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What they said 10 years ago was correct. It did hit society like a sledge hammer. Machine learning basically took over the AI space and penetrated the consumer

What they said 10 years ago was correct. It did hit society like a sledge hammer. Machine learning basically took over the AI space and penetrated the consumer space with applications that were all but impossible in the previous decade. There's AI chips in smart phones now. What you're seeing here with LLMs is sledge hammer number 2. It's understandable how most people don't notice the sledge hammer. The decade prior to 2010 there was another sledge hammer had no smart phones. We were hit with a smart phone hammer AND an AI sledge hammer and the integration was so seamless we didn't even notice. Much of the same will happen with LLMs. In 5 years it's so normal, nobody cares and likely we will forget what life was like before LLMs.

anon7725 4y ago
Sledge hammer #1 (voice assistants, AI chips in phones) didn’t cause unemployment. It was at the level of new features and capabilities. Sledge hammer #2 is aimed squarely at “white collar” work without much in the way of bounds to its capabilities.
- Jeff_Brown 4y ago
  We can't trust it. That's a pretty hard bound.
  - HervalFreire 4y ago
    For article writing verification is quick, I don't need to worry about a "bug" in the generated article as I do with code. For art, verification is instant, a bad generation is rejected. Trust is only a bound for certain areas, and this bound is eroding.
  - anon7725 4y ago
    Consider that a lot of useful work involves summarization (search++). “What work has gone on for supply chain improvement in our European operations this year?” - this is the kind of question that is easy to ask in natural language but might take someone a week of searching, messaging, etc to assemble. An LLM with access to all of the code, documents, chats, etc could just give an answer with citations. We are not betting $1B on the answer that it gives, but it has saved us 1 week of work and allows us to move on to the next step in the project. There are plenty of tasks like this which are highly valuable yet don’t require high trust. The one-shot “what is the airspeed of a coconut-laden swallow” type questions are actually fairly rare.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    We can't trust the police, politicians, or businesses either, but we're still on their hands...
    - Jeff_Brown 4y ago
      Fair. It's always a question of how much. If someday we can trust AI more than those groups (to do the kinds of things they do), that will be amazing.
  - Izkata 4y ago
    There was an episode in the original Kino's Travels anime where in one country, where a computer ran everything, humans still had jobs - their work was basically just verification that the computer was correct.
coldtea 4y ago
>What they said 10 years ago was correct. It did hit society like a sledge hammer. Machine learning basically took over the AI space and penetrated the consumer space with applications that were all but impossible in the previous decade. There's AI chips in smart phones now. And still almost all of these applications are not really impactful or that important compared to actually society and life changing developments like the steam engine, electricity, electromagnetic transmission, cars, computers themselves and the internet. Just more of the same, with added spice. In the sense that we could revert to 10 years ago, and nothing would be much different or missed. Whereas going back without electricity or cars would be a totally different thing! I think LLMs can be far more impactful than anything else hyped in machine learning of the past 10 years...
- civilized 4y ago
  I feel like the only form of "AI" I regularly benefit from is when I type "n" in the address bar and it autocompletes to news.ycombinator.com. Oh, browser, you know me so well.
  - muxator 4y ago
    Yeah, I understand. But, really, there's no need for any AI in that.
- HervalFreire 4y ago
  Of course we hit many technological limits long ago. Most miracle technologies have already been discovered. Heck space travel has had zero actual progress other then Elon redoing what we did decades ago more "efficiently". The AI sledge hammer is as good as we are going to get in paradigm shifts for a while given how we are at the top of an s-curve for development. Additionally we're only really seeing the first decade. When the computer was discovered was it ubiquitous in a decade? No. In fact it was largely a sort of useless academic research project for the longest time.

anon7725 4y ago

Sledge hammer #1 (voice assistants, AI chips in phones) didn’t cause unemployment. It was at the level of new features and capabilities. Sledge hammer #2 is aimed squarely at “white collar” work without much in the way of bounds to its capabilities.

Jeff_Brown 4y ago
We can't trust it. That's a pretty hard bound.
- HervalFreire 4y ago
  For article writing verification is quick, I don't need to worry about a "bug" in the generated article as I do with code. For art, verification is instant, a bad generation is rejected. Trust is only a bound for certain areas, and this bound is eroding.
- anon7725 4y ago
  Consider that a lot of useful work involves summarization (search++). “What work has gone on for supply chain improvement in our European operations this year?” - this is the kind of question that is easy to ask in natural language but might take someone a week of searching, messaging, etc to assemble. An LLM with access to all of the code, documents, chats, etc could just give an answer with citations. We are not betting $1B on the answer that it gives, but it has saved us 1 week of work and allows us to move on to the next step in the project. There are plenty of tasks like this which are highly valuable yet don’t require high trust. The one-shot “what is the airspeed of a coconut-laden swallow” type questions are actually fairly rare.
- coldtea 4y ago
  We can't trust the police, politicians, or businesses either, but we're still on their hands...
  - Jeff_Brown 4y ago
    Fair. It's always a question of how much. If someday we can trust AI more than those groups (to do the kinds of things they do), that will be amazing.
- Izkata 4y ago
  There was an episode in the original Kino's Travels anime where in one country, where a computer ran everything, humans still had jobs - their work was basically just verification that the computer was correct.

coldtea 4y ago

>What they said 10 years ago was correct. It did hit society like a sledge hammer. Machine learning basically took over the AI space and penetrated the consumer space with applications that were all but impossible in the previous decade. There's AI chips in smart phones now. And still almost all of these applications are not really impactful or that important compared to actually society and life changing developments like the steam engine, electricity, electromagnetic transmission, cars, computers themselves and the internet. Just more of the same, with added spice. In the sense that we could revert to 10 years ago, and nothing would be much different or missed. Whereas going back without electricity or cars would be a totally different thing! I think LLMs can be far more impactful than anything else hyped in machine learning of the past 10 years...

civilized 4y ago
I feel like the only form of "AI" I regularly benefit from is when I type "n" in the address bar and it autocompletes to news.ycombinator.com. Oh, browser, you know me so well.
- muxator 4y ago
  Yeah, I understand. But, really, there's no need for any AI in that.
HervalFreire 4y ago
Of course we hit many technological limits long ago. Most miracle technologies have already been discovered. Heck space travel has had zero actual progress other then Elon redoing what we did decades ago more "efficiently". The AI sledge hammer is as good as we are going to get in paradigm shifts for a while given how we are at the top of an s-curve for development. Additionally we're only really seeing the first decade. When the computer was discovered was it ubiquitous in a decade? No. In fact it was largely a sort of useless academic research project for the longest time.