is crypto not dead?
    • jaimex2 4y ago
      the same way stock markets arent dead.
    • gardenhedge 4y ago
      Total Cryptocurrency Market Cap is over a trillion dollars
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    • atemerev 4y ago
      Well, I am old enough to remember the cryptowinters of 2015, 2018, and early 2020. Not the first, not the last. BTC/USD is still around 22,000, which looks very much not zero to me.
    • foobarbaz33 4y ago
      If crypto is dead, then I'm sure you wouldn't mind gifting me several bitcoin :D
      • revskill 4y ago
        You're too smart to be here ??? ;))
• lm28469 4y ago
  It's just the regular wantrepreneurs wave when a new shiny thing is released, we had the same with crypto, give it a few months they'll crawl back from where they came
• rythmshifter 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
  • krona 4y ago
    I think Machine learning already went through the trough of disillusion around 2016-2018 in computer vision and around 2018-2020 for voice assistants. I think we're now past that and people can see that tools like ChatGPT are powerful enough to be applied in many pre existing contexts and industries in unpredictable and inventive ways without huge amounts of manual configuration, which makes it more exciting.
    • qsort 4y ago
      Machine learning is way too generic of a term. Everything from linear regressions to neural models is technically "machine learning". Language models are right now at the very top of the peak of inflated expectations. It's still too early to tell what the real impact will be, but it won't be even remotely close to what you read on the headlines. Far more impressive technology (like Wolfram Alpha) has existed for almost a decade now, and it's directly comparable to language models for many applications. My guess is they will end up being something like Rust. Very cool to look at, little impact on your day-to-day.
    • rsynnott 4y ago
      ML/AI is a repeat offender (for that matter, so is The Almighty Blockchain; it managed a few hype cycles under slightly different identities; blockchain, ICO, NFTs, and so on). Remember in the late 90s when Microsoft and Apple both appeared fully convinced that voice would be the primary interface with computers imminently? There was also a large brief chat agent bubble a few years back.
  • a3w 4y ago
    If you can jump around without prediction which point is next, the hype cycle is useless. There are terms ppl use for things that are en vogue. There is no hype cycle.
• oxfordmale 4y ago
  Yes, many people are feeling AI fatigue. AI can be overwhelming and many people feel like they are being bombarded with information that they don't understand. People are also concerned about how AI is being used and its potential implications for privacy and security. Sorry, I couldn't help; that is the ChatGPT response to your question. More informatively, AI is clearly at the height of inflated expectations. It will provide a helpful tool. However, it will not push people out of jobs. Furthermore, right now it gives a much better search experience than Google, as it is not yet filled with ads or has been gamed extensively by SEO. It is doubtful this will stay like this in the future.
  • timeon 4y ago
    That first paragraph. It is big thing that machine can generate something like that but in reality it feel like it brings just noise. Not sure why anyone expect this to improve SEO noise.
  • totetsu 4y ago
    I could tell by the start of the second sentence.
    • crubier 4y ago
      ChatGPT overuse of the word "overwhelming" and a couple other similar words is very characteristic. I think it comes from the "political correctness"/"provide kind answers" prompts it is bombarded with during training
• raldi 4y ago
  I think it’s less like the crypto craze than the PC, web, or smartphone “crazes”, where businesses starting incorporating each of the above into everything. In other words, if you’re fatigued already, I have some bad news regarding the rest of your life.
• deafpolygon 4y ago
  ChatGPT is great, but it's being hyped up so much right now. We've got AI bros coming in the scene trying to sell everybody a new product. Before the crypto craze, it was big data. I probably missed something in between.
  • criddell 4y ago
    ChatGPT has certainly made a splash, but it's part of a larger trend. I started following developments in modern AI when Kevin Kelly tweeted[1] this in 2016: > The business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. I think the AI hype cycle isn't done building. A few days ago, Paul Graham tweeted[2] this: > One of the differences between the AI boom and previous tech booms is that AI is technically more difficult. That combined with VC funds' shift toward earlier stage investing with less analysis will mean that, for a while, money will be thrown at any AI startup. [1]: https://twitter.com/kevin2kelly/status/718166465216512001 https://twitter.com/kevin2kelly/status/718166465216512001 [2]: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1623060319403905026 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1623060319403905026
  • rsynnott 4y ago
    It was actually briefly ML again; there was a chat agent VC funding bubble before the main crypto VC funding bubble.
• jpnc 4y ago
  We're in the middle of an AI hype. Much like with previous hypes (crypto etc), time will tell whether it was worth it. Unless you're chasing gold or selling shovels the only thing to do is just to wait it out.
• RamblingCTO 4y ago
  I had that since I was doing my masters in data science (5 years ago?). I love the models, the statistics and just the cleverness of everything but I just can't stand the "scene" anymore and moved almost entirely away from it. It's not as exciting as it was anymore. When I started with the topic I watched a documentary with Joseph Weizenbaum ([1]) and felt weirded out that someone would step away from such an interesting and future-shaping topic. But the older I get, the more I feel that technology is not the solution to everything and AI might actually make more problems than it solves. I still think Bostrom's paperclip maximizer ([2]) is lacking fundamental understandings of the status quo and just generated unnecessary commotion. [1] http://www.plugandpray-film.de/en/ http://www.plugandpray-film.de/en/ [2] https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer
  • EForEndeavour 4y ago
    you mentioned you moved almost entirely from the AI / data science "scene." Where did you move to?
    • RamblingCTO 4y ago
      Being a CTO (doing manager stuff), regular coding. By moving away I also meant I don't follow along anymore and don't contribute to the projects I did so in the past. I just lost interest.
  • Rattled 4y ago
    Yes, PoW crypto is now a much more concrete example of the potential damage from poorly aligned utility functions, as well as the challenges in containing a system once it is released. I'm finding the current hype cycle very frustrating from both sides. On one side there is frequent overplaying current capabilities, and cherry picked examples given as it they're representative. On the other side there is an over simplistic "AI is evil" reaction. It's hard to deny that progress in the past few years greatly exceeds expectations and could make a significant improvement to individual creativity and learning, as well as how we cooperate but so much of the discussions are fear based.
  • 4y ago
• ergonaught 4y ago
  You are hardly alone, but you are also likely in the midst of an actual paradigm shift, so the "ecosystem" does what ecosystems do. ie: herds stampede, flocks flock, scavengers scavenge, parasites uhh parasite. It will be increasingly tiresome until it becomes commonplace, then the disastrous consequences will become the next tedium.
• mistermeta 4y ago
  It seems to part of a trend to prompt us and in some ways mold us into giving responses, under the probably sincere guise of convenience, like the famous Word paper clip. I think some find that useful, but it does tend to take away agency. This may be the slide to the AI's taking over :-)
• alexfromapex 4y ago
  You may want to try to mentally reframe it so it doesn't bother you as much because it's not going away any time soon.
• michaeljohansen 4y ago
  If you're tired of AI now you're gonna hate where we are going. Strap in! (…or take a good step back from the news cycle, check in once or twice a week instead of several times daily. News consumption reduction is good for mental health.)
  • graderjs 4y ago
    Haha! Yeah good idea.
  • tosihakkeri 4y ago
    This is something any crypto-bro would have told you in 2017.
    • Kiro 4y ago
      Really don't understand the constant crypto comparisons. We have one technology that hasn't provided any benefits whatsoever in 10 years and one that has provided real utility from day one. One deserves the hype, the other doesn't.
      • barrell 4y ago
        Bitcoin has provided hundreds of billions in value, chatGPT has provided me with one hundred times the spam. I'm actually optimistic about both crypto and AI, but I see the authors point. I really don't think the comparison is hard to spot between the AI hype and, say, the NFT hype from 1 year ago. A lot of people are claiming that these technologies will imminently change everything, fundamentally. In reality, both of them are just neat things that give us a glimpse of what the future may hold, and hold a bunch of promise, but aren't really changing anything fundamentally. Not yet, at least.
• snozolli 4y ago
  I never even fully recovered from the "Facebook, but for X" fad. At least all the previous crazes didn't threaten to replace humans, so I suppose this tech hype bubble is arguably even more irritating.
• autoexec 4y ago
  The world has some cool new toys and I'm glad people are playing with them. I hope it only becomes increasingly accessible with time. Yes, there's going to be a ton of snake oil and disappointments if you listen to the people looking to get rich quick, but I'm excited for what might come from it in the end. In the meantime, all the attention and media is easing people into thinking about some difficult questions that we may end up having to deal with sooner than we'd like. The hype can be annoying, and I'm sure they'll be suckers who lose a lot of money chasing it, but I'm also sure AI will get better, and be better understood too, as a result of all of the attention and attempts to shoehorn it into new roles and environments.
• brianmcc 4y ago
  What winds me up is the mis-branding, sometimes deliberate sometimes not (which one is worse?!), of basic computer processing as "AI". It's not AI it's an IF statement for crying out loud :-( But this is the industry we're in, and buzzword-driven headlines and investment are how it goes. Actual proper AI getting some attention makes a pleasant change tbh :-)
  • a_bonobo 4y ago
    I feel like AI-scientists themselves are partially to blame for this. For starters, AI does not 'learn' like a human learns. But still many of the main terms of the field are based on learning: terms like 'learning rate', 'neural networks', or 'deep learning' are implying that there's some kind of being which learns, not just a very complicated decision tree. It's not all the fault of hype marketing people!
    • datpiff 4y ago
      > AI-scientists themselves are partially to blame for this They are not addressing the public or swaying opinion
  • cshimmin 4y ago
    I disagree; consider the use of the term "video game AI", which historically at least has just been a bunch of _if_ statements chained together. This is totally valid, it's an example of AI without machine learning. The thing is that AI is just about the most general term for the type of computing that gives the illusion of intelligence. Machine learning is a more specific region of the space of AI, and generally is made of statistical models that lead to algorithms that can train and modify their behavior based on data. But this includes "mundane" algorithms like k-means clustering or line-fitting. Deep learning (aka neural networks) is yet a more specific subfield of ML. I think the term AI just has more "sex appeal" because people confuse it with the concept of AGI, which is the holy grail of machine intelligence. But we don't even know if this is achievable, or what technology it will use. So in terms of conceptual spaces, we can say that AI > ML > DL, and we can say (by definition) that AI > AGI. And it seems very likely that AGI > ML. But it's not known, for instance, whether AGI > DL, ie, we don't know for sure that deep learning/neural networks are sufficient to obtain AGI. In any case, people should put less weight on the term AI, as it's a pretty low bar. But also yes, the term is way over hyped.
• codeptualize 4y ago
  I'm working on a project that uses GPT-3 and similar stuff, even before the hype. I think the overhype is really tiring. Just like with most of these hype cycles there is an actual useful interesting technology, but the hype beasts take it way overboard and present it as if it's the holy grail or whatever. It's not. That's tiring, and really annoying. It's incredibly cool technology, it is great at certain use cases, but those use cases are somewhat limited. In case of GPT-3 it's good at generative writing, summarization, information search and extraction, and similar things. It also has plenty of issues and limitations. Lets just be realistic about it, apply it where it works, and let everything else be. Now it's becoming a joke. Also, a lot of products I've seen in the space are really really bad and I'm kinda worried AI will get a scam/shitty product connotation.
  • chx 4y ago
    > GPT-3 it's good at generative writing made up bullshit > summarization except you can't possibly know the output has any relation whatsoever to the text being summarized > information search and extraction except you can't possibly know the output has any relation whatsoever to the information being extracted people still fall for this crap?
    • NobleLie 4y ago
      Agreed. Been testing out responses to parsing complex genomics papers (say, a methodology section describing parameters of some algorithm) and its mostly rephrasing rather than digesting and responding with useful information / interpretation. And it will use so many words and imbue so little to the conversation, yet appear like it's helping because ... words.
      • codeptualize 4y ago
        > complex genomics papers I think it's fair to say this is not one of the use cases where it shines. It's not great at logic, it's also not that smart. That's exactly what the hype does. Too big claims and then it gets dismissed when it inevitably doesn't live up to the hype.
• fsociety 4y ago
  Yes and it is sad because I see people trying to find problems for ChatGPT and say this is the future.. but the industries they are targeting have such a wide variety of concrete problems for a startup to solve.
• axilmar 4y ago
  Absolutely not. It seems too exciting to me and I am eager to see more AI. It's fascinating stuff.
  • tuxracer 4y ago
    Happy to find a fellow soul. I'm fatigued of the complaints of AI fatigue - especially where the complaints aren't based on recent (last year or so) first hand use. It's bold (to put kindly) how lengthy some of these critical comments are from folks who later in the thread admit to not personally used Copilot (for example) much themselves. The quality of LLM output can wildly vary based on what prompts (or series of prompts) are used.
• moffkalast 4y ago
  Well most products today need to be adaptive and handle complex states, even if there's a few if sentences in there handling something in an intelligent way that's AI, it's a broad term after all. The problem is that it's also become a marketing buzzword.
• hprotagonist 4y ago
  I work in the field, so: yes, since about 2015, heh.
• avidphantasm 4y ago
  That’s Capitalism. AI is the new growth frontier, so it’s all you are hearing about. Seems like LLMs and generators are genuine innovations. But don’t lose sight that these innovations are driven by the Capitalist need to concentrate more surplus value into fewer hands. This is no different than programable looms, etc. of the past, except now they will try to automate immaterial/“intellectual” work. It remains to be seen if these technologies will succeed at that, but the Capitalists are compelled to try, and we will be forced to live with the wreckage.
• dual_dingo 4y ago
  The "I" in AI is just complete bullshit and I can't understand why so many people are in a awe of a bit of software that chains words to another based on some statistical model. The sad truth is that ChatGPT is about as good an AI as ELIZA was in 1966, it's just better (granted: much better) at hiding its total lack of actual human understanding. It's nothing more than an expensive parlor trick, IMHO. Github CoPilot? Great, now I have to perform the most mentally taxing part of developing software, namely understanding other people's code (or my own from 6 months ago...) while writing new code. I'm beyond thrilled ... So, no, I don't have an AI fatigue, because we absolutely have no AI anywhere. But I have a massive bullshit and hype fatigue that is getting worse all the time.
  • nunodonato 4y ago
    I can say with a certain degree of confidence that you haven't actually used CoPilot daily.
    • morelisp 4y ago
      This is such a bullshit answer. No, I don't use it daily because I tried it for a couple hours and it suggested nothing useful and several harmful. Why would I keep using it?
      • wokwokwok 4y ago
        [flagged]
        • weeksie 4y ago
          I've used it and it did nothing helpful. I also find autocomplete slows me down. The code it suggested always needed enough reworking I would have been faster writing it out from scratch. It's just not that helpful for me. Maybe if I didn't know the apis that well but I suspect even then it would be as much a liability as a benefit
        • dmitriid 4y ago
• nunodonato 4y ago
  Like I said some days ago, I really wished that the hype would die or dwindle a bit. I'm working on my own AI side-projects, but the amount of BS and misinformation being put out everyday by new "AI experts" is fatiguing, yes.
• roenxi 4y ago
  The hype will die down fairly quickly. But this technology is obviously a huge deal. We've found a practical algorithm to turn more powerful hardware into better results. And hardware was still ramping up at an astonishing rate last time I checked. It seems more likely that we'll surpass the hype than not in the next few decades. I think people have forgotten how quickly technology can move after the last 20 years of relative stability where more powerful hardware didn't really change what a computer can do.
• indigoabstract 4y ago
  ChatGPT is, of course, a great piece of software, but the huge hype is probably what it will be best remembered for. Also, since currently, AI is the exclusive playground of big corporations, to me it's a bit puzzling how some people can get so excited (and maintain that excitement) over something that they cannot control and have little hope of building it by themselves. I guess some are just more in love with technology, than with other things in life. Because, as everyone is probably well aware by now, more technology is the solution to every problem that ever faced mankind and will finally fix everything. :)
  • williamcotton 4y ago
    I assume that there will be an open and freely available model as large as ChatGPT within a year or so. Training costs are prohibitive but what about NSF grants?
    • indigoabstract 4y ago
      I don't know about the NSF, or when will governments get in on AI, but you're probably right, the technology will become open source in a while, as it has happened in the past. It looks much less likely for the cost of developing and training an AI system to come down for the time being, making it out of reach for most individuals. When the PC revolution was happening, everyone interested had a good chance of getting in, they just needed some money to buy/rent a computer and learn to use it or program it. Compared to that, the AI revolution doesn't seem to have the same quality. The barrier to entry seems much much higher this time.
    • wnkrshm 4y ago
      I do think that governments will have an interest in keeping around models that they're in control of, just like there is publicly funded boradcasting, you may want to be able to control all the biases of a widely-used model and not just import it from somewhere.
• bsaul 4y ago
  I think this time is the good one. ChatGPT has reached a level where we finally can think of building actually useful products on top of "AI". Note that nobody is pretending that ChatGPT is "true" intelligence (whatever that means), but i believe the excitement comes from seeing something that could have real application (and so, yes, everybody is going to pretend to have incorporated "AI" in their product for the next 2 years probably). After 50 years of unfulfilled hopes from the AI field, i don't think it's totally unfair to see a bit of (over)hype.
  • rxhernandez 4y ago
    I really don't understand how engineers are having good experiences with it; a lot of the stuff I've seen it output w.r.t. swe is only correct if you're very generous with your interpretation of it (re: dangerous if you use it as anything more than a casual glance at the tech). W.r.t. anything else it outputs, it's either so generic that I could do it better, outright wrong (e.g. cannot handle something as simple as tic tac toe), or functions as an unreliable source (in cases where I simply don't have the background). I wish I could derive as much utility as everyone else that's praising it. I mean, it's great fun but it doesn't wow me in the slightest when it comes to augmenting anything beyond my pleasure.
    • bsaul 4y ago
      The fact that i can use this tool as a source of inspiration, or a first opinion on any kind of problem on earth is totally incredible. Now whenever i'm stuck on a problem, chatgpt has become an option. And this happens in the artistic world as well with the other branch of NN : "mood boards" can now be generated from prompts infinitely. I don't understand how some engineers still fail to see that a threshold was passed.
      • rxhernandez 4y ago
        I've literally asked it to generate stories from prompts and, it has, without fail, generated the most generic stories I have ever read. High school me could have generated better with little to no effort (and I don't say that lightly) and I'm not a good writer by any means. Moreover, it's first opinion on the things I'm good at has been a special kind of awful. It generates sentences that are true on their face but, as a complete idea, are outright wrong. I mean, you're effectively gaslighting yourself by learning these half truths. And as someone with unfortunate lengthy experience in being gaslit as a kid, I can tell you that depending on how much you learn from it, you could end up needing to spend 3x as much time learning what you originally sought to learn (if you're lucky and the only three things you need to do is learn it very poorly, unlearn it and relearn it the right way)
• nubinetwork 4y ago
  I've been using the hide button here for weeks because there are so many ai/gpt posts... so, yes.
• crubier 4y ago
  I thought you were going to use "AI Fatigue" in the same sense as "JS Fatigue", and I was going to agree a lot. I've got "AI Fatigue" not in the sense that it is overhyped, but just like "JS Fatigue": It is all very exciting, and new genuinely useful and impressive things are coming up all the time, but it's too much to deal with. I feel like it's difficult to start a product based on AI these days due to the feeling that it will become obsolete next week when something 10x better will come out. Just like with JS Fatigue back in the days, the reasonable solution for me is something like "Let the dust settle a bit before going in the latest cool thing"
• smcl 4y ago
  I feel the same way about the rapid proliferation of this latest generation of AI tech as I did when crypto began to take off: "this is interesting, but it will not deliver on the promises or live up to the hype, and there will be a lot of grifters and bad actors who will give the tech a bad name".
• imbiased 4y ago
  Maybe this will help https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ai-just-some-if-statement/ihdinhfmngbefhhajfjankbpphnflfbd?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ai-just-some-if-st... And you're not alone, I feel the same since ~2015
• hubraumhugo 4y ago
  This happens during all hype cycles, with one big difference: While crypto or VR tech still hasn't arrived in our daily lives, most of my friends are already using tools like ChatGPT on a regular basis.
• pydry 4y ago
  I feel like there will be some lucrative opportunities somewhere here to exploit the fallout from this hype. I get the fatigue, but our incomes are basically critically dependent on investor FOMO. I'd rather we have bitcoin crazes, scaling crazes, nosql crazes and GPT crazes than this industry commoditizes itself to hell and I have to spend the rest of my career gluing AWS cognito to AWS lambdas for $55k / year. At the same time I'm pretty sure that it will wildly change any industry where creativity is critically important and quality control either isn't that important or can be done by amateurs. There is substance at the core of the hype.
• PedroBatista 4y ago
  In the last ~15 years AI has been on the hype train but also had moments when it started to die down ( remember chat bots? ). ChatGPT is the "new" booster shot, it's a hell of a boost and this one might stick. What will not stick is the copious amount of wishful thinking and bullshit the usual suspects are bringing in. ChatGPT is a godsend after crypto went bust and the locusts had to go somewhere else. I suspect we will have to endure a crypto-craze like environment for a couple years at least..
• college_physics 4y ago
  Its part of overall "tech hype fatigue", think of all the waves upon waves, big data, social apps, crypto/web3, self-driving cars, virtual reality, AI etc, At the same time people's actual quality of life or economic standing is going nowhere, there is fragility that bursts in the open with every stress, politics has become toxic and the environment gets degraded irreversibly. Yet people simply refuse to see and they keep chasing unicorns.
  • agentultra 4y ago
    Everyone is a temporarily inconvenienced multi-millionaire. They only need to get in on the next big thing and ride their way to a comfortable life at the top.
    • bitneuker 4y ago
      It's called being transfinancial. You feel like a rich person but are born in the body of a poor one.
• gitfan86 4y ago
  In the early 2000s people were also annoyed about all the internet hype. "DotCom this and DotCom that" and it was stupid that a company could announce they were adding a DotCom to their name and the stock would go up a bunch. So yes, it is annoying that all these crypto scammers and entrepreneurs have put a wrapper around GTP API call and hype it up. BUT the rate of change in AI is enormous and it will be a much bigger deal than the internet over the next 10 years. Not because of API wrappers, but because the cost of many types of labor will effectively go to zero.
  • coldtea 4y ago
    >In the early 2000s people were also annoyed about all the internet hype. Well, they were right...
    • falcor84 4y ago
      They were right? Even if we only consider the ability of the internet to enable remote work, the internet's impact to human life is astronomic.
      • coldtea 4y ago
        Astronomically annoying more like it... People need to get off being 24/7 wired and chill more. The last thing people, society, and the environment needs is the kind of changes the internet brought...
• Avalaxy 4y ago
  I'm not at all tired of AI, but I am tired of all the sales/marketing/business people taking our AI, misunderstanding it, pretending it does all sorts of things that it absolutely does not do and then also not being willing to being educated about how things _really_ work under the hood. It's the same kind of people that were hyping cryptocurrencies in the past. People who understand nothing about the technology, but shout the loudest about how amazing it is (probably to make money off of it). Those are also the kind of people that will be the cause of the next AI winter.
  • pjio 4y ago
    With all respect for good salesman who can understand a customer and recommend the right solution: Those other types, which just verbally hype something until they get their lead, those may be replaceable by said ai some day...
• schizo89 4y ago
  There's much more than LLMs -- RL, Robotics and graphs. AI hasn't reached mainstream gamedev yet, and general adoption among devs is low. I find it hard to convince my fellow devs from old time (web, startups) to invest their time to learn AI.
• WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  It’s the usual AI boom and bust cycles. The term is just too good to let go for marketers. It’s instantly evocative for the general public. Just wait for it to underdeliver. Investors will get scared and we will be back to calling it machine learning.
• jimmar 4y ago
  Sick of hype? Yes. Excited about the future of AI? Also yes.
• bprasanna 4y ago
  I too feel overwhelmed by this sudden rush towards *GPT. The content generated by AI is slowly erasing the line between the creative content and computer generated content. I remember last year when so many people earning or trying to earn by creating art forms to sell as NFT. Once Dall-E landed, then the originality quotient of any creative content is lost. Likewise, ChatGPT is going to erase the originality in text content. Once internet is mixed with AI generated content, then there is no going back. We can't find what's real work, what's AI generated.
• a3w 4y ago
  AI for actual applications, where mistakes are costly, is becoming an idiot marker. As "crypto" for projects other than non-decentralized finance or "smart" contracts, has already become. FOMO is great on this though, so every major investor/consultant is no starting to to tell you to get shitcoin. AGI could be ML driven, most likely it is not. Neuronal nets are still AI tech. Even Bayesian inference is weakly AI tech. The public always misuses words. Words change to match that meaning.
• BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
  Singularity, my man. You’re tired. But theme world isn’t.
• xchip 4y ago
  This is a sign that you should spend less time on your computer and go out a bit more.
• corobo 4y ago
  Not really AI itself but I am already sick of people asking ChatGPT then posting it in the comments of HN/Reddit. It just feels like a waste of time having read the comment. Even if the information is there I don't trust the user to be able to distinguish between true or confident false. If it's not my skillset or knowledgebase I assume it's wrong because I can't tell and can't ask followup questions. Me using it as an assistant? Love it. Others using it as an assistant? I don't trust them to be doing it right. In any case I want to read your opinion, copy paster, not a robot I could just ask in my own time! Just don't post if you've got no thoughts lol
• FrustratedMonky 4y ago
  Engineers are always building things that are incredible, then turning their back on it as ordinary once the problem is solved, “oh that’s so normal, it was just a little math, a little tweak, no big deal”. AI has gone through a lot of stages of “only X can be done by a human”-> “X is done by AI” -> “oh, that’s just some engineering, that’s not really human” or “no longer in the category of mystical things we can’t explain that a human can do”. LLM is just the latest iteration of, “wow it can do this amazing human only thing X (write a paper indistinguishable from a human)” -> “doh, it’s just some engineering (it’s just a fancy auto complete)”. Just because AI is a bunch of linear algebra and statistics does not mean the brain isn’t doing something similar. You don’t like terminology, but how is re-enforcement “Learning”, not exactly the same as reading books to a toddler and pointing at a picture and having them repeat what it is? Start digging into the human with the same engineering view, and suddenly it also just become a bunch of parts. Where is the human in the human once all the human parts are explained like an engineer would. What would be left? The human is computation also, unless you believe in souls or other worldly mysticism. So why not think eventually AI as computation can be equal to human. Just because Github CoPilot can write bad code, isn't a knock on AI, it's real, a lot of humans write bad code.
  • haswell 4y ago
    I generally agree that we quickly adjust to new tech and forget how impactful it is. But I can’t fully get on board with this: > but how is re-enforcement “Learning”, not exactly the same as reading books to a toddler and pointing at a picture and having them repeat what it is? Start digging into the human with the same engineering view, and suddenly it also just become a bunch of parts. Where is the human in the human once all the human parts are explained like an engineer would. The parent teaching a toddler bears some vague resemblance to machine learning, but the underlying results of that learning (and the process of learning itself) could not be any more different. More problematic than this, while you may be correct that we will eventually be able to explain human biology with the precision of an engineer, these recent AI advances have not made meaningful progress towards that goal, and such an achievement is arguably many decades away. It seems you are concluding that because we might eventually explain human biology, we can draw conclusions now about AI as if such an explanation had already happened. This seems deeply problematic. AI is “real” in the sense that we are making good progress on advancing the capabilities of AI software. This does not imply we’ve meaningfully closed the gap with human intelligence.
• TooLazy 4y ago
  There is no AI. At best it's diffusive sequence generation, and at worst it's just noise.
  • TooLazy 4y ago
    As an operation, it's a big mechanical turk that is sped up with huge amounts of server spend. The utility of any output is a lossy derivative of curated knowledge and IP, trained and censored by some of the poorest people on the planet.
  • TooLazy 4y ago
    The analogue version was academic institutions that paid gifted people with intelligence to have research assistants that went to the library. But we defunded that model of natural intelligence because it wasn't equitable for the ungifted.
  • Sunhold 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
• agumonkey 4y ago
  still way below js/py fatigue or internet fatigue; actually i find the recent GPT a bit different in their impact (even though I'm not thinking it's the fatigue) bring me npmGPT
• tempaccount420 4y ago
  No, I absolutely love it and can't get enough of it. I'm really happy that AI tools are going mainstream.
• a13o 4y ago
  You're absolutely right. And if this is only your second ride on the hype cycle, they come around often. Gartner publishes a list of them. Try to focus on the bright side - now that you've seen behind the curtain, you can more easily avoid the hacks and shysters. They will try to cast the "ML/AI" spell on you and it won't take.
• thecleaner 4y ago
  Not really. Deep learning had continued to deliver since 2012. You can't say that about crypto. Or any other new tech.
• JCM9 4y ago
  There’s some very good stuff going on but no question the hype cycle is currently shifting. Crypto is dead, AI is the new crypto. With that, all the hype-sters and shady folks rush in and it can quickly become hard to differentiate between what’s good, what’s misplaced enthusiasm, and what’s just a scam. These scenarios are also a big case study in the Dunning-Kruger effect. I’ve already got folks that haven’t written a line of code in their life trying to “explain” to me why I’m not understanding why some random junk AI thing that’s not really AI is the next big thing. Sometimes you gotta just sit there and be like “thanks for your perspective”.
• vinyl7 4y ago
  It's been happening for a decade and I've learned to ignore it. Cloud for this cloud for that! Blockchain for this blockchain for that! Big Data for this, big data for that! Web scale all the things! The marketing driven development is exhausting and has done nothing to improve technology. This happened because of 0% interest rates and free money. People have been vying for all the VC money by creation solutions looking for problems, which end up being useless solutions for which no problems exist
  • elforce002 4y ago
    100% this. This is marketing to the highest level. Heck, look at MS now. They knew this was the opportunity to associate bing to the hype and with Google making a mistake with its "infamous" video, they won round 1. Let's wait until the end of the year and see how much will this wave will hold up.
• goolulusaurs 4y ago
  There is a lot of negativity towards the idea of AI in this thread, and I feel like someone has to say it: it is quite likely that in the near future computers will be better than almost all humans at almost all cognitive tasks. If you have a task or are trying to accomplish something, and the way you do it is by moving a mouse around or typing on a keyboard then it is very likely that an AI will be able to do that task. Doing so is a more or less straightforward extension of existing techniques in AI. All that is necessary is to record you performing the task and then an AI will be able to imitate your behavior. GPT3 can already do this for text, and doing it instead with trajectories of screen, mouse and keyboard is not fundamentally different. So yes, it is true that there is a lot of hype right now, but I suspect it is a small fraction of what we will see in the near future. I also expect there will be an enormous backlash at some point.
  • reportgunner 4y ago
    > If you have a task or are trying to accomplish something, and the way you do it is by moving a mouse around or typing on a keyboard then it is very likely that an AI will be able to do that task. You don't need AI to move a mouse around or type on a keyboard. A simple automation is enough. The value is not in moving a mouse or typing on a keyboard. The value is in knowing when and where to move the mouse and when and what to write on the keyboard.
  • bobmaxup 4y ago
    > GPT3 can already do this for text Kind of, it isn't fool proof. I use GPT3 and Chat GPT (not the same thing) almost daily, and there is quite a bit of error correction that I am doing. Still, it is really helpful.
  • barrell 4y ago
    I think this sentiment that this will happen in the "near future" is the cause for exactly the sort of fatigue the author is talking about. If you mean in the next year or two, I hate to disappoint you, but barring some massive leap forward, you are going to be wrong. If you mean in the next hundred years, or maybe sometime in our lifetimes, sure. The chances it looks anything like chatGPT or GPT3 now though is laughable. This isn't the future. This is a small glimpse into a potential future down the line, but everyone is talking like developers/designers/creatives/humans are already obsolete.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• cttet 4y ago
  No, it is just that you are browsing the news that only follow the trends I think. Follow more independent thinkers and things would get better.
• 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
  after 10+ years of stagnation or increments in general tech, this feels really novel ofc HN over-analysing is killing the fun
• bwooceli 4y ago
  The HN crowd would do well to take a step back and look at this from a little different perspective. We are able to see "AI" and machine learning as the very young and imperfect technologies that they are. That said, ChatGPT is the first time a technology like this has been even REMOTELY available to the vast majority of the public, and democratizing this capability even in the small box of a chat window is wildly disruptive. Even after explaining that it probably isn't a great idea to use it for generating 100% factually reliable content, everyone I've shown it to has come up with ways they would use it to make small-but-meaningful improvements in some area of their lives. Consider an immigrant owner of a landscaping company who isn't super confident in their English but needed to respond to a customer to clarify exactly what they need to do on a job site. Did they close the deal solely because of ChatGPT? Hard to say for sure, but it saved an hour of productive time and likely made it easier for the customer to be a reference/word-of-mouth fan.
• sgarrity 4y ago
  Sriracha is great, but we don't need Sriracha Cheerios.
• fsloth 4y ago
  People are loud, that is the nature of public discourse. Ignore the noise. Focus on the things you find personally interesting - if they are lindy proof it does not hurt (this includes maths, science, any fundamental computational problem like ray tracing for example). Use new stuff you personally find interesting or usefull.
• flumpcakes 4y ago
  AI leaves a bad taste in my mouth but I think it is because we have moved away from ML/Vision problems with a strong background in academic research, and high impact and purposeful development of these into products. We are now exposed to companies hyping huge general purpose models with whatever tech is the latest fad, which resonates with the average person who wants to generate memes, etc. This is impressive only at the surface level. Take a specific application: prompting it to write you an algorithm, outside of any copying-and-pasting from a textbook these models will generate bad/incorrect code and then explain why it works. It's like having an incompetent junior on your team who has the bravado of a senior 10x-er. That's not to say "AI" doesn't have a purpose, but currently it seems just hyped up by sales people looking for Series-A funding or an IPO cash-out. I want to see the models developed for specific tasks that will have a big impact, rather than the slight-of-hand or circus tricks we currently get. Maybe that time is passed, and general models are the future and we will just have to wait until they're as good as any specific model that was built for any task you can ask of it. It will be interesting what happens when these "general" models are used without much thought and their unchecked results lead to harm. Will we still find companies culpable?
  • mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    I dread the coming "age of buggyness" when imprecise LLMs pervade UIs and make everything always a little broken. I don't deny that LLM represent a coming revolution in computer interaction. But as someone who's already mastered the command line, programming, etc. I already know how to use computers. LLMs will actually be slower for me for a huge variety of tasks like finding information. English is so clumsy compared to programming languages. I feel like for nerds like me "user friendlyness" is often just a hindrance. For me this has been the case with GUI in general, touch GUI especially, and probably will be for most LLM applications that don't fundamentally do something I cannot(like stable diffusion).
  • deepsquirrelnet 4y ago
    I think you hit on some good points. It seems like in common language, AI has taken the meaning “general purpose”, rather than satisfying some criterion of the futurist definition. Personally, I care very little about whether the machine is intelligent or not. If it actually happens in my lifetime, I believe it will be unmistakable. I am interested in how people solve problems. If you built and trained a model that solves a challenging task, THAT is something I find noteworthy and what I want to read about. Apparently utility is boring, and “just ML” now. There’s tons of academic papers I see fly under the radar probably because they solve specific problems that the average person doesn’t know exists. Much of ML doesn’t foray into “popular science” enough to hold general public interest.
• washadjeffmad 4y ago
  There probably a koan for it, but separate the commercial from the noncommercial. I'm excited for these emerging technologies, but I don't care about any of the products people want to sell based on them. I've spent the past 27 years developing zero-effort self-filtering against spam and hucksters, so I'm not even aware of any AI startups, just as I can't tell you the names of any Bitcoin exchanges. That's just not in my sphere, and I'm not missing out. Hunker down and have fun. It's incredibly accessible, and you likely have more than you need to get started making it work for you.
• lagrange77 4y ago
  Me too. Especially since ChatGPT, the overhype has gone wild. I think it's because it's the first Chatbot, that repeatedly solves the Turing test for the masses. What annoys me the most, is that people fall for the illusion of talking to an intelligent being and the media (i've read) does not seem to hesitate to debunk it. That uncritical handling along with a growing offer can lead to the next big bullshit bubble.
• tpoacher 4y ago
  Yes but there's nothing new in what you say. Whenever something new comes out, people try to capitalize on the buzzword, even if what they're doing has zero relevance in practice. The whole "X but in Y" thing reinvents itself all the time. "X but in Rust". "X but on the blockchain". "X but with Neural Networks". "X but with nanobots". "X but quantum". Best you can hope if you're a "Y" person is for the marketers to get bored of the current Y and jump to the next one, leaving yours alone.
• stephc_int13 4y ago
  Yeah, this is the new gold rush, all the sharks and all the kids are joining the chase. We've seen this pattern many times. And there is money to be made, for sure, but the value might not be there yet.
• znpy 4y ago
  No. I’ve ignored the whole thing so far. I just use the features in the iphone where some photos get enhanced or i can detect and copy text from images. So far it’s going very well.
• anta40 4y ago
  AI fatigue? Nope, far from it. I asked some general questions to ChatGPT, and it gave me pretty coherent answers. But when I asked really specific question like "How to rewrite Linux kernel in Lisp", then it gave me seemingly gibberish answer. This was about 2 months ago, BTW. Maybe ChatGPT already learn more stuffs and are smarter. Let's see...
  • grugagag 4y ago
    > Maybe ChatGPT already learn more stuffs and are smarter. Let's see... LLMs don’t have a mechanism to learn from interaction, their models are simply fed more data and luckily you’ll get better results, but you might as well get worse results if said data isn’t well curated.
• frou_dh 4y ago
  I haven't actually tried ChatGPT yet so it's just like the hundreds of other things I vaguely know of but don't really engage with. Not too bothersome.
• rg111 4y ago
  If you are getting AI fatigue, you never really scratched the surface and limited yourself to to the hype-train of AI, and not actual AI. AI is wide and deep, and its proper uses are so so far removed from mainstream media and the hype-train. AI still has too many undiscovered areas of usefulness to the degree that it will nothing short of transform those areas. But you hear most of the times about Stable Diffusion, see melted faces and weird fingers, and screenshots of ChatGPT. These, wrt area and width, are nothing compared to what is possible. So, no, I am not AI fatigued as I don't pay much attention to these hypes at all.
• davibu 4y ago
  I'm tired of people saying they're tired. I use ChatGPT every day and it provides results of a quality that has little to do with Google, even though I'm aware that it sometimes fibs to me, makes up names for functions that don't exist, or makes mistakes. There's hype, but I think it's much more deserved than the hype around cryptocurrencies
  • barrell 4y ago
    There are plenty of people who live their entire life with bitcoin - they get paid in bitcoin, pay their bills in bitcoin, and send each-other money in bitcoin. I think it's safe to say your experience is an outlier, just like theirs are. I'm happy it's working for you, but if you really do use it every day, you surely can understand the points where it doesn't live up to the hype -- or at the very least, how it is not for everyone.
• liveoneggs 4y ago
  It's important for the marketing machine to keep things going until Microsoft is able to transfer enough money from GOOG to MSFT and, if possible, Bing marketshare to be responsible for that move.
• KrugerDunnings 4y ago
  AI is a hype but still I am jumping on this horse. It is the game everyone has agreed on playing and I think I can build and sell a compelling product. Yes it is herd behaviour but don't think you'll be safer on your own.
• anuragvohraec 4y ago
  All things built on top of ChatGPT, "seems to me" as bullshit which simply are created to generate click bait, or with no future whatsoever. The next AI big thing will be ChatGPT 5 or a competing model with less memory requirements.
• mattbrewsbytes 4y ago
  Its the next hype train since the blockchain/crypto/nft's hype train. The crypto train has arrived at its overheated, decentralized set of train stations that all have remnants of fraudsters, high end GPU boxes scattered about, torn up flyers with the promise of untold riches, people scampering about in the shadows muttering "defi" to themselves, people getting carted off in handcuffs. Where will the AI hype train go? The internet as we know it already has so much SEO engineered content and content producers chasing that sweet, sweet advertising money that they could all be replaced by mediocre, half-true, outdated content created by bots. So do we have to wait until our refrigerators are "AI powered, predicts your groceries for you!" in order to see the usefulness?
  • not_a_shill 4y ago
    >Its the next hype train since the blockchain/crypto/nft's hype train. It really isn't. The business use cases even with current tech are pretty obvious. The problem with crypto/blockchain stuff was that it was useless. An emperor with no clothes. Is there a more legitimate argument for why they're similar other than "hype" or am I missing something?
    • rapnie 4y ago
      It is not about whether or not there's viable use cases or not. It is the hype added on top. Hype cycles are as old as IT. XML, Semantic Web, SOAP, Service Oriented Architecture, Enterprise Service Buses, Big Data, Serverless .. they all got their hype phase where you are bombarded with them to death, and then finally when that dies down some good applications remain.
      • not_a_shill 4y ago
        I don't really understand your argument. Because other tech has been hyped in the past and let you down you think that will therefore extend to AI because...it just will? What precisely links AI to the semantic web or SOAP? (and it's always about business use cases)
• rsynnott 4y ago
  It's very much the new blockchain. For the next year or so everything will have "AI" in the description because it produces a pavlovian response in VCs, then it'll move onto something else. So goes the tech industry. None of this is new; there's a special magic phrase to attract VCs that changes every few years, and for now AI is it (we've actually been here before; there was a year or so a while back when everything was an "intelligent agent"/chatbot).
• latexr 4y ago
  > AI is great. ChatGPT is incredible. Imagine how the HN users who disagree with that feel. It is beyond fatiguing. I’m frequently reminded of the companies who added “blockchain” to their name and saw massive jumps in their stock price, despite having noting to do with blockchains¹. ¹ https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/21/16805598/companies-blockchain-tech-cryptocurrency-tea https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/21/16805598/companies-block...
  • rchaud 4y ago
    I don't mind the companies that got a temporary bump from adding blockchain to the name. I'm more concerned about the Twitter hype-men and women adding '.eth' to their name and singing DeFI praises all day long....and then quietly removing it without so much as a word, once the hype is dead and keeping the '.eth' makes you look like a sucker. BTW a lot of influential people were on that train, current CEO of YCom being one of them.
• leeches 4y ago
  I would say, at least it’s not as predatory and unethical as crypto, where the people involved are knowingly harming others. But it seems like the current trendline for “AI” is going to be worse. Why be excited about building tools that will undermine democracy and cast doubt on the authenticity of every single photo, video, and audio clip. Now it can be done cheaply, by anyone. It will become good enough that we cannot believe any form of media. And also make it impossible to determine if the written word is coming from an actual person. This is going to be weaponized against us. And at the very least, if you think blogspam sucks now, wait until this becomes 99.9999% of all indexed content. It’s going to jam all of our comms with noise. But hey it looks great on your resume, right? Maybe I’m too cynical, would love for someone to change my mind. But you are not alone in your unease.
  • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
    If some person A decides to pay person B in crypto money instead of dollars or pesos, because it's more convenient/cheaper/faster, how is that harming you? That's their business. Nobody is forcing you to use crypto.
  • zigman1 4y ago
    To be honest, I see some positivity in that. > Now it can be done cheaply, by anyone. It will become good enough that we cannot believe any form of media. And also make it impossible to determine if the written word is coming from an actual person. This is going to be weaponized against us. We shouldn't believe any form of media straight away. We only do so because we think faking it is hard and why should one do. Being able to produce it cheaply could make people more attentative and skeptical of things around them. Blogspam sucks mostly out of consumers belief that this is something that was written by a person who deeply cares about them. Average internet consumer consumes shitty internet not because he is ignorant, but because he or she doesn't know enough to care. But maybe I'm to optimistic, I just think people are not aware of stuff around them
    • leeches 4y ago
      Let's imagine a scenario: There is a state of emergency presidential address. In Video A, the politician says X Y Z. In Video B, the politician says A B C. Both videos have equal credibility. The videos show no artifacts from tampering. The alteration is undetectable by experts. The broadcast has dire consequences in a divided country. 50% of channels are pushing Video A, 50% of channels are pushing Video B. We are now in a position where the public actually cannot determine which video is authentic. The politician could broadcast a new statement, to clarify the validity of the first video. But, you could just as easily fake that too, to publish a statement that declares the opposite. So, then you load up Hacker News or wherever, to determine for yourself what the hell is going on. But someone spins up 1,000 bots to flood the comments in favor of Video A, and someone else spins up 1,000 bots to flood the comments in favor of Video B. These comments are all in natural language, all with their own individual idiosyncrasies. It's impossible to determine if the comment is a bot. And because the cost is essentially free, these bots can be primed for years, making mundane comments on trivial topics to build social credibility. Actual humans only account for maybe 1% of this discourse. Now imagine: our entire world operates like this, on a daily basis, ranging from the mundane to the dramatic. How about broadcasting a deepfake press statement from a CEO to make a shorted meme stock crash. If there are financial/political incentives to do so, and the technological hurdle is insignificant, these tools will be weaponized. So how do we "not believe the media", do we all have to be standing in the same room together where something notable happens? I understand that there could be upsides, the world isn't all doom and gloom. But, I think engineers get myopic, and do not heed the warnings.
• quaestio 4y ago
  From an engineering perspective ChatGPT makes some ridiculous errors and at times seems to fabricate random guesses. When these are pointed out it simply apologises and says "oh you right", even if it is being fed a lie. When asked for references it cannot refer to any. Scientifically useless? Until AI can filter out fact from fiction, it will continue frustrate the technical people who rely on absolute truths keep important systems running smoothly.
• LatteLazy 4y ago
  Before AI it was Crpyto. Before Crypto it was Quantum computing. Fusion pops up from time to time with "huge breakthroughs" that mean working products could be just 20 years away. People love the optimism and the paranoia and uncertainty.
• city17 4y ago
  Although I understand your sentiment, I think it’s an inevitable phase in the development of any new groundbreaking technology. People are still trying to figure out what the new AIs can and can’t be used for. Some people will try to build ridiculous products that don’t work, but that’s just part of the learning process and those things will be weeded out over time. There’s no ‘clean’ path to finding all the useful applications of these new models, so be prepared to be bombarded with AI powered tools for a few more years until the most useful ones have been figured out.
• cardosof 4y ago
  I understand the sentiment, but I'm trying actively to get away from all the hype and focus on the capabilities it has today. It's being useful for a bunch of people, there are some threads on it such as: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34589001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34589001
• tyfon 4y ago
  While I agree the name AI is pretentious, I personally and professionally embrace the technology. Personally I enjoy creating language models and agent networks, at work I make predictive models so.. :) Even if I didn't find the tech fascinating and especially the new emergent features of the big LMs, I would be left in the dust professionally if I ignored it. The tech really works for a lot of stuff.
• alach11 4y ago
  I’m not. I’ve been using OpenAI’s API a lot for work and it’s made tasks easy that would previously have been very challenging. Some examples: - Embedding free text data on safety observations, clustering them together, using text completion to automatically label the clusters, and identifying trends - Embedding free text data on equipment failures. Some of our equipment failures have been classified manually by humans into various categories. I use the embeddings to train a model to predict those categories for uncategorized failures. - Analyzing employee development goals and locating common themes. Then using this to identify where there are gaps we can fill in training offerings.
• zetalyrae 4y ago
  Every time I read people dismissing AI for the same tired old reasons, I am reminded of this line from the Psalms: “the Lord knows the thoughts of men, that they are vanity”. The only thing we can definitely do better than machines is sad, proud sophistry. “Not real understanding, not real intelligence, just a stochastic parrot”. Sure, keep telling yourself that.
• jefe_ 4y ago
  I have a bit of AI fatigue around this wave of tools, but also understand why they are garnering so much attention. Many of the innovation hype categories of the past decade have appeared stuck in the 'early days but just wait...' phase. Self-driving cars, drone delivery, crypto as a currency, crypto as a(n) _____, plant-based meats, virtual reality, etc. While there has been great progress in each of these areas, not one has yet matched market demand with current capabilities in a way that enables it to become a 'game changer.' To the general public, ChatGPT and the Image Generators 'just appeared,' and appeared in a very impressive and usable form. Of course there were many waves of ML advances leading up to these models, but for many people these tools are their first opportunity to play with ML models in a meaningful way that is easy to incorporate into daily life and with very little barrier to entry. While impressive and there are many applications, my questions surrounding the new AI tools relate to the volume of information they are capable of producing and our capacity to consume it. Tools can be used to synthesize the information, tools can act on it, but there is already too much 'noise.' There is a market for entertainment tailored to exact preferences, but it won't provide the shared cultural connection mass media provides. In the workplace, e-mails and documents can be quickly drafted. This is a valuable use case, but it augments and increases productivity. It will lower the bar necessary for certain jobs, and it will increase productivity expectations, but it will become a tool like Excel rather than a replacement like a factory robot (for now). The Art of Worldly Wisdom #231 - Never show half-finished things to others. <- ChatGPT managed it's release perfectly in this regard.
• noobermin 4y ago
  AI is the new blockchain. Fortunately for AI, it will have its use, it will just be more mundane than everyone thinks it will be, which is better than the crypto stuff. Or who knows, may be there will be an application for block chains too.
• somewhereoutth 4y ago
  AI/ML in general seems good for situations when being wrong, indeed very wrong, occasionally is ok. So yes to AI driven recommendation engines, no to AI driven cars.
• mattr47 4y ago
  Yes, so much this. This seems to be the same type of hype as blockchain was a couple years ago when everyone said that will solve all our problems.
• revskill 4y ago
  I told ChatGPT to implement itself. It's a WOW moment for me. It's like i was reborn for next century.
• mattkrause 4y ago
  I’m very excited about the methods themselves, but I’m so tired of the manic “vibes” around them——-and how they’re starting to affect related fields too. I work at the border between neuroscience and AI, and there are some undeniably cool developments but there’s also so much hype and overkill. In a better world, it’d be possible to occasionally pause, take a breath and think about what the models are actually doing, how they’re doing it, and if that’s what we want something to do. However, it’s hard to find space to do so without getting run over by people “moving fast” and breaking things and feels like doing the hard corrective work is so much less rewarded.
• thrill 4y ago
  No, just AI fatigue fatigue.
• swah 4y ago
  I kinda like how the tech bubble feels when "everyone" is excited about the same thing... (be it Lisp, a text editor or AI)
• crakhamster01 4y ago
  I think with any technology, there will always be individuals looking to make a quick buck. Whether that's a fledgling startup trying to woo investors, big tech cos looking to pump their share price, or your average Twitter/LinkedIn influencer peddling engagement bait. IMO AI has reached this stage of its lifecycle. There have always been, and still are, valid use cases for AI, but I think the GPT-3 inspired applications we've been seeing as of late are no more than impressive tech demos. It's the first time the general public has seen a glimmer of where AI can go, but it really is just a glimmer at this point. My advice is to keep your head down and try to be selective with the content you engage with on AI. It seems like every feed refresh I have some unknown Twitter Verified account telling me why swaths of the population will be out of a job soon. The best heuristic I have so far is to ignore AI-related posts/reshares from names I haven't heard of before, but of course that has obvious drawbacks.
• scoofy 4y ago
  I think any research project, when it gets successful enough, and complex enough, we stop seeing the future potential, and are annoyed we're not getting what we want from it. Machine Learning research isn't "for us." Let the researchers do what they do, and toil away in boring rooms, and eventually, like the internet slowly did, it will be all around us and will be useful.
• lee101 4y ago
  Speaking about opportunity cost of folks pursuing AI like a mad crowd... I started a ChatGPT competitor https://text-generator.io https://text-generator.io let me know what you think .. or if it's too much...
• p0w3n3d 4y ago
  From my side there are three feelings that fight in me: 1. it's incredible how this AI performs drawing and writing 2. will it take my programmers work? 3. what if this AI makes a mistake? I think putting AI inside everything will give us opportunity to experience first-hand what is a local extremum of multidimensional function and how it differs from global extremum. Our paper gets eliminated because some AI-based curriculum vitae review glitch. Our car lost a wheel because computer vision failed (or lose our heads like that one owner of Tesla )... Most scary for me is that we are starting to build more and more things of which we wouldn't be able to understand the inner workings. Hence there might be an intelligence crisis creeping slowly into our civilisation, and then bam... like in Andrzej Zajdel's Van Troff's Cylinder