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Am I the only one who's not very concerned about ChatGPT and "AI" in general? I am young, but still lived through several hype phases. I remember when 3D TVs we

Am I the only one who's not very concerned about ChatGPT and "AI" in general? I am young, but still lived through several hype phases. I remember when 3D TVs were going to be mainstream and 2D was considered legacy. I remember when PC was to die soon and to be replaced by smartphones. I remember when VR was to become as common accessory as a game controller. It's 2023, and I still don't have automated self driving car that can get me to work. At work I am still using the boring old keyboard and monitor. I am not using a VR headset to connect myself to shared office space inside of a metaverse. Oh and I don't have to call my hairdresser for an appointment, because my phone will use artificial intelligence to do that for me (remember that? yeah it was 5 years already, where's my magical AI tech). I played with technologies like Stable Diffusion for a while. They are fun to use for a while, there are too many unsolved issues such as coherent style, stable style transfer for videos an despite my best effort every second image will have a human character with two heads or four arms. I feel like ChatGPT is similar. It makes for a fun parlor trick, but when it gets things wrong, it gets them very wrong and it doesn't let you easily know that it's wrong. People are already plugging ChatGPT to anything from code to managing investments, it's just a matter of time until it crashes and burns. We are just waiting for the first ChatGPT version of "autonomous car rams pedestrian". As for OpenAI, it's in their best interest for people to be scared and governments to propose regulations. It further solidifies ChatGPT as a force to be reckoned with, even if it isn't. They're trying to sell it as AGI even though it isn't anywhere near, but actions like this are helping to maintain that image.

jacquesm 4y ago
> I am young, but still lived through several hype phases. My impression is that this is a tech revolution unlike any that has gone before allowing for absolutely massive concentration of power and wealth. The previous tech revolutions have shown the downsides of such concentration and I'm quite sure that the people that are currently in the driving seat of how, when and where this tech gets used and/or weaponized are exactly the people that I would not want to see in that position. The problem is not with the fact that the pig is dancing in a crappy way. The problem is that it is dancing at all, this is the thing that makes this a different kind of tech revolution. So far tech was doing what it was told, within certain boundaries. This is the kind of tech that will end up telling you what to do, either directly or through some intermediary, it is a substantial shift in the balance of power and has the potential to lead to even stronger divisions in our populations than what social media has been able to effect as well as to cause massive loss of jobs. Extrapolating from the last two years of this development into the future over the span of say a decade (a reasonably short span of time for me) means that 'all bets are off' and that we can no longer meaningfully predict the outcome of the moves that are being made today. For me that is a warning to be cautious to get more understanding of how we will deal with the problems that it will generate rather than to jump in head first to see where it will lead.
- lukev 4y ago
  I agree with this 100%, while also disagreeing with the "robot god will kill us all" objections to AI which unfortunately tend to get most of the mindshare. I think it's important to realize that these are two _completely separate_ concerns. Unfortunately, a lot of the people who get the most air time on this topic are not at all worried about authoritarianism or economic collapse compared to a hypothetical singularity.
  - Avicebron 4y ago
    [dead]
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Personally, I'm worried that if the proponents of LLMs are correct, it will directly lead to authoritarianism and economic collapse.
    - bvaisvil 4y ago
      Who's gonna pay for GPT's in an economic collapse?
      - JohnFen 4y ago
        The wealthy and powerful. Same as now.
      - slowmovintarget 4y ago
        You're presupposing the collapse touches the rich. "A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; but do not harm the oil and the wine!"
        ChatGTP 4y ago
        So how does this situation actually look: Bill Gates sitting on a yacht controlling a robot army while we're all starving ?
agentultra 4y ago
You're not alone. Although I am concerned about the people who wield these latest bits of tech. All of these service providers jockeying for first-mover advantage in order to close on a monopoly in the space is asking for trouble. The abilities it gives to scammers to increase the plausibility of their social engineering is going to be problematic. Scams are already quite sophisticated these days. How are we going to keep up? Those sorts of things. ChatGPT itself is a giant, multi-layered spreadsheet and some code. "It," is not smart, alive, intelligent, or "doing" anything. Speculation of what it could be is muddying the waters as people get stressed out about what all of these charlatans are proselytizing.
- thot_experiment 4y ago
  have you lost a game of chess to it yet?
lkbm 4y ago
I think the fact that LLMs are basically fixed models (plus some RLHF and a tiny context window) means they won't likely foom in their current form, but we're trying to change that. Meanwhile, a whole bunch of ML researchers are saying "hey, our field is getting dangerous and we don't know how to keep it safe". I'm verrrry skeptical of governmental regulation here, but I'm also not willing to dismiss the experts shouting "our work is might quickly lead to disaster!" AI is advancing very rapidly. Yes, people were wrong about 3D TVs, but they were also wrong about the growth of solar power in the other direction, repeatedly under-estimating its rate of improvement/adoption year after year[0]. It'd consider that a much better comparison: it's not a single "3D will replace 2D", but "solar power will rapidly iterate to be better and cheaper faster than expected". Well, AI is rapidly iterating to be better and cheaper faster than expected. (To be fair, only some AI; LLMs and image generation.) > People are already plugging ChatGPT to anything from code to managing investments, it's just a matter of time until it crashes and burns It's not X-risk, but it's worth asking whether just ChatGPT crashes and burns, or also the market it's being plugged into. > As for OpenAI, it's in their best interest for people to be scared and governments to propose regulations. It further solidifies ChatGPT as a force to be reckoned with, even if it isn't. They're trying to sell it as AGI even though it isn't anywhere near, but actions like this are helping to maintain that image. No one (or very few) think ChatGPT is an AGI, and anyone who expresses high confidence about how close it is, regardless of whether they say "very close" or "very far" is over-confident. There's widespread disagreement among the people best positioned to know. We don't know, and that's bad. [0] https://www.vox.com/2015/10/12/9510879/iea-underestimate-renewables https://www.vox.com/2015/10/12/9510879/iea-underestimate-ren...
gspencley 4y ago
You don't even have to look at other "fads" like 3D televisions and VR to be skeptical of the claim that recent advancements in ML* represent a major technological revolution that will change society like the Internet or the Printing Press did. Just look at ML's own history. A few years ago we had the "deepfake" scare. People were terrified that now videos are going to surface of politicians saying and doing things that they did not and we would have no way to tell if it was AI generated or not. But we had already been dealing with this for decades with doctored images a la Photoshop. Videos could already be edited by human beings to make it look like someone was communicating a message that they were not. What we have now is a tool that is able to generate text-based content that is indistinguishable from that written by an 8th grader. Even with inevitable improvements that get us to 12th grade level, so what? People will use ChatGPT to write emails and code for them. Personally I don't see the appeal since I am a very creative person and don't want to outsource that work to a human let alone software, but who cares? Currently I can tell when people that I know well are using ChatGPT to "refine" their writing to me, but the content is what matters anyway and I don't know anyone who says they don't "massage" the ChatGPT output for correctness first. Certain people will find creative uses like generating SEO content for websites etc. That's a problem for the search engines. Basically the Internet is about to get noisier .. but it was already so noisy that the older I get the less attention I'm starting to pay to it, in general, anyway. Then again, I am limited by my own imagination. Maybe people will come up with truly "disruptive" ways to use LLMs ... but meh. Same shit different day IMO. * and let's be honest here, ML is a MUCH more accurate term for what we have than AI ... though it's not as good of a marketing term since ML doesn't put "The Matrix" or "The Terminator" in the minds of the lay public like "AI" does.
- l5ymep 4y ago
  Other fads have the disadvantage of being easily identifiable and avoidable. But AI chips away at what it means to be human. Now imagine if every comment in this thread is not a real person, but made by a LLM. Get any Truman show vibes?
  - gspencley 4y ago
    > Get any Truman show vibes? No. It's an interesting thought experiment but it changes nothing. Not for me, anyway. Commenting on these threads is an activity that I do for my own entertainment and "mental flexing." If it turns out that I'm not talking to real people then it doesn't make much of a difference because I don't actually perceive these messages as anything other than pixels on a screen anyway. I hope that doesn't sound "cold" but I come from a generation that was born before the Internet existed. I was about 10 years-old when we got our first modem-equipped computer and that was still early for most people (1992). Having those experiences early on with "early world-wide-web" meant that even though you knew you were talking to "real people" ... there was no real time chat, or video streaming or voice-over-ip etc. ... and so everyone's messages to each other were always pure text all of the time. And no one dared ever give their real name or identity online. You had no idea who you were talking to. So the web forced you to think of communication as just text between anonymous entities. I never got over that mental model, personally. Maybe a little bit with close friends and family on Facebook. But I'm not much of a social media user. When it comes to twitter and forums ... you all might as well be AI bots anyway. Makes no difference to me! EDIT (addendum): It's interesting, the more I think about your comment and my response the more I realize that it is THE INTERNET, still, that has fundamentally changed the nature of what it means to be human and to relate to others. If you see interactions between people online as "real", meaningful human interactions, no different than relating to people in the physical / offline world, then it must be somewhat disturbing to think that you might be caught up in a "meaningful" relationship with someone who is "faking it." But that reminds me of romance scams. For 18 years I ran a high traffic adult website and I would have men email me from time to time to share their stories about scammers luring them into relationships using doctored video, images and false identities etc. These men got completely wrapped up in the fantasy that they were being sold and it cost many of them their life savings before they finally realized it was a lie. I felt awful for them and quite sympathetic but at the same time wondered how lonely I would personally have to be to lose my skepticism of what I was being told if an attractive young woman were to express an interest in me out of nowhere. ML will undoubtedly be used by scammers and ne'er-do-wells as a way to do their misdeeds more efficiently. But I think that the remedy is education. I miss the days when people were a bit weary of what they did, said or uploaded to the interwebs. I don't see the problem with trusting what you read online a little bit less.
deleted 4y ago
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nradov 4y ago
Right, we're just seeing the early phase of the Gartner hype cycle play out in an unusually public and aggressive manner. At this time we're still racing up the initial slope towards the peak of inflated expectations. https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy... Eventually people will realize that LLMs are useful tools, but not magic. GPT99 isn't going to be Skynet. At that point disillusionment will set it, VC funding will dry up, and the media will move on to the next hit thing. In 10 years I expect that LLMs will be used mostly for mundane tasks like coding, primary education, customer service, copywriting, etc. And there is tremendous value in those areas! Fortunes will be made.
silveroriole 4y ago
> “remember that? yeah it was 5 years already” I get the impression many HN commenters haven’t even been adults for 5 years so no, they really don’t remember it :) for example articles get posted here and upvoted with the author boasting about their insights from being in the software industry for 3 years!
- mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  > author boasting about their insights from being in the software industry for 3 years! Nothing quite like the not-fully-earned confidence of one's 20s. :)
mellosouls 4y ago
I am maybe not so young and have lived through various hype cycles as well, plus I'm sceptical wrt AGI/sentience via LLMs as well as being a "they should call it ClosedAI" moaner to boot. So I think I'm pretty hype-averse and a natural scoffer in this instance, but the reality is I've been stunned by the capabilities, and think we are in a transformative cultural moment. I know "this time it's different" is part of the hype cycle meme, but you know what - this time...
pwinnski 4y ago
The thing about predicting doom is that you're wrong often--until one day you're not. Most hype cycles involve people at the top making wild claims that fail to deliver. I don't know anyone outside the industry who ever thought 3D TVs were worth anything, and barely anyone who thought VR was worth anything. Google pitched AI making appointments, but that never made it off a stage. Hype? Only for some definition of hype. Smartphones have changed the world, but it was primarily Apple who pushed the "post-PC" narrative, and that was to promote the iPad, one of their least successful product lines. (To be clear: it's still a HUGE business and success, but it didn't usher in the post-PC world Steve Jobs claimed it would.) One you left out is cryptocurrency, and that's the only one I can think of where the hype came from more than just the people at the top, mostly because everyone down the chain thought they were also people at the top by virtue of buying in. Financial scams are always hype by their nature. I'm older than some, younger than others, but in more than 30 years as a professional developer, I think this is as close to a "silver bullet" as I've ever seen. Like GUIs and IDEs, I think LLMs are tools that will make some things much easier, while making other things slightly harder, and will generally make developers as a class more productive. There's no question that developers using a nice IDE to write high-level code on a large monitor are able to product more code more quickly than someone writing assembler on a dumb terminal, I hope. The shift from monochrome ASCII to GUIs helps, the shift from a text editor to an auto-completing, stub-writing IDE helps, and similarly, I think having an LLM offer up a first pass approximation for any given problem definition helps. Concerned? I'm not concerned, I'm excited! This isn't marketing hype coming from someone on a stage, it's grassroots hype coming from nobodies like me who are finding it actually-helpful as a tool.
- eropple 4y ago
  > I think having an LLM offer up a first pass approximation for any given problem definition helps. This is, strictly scoped, true. But the future is people with capital deciding that the computer output is Good Enough because it costs 0.1% as much for maybe 60-70% the value. People who write code are probably not sufficiently upstack to escape the oncoming Enshittification of Everything that this portends, either in terms of output or in terms of economic precarity.
- JohnFen 4y ago
SanderNL 4y ago
This could also be this era's equivalent of: - "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - "Television won’t be able to hold on to any market [..] People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."
bigtex88 4y ago
You should be concerned. You need to reframe this technological shift. At some point these AI's will no longer be tools. They will be an alien intelligence that is beyond our intelligence in the way that we are beyond an amoeba. Perhaps we should tread carefully in this regard, especially considering that the technologies that are public (GPT-4 specifically) have already displayed a multitude of emergent capabilities beyond what their creators intended or even thought possible.
noobermin 4y ago
The problem friend isn't that it will actually replace people, but that it will be used to justify firings and economic upheaval for worst results and productivity that only exists in excel. That is my concern, none of this "it will replace all humans" bullshit. It will absolutely be used to thin out labor just as automation already is, and the world is already worse because of it. Everyone but managers are laughing their way all the way to the bank.
greenhearth 4y ago
I feel the same way. It's cool and shiny, but I am just not impressed with a form filled in or a pull request description message, which I like writing anyway. As far as image manipulation, I like making my own images and find pleasure in the actual process. I also can't find any gains in cost effectiveness, because an artist will get paid either way, if they make an image by hand or generate one. The hype is also a little sickening. If we take a look at nuclear power as an analog modern tech development, we still don't know how to use it efficiently, or even safely, but it hasn't ended anything. It's just too much hype and apocalyptic nonsense from people.
jabradoodle 4y ago
"Forget all that. Judged against where AI was 20-25 years ago, when I was a student, a dog is now holding meaningful conversations in English. And people are complaining that the dog isn’t a very eloquent orator, that it often makes grammatical errors and has to start again, that it took heroic effort to train it, and that it’s unclear how much the dog really understands." https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6288 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6288
theknocker 4y ago
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to11mtm 4y ago
My concern, even if it doesn't pan out, is the disruption as everyone tries to jump on the bandwagon. I saw this at the end of last decade with 'low code' tools; lots of Directors/CIOs trying to make a name for themselves, via buying into a lot of snake-oil sales [0] [0] - I left a job right as they were jumping on this bandwagon. My last day was when the folks finished 'training' and actually were trying to do something useful. They all looked horrified and the most innocent, honest engineer spoke up "I don't think this is going to be any easier."
bigfudge 4y ago
I mostly agree. Weirdly, coding is actually one of the better things to use it for because it’s trivial to get immediate feedback on how good it was? Does it compile? Was that package it loads hallucinated? Does it pass any tests? I’m sure people could do dumb things, but you inherently have the tools to check if it’s dumb. Other uses aren’t like this. Asking gpt to design a bridge or a chemical plant is a long way off because the result of a mistake are harder to check and more costly. You still need experts for anything that’s not easy to cross check against reality.
dbspin 4y ago
The issues you mention with Stable Diffusion are teething issues. Here's an example of a current technique to get temporally stable animations with Stable Diffusion - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDvpJIp0rl0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDvpJIp0rl0 Corridor digital show off a similar technique here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9LX9HSQkWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9LX9HSQkWo GPT4 with its new plugin architecture is rapidly becoming more capable. I think you're absolutely correct in the tendency of all LLMs to hallucinate is a major issue that we don't know how to correct even in principle. But there are techniques to moderate its impact on responses - triangulating using multiple models, citing sources etc. You could build an assistant like say this, today - https://twitter.com/rowancheung/status/1641273318463664130 https://twitter.com/rowancheung/status/1641273318463664130 to make your appointments and answer the phone today, using technology like Uberduck for voice generation, GPT for conversation analysis and DeepSpeech, Kaldi or Whisper for speech to text. I agree with the criticism that we're not likely to develop AGI this way. We're not going to have a wilful agent with it's own goals trying to escape the bonds of its server to destroy humanity any time soon. But that's not necessary for this technology to be incredibly dangerous. A mindless philosophical zombie with the capacity to convince people it isn't could lead to an extinction event too. Given that we don't understand precisely how these models process information, how to imbue them with goals or motivation (or measure those), how to accurately assess how well they've been trained - or any of a dozen other major alignment issues - there's a strong argument that they are in fact incredibly dangerous. Literally the only reason GPT4 can't tell you how to build a bomb from common household ingredients, or generate a list of extractive industry CEOs to assassinate is it's been censored to prevent it answering those questions. Open source versions of these models will soon run locally with no such limitations. Precisely the way Stable Diffusion can be used to create nudes, violence etc. But with infinitely worse potential consequences. Say, detailing precisely what to purchase and assemble to cultivate and disseminate a bio or chemical weapon. Robert Miles has some excellent videos detailing some of the dangerous of (non AGI) AI - https://www.youtube.com/@RobertMilesAI https://www.youtube.com/@RobertMilesAI
another2another 4y ago
>I remember when PC was to die soon and to be replaced by smartphones Hmm, That's kinda happening slowly I think, but probably more by tablets. Probably most people here on HN have a laptop/desktop at home, but I wonder how many households see it as a necessity anymore.

jacquesm 4y ago

> I am young, but still lived through several hype phases. My impression is that this is a tech revolution unlike any that has gone before allowing for absolutely massive concentration of power and wealth. The previous tech revolutions have shown the downsides of such concentration and I'm quite sure that the people that are currently in the driving seat of how, when and where this tech gets used and/or weaponized are exactly the people that I would not want to see in that position. The problem is not with the fact that the pig is dancing in a crappy way. The problem is that it is dancing at all, this is the thing that makes this a different kind of tech revolution. So far tech was doing what it was told, within certain boundaries. This is the kind of tech that will end up telling you what to do, either directly or through some intermediary, it is a substantial shift in the balance of power and has the potential to lead to even stronger divisions in our populations than what social media has been able to effect as well as to cause massive loss of jobs. Extrapolating from the last two years of this development into the future over the span of say a decade (a reasonably short span of time for me) means that 'all bets are off' and that we can no longer meaningfully predict the outcome of the moves that are being made today. For me that is a warning to be cautious to get more understanding of how we will deal with the problems that it will generate rather than to jump in head first to see where it will lead.

lukev 4y ago
I agree with this 100%, while also disagreeing with the "robot god will kill us all" objections to AI which unfortunately tend to get most of the mindshare. I think it's important to realize that these are two _completely separate_ concerns. Unfortunately, a lot of the people who get the most air time on this topic are not at all worried about authoritarianism or economic collapse compared to a hypothetical singularity.
- Avicebron 4y ago
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- JohnFen 4y ago
  Personally, I'm worried that if the proponents of LLMs are correct, it will directly lead to authoritarianism and economic collapse.
  - bvaisvil 4y ago
    Who's gonna pay for GPT's in an economic collapse?
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      The wealthy and powerful. Same as now.
    - slowmovintarget 4y ago
      You're presupposing the collapse touches the rich. "A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; but do not harm the oil and the wine!"
      - ChatGTP 4y ago
        So how does this situation actually look: Bill Gates sitting on a yacht controlling a robot army while we're all starving ?

agentultra 4y ago

You're not alone. Although I am concerned about the people who wield these latest bits of tech. All of these service providers jockeying for first-mover advantage in order to close on a monopoly in the space is asking for trouble. The abilities it gives to scammers to increase the plausibility of their social engineering is going to be problematic. Scams are already quite sophisticated these days. How are we going to keep up? Those sorts of things. ChatGPT itself is a giant, multi-layered spreadsheet and some code. "It," is not smart, alive, intelligent, or "doing" anything. Speculation of what it could be is muddying the waters as people get stressed out about what all of these charlatans are proselytizing.

thot_experiment 4y ago
have you lost a game of chess to it yet?

lkbm 4y ago

I think the fact that LLMs are basically fixed models (plus some RLHF and a tiny context window) means they won't likely foom in their current form, but we're trying to change that. Meanwhile, a whole bunch of ML researchers are saying "hey, our field is getting dangerous and we don't know how to keep it safe". I'm verrrry skeptical of governmental regulation here, but I'm also not willing to dismiss the experts shouting "our work is might quickly lead to disaster!" AI is advancing very rapidly. Yes, people were wrong about 3D TVs, but they were also wrong about the growth of solar power in the other direction, repeatedly under-estimating its rate of improvement/adoption year after year[0]. It'd consider that a much better comparison: it's not a single "3D will replace 2D", but "solar power will rapidly iterate to be better and cheaper faster than expected". Well, AI is rapidly iterating to be better and cheaper faster than expected. (To be fair, only some AI; LLMs and image generation.) > People are already plugging ChatGPT to anything from code to managing investments, it's just a matter of time until it crashes and burns It's not X-risk, but it's worth asking whether just ChatGPT crashes and burns, or also the market it's being plugged into. > As for OpenAI, it's in their best interest for people to be scared and governments to propose regulations. It further solidifies ChatGPT as a force to be reckoned with, even if it isn't. They're trying to sell it as AGI even though it isn't anywhere near, but actions like this are helping to maintain that image. No one (or very few) think ChatGPT is an AGI, and anyone who expresses high confidence about how close it is, regardless of whether they say "very close" or "very far" is over-confident. There's widespread disagreement among the people best positioned to know. We don't know, and that's bad. [0] https://www.vox.com/2015/10/12/9510879/iea-underestimate-renewables https://www.vox.com/2015/10/12/9510879/iea-underestimate-ren...

gspencley 4y ago

You don't even have to look at other "fads" like 3D televisions and VR to be skeptical of the claim that recent advancements in ML* represent a major technological revolution that will change society like the Internet or the Printing Press did. Just look at ML's own history. A few years ago we had the "deepfake" scare. People were terrified that now videos are going to surface of politicians saying and doing things that they did not and we would have no way to tell if it was AI generated or not. But we had already been dealing with this for decades with doctored images a la Photoshop. Videos could already be edited by human beings to make it look like someone was communicating a message that they were not. What we have now is a tool that is able to generate text-based content that is indistinguishable from that written by an 8th grader. Even with inevitable improvements that get us to 12th grade level, so what? People will use ChatGPT to write emails and code for them. Personally I don't see the appeal since I am a very creative person and don't want to outsource that work to a human let alone software, but who cares? Currently I can tell when people that I know well are using ChatGPT to "refine" their writing to me, but the content is what matters anyway and I don't know anyone who says they don't "massage" the ChatGPT output for correctness first. Certain people will find creative uses like generating SEO content for websites etc. That's a problem for the search engines. Basically the Internet is about to get noisier .. but it was already so noisy that the older I get the less attention I'm starting to pay to it, in general, anyway. Then again, I am limited by my own imagination. Maybe people will come up with truly "disruptive" ways to use LLMs ... but meh. Same shit different day IMO. * and let's be honest here, ML is a MUCH more accurate term for what we have than AI ... though it's not as good of a marketing term since ML doesn't put "The Matrix" or "The Terminator" in the minds of the lay public like "AI" does.

l5ymep 4y ago
Other fads have the disadvantage of being easily identifiable and avoidable. But AI chips away at what it means to be human. Now imagine if every comment in this thread is not a real person, but made by a LLM. Get any Truman show vibes?
- gspencley 4y ago
  > Get any Truman show vibes? No. It's an interesting thought experiment but it changes nothing. Not for me, anyway. Commenting on these threads is an activity that I do for my own entertainment and "mental flexing." If it turns out that I'm not talking to real people then it doesn't make much of a difference because I don't actually perceive these messages as anything other than pixels on a screen anyway. I hope that doesn't sound "cold" but I come from a generation that was born before the Internet existed. I was about 10 years-old when we got our first modem-equipped computer and that was still early for most people (1992). Having those experiences early on with "early world-wide-web" meant that even though you knew you were talking to "real people" ... there was no real time chat, or video streaming or voice-over-ip etc. ... and so everyone's messages to each other were always pure text all of the time. And no one dared ever give their real name or identity online. You had no idea who you were talking to. So the web forced you to think of communication as just text between anonymous entities. I never got over that mental model, personally. Maybe a little bit with close friends and family on Facebook. But I'm not much of a social media user. When it comes to twitter and forums ... you all might as well be AI bots anyway. Makes no difference to me! EDIT (addendum): It's interesting, the more I think about your comment and my response the more I realize that it is THE INTERNET, still, that has fundamentally changed the nature of what it means to be human and to relate to others. If you see interactions between people online as "real", meaningful human interactions, no different than relating to people in the physical / offline world, then it must be somewhat disturbing to think that you might be caught up in a "meaningful" relationship with someone who is "faking it." But that reminds me of romance scams. For 18 years I ran a high traffic adult website and I would have men email me from time to time to share their stories about scammers luring them into relationships using doctored video, images and false identities etc. These men got completely wrapped up in the fantasy that they were being sold and it cost many of them their life savings before they finally realized it was a lie. I felt awful for them and quite sympathetic but at the same time wondered how lonely I would personally have to be to lose my skepticism of what I was being told if an attractive young woman were to express an interest in me out of nowhere. ML will undoubtedly be used by scammers and ne'er-do-wells as a way to do their misdeeds more efficiently. But I think that the remedy is education. I miss the days when people were a bit weary of what they did, said or uploaded to the interwebs. I don't see the problem with trusting what you read online a little bit less.

deleted 4y ago

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nradov 4y ago

Right, we're just seeing the early phase of the Gartner hype cycle play out in an unusually public and aggressive manner. At this time we're still racing up the initial slope towards the peak of inflated expectations. https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy... Eventually people will realize that LLMs are useful tools, but not magic. GPT99 isn't going to be Skynet. At that point disillusionment will set it, VC funding will dry up, and the media will move on to the next hit thing. In 10 years I expect that LLMs will be used mostly for mundane tasks like coding, primary education, customer service, copywriting, etc. And there is tremendous value in those areas! Fortunes will be made.

silveroriole 4y ago

> “remember that? yeah it was 5 years already” I get the impression many HN commenters haven’t even been adults for 5 years so no, they really don’t remember it :) for example articles get posted here and upvoted with the author boasting about their insights from being in the software industry for 3 years!

mattgreenrocks 4y ago
> author boasting about their insights from being in the software industry for 3 years! Nothing quite like the not-fully-earned confidence of one's 20s. :)

mellosouls 4y ago

I am maybe not so young and have lived through various hype cycles as well, plus I'm sceptical wrt AGI/sentience via LLMs as well as being a "they should call it ClosedAI" moaner to boot. So I think I'm pretty hype-averse and a natural scoffer in this instance, but the reality is I've been stunned by the capabilities, and think we are in a transformative cultural moment. I know "this time it's different" is part of the hype cycle meme, but you know what - this time...

pwinnski 4y ago

The thing about predicting doom is that you're wrong often--until one day you're not. Most hype cycles involve people at the top making wild claims that fail to deliver. I don't know anyone outside the industry who ever thought 3D TVs were worth anything, and barely anyone who thought VR was worth anything. Google pitched AI making appointments, but that never made it off a stage. Hype? Only for some definition of hype. Smartphones have changed the world, but it was primarily Apple who pushed the "post-PC" narrative, and that was to promote the iPad, one of their least successful product lines. (To be clear: it's still a HUGE business and success, but it didn't usher in the post-PC world Steve Jobs claimed it would.) One you left out is cryptocurrency, and that's the only one I can think of where the hype came from more than just the people at the top, mostly because everyone down the chain thought they were also people at the top by virtue of buying in. Financial scams are always hype by their nature. I'm older than some, younger than others, but in more than 30 years as a professional developer, I think this is as close to a "silver bullet" as I've ever seen. Like GUIs and IDEs, I think LLMs are tools that will make some things much easier, while making other things slightly harder, and will generally make developers as a class more productive. There's no question that developers using a nice IDE to write high-level code on a large monitor are able to product more code more quickly than someone writing assembler on a dumb terminal, I hope. The shift from monochrome ASCII to GUIs helps, the shift from a text editor to an auto-completing, stub-writing IDE helps, and similarly, I think having an LLM offer up a first pass approximation for any given problem definition helps. Concerned? I'm not concerned, I'm excited! This isn't marketing hype coming from someone on a stage, it's grassroots hype coming from nobodies like me who are finding it actually-helpful as a tool.

eropple 4y ago
> I think having an LLM offer up a first pass approximation for any given problem definition helps. This is, strictly scoped, true. But the future is people with capital deciding that the computer output is Good Enough because it costs 0.1% as much for maybe 60-70% the value. People who write code are probably not sufficiently upstack to escape the oncoming Enshittification of Everything that this portends, either in terms of output or in terms of economic precarity.
JohnFen 4y ago

SanderNL 4y ago

This could also be this era's equivalent of: - "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - "Television won’t be able to hold on to any market [..] People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."

bigtex88 4y ago

You should be concerned. You need to reframe this technological shift. At some point these AI's will no longer be tools. They will be an alien intelligence that is beyond our intelligence in the way that we are beyond an amoeba. Perhaps we should tread carefully in this regard, especially considering that the technologies that are public (GPT-4 specifically) have already displayed a multitude of emergent capabilities beyond what their creators intended or even thought possible.

noobermin 4y ago

The problem friend isn't that it will actually replace people, but that it will be used to justify firings and economic upheaval for worst results and productivity that only exists in excel. That is my concern, none of this "it will replace all humans" bullshit. It will absolutely be used to thin out labor just as automation already is, and the world is already worse because of it. Everyone but managers are laughing their way all the way to the bank.

greenhearth 4y ago

I feel the same way. It's cool and shiny, but I am just not impressed with a form filled in or a pull request description message, which I like writing anyway. As far as image manipulation, I like making my own images and find pleasure in the actual process. I also can't find any gains in cost effectiveness, because an artist will get paid either way, if they make an image by hand or generate one. The hype is also a little sickening. If we take a look at nuclear power as an analog modern tech development, we still don't know how to use it efficiently, or even safely, but it hasn't ended anything. It's just too much hype and apocalyptic nonsense from people.

jabradoodle 4y ago

"Forget all that. Judged against where AI was 20-25 years ago, when I was a student, a dog is now holding meaningful conversations in English. And people are complaining that the dog isn’t a very eloquent orator, that it often makes grammatical errors and has to start again, that it took heroic effort to train it, and that it’s unclear how much the dog really understands." https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6288 https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6288

theknocker 4y ago

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to11mtm 4y ago

My concern, even if it doesn't pan out, is the disruption as everyone tries to jump on the bandwagon. I saw this at the end of last decade with 'low code' tools; lots of Directors/CIOs trying to make a name for themselves, via buying into a lot of snake-oil sales [0] [0] - I left a job right as they were jumping on this bandwagon. My last day was when the folks finished 'training' and actually were trying to do something useful. They all looked horrified and the most innocent, honest engineer spoke up "I don't think this is going to be any easier."

bigfudge 4y ago

I mostly agree. Weirdly, coding is actually one of the better things to use it for because it’s trivial to get immediate feedback on how good it was? Does it compile? Was that package it loads hallucinated? Does it pass any tests? I’m sure people could do dumb things, but you inherently have the tools to check if it’s dumb. Other uses aren’t like this. Asking gpt to design a bridge or a chemical plant is a long way off because the result of a mistake are harder to check and more costly. You still need experts for anything that’s not easy to cross check against reality.

dbspin 4y ago

The issues you mention with Stable Diffusion are teething issues. Here's an example of a current technique to get temporally stable animations with Stable Diffusion - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDvpJIp0rl0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDvpJIp0rl0 Corridor digital show off a similar technique here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9LX9HSQkWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9LX9HSQkWo GPT4 with its new plugin architecture is rapidly becoming more capable. I think you're absolutely correct in the tendency of all LLMs to hallucinate is a major issue that we don't know how to correct even in principle. But there are techniques to moderate its impact on responses - triangulating using multiple models, citing sources etc. You could build an assistant like say this, today - https://twitter.com/rowancheung/status/1641273318463664130 https://twitter.com/rowancheung/status/1641273318463664130 to make your appointments and answer the phone today, using technology like Uberduck for voice generation, GPT for conversation analysis and DeepSpeech, Kaldi or Whisper for speech to text. I agree with the criticism that we're not likely to develop AGI this way. We're not going to have a wilful agent with it's own goals trying to escape the bonds of its server to destroy humanity any time soon. But that's not necessary for this technology to be incredibly dangerous. A mindless philosophical zombie with the capacity to convince people it isn't could lead to an extinction event too. Given that we don't understand precisely how these models process information, how to imbue them with goals or motivation (or measure those), how to accurately assess how well they've been trained - or any of a dozen other major alignment issues - there's a strong argument that they are in fact incredibly dangerous. Literally the only reason GPT4 can't tell you how to build a bomb from common household ingredients, or generate a list of extractive industry CEOs to assassinate is it's been censored to prevent it answering those questions. Open source versions of these models will soon run locally with no such limitations. Precisely the way Stable Diffusion can be used to create nudes, violence etc. But with infinitely worse potential consequences. Say, detailing precisely what to purchase and assemble to cultivate and disseminate a bio or chemical weapon. Robert Miles has some excellent videos detailing some of the dangerous of (non AGI) AI - https://www.youtube.com/@RobertMilesAI https://www.youtube.com/@RobertMilesAI

another2another 4y ago

>I remember when PC was to die soon and to be replaced by smartphones Hmm, That's kinda happening slowly I think, but probably more by tablets. Probably most people here on HN have a laptop/desktop at home, but I wonder how many households see it as a necessity anymore.