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A year or two ago it was NFTs and blockchain--look where that is now, lol. This time next year there will be some interesting incremental improvements and chan
by qbasic_forever 3y ago
A year or two ago it was NFTs and blockchain--look where that is now, lol. This time next year there will be some interesting incremental improvements and changes with the LLM hype, but nowhere near what the almost unhinged rhetoric is for it today.
- _jab 3y agoI understand the sentiment, and I definitely think there are appropriate comparisons to be made to past hype waves like crypto and even AVs, but the fact that so many normal people use ChatGPT and find it not only interesting but also, critically, useful, tells me that LLMs may follow a different path in the long term.
- osigurdson 3y agoFor sure. The argument that there was hype about something in the past, therefore any hype is unwarranted is not a logical conclusion.
- williamcotton 3y agoNot only is it unwarranted it is more obnoxious than some YouTuber making predictions about all lawyers being replaced in the next three years.
- uoaei 3y agoI've yet to see a serious study where there are measured improvements to QoL vis a vis workload, time required, etc. vs accuracy and fallibility issues that have been comprehensively demonstrated with the current crop of LLMs.
- extheat 3y agoI already have a massive improvement in productivity from GitHub Copilot that I don’t find it hard to imagine that fine tuned LLMs will be able to automate the bulk of mundane work in software (maybe even all of it). Programming, and other computer based activities that involve writing are the exact types of things that language models are good at.
- oulu2006 3y agoLuckily, I was just reading such a study a few days ago: https://www.itnews.com.au/news/westpac-sees-46-percent-productivity-gain-from-ai-coding-experiment-596423 https://www.itnews.com.au/news/westpac-sees-46-percent-produ...
- feyman_r 3y agoThat’s how folks initially thought of cars too - the accident rates, lack of speed etc. The point is, as a technology, this is going to change the future. It’s a valid point that the current state might be less than what you expect. The only way to improve it is to double down on it. Comparisons to crypto are a bit shallow - except that they both are ‘new’ technologies and need GPUs, there’s not much.
- khazhoux 3y agoYou are probably right that in the six months since the release of ChatGPT, we do not have academic surveys of the productivity gains of LLMs in real-world scenarios. But that is hardly the measure of a new technology.
- usaar333 3y agoOne was just posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36152510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36152510
- dangwhy 3y ago> so many normal people use ChatGPT and find it not only interesting but also, critically, useful Is this actually true though. I write code for living and tried to use it many times but it wasn't really that useful to me ( vs google search) Curious to hear ppl who are using it in 'critically useful way' . i am eager to use it my workflows .
- somehnguy 3y agoTo your point - I don’t actually know a single ‘normal’ person IRL who uses ChatGPT or any other LLM app in general. The only people I know that have ever even mentioned them are other engineers at my job. Even then it’s more just bragging in passing about getting into the latest beta $whatever or making it generate some outrageous paragraph for 30 seconds of fun.
- gbraad 3y agoI have seen several people justifying their use for it to work on that novel they always wanted to write. when challenged on who is actually writing it, they respond with "you need to understand the limitations", and that by itself it "can't write the novel". in short, they mean that ChatGPT only grnerates short passages the size of a few paragraphs. they are therefore just puzzling and joining these short plots together. can't imagine what kind of novel could be resulting from this.
- qbasic_forever 3y agoWe are already seeing stories of AI fail too, like this lawyer that tried to use it to write an argument and it invented entire cases which don't exist. The judge is not pleased! https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65735769 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65735769
- taf2 3y agoI was on vacation at the beach so this was back in march and I had just received access to gpt4. I had lot of time and I was mostly curious to see if I could use c++ and the recently released whisper.cpp which is pretty solid for transcription s… so I haven’t written c++ for sometime and figured let’s guide gpt 4 to help me write this. It started out giving me the Skelton code. From there it was less about it driving the code and more about it writing the tedious functions. A request handler for parsing form data. After I got the example I could reuse and fit the code into the right places at the end I have a working c++ service wrapping whisper.cpp … I should open source the work but I was blown away that I was able to get this working and still be totally relaxed… occasionally I’d compare my searches in google to my answers from gpt 4 and the difference was me spending 15 - 20 minutes reading through search results vs 5 to 10 minutes… so yeah I’m a crazy ceo who won’t shut up about ai
- aiunboxed 3y agoI think there are broadly two types of people, one who understand LLMs and realise that it is actually going to change the world, others who think it is just a hype like crypto / NFTs/ meta verse. I have friends working in big tech who are completely unaware of how to use GPT - maybe because their work prohibits it and can't appreciate the value.
- qbasic_forever 3y agoThere's a third person--someone who knows what these tools are and knows their limitations mean they will only be applied successfully to very narrowly scoped problems and domains. I've been in and around the ML space for a couple decades and the hype for LLMs is just plain unhinged and does not match the reality of their applications. There are very few domains that benefit from a better BS generator, which is what these tools are in practice.
- matthewaveryusa 3y agoIm in this camp, my impression is it’s a tool that augments me while working, but it’s something that’s incredibly difficult to reliably use in a service: the sandboxing between user data and instructions is a real problem in langchain/react.
- jedberg 3y agoI'd be willing to take the other side of that bet. I liked NFTs, and invested in NFT companies, but I never thought the hype would continue. On the other hand, I think the hype for transformer models is justified. Maybe not ChatGPT or any other specific one, but I think LLMs and transformers will be transformational for our industry, like HTTP was, or portable touchscreen devices. Just not sure how to measure which one of us is right next year. :)
- tuatoru 3y agoIf it's transformational, measurement will be unecessary.
- qbasic_forever 3y agoI don't buy it, it's a better chat bot and has serious problems with fabricating facts that may never be overcome. We've been through hype cycles of chat bots before (remember 'agents' being all the rage on MSN chat in the mid 2000s?) and they move the needle in very small ways.
- _jab 3y agoHigh accuracy is not vital for all applications. I’d offer code completion bots as a perhaps familiar example of LLMs delivering meaningful value today.
- richk449 3y ago> I don't buy it, it's a better chat bot It feels like this is a category error that is causing you to miss the reason there is so much excitement. It like saying “I don’t get it, the model T is just another car. We have had them before, and most of them are better than what Ford is selling”. The revolution wasn’t that model T cars were way better than what came before - it was that the way they were built enabled huge new markets. LLMs seem vastly more powerful than the technology previous chat bots were built on. Plus, there is a whole ecosystem of generative techniques being applied to images, videos, sound, and others.
- 3y ago
- version_five 3y agoI used to post things like this, and immediately got tons of follow-ups saying I was wrong, this time it's different, "I'm already getting so much value out of chatgpt", etc. I have a sense that at least we're closer to neutral now and a lot of this shilling has past (on HN, it's still ramping up hard in the real world). It will be interesting to see the trajectory. Edit: the comments I was referring to came while I was writing the comment, looks like I spoke too soon.
- loeg 3y agoI don't think hype around either of those was nearly as pervasive as the hype around AI now. I agree the terms all entered earnings calls for similar herd-mentality reasons and most companies won't actually do much with AI, either. But blockchain and especially NFTs were pretty niche.
- andrewxdiamond 3y agoAI has actually been delivering value and solving problems in new ways, as opposed to blockchain searching for a problem to solve
- azinman2 3y agoBingo. Not long ago it was just machine learning. There is no shortage of successful deployments of AI/ML in the world, and it enables some of the biggest businesses we have. Blockchains deliver what value?
- yieldcrv 3y agoIn my world I see a statement about NFT’s as a past tense phenomenon every day While also seeing the most advanced things ever in NFTs every day, sold out new issuances every week, EIP-6551, unique differentiations, a wildly entertaining ordinals bubble, and so much more such a weird gulf, given that the former perception smugly lives rent free while not even being accurate aside from … volume being down from a peak?
- papertokyo 3y agoHow much of what you see in the NFT world is 'clearly valuable to large numbers of regular people' versus 'interesting and novel to people who enjoy tinkering with crypto tech'? I started paying attention to crypto during 2017's ICO fever phase, and the hype-to-reality ratio of this latest AI wave over the last year feels much stronger than anything blockchain-related in the last five.
- yieldcrv 3y agoit’s the entertainment sector, who cares. most of the bewilderment is about the size of the existing collectors market - which blockchain activity simply reveals due to its transparency - and everyone is mostly acting surprised that the collectors market exists, at any size, and has frictions whose NFT based solutions are of interest to collectors. By that standard, the answer to your question is “nearly all”? These collectors are not crypto enthusiasts, they don’t know anything about crypto technology, just a 5 step process of getting their wallet open and using one marketplace.
- papertokyo 3y agoOh I see, so it's kind of a hobbyist scene. I guess you could look at the past tense mentioning of NFTs as in relation to the general impact that was hyped, which was promised to be far greater and more widespread than "there's some collectors who are into it". It's also interesting that a centralized marketplace and (I presume user-friendly and less secure) wallets for non-crypto folks is a no-no in other parts of cryptoland.
- khazhoux 3y ago> A year or two ago it was NFTs and blockchain--look where that is now, lol. Yeah, you picked two ideas that were overhyped by a number of people. But NFTs struggled from day one to justify their existence. And blockchain started with a clear use case, but it was expensive (by design) and people really stretched to apply it non-problems. In contrast, these new AI technologies very clearly will revolutionize technology. To me this is self-evident, and if someone is unimpressed by what ChatGPT produces and the huge leap we've witnessed in human-computer interaction... well, I'm not sure what it would take to impress them.
- krainboltgreene 3y ago> To me this is self-evident, and if someone is unimpressed by what ChatGPT produces and the huge leap we've witnessed in human-computer interaction... well, I'm not sure what it would take to impress them. I promise you that every blockchain and crypto bro said the exact same thing, hundreds of times on this very website.
- tambourine_man 3y agoYes, and because something was overhyped once, everything after that must be as well. That's how logic works.
- krainboltgreene 3y agoYou can say that but I'm responding explicitly to how it's 'self-evident' to you.
- tambourine_man 3y agoWhat’s going to happen to Twitter? Will Mastodon, Bluesky or another contender take its place? Will they all coexist? Perhaps an open protocol will take over? Or maybe the bird will become phoenix and rise from the ashes. Who knows, who cares (I do, but maybe I shouldn’t as much). Some things are hard to predict. If, on the other hand, you’ve been caring a third of your weight on your back for years and you suddenly see someone with a pushcart for the first time in your life, it’s not hard to predict you’ll want one too.
- tambourine_man 3y agoI use Photoshop and write code almost everyday and have for 30 years. Have you seen what generative fill can do? Have you seen the code ChatGPT writes? Can you imagine how many hours it could have saved me? Now multiply that by the number of professionals in the field. And that's just two areas I’m familiar with. How’s that comparable to NFT, Crypto or Web3? There are empty hypes bubbles and seismic shifts. It’s not that hard to tell them apart.
- nemothekid 3y agoTo be fair there are plenty of people who made an incredible sum of money and we’re convinced crypto was going to change the world. Generative fill is cool but I’m unconvinced but figma probably also saved a ton of time for a great number professionals, but I’d be wary if everyone executive was talking about figma the same way. I’m not dismissive of AI, but people talk about LLMs as if they are AGI, and I think that is hype
- tambourine_man 3y agoFigma is a nice-to-have thing. Collaborative, more focused and vastly simpler version of Illustrator/Photoshop. Think of it as what Google Docs was to MS Word. AI is in a different league altogether. I don’t know if we’ll reach AGI in my lifetime, I think we will, but even if we don’t, what we already have and what’s on the horizon is ground breaking.
- sdwr 3y agoI wrote some (decently repetitive) code today. Copilot autofilled 80% of it. Even if it doesn't impact bottom line, will save my wrists for sure.
- qbasic_forever 3y agoI've seen chat GPT write terrible code. For simple problem domains where you're coding stuff that's effectively interview questions or basic data handling (like what millions of tutorials describe on the net today) it's fine. But for actually solving novel problems it completely fails. The best way to understand this is the fact that the open AI/chat GPT developers themselves don't use the tech to code itself. Generative fill is a neat feature for a limited domain. It is not some grand realignment of labor, the truth is there are orders of magnitude more construction workers, dog walkers, baristas, etc. than graphic designers. Generative fill or other related AI tech is useless to most people's work.
- jorgemf 3y agoNFTs and blockchain never had the adoption rate that LLM had (see GPT4 and how companies and users are using it).
- krainboltgreene 3y agoAdoption rate here meaning "people signing up for a website that is free".
- tambourine_man 3y agoYeah, because people signing up for free websites in record numbers have historically been a strong indicator of business failure. I literally LOLed here.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]