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The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

126 points by TomWhitwell 4y ago

walrus01 4y ago
I don't know what the duck you are talking about with autocomplete modifying things
valine 4y ago
Computers and the internet looked like bubbles until they didn’t. Not every craze is the next big thing, but for LLMs it’s still too soon to say anything with certainty. The people comparing LLMs to autocomplete have no more legitimacy than people who think LLMs are the first coming of AGI. I found it humorous that the author couldn’t help but anthropomortise ChatGPT by calling it ”fully automated supremely confident liar”. Calling it a liar implies intent to deceive. Strange to ascribe intent to an autocomplete.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  He's not really anthropomorphizing it. He's just trying to phrase things in the snarkiest, clickbaitiest way possible.
  - valine 4y ago
    It’s clickbaity because it invites the reader to anthropomorphize ChatGPT.
- masswerk 4y ago
  > Computers and the internet looked like bubbles until they didn’t. The funny thing being, it isn't that clear how the (personal) computer revolution worked out: The IBM PC was envisioned as a dumb smart terminal that would rely on mainframe integration for anything serious business. This model clearly failed with the advent of i386, as tasks were increasingly done locally and exclusively so. That model failed clearly, as computers are now dumb smart terminals that are connected to mainframes (AKA "the cloud")… Similarly, the Internet revolution would connect everyone on equal standing and equal reach, decentralized, as opposed to the ideas of information utilities that has been proposed previously, an idea that clearly failed. Now this idea has clearly failed, as the Internet has become a centralized information utility run by a few companies for the majority of its use…
entropyneur 4y ago
The author seems to be unaware of how many people's jobs are nothing but a sophisticated form of autocomplete. How many people's lives are nothing but a sophisticated form of autocomplete. Also, what terrible writing, full of rage about nothing.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  Chomsky revealed that it is bad, therefore, it is bad.
- thatjoeoverthr 4y ago
  Doctorow's text always feels like it's glaring.
pmoriarty 4y ago
I've long been a fan of Cory Doctorow. He's a witty, eloquent writer with lots of interesting, insightful things to say about technology, and I agree with him on his critiques of capitalism and corporate hype. However, he's dead wrong if he thinks AI is all hype and no substance. Yes, AI is being exploited and hyped up by corporations. Yes, most workers are going to get screwed, as usual. But there is so much potential in AI... even if it's not "truly intelligent" (yet). At the very least it's a tool that can boost creativity. Playing around with Midjourney made a believer out of me. I've been a life long artist, and midjourney just blew me away. It's nothing short of amazing, and just about as close to magic as anything I've ever seen a computer do. AI is a completely transformative technology. People like Doctorow can dig their heels in and scream against the hurricane, but it's utterly futile. The world will adopt this technology anyway, and it will transform the world (for the better or for the worse). It already has, and the transformation will only accelerate.
- EGreg 4y ago
  “ Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI.” Amazing to see the totally different attitude of HN to AI vs Blockchain. AI can actually become a huge NEGATIVE value for the Web, as swarms of AI turn every forum including this one into a dark forest
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    "swarms of AI turn every forum including this one into a dark forest" As AI text generation gets better, will it really matter if you're talking to a human or a machine?
    - EGreg 4y ago
      Oh, you won’t be talking. As soon as you pipe up, you’ll be shouted down by implacable bot swarms until you learn to not even bother. Give it 3-5 years
      - textninja 4y ago
Vanit 4y ago
So I guess just ignore all the people getting real value out of ChatGPT/etc? How can you compare that to crypto at all with a straight face. Yes, you need to be an expert to validate the output. Welcome to being an expert using any tool.
- EGreg 4y ago
  I predict this comment will be heavily donvoted with zero explanation. Because HN is always predictable when it comes to the trigger words: “Crypto bad” and “AI good” Crypto can actually help people transact trustlessly, let communities govern themselves without a king etc. Whereas AI swarms can generate bullshit at scale and turn every forum into a dark forest, with 99% bot-generated content deployed to silence or distract groups of people whose viewpoint is to be buried. One has the potential to quickly destroy all the systems we rely on, including public discourse, voting, and so on. I would say that is far worse than a few silly smart contracts.
- h10h10h10 4y ago
  I've been using Bitcoin for over a decade almost daily and it's a great tool that has passed the test of time, and will continue to be useful unless governments around the world actually go out of teh way to ban it. As for Chatgpt, I think it's really useful as well, but there's no way to compare the two.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    How's bitcoin useful for anything other than money laundering and selling it to the bigger sucker?
    - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      Trustless, programmable money. It's useful. The problem centers generally around how useful "trustless" really is. Developed nations usually already have a trusted currency and underdeveloped nations have so many extant corruption issues that trustless money isn't necessarily spendable. The goldilocks zone so far for crypto has been remittances to developing countries, a small market indeed. Crypto's narrow application range is what makes it, so far at least, more hype than bite. Sure ChatGPT and other LLMs can do all sorts of stuff. It can give you inspiration, help you search through a corpus that hasn't been scraped properly, or just fill in the blanks for laborious writing that was generally a waste of your time. It's lots of fun to play around with. But is that worth enough to offset the R&D, training, compute, and profit costs associated? Are people willing to pay for LLMs at a scale that makes sense? For companies that really need this kind of writing done, is it that much cheaper than hiring an English literature major intern? Can the sorts of "hallucinations" an LLM outputs be tolerated in actual applications? The two fields suffer from a similar problem. Sure they're breakthroughs, but are they enough to derive broad utility? Regardless I disagree with the premise of Doctorow's post. I think the problem is subtle and not deserving of the silly snark that his post contains as it tried to pick apart banal definitions.
dmurko 4y ago
With all the arguments how ChatGPT is "just autocomplete", I wonder if these people ever used it. I know it is technically autocomplete, but the end results are so much more than that.
- padjo 4y ago
  Indeed, I was quite sceptical of all of this until I actually tried Co-pilot. Sure you can characterise it as “just autocomplete” but that autocomplete has saved me a bunch of typing and thinking.
  - plutonorm 4y ago
    If you haven't spent more than an hour inveestigating ChaGPT or Bing Chat then you really should. They are astonishing. I would say that in certain ways they are smarter than me. In a generation or two, with a motivational layer on top, they will be smarter than me. Do not scoff until you have honest to god sat down and interrogated these things.
    - manuelmoreale 4y ago
      I personally wouldn’t say they’re smarter than you. They’re definitely faster. But I believe you, internet stranger, could spend time and resources and produce the same result ChatGPT has produced for you. It would probably take you a lot longer though.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        > could spend time and resources and produce the same result ChatGPT has produced for you. It would probably take you a lot longer though. Actually no. I have a limited lifespan of which I've already burned half and have to spend at least another 1/3rd of the remaining lifespan sleeping. Not even counting making money to feed and shelter myself. GPT is already a better translator than I'll ever be in far more languages then I'll ever know. To get better than GPT at any one of these things will require a massive amount of dedicated time for me to do so. It is already superhuman in this sense with capabilities well past all but the most unique translators. This is the story of John Henry again. Yea, humans are still exceptional and can beat the machine at things, especially if they've had any training in doing so, but we're not sticking with the same steam-powered hammer, we're spending billions on building newer, bigger, faster ones. More and more of humanity will fall behind the machine every day.
zamnos 4y ago
Ah I mean if you're hell bent on not being impressed by ChatGPT you don't have to be. Everyone's entitled to their own opinions too. It's already useful for those in certain roles, the only question is what's the medium term situation with ChatGPT gonna be? It's free, with a paid option for now. Is it going to get shut down? is it going to go pay-only? or go away and only be available as BingGPT? If you're already using this for work (eg gptforwork.com) or play (https://gamesplayedbadly.com/2023/02/14/create-your-own-dd-adventure-with-chatgpt-you-wont-believe-what-happens-next/ https://gamesplayedbadly.com/2023/02/14/create-your-own-dd-a...), those are your real questions. Pundits and critics have a vested interest in predicting the future the way their readers want, but your time machine is as good as mine - it only goes 1 second per second and we'll get to the future at the same time. If your role doesn't involve things ChatGPT would be useful for (eg you're a blue collar carpenter), it doesn't seem very useful, but neither do computers or the Internet, really. They still revolutionized the world though, so do you want to be a buggy whip manufacturer, or a computer (the job, mostly employing women, prior to the advent of the digital computer and auto calculating spreadsheets, who performed the math for spreadsheets at accounting firms)? Or do you want to at least be aware of incoming trends. Crypto and web3 still has yet to have a clearly defined use case by anyone outside that industry. Meanwhile, anybody with a phone number can make an openAI account and try out ChatGPT. Some, like our carpenter, will walk away thinking it's neat but ultimately useless. Others simply won't be impressed, for whatever reason. Some will see immediate uses for it in their life and can't live without it again. Don't expect them to speak up about it either, they're too busy using it to write emails and make plans to be bothered to convince the haters.
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  If your role doesn't involve things ChatGPT would be useful for (eg you're a blue collar carpenter), it doesn't seem very useful, but neither do computers or the Internet, really. Are you freaking serious? Carpenters use computers all the time. Ever heard of CAD? Calculators? Talking to customers via email? Ordering materials, researching, I'm shocked actually this is how naive people are ? Crypto and web3 still has yet to have a clearly defined use case by anyone outside that industry. What exactly is the use case for ChatGPT? I mean it can do a bunch of different things, but to what degree really depends on a great deal of factors, so I don't really get your point. I actually think maybe this will be a problem for ChatGPT as a product in the future. It doesn't really do anything especially well and it's not clear when you should trust it to be correct. Maybe it will get 99.9% accurate soon, until then, will be interesting to see what actually happens when the novelty wears off. I do remember walking home from my friends house after using a VR headset about 6 years ago and thinking, well that's it, I'm going into the matrix. It's been 6 years and I've never had the need to use one again. Maybe when designing our house I would've liked to have put one on for 10 minutes to walk through the plans. ChatGPT I has had a similar effect for me, I used it, it was fun, didn't really have that much daily use for it, now it's just a tool, like many in my toolbag, I pull out of I can think of a good use for it, it sometimes yields good results, then I move on. Edit: Please if you down vote, I'd like to hear why, don't hate on people for having a difference of opinion.
currymj 4y ago
there's been steady progress on language models for the past 6-7 years, getting somewhat faster in the last 2 years, in part due to fundamental advances, in part due to (mainly) OpenAI being a little more product focused. it's true that certain types of scammers and influencers have started jumping on LLMs en masse now that shilling cryptocurrencies isn't so lucrative. i think that if it appears from your perspective like there is a brand-new LLM hype bubble that just appeared this year to substitute for the previous cryptocurrency hype bubble, you're in a bad part of the information ecosystem.
mschuster91 4y ago
> AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn't "artificial" and it's not "intelligent." "Machine learning" doesn't learn. On this week's Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete – not our new robot overlord. For what it's worth: a lot of "office work" is repetitive bullshit that could be done just as well with decent automation or assisting "artificial intelligence" (=lawyers writing letters, ...).
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  "lawyers writing letters" Or programmers writing lots of boilerplate or really simple code. They don't call them code monkeys for nothing...
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textninja 4y ago
This criticism, like many others, attacks the mechanics of how LLMs think, apparently dismissing the models for not doing so using the same process, faculties, and background life experience as a human. It does not contain any compelling arguments to refute the notion that LLMs think. We may not have consumer level AGI just yet, but suggesting a LLM is just a dumb anything (stochastic parrot or otherwise) is a rather extraordinary claim to make about something that basically patterns the whole internet. We’ve been here before. Our sense of place in the universe was first upset by the heliocentric model (we’re not as special as we thought), then the theory of general relativity (not as correct as we thought), then quantum mechanics (not even living in a deterministic universe, really). With all these fantastic discoveries behind us, now seems like the right time to learn that we’re not as smart as we thought either.
- thom 4y ago
  The stochastic parrot claim seems to crash people’s brains because they assume this is all about words. The fact that these models very clearly learn not just patterns of words, but patterns of ideas, and ideas about ideas, seems a very profound result. Personally I do remain unimpressed by how the current models ‘think’ on top of this knowledge, but I’d have to work very hard to be as cynical as to imply this was all a scam, or somehow not progress (whatever you think of the destination).
  - masswerk 4y ago
    Hum, as someone who grew up in the times of the linguistic turn, I'm somewhat missing the groundbreaking revolution here. The entire idea of "text" was based on this.
  - AndrewDucker 4y ago
    "these models very clearly learn not just patterns of words, but patterns of ideas, and ideas about ideas" This is not at all clear to me.
    - smitty1e 4y ago
drdeca 4y ago
In the limit of quality of sequence continuation, there are many wonders.
Animats 4y ago
We're still at the beginning of large language models. This is very new technology. Right now, they can act as question-answering and interaction systems that can do a decent job most of the time and are totally wrong some of the time. Improvement is needed, and does not seem to be impossible. Making up bogus facts has to stop if these things front-end search engines. The concern right now is widespread deployment of really crappy systems. ChatGPT can probably outperform the average call center staffer now. That's going to be a problem.
dalbasal 4y ago
The anti-hype around GPT is quite a thing. It got out of a gate at a sprint, determined to get ahead of the hype. So sure... if you want to point to hype statements that are silly, you'll find them. If you want to find monopolies investing I gpt to preserve their monopolies, you'll find them. If you want analogies to stuff that has empty hype in the past, you'll find those analogies. I'm old enough to remember the hype, and anti-hype around the early web... The information superhighway. Anti-hype had all the same arguments there. It really doesn't matter what we think about chatgpt's answers to philosophical questions, or it's ability to write poetry. Those are just novelties and parlour games. What matters is that autocomplete is useful, and that means it's going to be used. Well use it for writing emails. Well use it to code. Well use it to summarize, tabulate... It'll bring video game characters to life. Some of these will be significant. Others will be profitable. Others will be harmful. What autocomplete isn't, is a dud. The thing works.
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akhosravian 4y ago
“It’s just auto complete” is probably one of the worst takes out there on AI. It’s also clear the author doesn’t actually know how LLMs work and is parroting information, e.g. “…it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average.” is just not correct, and, frankly, suggests the author hasn’t even observed what autocomplete does. I completely respect the view that there’s more to being human than pattern matching text, but I also am open to the possibility consciousness may not actually be that much more than stochastic parrots.
- textninja 4y ago
  It’s a bad take for several reasons. - It’s reductive. The model may be architecturally relatively simple, at least insofar as humans are involved, but the data that was used train it is anything but. Code is data, data is code. The model is more than its architecture. It’s all the weights and biases within. - It’s qualitatively wrong. The temperature settings change it from a predictive system (auto complete) to a generative one (digital assistant). - It’s quantitatively ignorant. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. For that matter, how do you speak if not one word at a time? It happens that the model generates one token at a time as well, but the million dollar question remains: what chain of reasoning did it have to follow to come up with that token? Just because it‘s only outputting a single token doesn’t mean it’s not “thinking” about the structure of the sentence, paragraph, or the entire document - several tokens ahead, to say the least. Indeed, having been trained on a such a large internet corpus it has the capacity to model entire personalities and all the quirks and neuroses that go on behind the scenes. So, yes, it is a bad take. That being said, it’s still a useful one because it encourages people to think about the models as tools, which is exactly correct given how they’re structured. So I still describe them as such.
  - anileated 4y ago
    > “thinking” about the structure of the sentence, paragraph, or the entire document - several tokens ahead, to say the least You put thinking in quotes, so what exactly do you mean by thinking? Where does it do it? When? AI as autocomplete is a perfect summarization of both what it does and how it does it. Anything more, including models “thinking”, is strategic PR aimed to make the public happy with their mouths gaping while they take all intellectual property ever published online and monetize it without paying the author.
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anuraaga 4y ago
While big companies getting even bigger may not sit well, equating business development with the actual ponzi schemes of crypto, which will result in convictions (FTX members are already admitting guilt) seems like a stretch. There doesn't seem to be any reason to believe users are not in a position to pick experiences that work for them and abandon ones that don't for AI products - a far cry from financial products that require significant literacy and profit the most when ensuring the users never achieve it.
BorisTheBrave 4y ago
Ah yes, AI doesn't have any significant use cases and is only good for party tricks, but also it's going to be used by paymasters to erode wages. If it's useless, it can hardly replace jobs, can it?
fwlr 4y ago
LLMs may be stochastic parrots, but the critics of LLMs are starting to look like deterministic parrots. Do they know any other phrases besides “autocomplete on steroids” and “stochastic parrot”? (The LLMs do: I asked ChatGPT for some sarcastic and dismissive phrases for language models and it gave me back “mindless mimics”, “algorithmic babblers”, “robotic regurgitators”, “synthetic chatterboxes”, and my personal favorite: “soulless scribble-bots”.)
- AstralStorm 4y ago
  Imaginationless idea-free implements. So, when will ChatGPT write a credible self-critical article? Oh wait, it really cannot. It can only transform text. The difference between writing and producing text does indeed exist.
  - fwlr 4y ago
    It used to be someone would confidently say “computers can’t do this” and they could be right for 10 or 20 years before the state of the art caught up and proved them wrong. Now it’s like, “it can’t write a credible and coherent article“. Well, GPT3 does fine on paragraphs, and whole articles are literally the very next incremental step from that, so probably GPT4 will be able to do that. And when does that come out? Like next week?
    - ryanjshaw 4y ago
      Are you sure it can't write articles? I had it write an outline for an article, then an outline for each of those sections, then the content of those sections and it wasn't too bad.
      - shadowofneptune 4y ago
        Based on what's presented hete: https://acoup.blog/2023/02/17/collections-on-chatgpt/ https://acoup.blog/2023/02/17/collections-on-chatgpt/, it's quite good at producing the form of an article or an essay, but the actual thesis made is incoherent. If what you want is a content mill, it's great. A depressing amount of web articles already look like this with human authors. To be clear though, the generation of the format of communication, content being optional, has always been the goal and domain of chatbots. It's no big revolution.
ieee2 4y ago
I agree with Sam Altman. It is not the main point that we are close to creating the human robot. Rather we start to understand that we are biological robots ourselves, just so sophisticated that it doesn't look like that from the top view. That we are called humans will not save us from this realisation. Each atom in our body just follows laws of physics.
- ElijahLynn 4y ago
  Can you share more about this context? Was this an article you read? Can you share the source for what you agree with Sam Altman about?
  - ieee2 4y ago
    I have this view for a some time already but it is not unique idea. I am referring to Sam saying on twitter we are just "Stochastics parrots".
keithalewis 4y ago
One day there will be a https://smbx.org/ https://smbx.org/ for ChatGPT.
maxdoop 4y ago
The problem I have with claims like “LLMS aren’t thinking— they are just parrots”, is we don’t even know what human thinking really is! So many people want to assume that human complexity makes us special, yet there is not any proof of that right now. This article claims “AI is not intelligent”— and I’ll counter with, “what is intelligence?” And further, say that we somehow prove LLMs aren’t “thinking” as humans do, but they still give (eventually) a near perfect illusion that they do — what does it matter that it’s not “really thinking?” I feel like crazy AI cultist at times when discussing this, but my main (admittedly petty) point is that such strong confidence about similarity or dissimilarity of human thinking to LLMs is unfounded. It’s like we are comparing the insides of two black boxes and trying to make absolute claims on them.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
I've been deep in both these bubbles. If I'm honest, I'm more terrified of crypto going mainstream than AI going rogue. The crypto utopia is a world where everything can be fractionalized and financialized and monetized. We already live in a world that's extremely hyper-financialized. Crypto can add a layer ontop and financialize it to a degree that it could completely perverse human motivations. So yeah, I'll take the AI bubble.
aogaili 4y ago
There is a genuine improvement in the ability of algorithms to understand, retrieve and generate knowledge. The tooling around an area that impacts the daily life of knowledge workers (probably everyone on this site) just got much better. Crypto was overhyped; this does not seem to be the case.
stuckinhell 4y ago
No, it really isn't the same as crypto. Crypto really didn't solve so many problems in such an immediately visible way. AI has some immediate and fully practical uses, it's completely different. Stable Diffusion with Control Net/Art AI's are game changers for art creation. AI artwork is already winning awards. Generative AI's are evolving so rapidly. ElevenLabs Voice AI is absolutely amazing, we are planning to use them over hiring any voice actors for internal presentations going forward. AI generated Seinfeld was watched by millions,and I thought it was pretty damn good. The flexibilities and immediate usefulness of neural net AI's is just astounding, and to think we are still in the beginning of the paradigm shift.
- vannevar 4y ago
  Agreed, the two are virtual opposites: no one is making money from AI (yet), but everyone is using it, while in crypto, a bunch of people were making money from it and no one was actually using it.
  - Kalanos 4y ago
    Did you mean one is making money from "generative" AI yet? Let's not forget the decade of supervised AI success
    - vannevar 4y ago
      Correct, AI has obviously been making money for a long time. But it wasn't described as a bubble until recent developments fired up a rapid rise in startups/investment.
  - rg111 4y ago
    We, in my last company saved our business customers US$2-3mn/year using AI products. And we made good money selling those products. Those weren't products sold from techies to techies (the way Blockchain made some people money) either. And those products were end-user facing- it solved problems for them, too. And I know a lot of people who are making money solving real problems for people outside of tech. Equating AI and blockchain is a common HN commentariat fallacy.
jsdeveloper 4y ago
Just before LLM and stable diffusion I would have agreed with you but this two tools are real game changer, I do use the daily and they are not part of my day to day business.
janalsncm 4y ago
It’s kind of amazing how wrong the author is here. Any comparison to crypto bubbles fails when one digs anywhere below the surface level. Crypto was a solution in search of a problem. Machine learning is a collection of techniques specifically designed to solve problems. That’s why it was used long before your grandma knew what ChatGPT was, and ML will continue to be used even if OpenAI shuts down ChatGPT tomorrow. I will say that crypto is a big reason why AI is blowing up, though. It primed people to believing in tech-backed get rich quick schemes. That’s why I avoid all ex-crypto “entrepreneurs” turned AI aficionados who couldn’t backpropagate their way through a paper bag.
TrackerFF 4y ago
Crypto was pure unadulterated speculation. I mean, SURE, you could (still can) actually use crypto for things like purchases, contracts, data tracking, and what have you - but in the crypto bubble people were solely buying and holding to sell at a profit. Zero actual use, all speculation. At least with the current ML, we daily see new tools and other cool stuff.
rambojohnson 4y ago
tired of this boomer cynical bullshit usually coming from people without a clue as to what crypto and AI is or works.
- f0ld 4y ago
  I second this but aside from the rather ephemeral article itself, the implication of the title rings true. This will end up in a very bad bubble burst and possibly world wars again unless there’s some way to mitigate the monstrous overproduction of goods and services it generates. It’s time to stop breaking things down to the smallest part and see the whole picture again for once. We’re simply repeating 20th century and we know where it went last time,,,
leashless 4y ago
Yes. Source: project managed the Ethereum launch in 2015.
fatjokes 4y ago
No. I've already used ChatGPT for a few practical tasks. I've never been able to do that with crypto. The most I got out of crypto was buying some, watching it go up/down in value and then selling.
aaroninsf 4y ago
I love Cory, and read much of what he writes, but he is without being fully self-aware about it starting to go down the same road that doomed Chomsky, being so compelled by a compelling frame of critique, that it necessarily becomes the first and insidiously becomes the only real lens he views things through. One of his tenets is that Technology is Hype. This may be true, but not all technology is hype; and the fact that hype is regularly an outgrowth of other equally intelligence observers finding reason to be excited, is something he is far too breezily dismissive of. I welcome a critical and sardonic voice, and the regular deflation of the over-inflated, but he is starting to predictably be derisive too quickly and too broadly, and to assume bad faith (or naiviety) too widely. He's a smart monkey, but there are other smart monkeys, and AI in specific is one area where he's beginning to genuinely miss the scale of the disequilibrium coming. This is a shame because many of his most passionately-held convictions and campaigns are going to be significantly impacted by AI. He has a window and a pulpit to shine a bright light on the intersections where real change is accelerating or otherwise changing the landscape of some of the things he is most concerned about. He's missing it.
pfoof 4y ago
Not the new crypto hype, rather .com hype, and only if investors start throwing money at "AI Metaverse Pet Generator Deluxe"
Imnimo 4y ago
For a bubble that has no future, the author seems quite worried about its future impacts in the final paragraphs.
ElijahLynn 4y ago
Nope.
ElijahLynn 4y ago
I so want to upvote this article just because the discussion is so good. But I just can't upvote it because the title is so 1,000% wrong.
afro88 4y ago
I don't totally agree with the article, but it was an interesting read. It's funny reading quotes like "I gave it a paper to peer review and it didn't help at all". It not doing exactly what you want it to do + you not wanting to believe it is revolutionary = it's all hype. Personally, I use ChatGPT everyday. I use it in ways that weren't possible through mere google searches. It does some of the thinking and synthesis of different ideas and patterns for me. I work faster as a result. I work in languages and frameworks I didn't know before in a matter of minutes instead of days. Is there AI hype? Yes. Am I starting to see patterns in the responses, and lots of errors, which makes me realise this is a bit more limited than I thought? Yes. Are there lots of gimmicky use cases? Absolutely. Is it still crazy useful, and game changing for lots of industries in fundamental ways? Yes!

126 points by TomWhitwell 4y ago

I don't know what the duck you are talking about with autocomplete modifying things

Computers and the internet looked like bubbles until they didn’t. Not every craze is the next big thing, but for LLMs it’s still too soon to say anything with certainty. The people comparing LLMs to autocomplete have no more legitimacy than people who think LLMs are the first coming of AGI. I found it humorous that the author couldn’t help but anthropomortise ChatGPT by calling it ”fully automated supremely confident liar”. Calling it a liar implies intent to deceive. Strange to ascribe intent to an autocomplete.

pmoriarty 4y ago
He's not really anthropomorphizing it. He's just trying to phrase things in the snarkiest, clickbaitiest way possible.
- valine 4y ago
  It’s clickbaity because it invites the reader to anthropomorphize ChatGPT.
masswerk 4y ago
> Computers and the internet looked like bubbles until they didn’t. The funny thing being, it isn't that clear how the (personal) computer revolution worked out: The IBM PC was envisioned as a dumb smart terminal that would rely on mainframe integration for anything serious business. This model clearly failed with the advent of i386, as tasks were increasingly done locally and exclusively so. That model failed clearly, as computers are now dumb smart terminals that are connected to mainframes (AKA "the cloud")… Similarly, the Internet revolution would connect everyone on equal standing and equal reach, decentralized, as opposed to the ideas of information utilities that has been proposed previously, an idea that clearly failed. Now this idea has clearly failed, as the Internet has become a centralized information utility run by a few companies for the majority of its use…

entropyneur 4y ago

The author seems to be unaware of how many people's jobs are nothing but a sophisticated form of autocomplete. How many people's lives are nothing but a sophisticated form of autocomplete. Also, what terrible writing, full of rage about nothing.

readthenotes1 4y ago
Chomsky revealed that it is bad, therefore, it is bad.
thatjoeoverthr 4y ago
Doctorow's text always feels like it's glaring.

pmoriarty 4y ago

I've long been a fan of Cory Doctorow. He's a witty, eloquent writer with lots of interesting, insightful things to say about technology, and I agree with him on his critiques of capitalism and corporate hype. However, he's dead wrong if he thinks AI is all hype and no substance. Yes, AI is being exploited and hyped up by corporations. Yes, most workers are going to get screwed, as usual. But there is so much potential in AI... even if it's not "truly intelligent" (yet). At the very least it's a tool that can boost creativity. Playing around with Midjourney made a believer out of me. I've been a life long artist, and midjourney just blew me away. It's nothing short of amazing, and just about as close to magic as anything I've ever seen a computer do. AI is a completely transformative technology. People like Doctorow can dig their heels in and scream against the hurricane, but it's utterly futile. The world will adopt this technology anyway, and it will transform the world (for the better or for the worse). It already has, and the transformation will only accelerate.

EGreg 4y ago
“ Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI.” Amazing to see the totally different attitude of HN to AI vs Blockchain. AI can actually become a huge NEGATIVE value for the Web, as swarms of AI turn every forum including this one into a dark forest
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  "swarms of AI turn every forum including this one into a dark forest" As AI text generation gets better, will it really matter if you're talking to a human or a machine?
  - EGreg 4y ago
    Oh, you won’t be talking. As soon as you pipe up, you’ll be shouted down by implacable bot swarms until you learn to not even bother. Give it 3-5 years
    - textninja 4y ago

Vanit 4y ago

So I guess just ignore all the people getting real value out of ChatGPT/etc? How can you compare that to crypto at all with a straight face. Yes, you need to be an expert to validate the output. Welcome to being an expert using any tool.

EGreg 4y ago
I predict this comment will be heavily donvoted with zero explanation. Because HN is always predictable when it comes to the trigger words: “Crypto bad” and “AI good” Crypto can actually help people transact trustlessly, let communities govern themselves without a king etc. Whereas AI swarms can generate bullshit at scale and turn every forum into a dark forest, with 99% bot-generated content deployed to silence or distract groups of people whose viewpoint is to be buried. One has the potential to quickly destroy all the systems we rely on, including public discourse, voting, and so on. I would say that is far worse than a few silly smart contracts.
h10h10h10 4y ago
I've been using Bitcoin for over a decade almost daily and it's a great tool that has passed the test of time, and will continue to be useful unless governments around the world actually go out of teh way to ban it. As for Chatgpt, I think it's really useful as well, but there's no way to compare the two.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  How's bitcoin useful for anything other than money laundering and selling it to the bigger sucker?
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    Trustless, programmable money. It's useful. The problem centers generally around how useful "trustless" really is. Developed nations usually already have a trusted currency and underdeveloped nations have so many extant corruption issues that trustless money isn't necessarily spendable. The goldilocks zone so far for crypto has been remittances to developing countries, a small market indeed. Crypto's narrow application range is what makes it, so far at least, more hype than bite. Sure ChatGPT and other LLMs can do all sorts of stuff. It can give you inspiration, help you search through a corpus that hasn't been scraped properly, or just fill in the blanks for laborious writing that was generally a waste of your time. It's lots of fun to play around with. But is that worth enough to offset the R&D, training, compute, and profit costs associated? Are people willing to pay for LLMs at a scale that makes sense? For companies that really need this kind of writing done, is it that much cheaper than hiring an English literature major intern? Can the sorts of "hallucinations" an LLM outputs be tolerated in actual applications? The two fields suffer from a similar problem. Sure they're breakthroughs, but are they enough to derive broad utility? Regardless I disagree with the premise of Doctorow's post. I think the problem is subtle and not deserving of the silly snark that his post contains as it tried to pick apart banal definitions.

dmurko 4y ago

With all the arguments how ChatGPT is "just autocomplete", I wonder if these people ever used it. I know it is technically autocomplete, but the end results are so much more than that.

padjo 4y ago
Indeed, I was quite sceptical of all of this until I actually tried Co-pilot. Sure you can characterise it as “just autocomplete” but that autocomplete has saved me a bunch of typing and thinking.
- plutonorm 4y ago
  If you haven't spent more than an hour inveestigating ChaGPT or Bing Chat then you really should. They are astonishing. I would say that in certain ways they are smarter than me. In a generation or two, with a motivational layer on top, they will be smarter than me. Do not scoff until you have honest to god sat down and interrogated these things.
  - manuelmoreale 4y ago
    I personally wouldn’t say they’re smarter than you. They’re definitely faster. But I believe you, internet stranger, could spend time and resources and produce the same result ChatGPT has produced for you. It would probably take you a lot longer though.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      > could spend time and resources and produce the same result ChatGPT has produced for you. It would probably take you a lot longer though. Actually no. I have a limited lifespan of which I've already burned half and have to spend at least another 1/3rd of the remaining lifespan sleeping. Not even counting making money to feed and shelter myself. GPT is already a better translator than I'll ever be in far more languages then I'll ever know. To get better than GPT at any one of these things will require a massive amount of dedicated time for me to do so. It is already superhuman in this sense with capabilities well past all but the most unique translators. This is the story of John Henry again. Yea, humans are still exceptional and can beat the machine at things, especially if they've had any training in doing so, but we're not sticking with the same steam-powered hammer, we're spending billions on building newer, bigger, faster ones. More and more of humanity will fall behind the machine every day.

zamnos 4y ago

Ah I mean if you're hell bent on not being impressed by ChatGPT you don't have to be. Everyone's entitled to their own opinions too. It's already useful for those in certain roles, the only question is what's the medium term situation with ChatGPT gonna be? It's free, with a paid option for now. Is it going to get shut down? is it going to go pay-only? or go away and only be available as BingGPT? If you're already using this for work (eg gptforwork.com) or play (https://gamesplayedbadly.com/2023/02/14/create-your-own-dd-adventure-with-chatgpt-you-wont-believe-what-happens-next/ https://gamesplayedbadly.com/2023/02/14/create-your-own-dd-a...), those are your real questions. Pundits and critics have a vested interest in predicting the future the way their readers want, but your time machine is as good as mine - it only goes 1 second per second and we'll get to the future at the same time. If your role doesn't involve things ChatGPT would be useful for (eg you're a blue collar carpenter), it doesn't seem very useful, but neither do computers or the Internet, really. They still revolutionized the world though, so do you want to be a buggy whip manufacturer, or a computer (the job, mostly employing women, prior to the advent of the digital computer and auto calculating spreadsheets, who performed the math for spreadsheets at accounting firms)? Or do you want to at least be aware of incoming trends. Crypto and web3 still has yet to have a clearly defined use case by anyone outside that industry. Meanwhile, anybody with a phone number can make an openAI account and try out ChatGPT. Some, like our carpenter, will walk away thinking it's neat but ultimately useless. Others simply won't be impressed, for whatever reason. Some will see immediate uses for it in their life and can't live without it again. Don't expect them to speak up about it either, they're too busy using it to write emails and make plans to be bothered to convince the haters.

ChatGTP 4y ago
If your role doesn't involve things ChatGPT would be useful for (eg you're a blue collar carpenter), it doesn't seem very useful, but neither do computers or the Internet, really. Are you freaking serious? Carpenters use computers all the time. Ever heard of CAD? Calculators? Talking to customers via email? Ordering materials, researching, I'm shocked actually this is how naive people are ? Crypto and web3 still has yet to have a clearly defined use case by anyone outside that industry. What exactly is the use case for ChatGPT? I mean it can do a bunch of different things, but to what degree really depends on a great deal of factors, so I don't really get your point. I actually think maybe this will be a problem for ChatGPT as a product in the future. It doesn't really do anything especially well and it's not clear when you should trust it to be correct. Maybe it will get 99.9% accurate soon, until then, will be interesting to see what actually happens when the novelty wears off. I do remember walking home from my friends house after using a VR headset about 6 years ago and thinking, well that's it, I'm going into the matrix. It's been 6 years and I've never had the need to use one again. Maybe when designing our house I would've liked to have put one on for 10 minutes to walk through the plans. ChatGPT I has had a similar effect for me, I used it, it was fun, didn't really have that much daily use for it, now it's just a tool, like many in my toolbag, I pull out of I can think of a good use for it, it sometimes yields good results, then I move on. Edit: Please if you down vote, I'd like to hear why, don't hate on people for having a difference of opinion.

currymj 4y ago

there's been steady progress on language models for the past 6-7 years, getting somewhat faster in the last 2 years, in part due to fundamental advances, in part due to (mainly) OpenAI being a little more product focused. it's true that certain types of scammers and influencers have started jumping on LLMs en masse now that shilling cryptocurrencies isn't so lucrative. i think that if it appears from your perspective like there is a brand-new LLM hype bubble that just appeared this year to substitute for the previous cryptocurrency hype bubble, you're in a bad part of the information ecosystem.

mschuster91 4y ago

> AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn't "artificial" and it's not "intelligent." "Machine learning" doesn't learn. On this week's Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete – not our new robot overlord. For what it's worth: a lot of "office work" is repetitive bullshit that could be done just as well with decent automation or assisting "artificial intelligence" (=lawyers writing letters, ...).

pmoriarty 4y ago
"lawyers writing letters" Or programmers writing lots of boilerplate or really simple code. They don't call them code monkeys for nothing...

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textninja 4y ago

This criticism, like many others, attacks the mechanics of how LLMs think, apparently dismissing the models for not doing so using the same process, faculties, and background life experience as a human. It does not contain any compelling arguments to refute the notion that LLMs think. We may not have consumer level AGI just yet, but suggesting a LLM is just a dumb anything (stochastic parrot or otherwise) is a rather extraordinary claim to make about something that basically patterns the whole internet. We’ve been here before. Our sense of place in the universe was first upset by the heliocentric model (we’re not as special as we thought), then the theory of general relativity (not as correct as we thought), then quantum mechanics (not even living in a deterministic universe, really). With all these fantastic discoveries behind us, now seems like the right time to learn that we’re not as smart as we thought either.

thom 4y ago
The stochastic parrot claim seems to crash people’s brains because they assume this is all about words. The fact that these models very clearly learn not just patterns of words, but patterns of ideas, and ideas about ideas, seems a very profound result. Personally I do remain unimpressed by how the current models ‘think’ on top of this knowledge, but I’d have to work very hard to be as cynical as to imply this was all a scam, or somehow not progress (whatever you think of the destination).
- masswerk 4y ago
  Hum, as someone who grew up in the times of the linguistic turn, I'm somewhat missing the groundbreaking revolution here. The entire idea of "text" was based on this.
- AndrewDucker 4y ago
  "these models very clearly learn not just patterns of words, but patterns of ideas, and ideas about ideas" This is not at all clear to me.
  - smitty1e 4y ago

drdeca 4y ago

In the limit of quality of sequence continuation, there are many wonders.

Animats 4y ago

We're still at the beginning of large language models. This is very new technology. Right now, they can act as question-answering and interaction systems that can do a decent job most of the time and are totally wrong some of the time. Improvement is needed, and does not seem to be impossible. Making up bogus facts has to stop if these things front-end search engines. The concern right now is widespread deployment of really crappy systems. ChatGPT can probably outperform the average call center staffer now. That's going to be a problem.

dalbasal 4y ago

The anti-hype around GPT is quite a thing. It got out of a gate at a sprint, determined to get ahead of the hype. So sure... if you want to point to hype statements that are silly, you'll find them. If you want to find monopolies investing I gpt to preserve their monopolies, you'll find them. If you want analogies to stuff that has empty hype in the past, you'll find those analogies. I'm old enough to remember the hype, and anti-hype around the early web... The information superhighway. Anti-hype had all the same arguments there. It really doesn't matter what we think about chatgpt's answers to philosophical questions, or it's ability to write poetry. Those are just novelties and parlour games. What matters is that autocomplete is useful, and that means it's going to be used. Well use it for writing emails. Well use it to code. Well use it to summarize, tabulate... It'll bring video game characters to life. Some of these will be significant. Others will be profitable. Others will be harmful. What autocomplete isn't, is a dud. The thing works.

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akhosravian 4y ago

“It’s just auto complete” is probably one of the worst takes out there on AI. It’s also clear the author doesn’t actually know how LLMs work and is parroting information, e.g. “…it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average.” is just not correct, and, frankly, suggests the author hasn’t even observed what autocomplete does. I completely respect the view that there’s more to being human than pattern matching text, but I also am open to the possibility consciousness may not actually be that much more than stochastic parrots.

textninja 4y ago
It’s a bad take for several reasons. - It’s reductive. The model may be architecturally relatively simple, at least insofar as humans are involved, but the data that was used train it is anything but. Code is data, data is code. The model is more than its architecture. It’s all the weights and biases within. - It’s qualitatively wrong. The temperature settings change it from a predictive system (auto complete) to a generative one (digital assistant). - It’s quantitatively ignorant. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. For that matter, how do you speak if not one word at a time? It happens that the model generates one token at a time as well, but the million dollar question remains: what chain of reasoning did it have to follow to come up with that token? Just because it‘s only outputting a single token doesn’t mean it’s not “thinking” about the structure of the sentence, paragraph, or the entire document - several tokens ahead, to say the least. Indeed, having been trained on a such a large internet corpus it has the capacity to model entire personalities and all the quirks and neuroses that go on behind the scenes. So, yes, it is a bad take. That being said, it’s still a useful one because it encourages people to think about the models as tools, which is exactly correct given how they’re structured. So I still describe them as such.
- anileated 4y ago
  > “thinking” about the structure of the sentence, paragraph, or the entire document - several tokens ahead, to say the least You put thinking in quotes, so what exactly do you mean by thinking? Where does it do it? When? AI as autocomplete is a perfect summarization of both what it does and how it does it. Anything more, including models “thinking”, is strategic PR aimed to make the public happy with their mouths gaping while they take all intellectual property ever published online and monetize it without paying the author.

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anuraaga 4y ago

While big companies getting even bigger may not sit well, equating business development with the actual ponzi schemes of crypto, which will result in convictions (FTX members are already admitting guilt) seems like a stretch. There doesn't seem to be any reason to believe users are not in a position to pick experiences that work for them and abandon ones that don't for AI products - a far cry from financial products that require significant literacy and profit the most when ensuring the users never achieve it.

BorisTheBrave 4y ago

Ah yes, AI doesn't have any significant use cases and is only good for party tricks, but also it's going to be used by paymasters to erode wages. If it's useless, it can hardly replace jobs, can it?

fwlr 4y ago

LLMs may be stochastic parrots, but the critics of LLMs are starting to look like deterministic parrots. Do they know any other phrases besides “autocomplete on steroids” and “stochastic parrot”? (The LLMs do: I asked ChatGPT for some sarcastic and dismissive phrases for language models and it gave me back “mindless mimics”, “algorithmic babblers”, “robotic regurgitators”, “synthetic chatterboxes”, and my personal favorite: “soulless scribble-bots”.)

AstralStorm 4y ago
Imaginationless idea-free implements. So, when will ChatGPT write a credible self-critical article? Oh wait, it really cannot. It can only transform text. The difference between writing and producing text does indeed exist.
- fwlr 4y ago
  It used to be someone would confidently say “computers can’t do this” and they could be right for 10 or 20 years before the state of the art caught up and proved them wrong. Now it’s like, “it can’t write a credible and coherent article“. Well, GPT3 does fine on paragraphs, and whole articles are literally the very next incremental step from that, so probably GPT4 will be able to do that. And when does that come out? Like next week?
  - ryanjshaw 4y ago
    Are you sure it can't write articles? I had it write an outline for an article, then an outline for each of those sections, then the content of those sections and it wasn't too bad.
    - shadowofneptune 4y ago
      Based on what's presented hete: https://acoup.blog/2023/02/17/collections-on-chatgpt/ https://acoup.blog/2023/02/17/collections-on-chatgpt/, it's quite good at producing the form of an article or an essay, but the actual thesis made is incoherent. If what you want is a content mill, it's great. A depressing amount of web articles already look like this with human authors. To be clear though, the generation of the format of communication, content being optional, has always been the goal and domain of chatbots. It's no big revolution.

ieee2 4y ago

I agree with Sam Altman. It is not the main point that we are close to creating the human robot. Rather we start to understand that we are biological robots ourselves, just so sophisticated that it doesn't look like that from the top view. That we are called humans will not save us from this realisation. Each atom in our body just follows laws of physics.

ElijahLynn 4y ago
Can you share more about this context? Was this an article you read? Can you share the source for what you agree with Sam Altman about?
- ieee2 4y ago
  I have this view for a some time already but it is not unique idea. I am referring to Sam saying on twitter we are just "Stochastics parrots".

keithalewis 4y ago

One day there will be a https://smbx.org/ https://smbx.org/ for ChatGPT.

maxdoop 4y ago

The problem I have with claims like “LLMS aren’t thinking— they are just parrots”, is we don’t even know what human thinking really is! So many people want to assume that human complexity makes us special, yet there is not any proof of that right now. This article claims “AI is not intelligent”— and I’ll counter with, “what is intelligence?” And further, say that we somehow prove LLMs aren’t “thinking” as humans do, but they still give (eventually) a near perfect illusion that they do — what does it matter that it’s not “really thinking?” I feel like crazy AI cultist at times when discussing this, but my main (admittedly petty) point is that such strong confidence about similarity or dissimilarity of human thinking to LLMs is unfounded. It’s like we are comparing the insides of two black boxes and trying to make absolute claims on them.

spaceman_2020 4y ago

I've been deep in both these bubbles. If I'm honest, I'm more terrified of crypto going mainstream than AI going rogue. The crypto utopia is a world where everything can be fractionalized and financialized and monetized. We already live in a world that's extremely hyper-financialized. Crypto can add a layer ontop and financialize it to a degree that it could completely perverse human motivations. So yeah, I'll take the AI bubble.

aogaili 4y ago

There is a genuine improvement in the ability of algorithms to understand, retrieve and generate knowledge. The tooling around an area that impacts the daily life of knowledge workers (probably everyone on this site) just got much better. Crypto was overhyped; this does not seem to be the case.

stuckinhell 4y ago

No, it really isn't the same as crypto. Crypto really didn't solve so many problems in such an immediately visible way. AI has some immediate and fully practical uses, it's completely different. Stable Diffusion with Control Net/Art AI's are game changers for art creation. AI artwork is already winning awards. Generative AI's are evolving so rapidly. ElevenLabs Voice AI is absolutely amazing, we are planning to use them over hiring any voice actors for internal presentations going forward. AI generated Seinfeld was watched by millions,and I thought it was pretty damn good. The flexibilities and immediate usefulness of neural net AI's is just astounding, and to think we are still in the beginning of the paradigm shift.

vannevar 4y ago
Agreed, the two are virtual opposites: no one is making money from AI (yet), but everyone is using it, while in crypto, a bunch of people were making money from it and no one was actually using it.
- Kalanos 4y ago
  Did you mean one is making money from "generative" AI yet? Let's not forget the decade of supervised AI success
  - vannevar 4y ago
    Correct, AI has obviously been making money for a long time. But it wasn't described as a bubble until recent developments fired up a rapid rise in startups/investment.
- rg111 4y ago
  We, in my last company saved our business customers US$2-3mn/year using AI products. And we made good money selling those products. Those weren't products sold from techies to techies (the way Blockchain made some people money) either. And those products were end-user facing- it solved problems for them, too. And I know a lot of people who are making money solving real problems for people outside of tech. Equating AI and blockchain is a common HN commentariat fallacy.

jsdeveloper 4y ago

Just before LLM and stable diffusion I would have agreed with you but this two tools are real game changer, I do use the daily and they are not part of my day to day business.

janalsncm 4y ago

It’s kind of amazing how wrong the author is here. Any comparison to crypto bubbles fails when one digs anywhere below the surface level. Crypto was a solution in search of a problem. Machine learning is a collection of techniques specifically designed to solve problems. That’s why it was used long before your grandma knew what ChatGPT was, and ML will continue to be used even if OpenAI shuts down ChatGPT tomorrow. I will say that crypto is a big reason why AI is blowing up, though. It primed people to believing in tech-backed get rich quick schemes. That’s why I avoid all ex-crypto “entrepreneurs” turned AI aficionados who couldn’t backpropagate their way through a paper bag.

TrackerFF 4y ago

Crypto was pure unadulterated speculation. I mean, SURE, you could (still can) actually use crypto for things like purchases, contracts, data tracking, and what have you - but in the crypto bubble people were solely buying and holding to sell at a profit. Zero actual use, all speculation. At least with the current ML, we daily see new tools and other cool stuff.

rambojohnson 4y ago

tired of this boomer cynical bullshit usually coming from people without a clue as to what crypto and AI is or works.

f0ld 4y ago
I second this but aside from the rather ephemeral article itself, the implication of the title rings true. This will end up in a very bad bubble burst and possibly world wars again unless there’s some way to mitigate the monstrous overproduction of goods and services it generates. It’s time to stop breaking things down to the smallest part and see the whole picture again for once. We’re simply repeating 20th century and we know where it went last time,,,

leashless 4y ago

Yes. Source: project managed the Ethereum launch in 2015.

fatjokes 4y ago

No. I've already used ChatGPT for a few practical tasks. I've never been able to do that with crypto. The most I got out of crypto was buying some, watching it go up/down in value and then selling.

aaroninsf 4y ago

I love Cory, and read much of what he writes, but he is without being fully self-aware about it starting to go down the same road that doomed Chomsky, being so compelled by a compelling frame of critique, that it necessarily becomes the first and insidiously becomes the only real lens he views things through. One of his tenets is that Technology is Hype. This may be true, but not all technology is hype; and the fact that hype is regularly an outgrowth of other equally intelligence observers finding reason to be excited, is something he is far too breezily dismissive of. I welcome a critical and sardonic voice, and the regular deflation of the over-inflated, but he is starting to predictably be derisive too quickly and too broadly, and to assume bad faith (or naiviety) too widely. He's a smart monkey, but there are other smart monkeys, and AI in specific is one area where he's beginning to genuinely miss the scale of the disequilibrium coming. This is a shame because many of his most passionately-held convictions and campaigns are going to be significantly impacted by AI. He has a window and a pulpit to shine a bright light on the intersections where real change is accelerating or otherwise changing the landscape of some of the things he is most concerned about. He's missing it.

pfoof 4y ago

Not the new crypto hype, rather .com hype, and only if investors start throwing money at "AI Metaverse Pet Generator Deluxe"

Imnimo 4y ago

For a bubble that has no future, the author seems quite worried about its future impacts in the final paragraphs.

ElijahLynn 4y ago

Nope.

ElijahLynn 4y ago

I so want to upvote this article just because the discussion is so good. But I just can't upvote it because the title is so 1,000% wrong.

afro88 4y ago

I don't totally agree with the article, but it was an interesting read. It's funny reading quotes like "I gave it a paper to peer review and it didn't help at all". It not doing exactly what you want it to do + you not wanting to believe it is revolutionary = it's all hype. Personally, I use ChatGPT everyday. I use it in ways that weren't possible through mere google searches. It does some of the thinking and synthesis of different ideas and patterns for me. I work faster as a result. I work in languages and frameworks I didn't know before in a matter of minutes instead of days. Is there AI hype? Yes. Am I starting to see patterns in the responses, and lots of errors, which makes me realise this is a bit more limited than I thought? Yes. Are there lots of gimmicky use cases? Absolutely. Is it still crazy useful, and game changing for lots of industries in fundamental ways? Yes!