9 ms·

I know it's controversial during this incredible AI hype cycle on this site, but as a AI skeptic and increasingly neo-Luddite, I've reduced the amount I spend o

by sph 4y ago

I know it's controversial during this incredible AI hype cycle on this site, but as a AI skeptic and increasingly neo-Luddite, I've reduced the amount I spend on this site by 90% since the start of the year. If only I could add my userscript on my iOS Firefox to just hide any post containing the words "GPT", "AI" or "LLM", but alas, I guess I will have to be productive instead of slacking off reading HN. I honestly miss the Bitcoin hype era, or the short lived Erlang circlejerk that had pg himself put a stop to it. This one does not seem to die down anytime soon, and I'd like to read more criticism of the technology, rather than starry eyed engineers excited to add ChatGPT to their smart fridge and bird feeder. EDIT: Funny. 1 hour ago when I wrote this comment, this post was in 3rd position. Now, with 82 votes and 103 comments, it's nowhere to be found in the first 10 pages. @dang, what's going on?

quiet_light 4y ago
here's an extension I created for this https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-filter/olcgmfffcodkgnpgbhijncgpadkjgedo https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-filter... firefox : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-filter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-f... . no llm filter yet but I can add that too.
- theolivenbaum 4y ago
  Nice! We're wondering if we should build a browser extension based on the "similar stories" model there, if you would be interested in doing something like that happy to have a chat!
  - quiet_light 4y ago
    thanks! yeah absolutely, thats what I had in mind and I was even thinking of using a model to filter out all ai based stories but couldn't figure out if a local embedded model in the extension can do that so I ended up using a regex only. happy to chat , email in profile.
mrleinad 4y ago
You can ask ChatGPT to write you a script that hides those posts for you ;)
jsnell 4y ago
I'm reading that as "no browsers on iOS support sufficiently powerful extensions to filter out individual HN posts by word". Have you checked out any of the HN apps for iOS instead of reading with a browser? I'd expect some of them to include a keyword filtering feature.
csantini 4y ago
I see 3 kind of people, all common on HN: - The luddites: it's just hype. - The doomers: AI will kill us all. - The AI indie hackers: dunno about AI, I'm trying to make money with it. Somehow the intersection is right: AI is not really smart, but it will replace a lot of human activity anyhow.
- mlyle 4y ago
  Yah. I mean, a lot of human activity in employment is not really smart. Anything that you can make into a fairly formulaic job for someone who's not really interested in doing it or improving too much is probably not very intellectually demanding (but perhaps may be a bit demanding in world perception or actuation than current AI/robotics systems). And I believe that is "most jobs."
- aldousd666 4y ago
  You forgot about the rest of us. Developers who are interested in the subject and want to read about the latest developments and techniques. We're actually interested in the computer science.
- Mordisquitos 4y ago
  I would argue that a true luddite towards AI needs a corollary: - The luddites: it's just hype — because I will kill it with fire before it takes over.
- unshavedyak 4y ago
  > Somehow the intersection is right: AI is not really smart, but it will replace a lot of human activity anyhow. Which will really show how much busywork we humans do in a lot of areas. If -- before AI is "smart" -- it can impact humanity.. well, i feel it says more about our current society foundations than it does AI heh.
  - throwaway049 4y ago
    Microsoft is bringing OpenAI into Office 365. I predict no loss of employment in busywork, just a bigger output of boring reports per worker.
toddmorey 4y ago
My gut is that they mean AI generated comments vs AI focused topics. I did see at least one account that was posting a generated comment seconds after each submission posted.
pmoriarty 4y ago
Tags would help here, in that you could use them to filter out what you don't want to see. I've asked many times for HN to allow tagging, but my sense is that it's never going to happen. Another idea is to use a spam filter on an RSS feed of HN articles. I did this decades ago for my personal feed, using bayesean spam filters, and it worked well enough. Finally, you could use an AI to filter for you.
- viraptor 4y ago
  You may enjoy https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs then.
  - sph 4y ago
    I would love an invite. I am not HN famous, but I have been here for a while as my account page can attest.
    - bmurphy1976 4y ago
      Don't they have a chat channel? I thought you could always just hop on the chat and ask for an invite.
Lendal 4y ago
It does feel a bit like Bitcoin hype, in that I know there's something wrong with it but I can't quite put my finger on it or explain it. But this is why it's also likely to last a long time, just like Bitcoin did, because it's so enticing and yet so difficult to articulate exactly what it is that's wrong. I'm at that level where I'm just smart enough to know something is wrong here, but not smart enough to say what that is exactly. I know that I can use ChatGPT for things where it doesn't matter much whether it contains factual inaccuracies. Where all I need is a lead, like the same things I would use Wikipedia for. Where the failure mode definitely doesn't lead to anyone being hurt (or fired). For work where the results matter to someone's career or health, yeah I would avoid it.
- tnel77 4y ago
  I’m sure this is going to make you laugh and/or annoyed, but what about Bitcoin is exactly “wrong?” Curious if after all these years you’ve found the words.
  - roflyear 4y ago
    Well, I wouldn't say "what bitcoin got wrong" but rather "what people who were overly hyping bitcoin got wrong" It hasn't totally played out yet, but it doesn't seem like it is on track to be a currency, and the underlying tech hasn't proven to have a ton of uses beyond crypto currencies. Not trying to straw man here, just trying to honestly reply to your comment.
    - tnel77 4y ago
      That’s fair and I appreciate your response! While I’ve seen things that hint that Bitcoin might be starting to gain traction in high inflation nations commonly located in Africa and South America, we are a long ways out from seeing a Kroger accept Bitcoin. Regardless, crypto bros are the worst and I hate how every bull run we see an avalanche of new coins that all claim to be the solution to all our problems when they are really just a Ponzi scheme. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the only two that I feel are worth investing in long-term, but that’s just me.
mepian 4y ago
[dead]
bmurphy1976 4y ago
I think the difference between those other hype cycles and this one is utility. I found Bitcoin very interesting (Erlang as well, still do) but not very practical in my day-to-day life. Unless I'm going to be hired by a firm that specializes in that tech, they're just not very useful. Nerdy and interesting and fun yes, but I just don't need them in my day-to-day life. On the other hand ChatGPT 3.5 has become immediately useful today. It's already saved multiple hours of time doing nonsense work, or digging around for an answer to that one problem I have. It's succeeded when Stack Overflow, Google, Reddit, and the Official Documentation™ failed me. That's incredible!! And like a car I don't really have to know or care how it works (traditionally I didn't care at all about AI tech). Sure, it's a new skill (like driving) that takes some practice to do safely and effectively, but I don't have to know the details of how it works. Just how to use it. That's why this hype cycle is different, that's why it's not going away. It's useful, and we are collectively figuring out how to use it effectively. We do that through collaboration and communication and HN is one of the key points where ideas are shared. To put a stop on that now would be insanely short sighted. The criticism, post-mortems, retrospectives and "AI is dead" articles will come in time.
- davidw 4y ago
  Yeah, more or less in this boat too. ChatGPT does things. Useful things. "Crypto" has some clever ideas, but always seemed too full of utopians and grifters and people with a solution in search of a problem. I've used Erlang professionally and like the ecosystem very much. I am a bit annoyed with myself for still not having a better understanding of how these LLM's work, because that's important, at the end of the day for evaluating where they are best applied, and where danger lurks. But they are clearly going to be a game changer. Maybe more, maybe less than some people think, but I've seen enough hype cycles to think there is some substance here.
  - loudmax 4y ago
    I feel the same way about not understanding how LLMs work. I've found Hugginface's tutorials a good place to start: https://huggingface.co/course/ https://huggingface.co/course/
DJBunnies 4y ago
Bitcoin hype will return with the next cycle :)
- theolivenbaum 4y ago
  Hopefully to replace the Web3 / Bitcoin cycle https://hn.curiosity.ai/#/trends?terms=Bitcoin;Web3 https://hn.curiosity.ai/#/trends?terms=Bitcoin;Web3
mike_hearn 4y ago
Here's some criticism of AI for you: • VENDOR LOCKIN • It's possible that OpenAI is managing to establish a permanent competitive edge and will be the next Google. There is/was a lot of rather handwavy assumptions about open source models being competitive thanks to Stability AI and the Facebook leak, and last time I raised red flags about this on HN I got dunked on. But right now it looks more likely that LLMs are the new search engines and there won't be any competitive implementations that are both legal and that you can run yourself. It'll be APIs all the way, just like with web search engines. Also, embeddings are model/vendor specific and expensive to compute. If you calculate 10 million embeddings using OpenAI it's going to be expensive to recalculate them all with another vendor. • UNCLEAR PRICING • It seems likely that OpenAI is either selling at below cost, or is at best break-even on compute. It's very unclear right now if prices are going to rise, fall or remain where they are and in fact AI prices have done all these things in just a few months. That makes it difficult to know if it's an acceptable business risk to deeply incorporate AI into your workflow. • HUMAN BOTTLENECKS • A lot of AI use cases that sound initially compelling actually bottleneck on human review, because it's too risky to put AI output straight into production. Some people don't care hence the wave of amusing "As an AI language model" spam, but it shows what can go wrong if you skip reviews. • FACTUALITY • Obvious, but after having studied this more and listened to a talk by one of the OpenAI team I think this will actually go away as a problem in the semi-near term future. • INTEGRATION COMPLEXITY • The limited LLM context window size means a lot of tricky workarounds are required for many use cases, which increases implementation complexity. • TESTING DIFFICULTY • LLMs aren't deterministic, so it's a testing nightmare. You never know when the LLM will just do something unexpected that breaks your use case or integration. • BUSINESS UNCERTAINTY • There's genuinely a ton of potential, the tech deserves the hype. But it can be hard to capitalize because so many people are trying to do things all at once, so where do you go that you aren't immediately drowned in VC-flush competition? And many ideas may be more naturally done as features of existing products, so if the vendor isn't doing them, should you wait or should you try developing something yourself and risk obsolesence? The pricing uncertainty compounds that, of course.
- chongli 4y ago
  after having studied this more and listened to a talk by one of the OpenAI team I think this will actually go away as a problem in the semi-near term future. Is that talk available online? I’m skeptical that they will ever solve the problem of factuality. I’d love to hear their arguments for why I’m wrong.
troad 4y ago
I'd dearly love it if HN had tags. I could skip to all the weird quirky gems, and past all the $LATEST_FAD, or - worse - the VC broetry.
vlunkr 4y ago
And yet paradoxically you currently have a top comment as a skeptic.
sakras 4y ago
Maybe this is a bit too shameless of a plug, but I created EXACTLY this sort of thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35458826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35458826 It's just a regex that filters out "GPT", "AI", "LLM", and "LLaMA" :)
- theolivenbaum 4y ago
  Nice! Was checking the different terms, it's just crazy how ChatGPT is by far the most active one: https://hn.curiosity.ai/#/trends?terms=Llama;GPT;LLM;ChatGPT;Stable%20Diffusion;Dall-E+DallE https://hn.curiosity.ai/#/trends?terms=Llama;GPT;LLM;ChatGPT...
jb1991 4y ago
[dead]
version_five 4y ago
I'm laughing because I read your comment, which I agree with and I know a lot of people do, and then immediately saw that the top ranked replies were all the predictable "this is different" posts, explaining to you how the chatgpt is not like other hype bubbles. The most funny part is that your point seems to be around the annoyingness / ubiquity of the content, in no way a judgement on how much of a hype bubble it is, but you still get the reflexive "this time its different!!" Which is as good an indicator as any how big the bubble is relative to the long run usefulness.
throw99998888 4y ago
I used to be skeptic but not anymore. Since last year I've been using "AI" more and more in day to day life. Like some sort of assistant/consultant on every topic. Bitcoin changed my life as well.
hospitalJail 4y ago
Have you actually used it? I can't believe how many people are totally refusing to try it but made judgements on it. It just seems so slow and time consuming to do things like brainstorm snack or birthday party ideas. ChatGPT can make a list in moments, where with google, you get generic SEO spam.
dzsekijo 4y ago
The Show HN you want: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35654401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35654401 Update: Ah, sorry, "iOS", "Firefox", I missed that. I leave it here still, to honor the pain it took me to dig it up.

by sph 4y ago

quiet_light 4y ago

here's an extension I created for this https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-filter/olcgmfffcodkgnpgbhijncgpadkjgedo https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-filter... firefox : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-filter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hacker-news-f... . no llm filter yet but I can add that too.

theolivenbaum 4y ago
Nice! We're wondering if we should build a browser extension based on the "similar stories" model there, if you would be interested in doing something like that happy to have a chat!
- quiet_light 4y ago
  thanks! yeah absolutely, thats what I had in mind and I was even thinking of using a model to filter out all ai based stories but couldn't figure out if a local embedded model in the extension can do that so I ended up using a regex only. happy to chat , email in profile.

mrleinad 4y ago

You can ask ChatGPT to write you a script that hides those posts for you ;)

jsnell 4y ago

I'm reading that as "no browsers on iOS support sufficiently powerful extensions to filter out individual HN posts by word". Have you checked out any of the HN apps for iOS instead of reading with a browser? I'd expect some of them to include a keyword filtering feature.

csantini 4y ago

I see 3 kind of people, all common on HN: - The luddites: it's just hype. - The doomers: AI will kill us all. - The AI indie hackers: dunno about AI, I'm trying to make money with it. Somehow the intersection is right: AI is not really smart, but it will replace a lot of human activity anyhow.

mlyle 4y ago
Yah. I mean, a lot of human activity in employment is not really smart. Anything that you can make into a fairly formulaic job for someone who's not really interested in doing it or improving too much is probably not very intellectually demanding (but perhaps may be a bit demanding in world perception or actuation than current AI/robotics systems). And I believe that is "most jobs."
aldousd666 4y ago
You forgot about the rest of us. Developers who are interested in the subject and want to read about the latest developments and techniques. We're actually interested in the computer science.
Mordisquitos 4y ago
I would argue that a true luddite towards AI needs a corollary: - The luddites: it's just hype — because I will kill it with fire before it takes over.
unshavedyak 4y ago
> Somehow the intersection is right: AI is not really smart, but it will replace a lot of human activity anyhow. Which will really show how much busywork we humans do in a lot of areas. If -- before AI is "smart" -- it can impact humanity.. well, i feel it says more about our current society foundations than it does AI heh.
- throwaway049 4y ago
  Microsoft is bringing OpenAI into Office 365. I predict no loss of employment in busywork, just a bigger output of boring reports per worker.

toddmorey 4y ago

My gut is that they mean AI generated comments vs AI focused topics. I did see at least one account that was posting a generated comment seconds after each submission posted.

pmoriarty 4y ago

Tags would help here, in that you could use them to filter out what you don't want to see. I've asked many times for HN to allow tagging, but my sense is that it's never going to happen. Another idea is to use a spam filter on an RSS feed of HN articles. I did this decades ago for my personal feed, using bayesean spam filters, and it worked well enough. Finally, you could use an AI to filter for you.

viraptor 4y ago
You may enjoy https://lobste.rs https://lobste.rs then.
- sph 4y ago
  I would love an invite. I am not HN famous, but I have been here for a while as my account page can attest.
  - bmurphy1976 4y ago
    Don't they have a chat channel? I thought you could always just hop on the chat and ask for an invite.

Lendal 4y ago

It does feel a bit like Bitcoin hype, in that I know there's something wrong with it but I can't quite put my finger on it or explain it. But this is why it's also likely to last a long time, just like Bitcoin did, because it's so enticing and yet so difficult to articulate exactly what it is that's wrong. I'm at that level where I'm just smart enough to know something is wrong here, but not smart enough to say what that is exactly. I know that I can use ChatGPT for things where it doesn't matter much whether it contains factual inaccuracies. Where all I need is a lead, like the same things I would use Wikipedia for. Where the failure mode definitely doesn't lead to anyone being hurt (or fired). For work where the results matter to someone's career or health, yeah I would avoid it.

tnel77 4y ago
I’m sure this is going to make you laugh and/or annoyed, but what about Bitcoin is exactly “wrong?” Curious if after all these years you’ve found the words.
- roflyear 4y ago
  Well, I wouldn't say "what bitcoin got wrong" but rather "what people who were overly hyping bitcoin got wrong" It hasn't totally played out yet, but it doesn't seem like it is on track to be a currency, and the underlying tech hasn't proven to have a ton of uses beyond crypto currencies. Not trying to straw man here, just trying to honestly reply to your comment.
  - tnel77 4y ago
    That’s fair and I appreciate your response! While I’ve seen things that hint that Bitcoin might be starting to gain traction in high inflation nations commonly located in Africa and South America, we are a long ways out from seeing a Kroger accept Bitcoin. Regardless, crypto bros are the worst and I hate how every bull run we see an avalanche of new coins that all claim to be the solution to all our problems when they are really just a Ponzi scheme. Bitcoin and Ethereum are the only two that I feel are worth investing in long-term, but that’s just me.

mepian 4y ago

[dead]

bmurphy1976 4y ago

I think the difference between those other hype cycles and this one is utility. I found Bitcoin very interesting (Erlang as well, still do) but not very practical in my day-to-day life. Unless I'm going to be hired by a firm that specializes in that tech, they're just not very useful. Nerdy and interesting and fun yes, but I just don't need them in my day-to-day life. On the other hand ChatGPT 3.5 has become immediately useful today. It's already saved multiple hours of time doing nonsense work, or digging around for an answer to that one problem I have. It's succeeded when Stack Overflow, Google, Reddit, and the Official Documentation™ failed me. That's incredible!! And like a car I don't really have to know or care how it works (traditionally I didn't care at all about AI tech). Sure, it's a new skill (like driving) that takes some practice to do safely and effectively, but I don't have to know the details of how it works. Just how to use it. That's why this hype cycle is different, that's why it's not going away. It's useful, and we are collectively figuring out how to use it effectively. We do that through collaboration and communication and HN is one of the key points where ideas are shared. To put a stop on that now would be insanely short sighted. The criticism, post-mortems, retrospectives and "AI is dead" articles will come in time.

davidw 4y ago
Yeah, more or less in this boat too. ChatGPT does things. Useful things. "Crypto" has some clever ideas, but always seemed too full of utopians and grifters and people with a solution in search of a problem. I've used Erlang professionally and like the ecosystem very much. I am a bit annoyed with myself for still not having a better understanding of how these LLM's work, because that's important, at the end of the day for evaluating where they are best applied, and where danger lurks. But they are clearly going to be a game changer. Maybe more, maybe less than some people think, but I've seen enough hype cycles to think there is some substance here.
- loudmax 4y ago
  I feel the same way about not understanding how LLMs work. I've found Hugginface's tutorials a good place to start: https://huggingface.co/course/ https://huggingface.co/course/

DJBunnies 4y ago

Bitcoin hype will return with the next cycle :)

theolivenbaum 4y ago
Hopefully to replace the Web3 / Bitcoin cycle https://hn.curiosity.ai/#/trends?terms=Bitcoin;Web3 https://hn.curiosity.ai/#/trends?terms=Bitcoin;Web3

mike_hearn 4y ago

Here's some criticism of AI for you: • VENDOR LOCKIN • It's possible that OpenAI is managing to establish a permanent competitive edge and will be the next Google. There is/was a lot of rather handwavy assumptions about open source models being competitive thanks to Stability AI and the Facebook leak, and last time I raised red flags about this on HN I got dunked on. But right now it looks more likely that LLMs are the new search engines and there won't be any competitive implementations that are both legal and that you can run yourself. It'll be APIs all the way, just like with web search engines. Also, embeddings are model/vendor specific and expensive to compute. If you calculate 10 million embeddings using OpenAI it's going to be expensive to recalculate them all with another vendor. • UNCLEAR PRICING • It seems likely that OpenAI is either selling at below cost, or is at best break-even on compute. It's very unclear right now if prices are going to rise, fall or remain where they are and in fact AI prices have done all these things in just a few months. That makes it difficult to know if it's an acceptable business risk to deeply incorporate AI into your workflow. • HUMAN BOTTLENECKS • A lot of AI use cases that sound initially compelling actually bottleneck on human review, because it's too risky to put AI output straight into production. Some people don't care hence the wave of amusing "As an AI language model" spam, but it shows what can go wrong if you skip reviews. • FACTUALITY • Obvious, but after having studied this more and listened to a talk by one of the OpenAI team I think this will actually go away as a problem in the semi-near term future. • INTEGRATION COMPLEXITY • The limited LLM context window size means a lot of tricky workarounds are required for many use cases, which increases implementation complexity. • TESTING DIFFICULTY • LLMs aren't deterministic, so it's a testing nightmare. You never know when the LLM will just do something unexpected that breaks your use case or integration. • BUSINESS UNCERTAINTY • There's genuinely a ton of potential, the tech deserves the hype. But it can be hard to capitalize because so many people are trying to do things all at once, so where do you go that you aren't immediately drowned in VC-flush competition? And many ideas may be more naturally done as features of existing products, so if the vendor isn't doing them, should you wait or should you try developing something yourself and risk obsolesence? The pricing uncertainty compounds that, of course.

chongli 4y ago
after having studied this more and listened to a talk by one of the OpenAI team I think this will actually go away as a problem in the semi-near term future. Is that talk available online? I’m skeptical that they will ever solve the problem of factuality. I’d love to hear their arguments for why I’m wrong.

troad 4y ago

I'd dearly love it if HN had tags. I could skip to all the weird quirky gems, and past all the $LATEST_FAD, or - worse - the VC broetry.

vlunkr 4y ago

And yet paradoxically you currently have a top comment as a skeptic.

sakras 4y ago

Maybe this is a bit too shameless of a plug, but I created EXACTLY this sort of thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35458826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35458826 It's just a regex that filters out "GPT", "AI", "LLM", and "LLaMA" :)

theolivenbaum 4y ago
Nice! Was checking the different terms, it's just crazy how ChatGPT is by far the most active one: https://hn.curiosity.ai/#/trends?terms=Llama;GPT;LLM;ChatGPT;Stable%20Diffusion;Dall-E+DallE https://hn.curiosity.ai/#/trends?terms=Llama;GPT;LLM;ChatGPT...

jb1991 4y ago

[dead]

version_five 4y ago

I'm laughing because I read your comment, which I agree with and I know a lot of people do, and then immediately saw that the top ranked replies were all the predictable "this is different" posts, explaining to you how the chatgpt is not like other hype bubbles. The most funny part is that your point seems to be around the annoyingness / ubiquity of the content, in no way a judgement on how much of a hype bubble it is, but you still get the reflexive "this time its different!!" Which is as good an indicator as any how big the bubble is relative to the long run usefulness.

throw99998888 4y ago

I used to be skeptic but not anymore. Since last year I've been using "AI" more and more in day to day life. Like some sort of assistant/consultant on every topic. Bitcoin changed my life as well.

hospitalJail 4y ago

Have you actually used it? I can't believe how many people are totally refusing to try it but made judgements on it. It just seems so slow and time consuming to do things like brainstorm snack or birthday party ideas. ChatGPT can make a list in moments, where with google, you get generic SEO spam.

dzsekijo 4y ago

The Show HN you want: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35654401 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35654401 Update: Ah, sorry, "iOS", "Firefox", I missed that. I leave it here still, to honor the pain it took me to dig it up.