8 ms·

Be careful with your estimations. Generative AI currently resembles VR in 2018. Very impressive as a technology, and will certainly find its niches, but grossly

• bink 3y ago
  And with very little moat, allowing any company big or small to dip their feet in the waters. It's likely to be a commodity.
• BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
  The difference is that generative AI is actually useful for ordinary people.
  • jonplackett 3y ago
    And also doesn’t require a you to buy a $3000 computer to use it. The price of VR hardware is still a massive drag on adoption - even if it was AMAZING most people aren’t going to buy the necessary hardware chat GPT, and for a while Midjourney are FREE And they save you time and effort VR=fun(ish) AI=fun+useful
    • koito17 3y ago
      > chat GPT, and for a while Midjourney are FREE They are free for now. Eventually OpenAI will no longer be able to subsidize the compute costs of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 for everybody... But yes, let's enjoy GPT-4 at cheap prices while we still can. I don't think we'll be able to in the near future. I've been interested in a while in running some AI models locally, but ironically, I'd need to purchase a $3,000 computer to do so, and consider the steep hikes to my electricity bill as I run that machine.
      • taneq 3y ago
        Fortunately I specced my laptop for vr so it should be able to quantized LLaMA 7b at least. ;)
      • jonplackett 3y ago
        MS have put it in Bing. Google will catch up and put it in google search. I will happily pay whatever OpenAI charge to not have ads It’s just too useful not to Midjourney is the same. Saves soooooooo much time. It pays for itself for the month in a day
    • jayd16 3y ago
      You can get a stand alone headset for $399 but I guess that being a secret even among tech people is also a data point.
      • jonplackett 3y ago
        I have a quest. It’s not a secret. But it’s still $400 more than FREE isn’t it. Even $20 a month is a lot more manageable than a $400 up front + games And chat GPT actually saves you time and money. It’s not just a bit of fun
      • EscapeFromNY 3y ago
        AFAIK all the cheap-ish (< $500) headsets either have awful specs, run android, or come bundled with spyware (or all of the above). Unless I missed a big product launch lately. It's not a secret, more just that tech people don't want what's for sale.
      • Gigachad 3y ago
        The bigger problem imo is lack of space. I used to have a VR space set up and would play frequently. But I have now moved and do not want to dedicate a huge amount of precious space to VR gaming.
        • jayd16 3y ago
          Yeah, I think this is a big part of it. Just the general UX problems of hopping into it is a major blocker. I think this is a much bigger hurdle than unit price. Maybe MR will help with this a bit but who knows.
    • PeterisP 3y ago
      Generative AI is really expensive hardware-wise, with high marginal costs. For now, a limited quantity usage is sponsored by the companies as PR to increase adoption, but in the long run for practical applications it won't be (can't be!) neither free nor cheap. Current models are intriguing but still need improvements, we know how to get those improvements by larger models, but all that means that the next iteration(s) will cost more money per 'answer'.
      • jonplackett 3y ago
        What I mean is, for an end user, it’s currently cheap and that must be a big factor in adoption. IF you could get average VR for free and awesome VR for £20 a month, then I think the adoption curve would look a hell of a lot different.
• cm2012 3y ago
  VR at its height was a hobby platform. Chatgpt alone is used by 100m+ people a month now.
• themodelplumber 3y ago
  Even if all it did was enable a new level of college cheating, which we can already read about today, it'd have hundreds of times the impact of VR. (Not an endorsement of cheating, just an observation of practical effect)
  • adhesive_wombat 3y ago
    Maybe colleges will actually have to figure out this thing called "teaching" again instead of just dectupling[1] fees and deferring everything else to some half-baked MOOC and some YouTube lectures. Any university course that can be cheated on using ChatGPT now has about as much value as a Masters in Pi Digits did in late 1949[2]. And any university that doesn't teach the use of the technology will be underserving it's students, since like it or not, it's out there now. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-08-23/college-tuitions-1-120-percent-increase https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-08-23/college-t... [2]: https://www.pocket-lint.com/laptops/news/109122-computer-calculating-pi-eniac-first/ https://www.pocket-lint.com/laptops/news/109122-computer-cal...
• tunesmith 3y ago
  All I know is that computer programming is qualitatively an entirely different thing than it was six months ago, different than it has ever been in the decades preceding. Programmers that never had to think about "what" to do are are just implementation machines are going to be hurt by this. Programmers that have to think hard about strategy, design, specification are about to be massively more productive. The ability to clearly communicate specifications; "what to do"; is more valuable than ever because it's the one way to unlock massive productivity gains.
  • ChatGTP 3y ago
    Won’t this be actually bad for the economy ? I’m personally not spending as much because I’m not clear if I’ll have a job when ChatGPT-5 comes out. I’d say many people are doing similar things ? Less jobs is not necessarily a good thing ?
    • mikea1 3y ago
      > Less jobs is not necessarily a good thing ? The rollout of the lightbulb significantly reduced the economic potential of candlemakers, but it improved the quality of life for society overall. So, whether technological advancement is a "good thing" depends on which group you are in: the one with obsolete skills or the one that benefits from cheaper and/or better goods and services. Either way, the overall economy benefits from creative destruction. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction
    • SoftTalker 3y ago
      Not having to pay developers 6-figure salaries might be a good thing in the big picture.
      • epicureanideal 3y ago
        Or ideally, we can keep making 6-figure salaries, but be able to accomplish more in the same number of hours.
  • 3y ago
• jonplackett 3y ago
  I bought a quest and enjoyed it. But it mostly gathers dust in my cupboard. I used it for maybe a month regularly. I am using generative ai every single day for many months so far. And every day I am still amazed by it - especially GPT-4. Virtually every day I get excited about a new thing I could do with it. It’s amazing (like VR was, for a bit) but also a lot more terrifying and awesome. I don’t think it’s the same
  • oxfordmale 3y ago
    >> Virtually every day I get excited about a new thing I could do with it. That is pretty much the definition of a hype cycle. I am old enough to remember the flury of microwave cookbooks that came out in the 90s when the microwave became commonplace. People were finding out new things they could do with the microwave each day. These days it is mostly used for warming up food and microwave popcorn
    • jonplackett 3y ago
      But we all have a microwave… because ultimately they are really useful
      • oxfordmale 3y ago
        Yes they are useful, just not for cooking five course meals. AI will have it use, the only question is for what.
        • jonplackett 3y ago
          The question is what __else It already has so many uses. That’s my point. There will be more, unknown uses, but there are a lot right now that are already potentially world changing.
    • fnordpiglet 3y ago
      All things in a hype cycle have this characteristic but not all this that have this characteristic are a hype cycle. The iPhone is an example. I remember iPads people laughed “it’s a giant phone! So silly!” Etc. To the point made, something can be in a hype cycle because it is obviously useful, but for what we aren’t sure - so there’s a huge creative grasping, and convergence of hucksters and con artists, that boils down into what is the long lasting utility. (Ala microwave) The thing is the utility is realizes right now by a lot of folks and the only tool folks are using is a crappy web UI onto a chat bot. Crypto had no utility ever, just some crypto anarchist dream of a world without the Treasury. VR is neat but rarely useful.
• pb7 3y ago
  I don’t see this resemblance at all. VR has peaked and plateaued at nothing more than a gimmick just like crypto. The hype around AI is because it was immediately useful from day 1 of a commercial product.
• Mistletoe 3y ago
  I anticipate I will find it somewhat useful in Microsoft Office products in the future. Beyond that I don’t know. Logos are easy to make now. Knowledge workers should probably think about becoming plumbers and AC repairmen. Something where you use your hands, because AI doesn’t have hands.
• pazimzadeh 3y ago
  I think that's what makes it a hype cycle. A period of massive short term growth/expansion/copy-cats followed by a selection process for the actually useful products, like the dot com bubble
• nkozyra 3y ago
  Boy, I don't know. VR really isn't positioned to disrupt entire industries while companies are already figuring out how to replace people with LLMs.
• fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I’ve been working with the tech for a long time now, and I’m convinced we’ve only scratched a very cursory amount of the value waiting. People are focused too much on its ability to write and emit bad code and say silly things and making it read poetry in the voice of a Dalek. Particularly generative multi modal AI hooked up into a feedback loop with classical AI and reasoning techniques, solvers, optimizers, etc, will be remarkable. For instance: I uploaded an image of a saloon with cowboys playing cards and asked one of the multimodal models to describe the scene. It did with details about the game and the card table etc. Acting as a goal base agent I told it we need $20. It said it could either play cards or work at the saloon and recommended saloon work as it’s assured. I advised it to play cards and describe how to walk to the card table and to provide an image with the card table labeled and the route annotated with obstacles. It was able to do this. This could be fed into a navigation system. I then uploaded an image of a bunch of card hands and asked it to classify each hand as what it’s holding and the relative strengths. It was accurate. Using a optimizer it could feed the visual card state and play an optimal game. Etc. Each one of these tasks would have been absurdly hard five years ago.
  • soared 3y ago
    Like crypto and VR, sounds pretty cool but it’s not clear how this fuels economic growth.
    • fnordpiglet 3y ago
      It’s a toy example of solving an abstract task that using classical techniques would have been impossible, but by combining the abstract semantic capabilities of LLMs with classical techniques becomes fully achievable. The problem with classical agents and other techniques is they fail hard when faced with a landscape that was unanticipated or requires a comprehensive semantic awareness beyond the models domain. LLMs provide a space where abstract semantic “reasoning” can happen. It isn’t a deterministic optimizer in any way, no matter the attempts to show it can do basic math tasks etc with larger models and context lengths. But why does it have to? There are tasks, class as classification, description, semantic analysis, and others it does very well at. By combining techniques you can create agents that are much more robust and autonomous in many different situations that wasn’t practical before. This example could very well have been a factory robot that can use LLM to assist in solving unanticipated challenges, expanding its generalized capabilities beyond a very narrow and specific task set. For instance, the same machinery can have the ability to assemble many different things with minimal additional programming by providing it with specifications, drawn plans, quality control criteria and examples, etc. The LLM can use those to encode instruction to its specialized sub systems that operate with classical techniques to achieve some goal based optimization. The “glue” so to speak to achieve the abstract task is supplied by the LLM. As it performs if it’s doing things wrong reprogramming is as simple as promoting it with the error and examples of better. Through reinforcement techniques the more it performs the tasks and encounters edges and errors the better it’ll get. Compared to current factory floor robotics this would be a remarkable advancement as floors could be reconfigured more rapidly, and the set of specialized machines could be reduced to a more general and commodity set.
• fnordpiglet 3y ago
  Here’s another example of real life improvements - my wife, who isn’t an English speaker, asked ChatGPT to write her a letter to the immigration service requesting a visa for her brother to visit. She filled in basic details like names and visit details and it provided a beautiful letter, conforming to what an immigration lawyer would typically write. She then took that, edited it slightly, and sent it off. What would have a multi hour task for her of research, struggling to write it, and editing, or hiring a lawyer, was reduced to a casual prompt and some light amendment. You might consider this example pedestrian and trivial. But it materially improved my wife’s life. VR and crypto have never done that for people in their day to day tasks. Neither have Alexa, and I’ll go further, the web made it easier - but this entirely solves the problem. These situations happen all the time in varying forms. I don’t need to convince anyone though. Y’all will see in five years.