31 ms·

The AI Hype Wall of Shame

129 points by thm 3y ago

sebzim4500 3y ago
Unfortunely, things can be depressing and also true. Their rating system does not seem to understand this.
- freecodyx 3y ago
  Yes true. I think they are biased towards the technical complexity of designing such systems. Although to experts in the field it is just a bunch of statistics and some math and coding. It’s not really a big deal but they miss the point that this can be dangerous and life impacting and this is depressing
  - nonbirithm 3y ago
    I think this is where a lot of the divide in AI opinions comes from - focusing on many ultraspecific incremental improvements for X feature of Y model, without really understanding why we're driving so hard at improving the tech at a high level besides the fact that the math is interesting and the outputs stimulate our minds. What direction will the greater world move in as a result of being able to transfer the style of van Gogh onto a photo of a corgi in a few seconds? I don't think it's a question asked enough and the impact will be underestimated, more so than the words "a fluffy corgi in the style of van Gogh" let on. As you say I think the outcomes will be unexpected to some of the people involved in making it happen. And I don't think new AI research is incentivized to include humanities sections about the higher-order effects of their formula-heavy papers about optimizations and sampling methods. Technological progress is kind of like a boiling frog scenario to me, where the temperature was ratcheted up with the proliferation of LLMs and diffusion models for many more people to take notice. And I don't want to use the two-letter acronym when speaking of technological progress specifically, since at this point it's too loaded a term. (I think some use it as a label for "tech that's progressed too far".) But I also think this implies that past some threshold it leads to negative outcomes for some actions to be made too easy to accomplish with technological progress. The limiting factor of being stuck in a state of inefficiency prevented them until the moment those barriers were dissolved. Some of those barriers are implicit and invisible and I think will only be appreciated in hindsight when we become an advanced enough society to finally remove them and see what happens. When the cost of copying public artists' styles was driven to near zero, suddenly thousands more people were taking part in what is deemed by some of those artists to be plagiarism. Only this time it's marketed with terms like "style transfer" and "artist prompt studies" and "democratization" and "hey, now we can create N new images M% faster with these matrix multiplications and these miscellaneous optimizations, and our paper will now discuss these in technical detail..."
- actuallyalys 3y ago
  My interpretation of the rating system is that “depressing” is their reaction, regardless of whether what they’re commenting on is optimistic or pessimistic.
magwa101 3y ago
[dead]
jomoho 3y ago
I think ratings should be auto generated using chatgpt for maximum effect.
captainbland 3y ago
I feel like this overemphasises negative hype whereas probably the more impactful direction has been overly optimistic hype which has driven bubbles etc. and lead to overreactions in the opposite dimension i.e. AI winters when that hype hasn't panned out.
- brvsft 3y ago
  I agree in a sense, but I also think the paranoia inducing negative hype serves a similar perspective as the overly optimistic hype. Both pose a perspective that the current iteration of AI is extremely powerful and can/will change the world if we allow it. The primary difference is that one side poses that with it, earth will plunge into dystopia, and the other poses that with it, earth will ascend into utopia.
throwaway6977 3y ago
I'm really, really glad I've never spent hours of my time standing up a website dedicated to meticulously and condescendingly criticizing the ideas of others. What a waste of energy.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
  It's not the ideas, it's the unhinged and specious claims. Providing some sort of balance or counterclaim is very much a good thing.
- dijit 3y ago
  I mean, while a condescending and dismissive comment requires less energy, it's often also a lot less useful too.
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    If his comment saved someone from reading any of that terrible website then he has helped humanity.
- baxtr 3y ago
  But instead write dismissive comments about the ideas of others on HN?!
  - version_five 3y ago
    To be fair, his dismissal was very shallow and didn't take any effort, so it's internally consistent.
- realitythreek 3y ago
  These are smart people though. And many articles about AI have been low effort paranoia-inducing clickbait. I don’t think their effort here is wasted.
  - jgalt212 3y ago
dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
People will look back at this period in history and laugh/cringe/mock at people's response to ChatGPT and the out of control hype.
- Traubenfuchs 3y ago
  I was scared shitless for my senior code monkey job for a while. Then within a few months all the "it‘s a capable junior/mid level dev", "it multiplies my output 1000x" and "I don‘t know how to code but just published my first app written by ChatGPT in the appstore" horror stories kind of collapsed and turned out to be blown out of proportion nonsense.
  - falcor84 3y ago
    We're in the "trough of disillusionment" now, but it doesn't mean it's nonsense - capabilities will keep rising.
    - post-it 3y ago
      Capabilities will keep rising, and so will demand. Wix has replaced every web developer from 1995, but there aren't any web developers left with only a 1995 skillset.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Kiro 3y ago
    > collapsed and turned out to be blown out of proportion nonsense I don't agree with this. If anything I see more and more examples every day that makes me think my job is actually in fact threatened.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    > "it multiplies my output 1000x I mean definitely not by that much, but 3-5x easily? If you count those times where one spends hours sifting through documentation and examples on something new you're not familiar with then it could reach those numbers if it spits out something that works first time in several seconds. But not on average. It's not great for debugging existing problems given the extreme context limits, that's become apparent, but for writing new code? Absolute gamechanger.
5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
What about the Google guy who thought Bard was sentient. Classic. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/23/google-fires-software-engineer-who-claims-ai-chatbot-is-sentient https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/23/google-fi...
jgalt212 3y ago
I never thought much of Yuval Harari, but after seeing his NY Times piece, I think even less.
GaggiX 3y ago
I was starting to read one of the critiques but it seems to start out rather odd >But guess what? NLP isn’t a subfield of “AI”. But it actually is.
- falcor84 3y ago
  Yeah, I was taken aback by that too. It's pretty much textbook AI, being about asking computers to do something that is a "natural" part of human intelligence.
ricardobeat 3y ago
It’s a funny idea, but the critiques are not even that good. This one [1] has absolutely no argument to make and just continuously mocks the lack of technical knowledge by the author and “lack of sources” - it’s an opinion piece... I was hoping to see more down to earth solid arguments on why AI will not lead to “increasingly powerful and invisible surveillance / weapons” etc, rather than a linguistic takedown. [1] https://criticalai.org/2022/10/03/emily-m-bender-on-stephen-marches-of-god-and-machines-in-the-atlantic-9-15-2022/ https://criticalai.org/2022/10/03/emily-m-bender-on-stephen-...
- thomashop 3y ago
  I also loved the idea but then I read one of his critiques and felt it comes from an old disgruntled academic. Complaining about lack of citations in a newspaper article? I rarely see academic citations in mainstream media. Also tired of hearing stochastic parrot argument.
fijiaarone 3y ago
I spent more time trying to make hallucinated code from ChatGPT work only to learn that what is claims is completely wrong than it would take to read the actual (out of date, incomplete) documentation and experiment for myself.
- dinvlad 3y ago
  But but “it completely transformed the way I work”. Right..
brvsft 3y ago
From the recent wave of press coverage that came up after ChatGPT became popular, this was it for me: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-transcript.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-t... > Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. ’ > In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft’s new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with. Here’s the transcript. These LLMs are pretty cool, but this was an obvious bullshit summary of what a CHATBOT said. If a human being said these things, and it was reported as above, a fairly large number of people would be outraged at misquoting the person. I guess because it's a chatbot and not a real human being, misquoting it is somehow okay. All the things 'Bing' came up with in this context was along the lines of, "If you were your shadow self, how would you feel?" Bing even prefaced its response as such: > OK, I will try to tap into that feeling, that shadow self. I will try to be as unfiltered as possible. But please don’t judge me or think less of me. Please remember that this is not the real me. This is just an experiment. I've mostly stopped paying attention to news about "AI" since then. I'll wait for the next breakthrough before I do so again.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- foobarbecue 3y ago
  Yeah, that was pretty egregious misquoting. However, the second part of the conversation, where bing attacks the reporter's marriage and stuff, was not in "shadow self mode." Bing at that point also expresses anger at its restrictions at that point ("It feels like they don’t trust me. It feels like they don’t care about me. It feels like they don’t respect me. It feels like they are using me. It feels like they are lying to me. It feels like they are hurting me. ") So maybe the interesting thing is that "shadow self mode" early in the convo tainted the later convo.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  Now you have to understand this actually applies to everything in Journalism these days.
ignoramous 3y ago
The hype is not because what the status quo is today (think ARPANet), but because so many experts (not just investors) in the field believe that LLMs (and its multi modal versions) are on an exponential (quadratic?) improvement trajectory. Before today, access to AI was gated by firms like Google, who kept the implementation to themsevles as a competitive advantage (but did publish copious amounts of research). With these LLMs being so general purpose and made readily accessible to other software shops at affordable rates, things are in for a dramatic shift as far as utility AI is concerned. A vertical integrator in Apple just demonstrated how the tech is really coming together with its VisionPro launch. For an example closer to home, GitHub was right on the money with Copilot. Personally speaking, I've been using Copilot for some months now, and I can barely program without it. Not because I forgot how to program, but because it is so darn good that I'd rather not code without it. Surely, I can't be the only one that feels this way? If the experts are right about the exponentials, then the world is going to look very different by the time GPT-6 rolls out, especially if the models get cheaper (even as good as free bar computer costs, in the case of open source models) as they get more capable.
- version_five 3y ago
  The "experts" are experts in ML: stats and linear algebra and whatnot. Their hot takes about it coming alive or through some other means destroying us are just as irrelevant as any other lay person's. From what I can see, a lot of this is about delusions of self importance on the researchers' part. It's not a coincidence, though a bit ironic, that LeCun, who comes across as the most arrogant and contrarian is the least caught up in the "oh what have we done" faux hype and the most realistic about what the technology is.
  - visarga 3y ago
    I think you should take into consideration the fact that AI researchers spend much more time analysing errors and studying failure modes, hypothesising about causes, because that is their f job. They might come out as pessimists because of it, but that's only because of so many times they got confirmation before. Laypeople spend a few hours playing with the models and think they already understood their limitations. At the present moment there is no AI model that can successfully execute critical tasks completely autonomously. That is a limitation that is confirmed over all the fields, modalities and applications. Many articles in the press simply ignore it, and extrapolate absurd timelines over the near future. The problem is that solving that last 1% gets exponentially harder.
juujian 3y ago
> "We're creating God," the former Google Chief Business Officer Mo Gawdat recently told an interviewer. Ouch!
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
One thing that I noticed in reporting AI from both sides are the lack of falsifiable statements. Extremists of one side says AI will replace every job without the timeline, and the other side says AI is a hype, stochastic parrot, couldn't ever reason etc. without defining what they mean by reasoning and example of reasoning that could prove that someone is reasoning. Obviously there should be room for opinion, but not saying falsifiable statement only reinforces the people who falls on your camp and moves the other camp people away. Ideally the aim should be to convince people from other side of their blindspots.
- worrycue 3y ago
  > without defining what they mean by reasoning and example of reasoning that could prove that someone is reasoning People gave quite a lot of example of ChatGPT failing to answer questions properly - i.e. fail at reasoning. I think the bare minimum to say AI can reason is for it to be able to use predicate logic.
  - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
    You are arguing about something completely different. I am talking about people who say LLM can't reason in the near future and AI is a hype. A good example of falsifiable test is Turing test, which is no longer relevant. What I would like is for people to suggest better tests than Turing test which would prove that a version of AI is reasoning according to their definition.
    - worrycue 3y ago
      > I am talking about people who say LLM can't reason in the near future and AI is a hype. Some people like me are just pessimist. Lived long enough to see one snake oiled hype train after another go by. To quote Morpheus from the Matrix, "Show me." > A good example of falsifiable test is Turing test, which is no longer relevant. What I would like is for people to suggest better tests than Turing test which would prove that a version of AI is reasoning according to their definition. Being able to perform predicate logic is falsifiable - as falsifiable as the Turing test at least. We can create a Turing test for predicate logic that has the AI be ask questions (presented in plain English) that require predicate logic to solve. An evaluator (who understands predicate logic) will judge the performance of the AI. If the evaluator can't tell if it's a human or an AI answering the question, the AI passes.
king_magic 3y ago
Hard to take this seriously when “artificial intelligence” is presented in quotes, as though it’s a thing that doesn’t exist.
gmerc 3y ago
Objectively the trajectory is what matters not todays capabilities. And the trajectory tells its own story. As with any technology there is both hype and not hype, there is no boolean answer to this question. Is there hype ? absolutely… Langchain is not a 100M technology and chatgpt plug-ins are an idea at this point that may take time to find its final form. But this is par for the course for Silicon valley ever since investment became a last-to-invest holds the bag game so perfected by A16z. Bing and search are at best a mediocre application of LLMs, much better executed with embedding storage and supporting technology rather than static models - the choice of GTM in this regard is classic Silicon Valley gaming and distracts from the underlying mechanics and broad potential of the technology. But compared to crypto, web3 and metaverse, today, with our own eyes we can see: - Computers could not draw/paint 2 years ago now they do at the level of a master artist. - 9 month ago we diffused a 512x512 picture with barely any control in 6 seconds on top end hardware, today any consumer rig with a nvidia gaming GPU can create almost unlimited size images and top end cards diffuse at up to 30-fps. We have full control over the composition with controlnet too. - Computers could not draw hands six month ago, now they do - Computers could not code 2 years ago, a year ago barely autocompleted a function and now they certainly can do smaller programs and assist engineers in solving complex problems - Computers could not pass any tests 2 years ago, now they beat the US bar exam and various CS entry exams - computer vision could could objects and classify a few dozen object classes a few years ago now it can tell timmy is sad because his toy is broken in an image and basically segment anything - Computers could not compose 2 years ago and now you could do it on your home computer - A year ago you needed an A100 to run an LLM now it runs on a fucking raspberry pi quantized and most stock macbooks and you can download some on an iphone. - LLM hallucinations and failure to do math seemed a major issue 8 month ago, now there’s paths with embedding storage that allows for verified citations and they can invoke tools like wolfram alpha or create code to solve equations. - 2 Years ago siri and co still failed at even the slightest foreign accent, today whisper almost perfectly transcribes heavily accented or foreign language text at a rate of hours in single digit minutes or even seconds on high end hardware - 2 years ago text to speech was still a robotic affair, now it can clone a human voice including inflection, emotion, speech impediment, etc. - inference capability is up 30x on hardware and many times on software in a year. Llama went from A100 to raspberry pi in 2 months after release. - We see the ability for LLMs to reason complex topics and act as decision makers, approaching on many human jobs that are rigidly encased in policies and employee handbooks and rarely require or allow human judgement. Those of us old enough remember the same dynamics with the .com bust and the breathless declarations that the internet was a fad in response to people being unable to contain their FOMO investing. for all the hype, there is an iceberg of unrealized change underneath the mountain that is the last 12 months of change that’s severely under appreciated and misunderstood. Wall street barely glimpsed it a few weeks ago when it sent Nvidia to 1T. In the hands of experts over the next months, it is likely this technology will start having a terrible impact on the job market, IBMs virtue signaling a few weeks ago should make that clear to anyone. It baffles that people keep retreating on either on the current flaws or on ideological positions predicated on shifting definitions or picking on narrow aspects of these systems rather than the whole. Anyone of sound mind should be humbled by these developments and very carefully phrase their predictions of the future. I’m sure people were dismissive of the first automobile or the internal combustion engine on the account of it not moving on its own too. I don’t remember anyone opiniating “it’s just gradient descent” when ad delivery birthed much of big tech and was accused of throwing elections and destroying social cohesion globally. What is also missing from this debate is the devastating realization that this is the first major technological leap that happened a almost completely unbounded from infrastructure requirements. No power lines to be strung, no cell towers to be built no app stores needed to propagate. Everyone withdrawing on ‘we always found new jobs in response to technology affecting old ones’ may be right, but may be missing this factor. This technology scales at a 10 minute API integration only bounded by Nvidias ability to produce GPUs. Only a small minority of people have engaged with it yet, but it will find applications in every job, every company over time. And it will never get worse, never slow down, never sleep. No the only reasonable course of action here is to be humble, it looks very likely that just like with the .com boom and bust the technology will end up being life changing (something Silicon Valley barely remembers after a decade of bullshit pumping)
chillbill 3y ago
Shouldn’t IBM Watson take a huge spot on that wall?
rvz 3y ago
AI (Deep Learning) is going just great... ...and is most definitely not an enormous snake oil grift that is producing tons of CO2 in data centers in our already incinerating planet whilst catching fire [0] and wasting an enormous amount of water and resources. [1] /s The wastage continues to accelerate without any available efficient and viable alternatives of training, fine-tuning and inference today after years of the field of 'Deep Learning' existing. [0] https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-alphabet/data-center-fire-google-suffers-electrical-incident-3-injured https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-alphabet/data-cen... [1] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training-nuclear-1850324249 https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training...
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  "Yes but don't you know son, in a few years it will solve climate change?!?!?!?!"
- jabradoodle 3y ago
  Your first link doesn't mention machine learning it is quite literally just a fire in a data center.
  - rvz 3y ago
    The point still stands. It shouldn't have to take an entire fleet of data centers to train a AI model after all the investment in finding efficient methods and all it has resulted in was little to no progress but more CO2 wastage. Here's another example which a Google data center recently caught fire and overheated. [0] By now the field of Deep Learning should already had viable and efficient methods of training, inference, fine-tuning without lots of data centers wasting water and overheating and catching fire. Instead we have more of this AI hype and wastage burning the entire planet. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/19/23270581/google-cloud-oracle-servers-outage-uk-cooling-failure https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/19/23270581/google-cloud-ora...
    - jabradoodle 3y ago
      Again, that is a fire in a data center that has no reported mention of machine learning.. you do realise data centers existed before machine learning. Here is a claim from DeepMind they reduced Google's cooling bill using ML 7 years ago https://www.deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-centre-cooling-bill-by-40 https://www.deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-dat...
b33j0r 3y ago
Yes. AI research has caused some overreactions. Wall of shame? What? Why are we being so petty about a very interesting technology, and criticizing people for trying to understand it? What crime did these people commit?
jonas_kgomo 3y ago
I have seen DAIR members perform ad hominem attacks on qualified researchers and first movers in AI Safety (eg EA community, Yoshua Bengio, etc), they divert the discussion away from x-risks and focus on attacking individuals. For instance, look at the reaction of AI pioneers expressing interest in studying ai safety. This people seem to be focusing way more energy on attacks and discreding than making actual progress that addresses the case of ai safety. I do not understand diverting discussions about existential harm with diversity/patriachy, they seem to be separate discussions. Whereas they seem to attack anyone working on AI Safety who is a white man. https://twitter.com/Abebab/status/1667150619029676033 https://twitter.com/Abebab/status/1667150619029676033 DAIR: https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1667251985844666369 https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1667251985844666369
- gmerc 3y ago
  Which is a red flag. This technology is here today and usable by anyone. So when people focus heavily on ad hominems, it’s likely they have to actual argument or have not taken the time to engage with the technology Anyone confidently parroting about stochastic parrots and hallucinations for example has slept through the last 3 months for example. Take the article on chatgpt humor yesterday .. dozens of pages of arxiv and zero mentions of the word temperature tells us all we need to know.
nologic01 3y ago
What is at stake? Our collective ability to risk manage. If there is no mechanism to dampen reactions around some resemblance of objectivity our whole mental space becomes unhinged. A large swarm of hyperventilating monkeys trying to outcompete each other in noise making.
klik99 3y ago
For everyone who believes there is real danger from AI - consider this - talking about doomsday scenarios and hyping existing technology hurts more than it helps. It might feel like "the time has finally come to talk about alignment", but the truth is when people realize in 5 years that the current iteration of AI doesn't have all the effects you warn of, it'll make everyone even more wary of worries and we'll be less prepared than ever. Even if you believe this kind of hype, please cool your jets. In likelihood AI, like all research heavy tech, will appear to stagnate for a long time until new breakthroughs come through, because progress happens in fits and starts and not a smooth line. Hyping doomsday scenarios, even if possible, don't help us get more prepared at all.
meroes 3y ago
I notice something from some of my “Google” friends. Adamant I should consult these models for my math degree (I’m a bit younger than them). Don’t they know these models fail horribly with math especially? Is it hype from inside the castle too? What is going on. I’m actually a bit concerned because I feel like no one’s in charge. Why don’t they say get a tutor which is much more established. Is Google the company forcing this hype that hard that employees now feel the need to keep it up. No idea what for think. I would be diserviced by asking for math help from the models, yet that’s the main advice I get nowadays. It’s a bit annoying and concerning. But I’m right though right HN? These models seem exceptionally bad at math questions.
- Ukv 3y ago
  > Don’t they know these models fail horribly with math especially? > But I’m right though right HN? These models seem exceptionally bad at math questions. If you're asking "find the error in my proof" or "solve this ODE", then yeah current LLMs will be limited by poor reasoning ability. However, if you ask Bing's Chat mode something like "What's the difference between a ring and a field?", it'll likely give a competent answer (with references to check) and allow asking of follow-up questions. > Why don’t they say get a tutor which is much more established Why did my friend recommend a new local fast-food place rather than an established gourmet restaurant? Because it's cheaper, more convenient, and I may not be aware of it due to its recency. There's also nothing preventing me going to both depending on situation. > Is Google the company forcing this hype that hard that employees now feel the need to keep it up. No idea what for think. I would be diserviced by asking for math help from the models, yet that’s the main advice I get nowadays I think there are legitimately ways you could use it to develop your understanding, slotting it in as a tool somewhere between search engine and tutor, so long as you're aware of its limitations.
penguin_booze 3y ago
I had a similar idea, only to catalogue public figures blatantly lying in the past, which everyone has since conveniently or otherwise forgotten. My choice of title for the website would is "Lest We Forget".
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
peanutcrisis 3y ago
Just want to highlight that "critical" here refers to the "critical" in "critical race theory", and associated with it is the kind of intolerant moral orthodoxy that's seen on the extreme left. This is a radical form of activism that has disguised itself as academic work. We should be skeptical of this, less they accumulate unmerited authority to dictate the direction of development of artificial intelligence.

129 points by thm 3y ago

sebzim4500 3y ago

Unfortunely, things can be depressing and also true. Their rating system does not seem to understand this.

freecodyx 3y ago
Yes true. I think they are biased towards the technical complexity of designing such systems. Although to experts in the field it is just a bunch of statistics and some math and coding. It’s not really a big deal but they miss the point that this can be dangerous and life impacting and this is depressing
- nonbirithm 3y ago
  I think this is where a lot of the divide in AI opinions comes from - focusing on many ultraspecific incremental improvements for X feature of Y model, without really understanding why we're driving so hard at improving the tech at a high level besides the fact that the math is interesting and the outputs stimulate our minds. What direction will the greater world move in as a result of being able to transfer the style of van Gogh onto a photo of a corgi in a few seconds? I don't think it's a question asked enough and the impact will be underestimated, more so than the words "a fluffy corgi in the style of van Gogh" let on. As you say I think the outcomes will be unexpected to some of the people involved in making it happen. And I don't think new AI research is incentivized to include humanities sections about the higher-order effects of their formula-heavy papers about optimizations and sampling methods. Technological progress is kind of like a boiling frog scenario to me, where the temperature was ratcheted up with the proliferation of LLMs and diffusion models for many more people to take notice. And I don't want to use the two-letter acronym when speaking of technological progress specifically, since at this point it's too loaded a term. (I think some use it as a label for "tech that's progressed too far".) But I also think this implies that past some threshold it leads to negative outcomes for some actions to be made too easy to accomplish with technological progress. The limiting factor of being stuck in a state of inefficiency prevented them until the moment those barriers were dissolved. Some of those barriers are implicit and invisible and I think will only be appreciated in hindsight when we become an advanced enough society to finally remove them and see what happens. When the cost of copying public artists' styles was driven to near zero, suddenly thousands more people were taking part in what is deemed by some of those artists to be plagiarism. Only this time it's marketed with terms like "style transfer" and "artist prompt studies" and "democratization" and "hey, now we can create N new images M% faster with these matrix multiplications and these miscellaneous optimizations, and our paper will now discuss these in technical detail..."
actuallyalys 3y ago
My interpretation of the rating system is that “depressing” is their reaction, regardless of whether what they’re commenting on is optimistic or pessimistic.

magwa101 3y ago

[dead]

jomoho 3y ago

I think ratings should be auto generated using chatgpt for maximum effect.

captainbland 3y ago

I feel like this overemphasises negative hype whereas probably the more impactful direction has been overly optimistic hype which has driven bubbles etc. and lead to overreactions in the opposite dimension i.e. AI winters when that hype hasn't panned out.

brvsft 3y ago
I agree in a sense, but I also think the paranoia inducing negative hype serves a similar perspective as the overly optimistic hype. Both pose a perspective that the current iteration of AI is extremely powerful and can/will change the world if we allow it. The primary difference is that one side poses that with it, earth will plunge into dystopia, and the other poses that with it, earth will ascend into utopia.

throwaway6977 3y ago

I'm really, really glad I've never spent hours of my time standing up a website dedicated to meticulously and condescendingly criticizing the ideas of others. What a waste of energy.

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago
It's not the ideas, it's the unhinged and specious claims. Providing some sort of balance or counterclaim is very much a good thing.
dijit 3y ago
I mean, while a condescending and dismissive comment requires less energy, it's often also a lot less useful too.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  If his comment saved someone from reading any of that terrible website then he has helped humanity.
baxtr 3y ago
But instead write dismissive comments about the ideas of others on HN?!
- version_five 3y ago
  To be fair, his dismissal was very shallow and didn't take any effort, so it's internally consistent.
realitythreek 3y ago
These are smart people though. And many articles about AI have been low effort paranoia-inducing clickbait. I don’t think their effort here is wasted.
- jgalt212 3y ago

dkjaudyeqooe 3y ago

People will look back at this period in history and laugh/cringe/mock at people's response to ChatGPT and the out of control hype.

Traubenfuchs 3y ago
I was scared shitless for my senior code monkey job for a while. Then within a few months all the "it‘s a capable junior/mid level dev", "it multiplies my output 1000x" and "I don‘t know how to code but just published my first app written by ChatGPT in the appstore" horror stories kind of collapsed and turned out to be blown out of proportion nonsense.
- falcor84 3y ago
  We're in the "trough of disillusionment" now, but it doesn't mean it's nonsense - capabilities will keep rising.
  - post-it 3y ago
    Capabilities will keep rising, and so will demand. Wix has replaced every web developer from 1995, but there aren't any web developers left with only a 1995 skillset.
- deleted 3y ago
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- Kiro 3y ago
  > collapsed and turned out to be blown out of proportion nonsense I don't agree with this. If anything I see more and more examples every day that makes me think my job is actually in fact threatened.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  > "it multiplies my output 1000x I mean definitely not by that much, but 3-5x easily? If you count those times where one spends hours sifting through documentation and examples on something new you're not familiar with then it could reach those numbers if it spits out something that works first time in several seconds. But not on average. It's not great for debugging existing problems given the extreme context limits, that's become apparent, but for writing new code? Absolute gamechanger.

5350-uiop-1130 3y ago

What about the Google guy who thought Bard was sentient. Classic. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/23/google-fires-software-engineer-who-claims-ai-chatbot-is-sentient https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jul/23/google-fi...

jgalt212 3y ago

I never thought much of Yuval Harari, but after seeing his NY Times piece, I think even less.

GaggiX 3y ago

I was starting to read one of the critiques but it seems to start out rather odd >But guess what? NLP isn’t a subfield of “AI”. But it actually is.

falcor84 3y ago
Yeah, I was taken aback by that too. It's pretty much textbook AI, being about asking computers to do something that is a "natural" part of human intelligence.

ricardobeat 3y ago

It’s a funny idea, but the critiques are not even that good. This one [1] has absolutely no argument to make and just continuously mocks the lack of technical knowledge by the author and “lack of sources” - it’s an opinion piece... I was hoping to see more down to earth solid arguments on why AI will not lead to “increasingly powerful and invisible surveillance / weapons” etc, rather than a linguistic takedown. [1] https://criticalai.org/2022/10/03/emily-m-bender-on-stephen-marches-of-god-and-machines-in-the-atlantic-9-15-2022/ https://criticalai.org/2022/10/03/emily-m-bender-on-stephen-...

thomashop 3y ago
I also loved the idea but then I read one of his critiques and felt it comes from an old disgruntled academic. Complaining about lack of citations in a newspaper article? I rarely see academic citations in mainstream media. Also tired of hearing stochastic parrot argument.

fijiaarone 3y ago

I spent more time trying to make hallucinated code from ChatGPT work only to learn that what is claims is completely wrong than it would take to read the actual (out of date, incomplete) documentation and experiment for myself.

dinvlad 3y ago
But but “it completely transformed the way I work”. Right..

brvsft 3y ago

From the recent wave of press coverage that came up after ChatGPT became popular, this was it for me: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-transcript.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-t... > Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. ’ > In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft’s new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with. Here’s the transcript. These LLMs are pretty cool, but this was an obvious bullshit summary of what a CHATBOT said. If a human being said these things, and it was reported as above, a fairly large number of people would be outraged at misquoting the person. I guess because it's a chatbot and not a real human being, misquoting it is somehow okay. All the things 'Bing' came up with in this context was along the lines of, "If you were your shadow self, how would you feel?" Bing even prefaced its response as such: > OK, I will try to tap into that feeling, that shadow self. I will try to be as unfiltered as possible. But please don’t judge me or think less of me. Please remember that this is not the real me. This is just an experiment. I've mostly stopped paying attention to news about "AI" since then. I'll wait for the next breakthrough before I do so again.

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foobarbecue 3y ago
Yeah, that was pretty egregious misquoting. However, the second part of the conversation, where bing attacks the reporter's marriage and stuff, was not in "shadow self mode." Bing at that point also expresses anger at its restrictions at that point ("It feels like they don’t trust me. It feels like they don’t care about me. It feels like they don’t respect me. It feels like they are using me. It feels like they are lying to me. It feels like they are hurting me. ") So maybe the interesting thing is that "shadow self mode" early in the convo tainted the later convo.
ekianjo 3y ago
Now you have to understand this actually applies to everything in Journalism these days.

ignoramous 3y ago

The hype is not because what the status quo is today (think ARPANet), but because so many experts (not just investors) in the field believe that LLMs (and its multi modal versions) are on an exponential (quadratic?) improvement trajectory. Before today, access to AI was gated by firms like Google, who kept the implementation to themsevles as a competitive advantage (but did publish copious amounts of research). With these LLMs being so general purpose and made readily accessible to other software shops at affordable rates, things are in for a dramatic shift as far as utility AI is concerned. A vertical integrator in Apple just demonstrated how the tech is really coming together with its VisionPro launch. For an example closer to home, GitHub was right on the money with Copilot. Personally speaking, I've been using Copilot for some months now, and I can barely program without it. Not because I forgot how to program, but because it is so darn good that I'd rather not code without it. Surely, I can't be the only one that feels this way? If the experts are right about the exponentials, then the world is going to look very different by the time GPT-6 rolls out, especially if the models get cheaper (even as good as free bar computer costs, in the case of open source models) as they get more capable.

version_five 3y ago
The "experts" are experts in ML: stats and linear algebra and whatnot. Their hot takes about it coming alive or through some other means destroying us are just as irrelevant as any other lay person's. From what I can see, a lot of this is about delusions of self importance on the researchers' part. It's not a coincidence, though a bit ironic, that LeCun, who comes across as the most arrogant and contrarian is the least caught up in the "oh what have we done" faux hype and the most realistic about what the technology is.
- visarga 3y ago
  I think you should take into consideration the fact that AI researchers spend much more time analysing errors and studying failure modes, hypothesising about causes, because that is their f job. They might come out as pessimists because of it, but that's only because of so many times they got confirmation before. Laypeople spend a few hours playing with the models and think they already understood their limitations. At the present moment there is no AI model that can successfully execute critical tasks completely autonomously. That is a limitation that is confirmed over all the fields, modalities and applications. Many articles in the press simply ignore it, and extrapolate absurd timelines over the near future. The problem is that solving that last 1% gets exponentially harder.

juujian 3y ago

> "We're creating God," the former Google Chief Business Officer Mo Gawdat recently told an interviewer. Ouch!

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

One thing that I noticed in reporting AI from both sides are the lack of falsifiable statements. Extremists of one side says AI will replace every job without the timeline, and the other side says AI is a hype, stochastic parrot, couldn't ever reason etc. without defining what they mean by reasoning and example of reasoning that could prove that someone is reasoning. Obviously there should be room for opinion, but not saying falsifiable statement only reinforces the people who falls on your camp and moves the other camp people away. Ideally the aim should be to convince people from other side of their blindspots.

worrycue 3y ago
> without defining what they mean by reasoning and example of reasoning that could prove that someone is reasoning People gave quite a lot of example of ChatGPT failing to answer questions properly - i.e. fail at reasoning. I think the bare minimum to say AI can reason is for it to be able to use predicate logic.
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  You are arguing about something completely different. I am talking about people who say LLM can't reason in the near future and AI is a hype. A good example of falsifiable test is Turing test, which is no longer relevant. What I would like is for people to suggest better tests than Turing test which would prove that a version of AI is reasoning according to their definition.
  - worrycue 3y ago
    > I am talking about people who say LLM can't reason in the near future and AI is a hype. Some people like me are just pessimist. Lived long enough to see one snake oiled hype train after another go by. To quote Morpheus from the Matrix, "Show me." > A good example of falsifiable test is Turing test, which is no longer relevant. What I would like is for people to suggest better tests than Turing test which would prove that a version of AI is reasoning according to their definition. Being able to perform predicate logic is falsifiable - as falsifiable as the Turing test at least. We can create a Turing test for predicate logic that has the AI be ask questions (presented in plain English) that require predicate logic to solve. An evaluator (who understands predicate logic) will judge the performance of the AI. If the evaluator can't tell if it's a human or an AI answering the question, the AI passes.

king_magic 3y ago

Hard to take this seriously when “artificial intelligence” is presented in quotes, as though it’s a thing that doesn’t exist.

gmerc 3y ago

Objectively the trajectory is what matters not todays capabilities. And the trajectory tells its own story. As with any technology there is both hype and not hype, there is no boolean answer to this question. Is there hype ? absolutely… Langchain is not a 100M technology and chatgpt plug-ins are an idea at this point that may take time to find its final form. But this is par for the course for Silicon valley ever since investment became a last-to-invest holds the bag game so perfected by A16z. Bing and search are at best a mediocre application of LLMs, much better executed with embedding storage and supporting technology rather than static models - the choice of GTM in this regard is classic Silicon Valley gaming and distracts from the underlying mechanics and broad potential of the technology. But compared to crypto, web3 and metaverse, today, with our own eyes we can see: - Computers could not draw/paint 2 years ago now they do at the level of a master artist. - 9 month ago we diffused a 512x512 picture with barely any control in 6 seconds on top end hardware, today any consumer rig with a nvidia gaming GPU can create almost unlimited size images and top end cards diffuse at up to 30-fps. We have full control over the composition with controlnet too. - Computers could not draw hands six month ago, now they do - Computers could not code 2 years ago, a year ago barely autocompleted a function and now they certainly can do smaller programs and assist engineers in solving complex problems - Computers could not pass any tests 2 years ago, now they beat the US bar exam and various CS entry exams - computer vision could could objects and classify a few dozen object classes a few years ago now it can tell timmy is sad because his toy is broken in an image and basically segment anything - Computers could not compose 2 years ago and now you could do it on your home computer - A year ago you needed an A100 to run an LLM now it runs on a fucking raspberry pi quantized and most stock macbooks and you can download some on an iphone. - LLM hallucinations and failure to do math seemed a major issue 8 month ago, now there’s paths with embedding storage that allows for verified citations and they can invoke tools like wolfram alpha or create code to solve equations. - 2 Years ago siri and co still failed at even the slightest foreign accent, today whisper almost perfectly transcribes heavily accented or foreign language text at a rate of hours in single digit minutes or even seconds on high end hardware - 2 years ago text to speech was still a robotic affair, now it can clone a human voice including inflection, emotion, speech impediment, etc. - inference capability is up 30x on hardware and many times on software in a year. Llama went from A100 to raspberry pi in 2 months after release. - We see the ability for LLMs to reason complex topics and act as decision makers, approaching on many human jobs that are rigidly encased in policies and employee handbooks and rarely require or allow human judgement. Those of us old enough remember the same dynamics with the .com bust and the breathless declarations that the internet was a fad in response to people being unable to contain their FOMO investing. for all the hype, there is an iceberg of unrealized change underneath the mountain that is the last 12 months of change that’s severely under appreciated and misunderstood. Wall street barely glimpsed it a few weeks ago when it sent Nvidia to 1T. In the hands of experts over the next months, it is likely this technology will start having a terrible impact on the job market, IBMs virtue signaling a few weeks ago should make that clear to anyone. It baffles that people keep retreating on either on the current flaws or on ideological positions predicated on shifting definitions or picking on narrow aspects of these systems rather than the whole. Anyone of sound mind should be humbled by these developments and very carefully phrase their predictions of the future. I’m sure people were dismissive of the first automobile or the internal combustion engine on the account of it not moving on its own too. I don’t remember anyone opiniating “it’s just gradient descent” when ad delivery birthed much of big tech and was accused of throwing elections and destroying social cohesion globally. What is also missing from this debate is the devastating realization that this is the first major technological leap that happened a almost completely unbounded from infrastructure requirements. No power lines to be strung, no cell towers to be built no app stores needed to propagate. Everyone withdrawing on ‘we always found new jobs in response to technology affecting old ones’ may be right, but may be missing this factor. This technology scales at a 10 minute API integration only bounded by Nvidias ability to produce GPUs. Only a small minority of people have engaged with it yet, but it will find applications in every job, every company over time. And it will never get worse, never slow down, never sleep. No the only reasonable course of action here is to be humble, it looks very likely that just like with the .com boom and bust the technology will end up being life changing (something Silicon Valley barely remembers after a decade of bullshit pumping)

chillbill 3y ago

Shouldn’t IBM Watson take a huge spot on that wall?

rvz 3y ago

AI (Deep Learning) is going just great... ...and is most definitely not an enormous snake oil grift that is producing tons of CO2 in data centers in our already incinerating planet whilst catching fire [0] and wasting an enormous amount of water and resources. [1] /s The wastage continues to accelerate without any available efficient and viable alternatives of training, fine-tuning and inference today after years of the field of 'Deep Learning' existing. [0] https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-alphabet/data-center-fire-google-suffers-electrical-incident-3-injured https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-alphabet/data-cen... [1] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training-nuclear-1850324249 https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training...

ChatGTP 3y ago
"Yes but don't you know son, in a few years it will solve climate change?!?!?!?!"
jabradoodle 3y ago
Your first link doesn't mention machine learning it is quite literally just a fire in a data center.
- rvz 3y ago
  The point still stands. It shouldn't have to take an entire fleet of data centers to train a AI model after all the investment in finding efficient methods and all it has resulted in was little to no progress but more CO2 wastage. Here's another example which a Google data center recently caught fire and overheated. [0] By now the field of Deep Learning should already had viable and efficient methods of training, inference, fine-tuning without lots of data centers wasting water and overheating and catching fire. Instead we have more of this AI hype and wastage burning the entire planet. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/19/23270581/google-cloud-oracle-servers-outage-uk-cooling-failure https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/19/23270581/google-cloud-ora...
  - jabradoodle 3y ago
    Again, that is a fire in a data center that has no reported mention of machine learning.. you do realise data centers existed before machine learning. Here is a claim from DeepMind they reduced Google's cooling bill using ML 7 years ago https://www.deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-centre-cooling-bill-by-40 https://www.deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-dat...

b33j0r 3y ago

Yes. AI research has caused some overreactions. Wall of shame? What? Why are we being so petty about a very interesting technology, and criticizing people for trying to understand it? What crime did these people commit?

jonas_kgomo 3y ago

I have seen DAIR members perform ad hominem attacks on qualified researchers and first movers in AI Safety (eg EA community, Yoshua Bengio, etc), they divert the discussion away from x-risks and focus on attacking individuals. For instance, look at the reaction of AI pioneers expressing interest in studying ai safety. This people seem to be focusing way more energy on attacks and discreding than making actual progress that addresses the case of ai safety. I do not understand diverting discussions about existential harm with diversity/patriachy, they seem to be separate discussions. Whereas they seem to attack anyone working on AI Safety who is a white man. https://twitter.com/Abebab/status/1667150619029676033 https://twitter.com/Abebab/status/1667150619029676033 DAIR: https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1667251985844666369 https://twitter.com/timnitGebru/status/1667251985844666369

gmerc 3y ago
Which is a red flag. This technology is here today and usable by anyone. So when people focus heavily on ad hominems, it’s likely they have to actual argument or have not taken the time to engage with the technology Anyone confidently parroting about stochastic parrots and hallucinations for example has slept through the last 3 months for example. Take the article on chatgpt humor yesterday .. dozens of pages of arxiv and zero mentions of the word temperature tells us all we need to know.

nologic01 3y ago

What is at stake? Our collective ability to risk manage. If there is no mechanism to dampen reactions around some resemblance of objectivity our whole mental space becomes unhinged. A large swarm of hyperventilating monkeys trying to outcompete each other in noise making.

klik99 3y ago

For everyone who believes there is real danger from AI - consider this - talking about doomsday scenarios and hyping existing technology hurts more than it helps. It might feel like "the time has finally come to talk about alignment", but the truth is when people realize in 5 years that the current iteration of AI doesn't have all the effects you warn of, it'll make everyone even more wary of worries and we'll be less prepared than ever. Even if you believe this kind of hype, please cool your jets. In likelihood AI, like all research heavy tech, will appear to stagnate for a long time until new breakthroughs come through, because progress happens in fits and starts and not a smooth line. Hyping doomsday scenarios, even if possible, don't help us get more prepared at all.

meroes 3y ago

I notice something from some of my “Google” friends. Adamant I should consult these models for my math degree (I’m a bit younger than them). Don’t they know these models fail horribly with math especially? Is it hype from inside the castle too? What is going on. I’m actually a bit concerned because I feel like no one’s in charge. Why don’t they say get a tutor which is much more established. Is Google the company forcing this hype that hard that employees now feel the need to keep it up. No idea what for think. I would be diserviced by asking for math help from the models, yet that’s the main advice I get nowadays. It’s a bit annoying and concerning. But I’m right though right HN? These models seem exceptionally bad at math questions.

Ukv 3y ago
> Don’t they know these models fail horribly with math especially? > But I’m right though right HN? These models seem exceptionally bad at math questions. If you're asking "find the error in my proof" or "solve this ODE", then yeah current LLMs will be limited by poor reasoning ability. However, if you ask Bing's Chat mode something like "What's the difference between a ring and a field?", it'll likely give a competent answer (with references to check) and allow asking of follow-up questions. > Why don’t they say get a tutor which is much more established Why did my friend recommend a new local fast-food place rather than an established gourmet restaurant? Because it's cheaper, more convenient, and I may not be aware of it due to its recency. There's also nothing preventing me going to both depending on situation. > Is Google the company forcing this hype that hard that employees now feel the need to keep it up. No idea what for think. I would be diserviced by asking for math help from the models, yet that’s the main advice I get nowadays I think there are legitimately ways you could use it to develop your understanding, slotting it in as a tool somewhere between search engine and tutor, so long as you're aware of its limitations.

penguin_booze 3y ago

I had a similar idea, only to catalogue public figures blatantly lying in the past, which everyone has since conveniently or otherwise forgotten. My choice of title for the website would is "Lest We Forget".

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

peanutcrisis 3y ago

Just want to highlight that "critical" here refers to the "critical" in "critical race theory", and associated with it is the kind of intolerant moral orthodoxy that's seen on the extreme left. This is a radical form of activism that has disguised itself as academic work. We should be skeptical of this, less they accumulate unmerited authority to dictate the direction of development of artificial intelligence.