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This time, it feels different
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- te_chris 3y agoVery good piece. It really does feel different this time. Lots of McKinsey BS about job creation...but where?
- blowski 3y agoEvery few years a new technology goes mainstream and quickly changes the world around us rather fundamentally. I’ve lived through the web in 1995. Google in 2000. Web 2.0 in 2005. Smartphones in 2009. Now it’s generative AI in 2023. Every time, there’s an argument about whether it’s the end of the world or a total nothingburger. Every time, industry leaders are knocked off their perch. Every time, there are surprise developments and innovations, both positive and negative. Every time, within a few years, the new technology goes from seeming magical even in the wealthiest and most advanced locations to commonplace in a rural farm in the developing world. It’s an incredible, terrifying and fascinating time to be alive.
- lapcat 3y ago> Every time, industry leaders are knocked off their perch. Is that really true? The two largest corporations in the world by market cap are Apple and Microsoft, both founded in the 1970s.
- analognoise 3y agoAlso the wealth of the average worker has been stagnant since the 70's - computers, the internet, etc came and brought tons of wealth, and didn't raise the standard of living. I've never thought about computers that way - they got here, and didn't make everyone's lives better - they just accelerated wealth concentration in the top 1%.
- c1sc0 3y agoIn the 70s the top 1% couldn’t even conceive of the power they’d have in their pockets one day. Today both billionaires and the rest of the world can have access to that same power. We’re all carrying the same phones in our pockets after all.
- RhodesianHunter 3y agoPower to search the internet != Food and housing.
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- haakonhr 3y agoThere are definitely interesting times ahead. What surprised me with ChatGPT is the impact of the interface. The quality of the responses are essential up to some threshold, but the chat interface arguably had an even bigger impact. I also remember having the same questions in my last job (in logistics) where potential customers wanted to know how we use AI. This sometimes seemed more important than whether our results would enable them to cut costs. Fascinating.
- pcl 3y agoYeah, absolutely. It’s astounding that Google didn’t come up with a chat-based refinement interface to a search session after all these years, instead forcing us to keep on trying again with a slightly changed query string.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoI think it must’ve been an accident. LLMs need a lot to context and the more you talk and narrow your requirements down the better its response gets (in theory). But it really was chatgpt that made it go mainstream. I remember playing with the earlier GPT playgrounds and I also thought neat but not for me
- nly 3y agoAren't they different use cases? I want generative AI to produce something for me. I want search to find something for me.
- jatins 3y agoI was hacking around with GPT-3 just a couple months before ChatGPT came out and had this feeling of "omg I found something that the world is largely sleeping on" Then ChatGPT came out and now that's all anybody ever talks about.
- thunderbong 3y agoFrom the article - > If a single dumb, stochastic, probabilistic, hallucinating, snake oil LLM with a chat UI offered by one organisation can have such a viral, organic, and widespread adoption ... imagine what better, faster, more “intelligent” systems to follow in the wake of what exists today would be capable of doing.
- random78965 3y agoThe haiku at the end is not a haiku, technically. As a non-business person, I imagine that folks would typically want some correctness guarantees, which seem near-impossible with today's LLMs. What kind of business use-cases do they enable? Probably a failure of imagination on my part, but I can't think of many tasks that can be done consistently well by AI that can't also be done with simpler software.
- TheDong 3y ago> The haiku at the end is not a haiku, technically Yeah, haikus are 17 japanese mora, and so if it doesn't come from the mora region of japan it's not a true haiku, it's just a short poem. > I imagine that folks would typically want some correctness guarantees Us programmers really value correctness, but the real world doesn't actually care about it in quite a few cases. In the real world, most data comes from humans, and humans make mistakes all the time, so basically any data might have some amount of error. There's a high tolerance for a few minor mistakes here and there. In the real world, tasks are often given to interns, and they make small mistakes all the time, but it mostly ends up being okay. If AI manages to do the same, well, that's a huge swath of tasks it can do. > I can't think of many tasks that can be done consistently well by AI that can't also be done with simpler software Here's the thing though: "simpler software" probably isn't actually cheaper, available, or usable. It's probably not simpler to operate since, you know, english is simpler than any DSL us programmers have come up with until now.
- doctor_eval 3y agoI’m both a business person and an engineer. I recently did a short workshop where a marketing guy took us through using GPT and Midjourney to iterate through new business ideas. In the 4 hours of the workshop, a bunch of mostly non developer people generated about 500 business ideas using GPT, took the top ideas, and turned them into business pitches. A couple of people in the room thought the idea their promoting came up with was good enough to run with. This sort of stuff is fuzzy, even without AI. In many ways it’s about exploring the knowledge space rather than seeking specific answers. None of this requires correctness because there are no correct answers to begin with. Even in computing, correctness is not always important. I recently asked GPT to produce a bunch of names from the Austin Powers universe in order to populate a demo database. I asked for them in JSON format and in 20 seconds I had what I needed. There is no wrong answer for that, either.
- analognoise 3y agoThe article links to Ted Chiang's article, which was equally fascinating: https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/will-ai-become-the-new-mckinsey https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intel...
- ChatGTP 3y agoI thought it was an incredible read too!
- fauigerzigerk 3y ago>LangChain[13] enters the chat! Imagine the horror stories of automated online account blocks and Kafkaesque customer support mazes that are all too common, manifesting at a societal level. I can imagine this to be a problem. But I can also imagine it to solve a problem. Right now, customer support is often "dehumanised" and Kafkaesque because no single human has the full picture and all the permissions required to resolve a problem. We're often talking to organisations with "brains" split into a thousand fragments. Having humans in the loop doesn't necessarily help if impersonating a cog is all these humans are allowed to do. So if an AI can reintegrate this split organisational brain into something resembling human thinking, it might just be an improvement on average.
- throwuwu 3y agoYes, these support agents are paid small hourly wages and do the same thing 1000 times a day while dealing with rude or irate customers. Automating their jobs to either eliminate them or change their role to that of bot supervisor will be much better for everyone.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoWell you need a handful of supervisors and the rest are laid off. It’s easy to say these jobs being eliminated is good when it’s not your job
- throwuwu 3y agoWe shouldn’t keep jobs around just to keep people employed. This kind of insane careerism is probably what’s responsible for the current climate of regulations that makes it difficult for many people to find new work and for companies to open more positions. Changing jobs is a good thing, you would think someone on HN would know that.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoWhat are these better jobs that the grunts laid off at the call center will land on? They live paycheck to paycheck so anything handwavy is not going to pay for their food and shelter.
- spamizbad 3y agoI see a ton of buzz around "prompt engineering", which is being able to shape arbitrary inputs into a prompt that will produce high quality results, but the next step is consuming and acting on prompt results programatically and that's an area where I see way less "buzz", but it's likely where the real value is found.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoLangChain is an early example of a programming environment where you “chain” prompts, replies and 3rd party calls together
- Barrin92 3y ago>AI technologies has probably started and large scale obsoletion of jobs may be around the corner this has been said with the advent of computerization, the entire internet and yet here's a simple thing to look for: If this is true we will see both skyrocketing unemployment numbers and productivity growth at the same time. Until that is happening you can rest easy. One pretty trivial reason is that deep technology adoption that actually replaces professions wholesale is really slow. A lot of companies still run on ancient Excel versions and fax machines. The average employer is a small business of 15 people where nobody has an idea what Slack is. Also one of the more sinister and clever strategies in recent times is tech companies framing their crazed hiring-spree corrections (looking at FAANG) as revolutionary AI developments
- ctrl-vvvvvvvvv 3y agoGeez another article on the AI Spookiness? How many is that this month now? Most of these articles border on science fiction and involve a lot of projection. While I am concerned in some ways with AI, particularly in mass surveillance and public manipulation via bots, what else can we do other than be reactive to _real_ AI applications when _deployed_? Then we start to discuss proper policy towards AI. Until we see service sector employees being replaced the way we saw self-checkouts emerge what is the point of these articles other than some form of PR campaign?
- la64710 3y agoVery well written article. Author talks about his own journey in this space from usual skepticism to belief and why it feels different this time. But it certainly is very well written. I doubt if a LLM can write like that.
- scaramanga 3y agoIt's a secular religion. The whole thing scans very much the like the man who ambushed me in a public bathhouse a few weeks ago to tell me about how skeptical he was about Jesus his whole life, right up until the moment he found Jesus. And proceeded to expound on it at great length, while I avoided eye contact, fidgeted, stared in the opposite direction, etc.. At some point you have to just get up and walk to the other side of the room from these people, because they show no sign of letting up.
- jatins 3y ago> Most of these articles border on science fiction and involve a lot of projection I understand the fatigue is real but this one does neither of above imo and was fairly grounded in reality. The author(who is CTO of a company) did a GPT integration and realised it could potentially replace 20% of jobs at their company. That is something to be spooked about. > these articles other than some form of PR campaign A lot of these are, but as an outside observer of Zerodha I can assure you this isn't. The company has spent zero dollars on marketing in last decade.
- petesergeant 3y agoIf everything stood still with nothing more than GPT-4 we are a few years ago from realising the disruption of just that alone
- ukuina 3y agoThis is very true. There is so much reinvention of processes happening behind the scenes around GPT4 as an API. These advancements will take a few quarters to show impact.
- 300bps 3y agoimagine what better, faster, more “intelligent” systems to follow in the wake of what exists today would be capable of doing Is this a given? Sure it will continue to improve but by how much? 200% or 2%? That’s the question. Anyone could’ve measured my height when I was 14 and predicted that I would be 35 feet tall today. But human bodies have limits. What are the limits of LLMs? It’s somewhere between ChatGPT-4 and the “digital god” that I’ve heard some proclaim is right around the corner. The boring but very possible answer is ChatGPT-4 might be near the pinnacle.
- cubefox 3y agoWe are talking about AI here. LLMs are obviously just an intermediate technology. For example, the next "big" model, Google's Gemini, will be multimodal, it will be able to handle other data types besides text. The next step is probably robotics.
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- cyber_kinetist 3y agoI’m a bit more skeptical about robotics though, the human body is a complex marvel of nature and no software will replace the fact that it’s hard to build hardware with the capability of a living musculoskeletal system.
- cubefox 3y agoIf a Boston Dynamics robot had human level intelligence, it could already do a lot. Their limbs are probably not capable of the agility of humans, but humans also don't have the agility of many animals, which hasn't stopped us.
- olddustytrail 3y agoSure, it might, but considering recent improvements and zero evidence of those improvements slowing, it's a rather bizarre article of faith.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoI look forward to Atlas getting a voice interface and responding GPTChat style. That will cement it for most of us, that there's something new under the sun. Until then I expect the denial and explainers (It's just another technology! Like phones!) will have the floor. The discussion is healthy because we'd like to anticipate changes before they swamp us. It's important to speculate. The denigration of speculation is less helpful. I'm happy to watch from the sidelines. But I sure pay more attention to the folks trying to imagine the future, than the folks claiming nothing will change.
- blibble 3y ago> I have come across people who do programming, legal work, business, accountancy and finance, fashion design, architecture, graphic design, research, teaching, cooking, travel planning, event management etc., all of whom have started using the same tool, ChatGPT if I found out my lawyer/account/tax advisor/broker had fed my privileged information into ChatGPT I'd be reporting them to their regulator and they'd be struck off
- rolisz 3y agoYou can use ChatGPT without feeding a clients personal data to it. You can ask hypothetical questions about a certain situation. Like in coding, you don't have to copy paste in source code be able to get some useful feedback on how to proceed.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoThis requires care as it may only require a few details or other metadata like when/where one asked to narrow down who they're talking about. Considering ChatGPT leaks and hallucinations I would hope folks in law and medicine are being very careful.
- blibble 3y agothe firm's compliance officers will be demanding that the services are completely blocked and that any use whatsoever is a disciplinary offence (in their view: removing the risk almost entirely)
- terminalcommand 3y agoIn my firm, it is the contrary. We are advised to remove any personal data in our queries and double check the output. We are encouraged to use chatgpt/bing on a daily basis to learn it. Our firm is also planning to purchase an LLM that will work locally.
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- snowwrestler 3y ago> To those who believe that new jobs will emerge at meaningful rates to absorb the losses and shocks, what exactly are those new jobs? This is a pretty disingenuous question to ask, as the whole point of an innovation-driven market economy is that one cannot predict the future. It’s a question that we know for a fact no one can answer in general, so why should we consider it any kind of useful criticism of AI specifically?
- softwaredoug 3y agoI have begun to expect every text box I use has a copilot type autocomplete custom tailored to the context.
- latchkey 3y agoSurprised they haven't added it to HN comments.
- akiselev 3y agoBased on the current pace of development, it's on the roadmap for 2055.
- fullstackchris 3y agogod please no
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- cubefox 3y agoHe (and most people on HN) are still underestimating the impact of this. Everything points at AI soon becoming far more intelligent than any human. That's not science fiction about the remote future in a hundred years. We are talking about something in the order of ten years. We are actually at the brink of the "technological singularity". It's happening. It's happening.
- nly 3y agoI would wager in 10 years time we're all looking back in dismay about how AI has just been used to produce an endless stream of fake news, empty-feeling generated content, spam, ads and other forms of monetisation that make our lives miserable. Some menial administrative jobs that have virtually no value but aren't yet fully automated will be wiped out by conglomerates who offer their white label AI solutions at scale...but that's it. Think about Google search. Has it really improved much in the last 20 years? Some HN frequents will swear it has gotten worse. What about your desktop computer? Sure it's about 10x more powerful than 2005, but has having one really changed your life much since then? Diminishing marginal returns.
- latchkey 3y ago> I would wager in 10 years time we're all looking back in dismay about how AI has just been used to produce an endless stream of fake news, empty-feeling generated content, spam, ads and other forms of monetisation that make our lives miserable. I don't think we will have wait 10 months for that, let alone 10 years.
- Filligree 3y agoThe size of my chat log with ChatGPT speaks against that. The vast majority of the conversations were productive. Of the remainder, most were highly entertaining—-which is a form of productivity in itself.
- latchkey 3y agoI don't know what you were responding to. We're not talking about personal experiences, we are talking about people using this stuff to annoy others.
- photochemsyn 3y agoWill current developments in generative AI eventually result in a social revolution in human affairs? Technology has played a role in similar transitions in the past. Mechanized agricultural production mosly eliminated the need for a large agricultural workforce for producing staple crops, a workforce that historically was organized and controlled via systems like serfdom and slavery, which were mostly eliminated as mechanization spread. Domestic household technology (washing machines, vacuums, electricity, etc) ended the need for a household to employ domestic servants and facilitated the entrance of women into the workforce, with associated loosening of societal gender role expectations. Machine learning systems might play a similar role in enabling automation of the industrial factory system, creating a system in which a few workers manage complex workflows with all basic tasks done by highly adaptable robots. Generative AI appears poised to eliminate a similar amount of basic tedious work in the white-collar world of documentation creation, legal research, all secretarial-type tasks, boilerplate code generation, etc. The real question in societal terms will be whether or not the fruits of all this labor elimination will end up controlled by a tiny minority of the human population. If so, that could plausibly lead to societal pressure to completely restructure the investment capital system of wealth accumulation and concentration, i.e. AI might cause socialism to become more popular. However, the notion that AI systems will be making the fundamental choices (going to war, creating a national constitution, writing and voting on legislation, forming a new business entity, etc.) seems farfetched at present.
- grugagag 3y agoAI in the right hands could end bureaucracy though I highly doubt that will be the outcome but it’s still possible, along with ending it all
- Jevon23 3y agoPlease don’t post AI-generated comments on HN.
- photochemsyn 3y agoI didn't realize I was an AI...
- nly 3y agoYeah, it's different because it's behind a HTTP API and in a year or two, once OpenAI is skint and your entire product is built around their chat API, you'll be paying 50 cents per request ...at which point your product will no longer be profitable.
- mlboss 3y agoThe competition is only increasing which will drive down the price. Right now users have 3 main providers: OpenAI, Anthromorpic and Google along with dozen open source models.
- nologic01 3y agoGeez people. Please learn to identify hypes, but most importantly the causes of hypes. LLM is fundamentally information processing technology. Not the path to AGI, not an emerging sentience. The reason "this time" feels so amazing is that the unwashed masses suddenly got access to new information processing technology in a context where their tools been stagnant for decades. Not because it was not possible, but because there was no money in it. To understand my argument and its implications, humor me for a moment and imagine a universe in which everyone was already using linux computers and for a decade now published papers of ML/DL were available for people to use. So there were various crowdsourced indices and models of all sorts, which people incrementally embedded in their information processing workflows. In that universe there would be no room for the delirious reaction we have here. It would be incremental evolution of search, knowledge bases, algorithmic content generation etc. What we have experienced instead in these past decades is information tool starvation. These incrementally improving tools, while nothing but known and ultimately mundane algorithms were not available except within a tiny elite. In fact, people's information processing capability arguably declined as the desktop platforms got downgraded, adtech toxic waste covered the information landscape etc. What is happening now is that a socioeconomic and artificially induced scarcity is now being broken (for reasons that require serious piecing together of events). So while on the surface this hype is as distastful as any illustration of human lemming behaviour, there is enormous silver lining if we succeed to read its causes. These tools are here, have been here for a while and they can be inserted into our ever growing information processing toolkit. The risks are there to match the opportunities. The biggest risk of them all is precisely what has led to the current situation. Technology not diffusing normally, but controlled by gatekeepers.
- Swizec 3y agoYour post boils down to “This is the next iPhone moment”. The tech existed but was clunky and unavailable. Now it’s good and accessible enough to be used by most people. This is how technological revolutions happen! Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb. But he made it useful and invented power distribution. That’s the important part. Consumers don’t care about technology that exists in a lab that they cannot even begin to fathom how to use. Mind you last year even experts didn’t think LLMs would be able to do what they’re doing right now for at least another 5 to 6 years. This also is in part a side-effect of the hype and extra attention. All this attention causes an acceleration.
- braindead_in 3y ago> To those who believe that new jobs will emerge at meaningful rates to absorb the losses and shocks, what exactly are those new jobs? Prompt Engineering. The highest paid will be the ones who are able to extract the most value out of LLMs with the least effort.
- loeg 3y agoNah. "Prompt Engineering" is the burger flipping of software.
- Filligree 3y agoAnd can be automated. The best results I get from stable diffusion tend to have GPT in the driving seat—it knows a lot more painters than I do. But the prompt I’m using for GPT-3.5 was generated by GPT-4.
- bonif 3y agountil prompt.ai is born ...
- fzeroracer 3y ago> It just repeats patterns > It is just a glorified probabilistic text generator. > It is just a “stochastic parrot”. > It “hallucinates”. > It is not “intelligent” the way humans are. > It does not actually “think” like humans. > It will never get human qualities like humour.[4] > It is snake oil and is no different from any other technology that has come before. > If it causes job losses, new jobs will emerge, like with all previous technological revolutions. The OP cites all of these as 'moving goalposts' but I'm not sure how, given that they're all true? Like all of the hype I see around LLMs is all the same hype I saw around from Bitcoin. It's by people that haven't used it in a professional environment, with no clue about the actual flaws, limitations or issues. And companies are intent on selling you a solution in search of a problem because they want to create aa product hype cycle. It feels different because you've bitten onto the bait. Personally given the code output and so forth I've seen from LLMs I'd highly doubt the experience of any software engineer that uses it in their day to day life.
- stevenhuang 3y agoWhen someone compares LLMs to crypto you know they've lost the plot.
- fzeroracer 3y agoTell you what, I'll go ahead and favorite this response and see what happens in about two years. By then I have a feeling I'll be vindicated and companies will have moved into the next Big Thing. Much like every other radical revolution that's been claimed in the past 10 years (Crypto, NFTs, Metaverse etc).
- stevenhuang 3y agoLol. That you're unironically lumping LLMs in the same category as all that is chef's kiss. Consider that your BS barometer needs a good recalibration, I'll just leave it at that.
- ThrowawayTestr 3y ago> It's by people that haven't used it in a professional environment Samsung had to tell it's engineers to stop using chatgpt because it was leaking secrets.
- docheinestages 3y ago> It states that no one at Zerodha will lose their job if a technology implementation (AI or non-AI) directly renders their existing responsibilities and tasks obsolete. This was just written to say that you care. You know well that when push comes to shove, they'll be laid off.
- Mawr 3y agoEvery article on this subject is the same: 1. Deny there's hype 2. Start engaging in hype LLMs are a just a tool. Yes, "just". They're good at certain tasks. Mainly ones that have a lot of training data available and don't require precise output. Images, writing, boilerplate code, etc. For any other task their usefulness falls of sharply. > What it and its contemporaries have set loose in such a short period of time, and what is to follow on their heels tomorrow, is the real crux of the matter. What is the idea that LLMs will get significantly better based on? That the technology finally got good enough to be useful is great, but past performance is not a predictor of future performance. Predictions need to be based on the nature of the technology in question. 1. There's only so much usable training data available out there and I suspect most of it is already being used. Once a programming LLM is trained on the code on Github it has basically seen it all. 2. They are incapable of learning anything. Not even trivial concepts. Therefore there's no real way for them to build up their understanding step-by-step like a human would.
- zamnos 3y agoYou forgot step 1a and 1b (which the article touches on). 1a) say it's incapable of thinking/reasoning/learning/understanding/etc 1b) argue about it's ability to think/reason/learn/understand/etc In this case: > They are incapable of learning anything ChatGPT seems to have learned about plenty of things before 2021. If you ask it about concepts like copyright or gravity or communism, or ask it to "explain quantum computing in simple terms", as the landing page suggests, it displays a fairly good understanding of these concepts. Human memory is divided into short-term and long-term (along with a bunch more concepts). It's true that ChatGPT lacks the ability to commit information from its short term memory (ie "chats") into it's long-term memory via inference, but GPT-4-Mawr, fine-tuned or re-trained on text including a new concept you invented would display some level of understanding (depending on how much text you had to fine tune it on). On a per-chat basis, ChatGPT is able to, up to the limits of the context window, know things, and it's entirely fair to point out that a) the context window is fairly limited (8000 tokens, or 32k paid) and b) beyond that, it forgets what it was told. Some people are described as having the memory of a goldfish, and that description applies to ChatGPT. If you can fit your concept into the context window, ChatGPT-4 is able to do some reasoning about it. Thus, it's able to learn and understand new things, but forgets them just as quickly. Humans sleep every day or so, and during that time the brain gets to do things that it isn't able to do while awake, and it's been suggested that sleep is important for integrating the day's activities and thus learning of advanced concepts. Assuming that's true, then we're just looking at different timescales. If ChatGPT "sleeps" every couple of months, and learns everything it was told between last time it was trained, it's just operating on different timescales than humans do.
- netfortius 3y agoOne of the articles linked here [1] reminded me of the great Ranulph Glanville, and his "Inside Every White Box There Are Two Black Boxes Trying To Get Out" [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02083 https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02083