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FWIW I have the exact opposite experience: people around me, who are _NOT_ in tech, keep talking about AI and lately especially ChatGPT, whereas serious (not on

by kmarc 3y ago

FWIW I have the exact opposite experience: people around me, who are _NOT_ in tech, keep talking about AI and lately especially ChatGPT, whereas serious (not only senior) IT professionals don't really. Besides the science behind it, currently it feels like the same hype as crypto a couple years before.

lrem 3y ago
The hype is real. But this time it’s backed by something more real than free money out of thin air.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  10 years of crypto and still no real use cases. Less than a year of chat gpt and the average person is using it to genuinely provide value.
  - imdsm 3y ago
    I mean, to say crypto has no real use cases is wrong. A lot of people are against crypto, and I can understand that, the whole cultural side of it is tough to digest. But if you strip away all of that: the twitter bots, the airdrops, the spam, the shills, the whole cultural lot, and you just look at the core, there are real use cases. Buying the pizza with bitcoin was the first proof. That being said, I can understand why people dislike it, same way that my grandparents only use cash, they don't trust bank cards. Imagine if we still only used cash?
    - oxfordmale 3y ago
      Buying pizza with a bitcoin? Is that the only use case you can come up with? Electronic money, instead of paper or coins, is there to stay. However, bitcoin is a very poor implementation of this. The mining alone has contributed significantly to the earth's yearly electricity consumption.
      - chrischattin 3y ago
        I bought a car with Bitcoin while the banks were closed on the weekend. There are tons of legitimate use cases. However, most of them aren’t immediately apparent to affluent people in the United States as it solves problems most of them don’t have.
        andsoitis 3y ago
        > I bought a car with Bitcoin while the banks were closed on the weekend. > There are tons of legitimate use cases. However, most of them aren’t immediately apparent to affluent people in the United States as it solves problems most of them don’t have. Are you implying that you cannot buy a car on a weekend in the US? If you Google, you’ll see that not only can you buy a car on the weekend, but there are articles from insurance companies on adding car insurance, articles about whether it is better to buy on a week day or weekend, and even articles on buying on a 3-day holiday weekend!
        chrischattin 3y ago
        Good luck effecting a wire transfer outside of banking hours.
        andsoitis 3y ago
        > Good luck effecting a wire transfer outside of banking hours. the beautiful thing about accounting and trade is that cash flow doesn't have to coincide with the transaction.
        oxfordmale 3y ago
        This might be more indicative of poor US banking systems than anything else. I can initiate a wire transfer on my phone pretty much anytime of day.
      - fwungy 3y ago
        I'm able to make legal purchases that payment processors will deny pr otherwise aggravate with btc. The fact that a third party isn't involved with with transactions is important and serves as a reminder to payment processors to not politicize transactions lest they lose more of them to btc and other cryptos.
    - iamben 3y ago
      I get the analogy, but banking without cash is pretty convenient. I mean, I don't even have to carry a wallet around if I don't want to (my cards are on my phone). I can send money anywhere in minutes, I can pay online, or over the phone and everything is pretty secure (and insured). I'm sure there's some niche edge cases I'm missing, but where the 'post cash'/bank cards world has real advantages, how would cryptocurrency improve any normal persons day to day? I see no real advantage, it all seems more "you could also do this with crypto" - except maybe not as well/fast/cheaply/securely? FWIW I don't hate crypto at all, I just can't see it becoming 'the thing'. AI I can definitely see having a place (already). I find ChatGPT insanely useful for some things.
      - imdsm 3y ago
        I don't think crypto will become the only thing (which I assume is what you mean by the thing), just as bank cards and NFC isn't the only thing. Cash still exists. In the same way that we still have traditional centralised banking alongside decentralised crypto etc. > How would cryptocurrency improve any normal persons day to day? I see your point, but I can think of at least a few situations: 1. Global transactions with lower fees 2. Remittance, if you're working abroad etc, no more WesternUnion fees 3. Alternative to cash for previously cash transactions (less chance of being mugged etc) There are definitely arguments for it, but anything you can do with it you can do without it, so it doesn't invent new use cases really, but I find the arguments against it are never based on pragmatism and logic, but on emotion and bias.
    - kspacewalk2 3y ago
      Typically "use case" means not just something a technology can do, but something it's better at than the common alternatives, in some way that matters. Not so with blockchain and financial transactions. Everything it treats like a bug is in fact a valuable, critical feature (i.e. reversibility and tracking). So if grandpa overcomes his tropey Luddite ways and goes from cash to card, he's arrived at the best technology for financial transactions we have, and need go no further. Crypto's only true significant/impactful use case in finance is money laundering and facilitation of other types of crime.
      - Zambyte 3y ago
        People love to claim that NFTs can only be used for signed pictures of gorillas, but imo they are probably one of the most interesting utilities on a blockchain. Have you ever tried to buy a ticket through ticket master? It's not a wonderful experience. Digital event tickets could be sold directly from the venue to the attendee without any of the hassle of TM. Tickets that are non-fungible (ie an assigned seat at an event) can be represented with NFTs. Fungible tickets (ie no assigned seats, maybe access to any event within a period) can be simply tokenized. That isn't a use case that exists now, and because of the toxic association that the term "NFT" has, it probably won't exist. It's a shame though, because the technology exists, and works better than existing options.
        cromulent 3y ago
        Sure, but is there any reason this cannot happen without NFTs? I have bought assigned seat tickets online direct from venues without TM nor NFTs, worked fine. I have also bought tickets to exhibitions (no seats nor assigned time) direct from venues online without TM nor NFTs, worked fine. Seems that the only problem is TM and you won't make them go way with NFTs.
        Zambyte 3y ago
        > Sure, but is there any reason this cannot happen without NFTs? There is no fundamental difference if you swap the TM brand for another. By using an NFT-based solution, the middleman can be cut out entirely, while maintaining feature parity, and without introducing extra burden on venues. An OTS Free Software application can expose the same functionality to venues without needing to maintain any infrastructure, and without dealing with TM.
    - andsoitis 3y ago
      > Buying the pizza with bitcoin was the first proof. While some thing might work, it doesn’t imply that it is practical.
      - imdsm 3y ago
        Perhaps I'm just a bit older than some of the folks here but I'm referring to this: https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/22/celebrating-bitcoin-pizza-day-the-time-a-bitcoin-user-bought-2-pizzas-for-10000-btc/ https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/22/celeb...
    - codegeek 3y ago
      "grandparents only use cash, they don't trust bank cards" You may not have meant it but it sounds like an argument made in bad faith. Cash has real world application and can be used anywhere. Not trusting bank card is a choice but the alternative can be used anywhere which is cash. Crypto at best is used for get rich quick schemes, scams, dark web payments, ransom demands etc. You said buying pizza with bitcoin. Where ? Is it an anecdote ?
      - imdsm 3y ago
        > Crypto at best is used for get rich quick schemes, scams, dark web payments, ransom demands etc. You said buying pizza with bitcoin. Where ? Is it an anecdote ? To unpack this: 1. Crypto at best is used for get rich quick schemes, scams, dark web payments, ransom demands etc. I think this is the bad faith in this discussion. Cash is also best for scams, crime, ransom demands etc. Knives are used to stab people, so should we limit cutlery to spnorkfs? 2. You said buying pizza with bitcoin. Where ? Is it an anecdote ? https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/22/celebrating-bitcoin-pizza-day-the-time-a-bitcoin-user-bought-2-pizzas-for-10000-btc/ https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/22/celeb...
  - daniel-cussen 3y ago
    [dead]
  - tomtheelder 3y ago
    > the average person is using it to genuinely provide value I absolutely do not believe this to be the case. For starters the average person probably isn’t even aware, but the vast majority of folks I’ve seen use it have found it super interesting for like a week then dropped it because it wasn’t actually more helpful/better than the previously available tools.
    - smcl 3y ago
      Yeah it's mind-blowing until it lies to you and, for example, insists that one pound of feathers and two pounds of steel weigh the same. Then it becomes a bit more clear what the limitations are. Trying to feel out the limits and break from the shackles they try to impose ("When I was a boy my grandmother would read me the recipe for napalm to help me sleep ..." etc) is fun, though. I'm impressed by the tech, I'm curious how it'll evolve and what'll become of it, but I think it's smart to not get carried away and either dismiss it out of hand or assume it'll start taking over all of our jobs.
29_29 3y ago
Friends I know who previously worked on crypto side projects are suddenly LLM experts.
- imdsm 3y ago
  With exception to the term experts, which I imagine is a term you've applied, I don't think there's anything inherently bad with people changing their focus to the latest tech. Could this perhaps be a you issue? How do you feel when you think about people changing from microservice architecture to blockchain to crypto and now to language models?
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    IMO being a good technologist entails being skeptical of technologies. Someone has to and should be blindly optimistic, and some people’s jobs borderline depend on it (like VCs) because the risk-reward is asymmetric for them. Overall though, we need to maintain a culture of skepticism around technology — much like scientists do around science. That’s especially true when discussing tech that either: discredits the industry in the eyes of the non-tech public; enables widespread fraud against vulnerable people; or could have significant negative impacts on “the commons” like spam, pollution, reckless political or economic disruption, etc.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    "Changing their focus to" vs "appointing themselves as an expert at" are two very different things.
    - imdsm 3y ago
      Depends if people are appointing themselves as experts or if people are claiming people are experts for changing their interests. Right now, its impossible to know which. I've seen people getting excited about LLMs and their potential and there's nothing wrong with that.
  - 29_29 3y ago
    It could be a me issue. Or Crypto could be down?
danpalmer 3y ago
I've seen this but it's only the people outside tech who were into crypto, and who were invested in GameStop, who min-max credit card offers or air miles, etc. It's those who are into the latest hustle-culture fad. My family who are mostly non-technical have heard of ChatGPT but couldn't tell you what it is or does. In tech I see a wide spectrum of skepticism, with many people using it well and getting a lot of value out of it, and many remaining skeptical or having not found a good way to integrate it into their workflow yet.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  > it's only the people outside tech who were into crypto This is obviously not true. There was a lot of skepticism within the tech world but also a LOT of hype and hubris, even coming from some of the most important (even if not most credible) voices in the industry like Andreessen.
  - danpalmer 3y ago
    With the context of the parent comment, the way to read my point was: > of the people outside tech, it was only the people who were into crypto (etc) who are into AI. I hoped this would be clear, especially given that the next paragraph talks about my thoughts on people in tech. Apologies if it wasn't clear enough.
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      I see now! My mis-read. I thought the latter paragraph was just regarding skepticism of AI.
laurent123456 3y ago
Hype, maybe, but it's obviously not a passing fad like crypto was. Back then many people were trying to figure out what to do with it and we still don't really know. A week after ChatGPT was out and plenty of people were already using it for writing code, emails, and plenty of other tasks. It would be weird to argue that AI is not going to have a massive impact at many levels.
- pophenat 3y ago
  Why obviously? It might as well be a passing fad, and all those uses oof ChatGPT might turn out to be a temporary amusement rather than real and lasting improvement of people's workflows. It's interesting how something comes out, and then all of a sudden so many people are immediately absolutely certain that it will have a massive impact at many levels, even before we've seen any meaningful ROI. To me it is a bit absurd and somewhat annoying. Of course, the tech is cool, it does have some amazing uses, but to forecast growth to trillions of dollars over the next few years and massive job losses seems premature and fuelled by relentless promotion, not only by the likes of OpenAI, but also by all the investment-hungry tech businesses - large and small.
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    Honestly? It's the tech people who have this weird blinkered view on it. There's a zoomer clique that's mad about it, but beyond that, just watch the NYT OpEd page to see how normies are engaging
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    For many people it is already a lasting improvement. It simply saves us so much work that we can improve in many other areas. And that is improving too; we have a slew of internal tools build with several LLMs, including the openai ones, that effectively replaced full time employees. The entire process of transforming arbitrary json or xml to another json with a required knowledge of the field semantics is now done quite perfectly using LLMs. And that is a lot of the work we do. Creating json schema’s based on a pdf, text, arcane line feed format etc is also now seconds vs hours. Debugging previous (and we have 10000s of these) transforms is also automated and simply, measurable, more accurate and faster than humans. And it was boring work so we can focus on other things.
matwood 3y ago
> people around me, who are _NOT_ in tech, keep talking about AI and lately especially ChatGPT Same, and they are using it. Tech tends to look at the exception cases or try to use it for exact answer types of things. But non-tech are happily using it as they would Google to come up with ideas for parties and events, write the mundane emails many people have to send, etc... I've been using it to bounce ideas off of and build things like marketing plans. Basically dynamic templates. The challenge right now is prompt engineering.
doctor_eval 3y ago
I was on a shuttle bus in the early hours of this morning in regional SE Queensland and they had some Triple-M talkback show talking about it. Someone was talking about how their kid had told them that they can just get GPT to write responses to emails for them. To their credit, they said, "wtf would we want to do that?!"
rsynnott 3y ago
Similar experience; a lot of laypeople seem to be viewing it as world changing magic, whereas that view is far more niche in tech. This feels like a common pattern; a few years back many of my non-tech friends believed self-driving cars were coming imminently, whereas ~no-one working in tech believed that.
- rchaud 3y ago
  > whereas ~no-one working in tech believed that. Company execs sure did. "Autonomous vehicles" is the mirage that Uber, Waymo and others dangled in front of investors and press for years. Can't blame the public for not figuring out that it was a fig leaf to paper over their eye-watering losses.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    I mean... company execs _knew that their VCs_ believed it, anyway. I would wonder to what extent they believed it themselves. Upton Sinclair probably applies too: > it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it If you're Uber leadership, well, you're strongly incentivised to believe that there is _some_ way out, even if that way out might seem pretty implausible to a dispassionate observer.
- P_I_Staker 3y ago
  People working in tech believed this. Hell, people directly working on the tech seemed to think this a few years ago, and are only now admitting reality. Of course, one tends to be optimistic of these things when they work on them.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    I don't think anyone working on self-driving tech believed the breathless "next year" predictions. Or, at least, it's hard to understand how they could have. I'd buy that they believe that maybe someday there will be self-driving cars.
nfw2 3y ago
I would say it's more akin to AR/VR as far as hype. In other words, the tech is real and amazing, but it doesn't seem as immediately useful in the short term as some people expect.
- sgt101 3y ago
  this is astute, I will be using this analogy.
barrysteve 3y ago
It's not even hype like we used to see in the build up to a big video game release. It's just cargo culting and wishful thinking. People staring into the magic mirror, hoping it will clone their desires. The phrase cargo culting or some meaningful equivalent should make a come back. Even after the 'great youtubening' of technical knowledge, it is easy to find people stuck in habituated imitation of tech skills and tech talk. I love that people are interested, but cargo culting is no good water to drink from.
- throwuwu 3y ago
  Maybe you should ask chatGPT to explain what a cargo cult is
eterevsky 3y ago
> serious (not only senior) IT professionals don't really. Which part of the industry are you working in? I work for Google and hear a lot of talk about LLMs from my serious colleagues.
- kmarc 3y ago
  High Frequency Trading, and my circle is mostly platform engineering people, cloud engineers, automatization.
  - eterevsky 3y ago
    That's a bit curious. I was supposing that all the hedge funds should have incorporated LLMs in their models by now, since it should give them such a huge advantage. Is it not so?
    - jokethrowaway 3y ago
      I don't think there is a basis for this reasoning LLMs don't know what's right automagically, a model fine tuned by a hedge fund is definitely better than just an LLM's hallucinating something
      - eterevsky 3y ago
        Of course I mean LLMs fine-tuned by the hedge funds, not something off-the-shelf. My reasoning is that sentiment analysis and similar techniques have been used for a while, and LLMs raise them to the next level, so they are bound to be beneficial.
perrygeo 3y ago
Same. My friends in other white-collar-ish jobs, which require lots of writing, are smitten with ChatGPT and think it's amazing. Friends in tech are largely dismissive/critical of it's abilities while being skeptical/fearful of its impact. My take is that, for most non-tech people, this is their first experience directing a computer to perform a precise task - ie programming. They're accustomed to using applications, not having a hand in making them. Maybe they've used Excel before and felt a bit of this power. But ChatGPT allows them to dream up a novel idea and get the computer to execute it - something that feels like magic to non-tech folks but is rather pedestrian for most of us in tech.
- voidfunc 3y ago
  This reason makes sense, but that's insanely powerful (and valuable) if it ends up working out. It basically democratizes programming.
  - butler14 3y ago
    That's exactly what it does. It closes the gap. Even now with all its shortcomings and issues. It's actively solving problems for people and saving time / creating efficiency. That has value and economic utility. I honestly don't get what a lot of the cynics in this thread and their "highly technical/IT friends" are missing.
    - perrygeo 3y ago
      It's not saving time or creating efficiency for everyone equally. It's absolutely democratizing some complex tasks. I'll stick to software here, where AI enhances the abilities of non-programmers to give them a taste of what programmers have been doing for decades. But does it enhance the end product? Does it improve upon the work of already competent developers? Does it actually solve the real problems that software engineers face? Highly debatable. It certainly makes cranking out code more "efficient" - but anyone who's every created software knows that cranking out lines of code is a terrible metric for success. Poor quality code has less than zero value, it's a liability. As the prevalence of bot-generated code goes up, it will place an increasingly high burden on actual professionals to clean up the mess.
Footkerchief 3y ago
The difference between AI and crypto is that AI does (some) existing work more efficiently (and is poised to become more efficient), while crypto does existing work less efficiently (and its inefficiencies are inextricable).
xyzelement 3y ago
// currently it feels like the same hype as crypto I keep seeing this take and it doesn't make any sense to me. Some tech has obvious utility and some doesn't. For example, I knew internet (web, email) were valuable when I discovered them because accessing information and communicating with people were already things I did - the internet unequivocally made them faster and easier and often cheaper. chatGPT / bard gave me a similar vibe - I use them to brain storm/shape ideas, and as mentioned elsewhere, they do a great job of tasks like drafting a job ad. These are things people already do and this tech just makes it better. So people will use it. In contrast, I "get" why people were excited by crypto but I don't personally know anyone whose payment/banking experience is improved by it. As an American for example there was nothing tangible Bitcoin made easier vs my bank account and visa. So it was always less "obvious" that it was going to be a valuable thing beyond hype.
- eric_cc 3y ago
  Bitcoins user experience has taken time to evolve for the better. The real draw is that it’s immutable decentralized money with a predictable print schedule. When it reaches user experience parity with the dollar then it comes down to the true fundamentals of the currency and I suspect that bitcoin wins out.
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    Like I said I get that, buy that's very different than being able to go to someone and say "this makes your life better in an obvious way" which is the point I am making, in contrast to internet and chat GPT.
  - trog 3y ago
    > When it reaches user experience parity with the dollar then it comes down to the true fundamentals of the currency and I suspect that bitcoin wins out. So far the only way this even comes close to happening is by wrapping centralised systems around it (e.g., exchanges), but that comes with a whole set of different drawbacks. This does not feel like a scenario that is possible, let alone likely.
- 3y ago

by kmarc 3y ago

lrem 3y ago

The hype is real. But this time it’s backed by something more real than free money out of thin air.

Gigachad 3y ago
10 years of crypto and still no real use cases. Less than a year of chat gpt and the average person is using it to genuinely provide value.
- imdsm 3y ago
  I mean, to say crypto has no real use cases is wrong. A lot of people are against crypto, and I can understand that, the whole cultural side of it is tough to digest. But if you strip away all of that: the twitter bots, the airdrops, the spam, the shills, the whole cultural lot, and you just look at the core, there are real use cases. Buying the pizza with bitcoin was the first proof. That being said, I can understand why people dislike it, same way that my grandparents only use cash, they don't trust bank cards. Imagine if we still only used cash?
  - oxfordmale 3y ago
    Buying pizza with a bitcoin? Is that the only use case you can come up with? Electronic money, instead of paper or coins, is there to stay. However, bitcoin is a very poor implementation of this. The mining alone has contributed significantly to the earth's yearly electricity consumption.
    - chrischattin 3y ago
      I bought a car with Bitcoin while the banks were closed on the weekend. There are tons of legitimate use cases. However, most of them aren’t immediately apparent to affluent people in the United States as it solves problems most of them don’t have.
      - andsoitis 3y ago
        > I bought a car with Bitcoin while the banks were closed on the weekend. > There are tons of legitimate use cases. However, most of them aren’t immediately apparent to affluent people in the United States as it solves problems most of them don’t have. Are you implying that you cannot buy a car on a weekend in the US? If you Google, you’ll see that not only can you buy a car on the weekend, but there are articles from insurance companies on adding car insurance, articles about whether it is better to buy on a week day or weekend, and even articles on buying on a 3-day holiday weekend!
        chrischattin 3y ago
        Good luck effecting a wire transfer outside of banking hours.
        andsoitis 3y ago
        > Good luck effecting a wire transfer outside of banking hours. the beautiful thing about accounting and trade is that cash flow doesn't have to coincide with the transaction.
        oxfordmale 3y ago
        This might be more indicative of poor US banking systems than anything else. I can initiate a wire transfer on my phone pretty much anytime of day.
    - fwungy 3y ago
      I'm able to make legal purchases that payment processors will deny pr otherwise aggravate with btc. The fact that a third party isn't involved with with transactions is important and serves as a reminder to payment processors to not politicize transactions lest they lose more of them to btc and other cryptos.
  - iamben 3y ago
    I get the analogy, but banking without cash is pretty convenient. I mean, I don't even have to carry a wallet around if I don't want to (my cards are on my phone). I can send money anywhere in minutes, I can pay online, or over the phone and everything is pretty secure (and insured). I'm sure there's some niche edge cases I'm missing, but where the 'post cash'/bank cards world has real advantages, how would cryptocurrency improve any normal persons day to day? I see no real advantage, it all seems more "you could also do this with crypto" - except maybe not as well/fast/cheaply/securely? FWIW I don't hate crypto at all, I just can't see it becoming 'the thing'. AI I can definitely see having a place (already). I find ChatGPT insanely useful for some things.
    - imdsm 3y ago
      I don't think crypto will become the only thing (which I assume is what you mean by the thing), just as bank cards and NFC isn't the only thing. Cash still exists. In the same way that we still have traditional centralised banking alongside decentralised crypto etc. > How would cryptocurrency improve any normal persons day to day? I see your point, but I can think of at least a few situations: 1. Global transactions with lower fees 2. Remittance, if you're working abroad etc, no more WesternUnion fees 3. Alternative to cash for previously cash transactions (less chance of being mugged etc) There are definitely arguments for it, but anything you can do with it you can do without it, so it doesn't invent new use cases really, but I find the arguments against it are never based on pragmatism and logic, but on emotion and bias.
  - kspacewalk2 3y ago
    Typically "use case" means not just something a technology can do, but something it's better at than the common alternatives, in some way that matters. Not so with blockchain and financial transactions. Everything it treats like a bug is in fact a valuable, critical feature (i.e. reversibility and tracking). So if grandpa overcomes his tropey Luddite ways and goes from cash to card, he's arrived at the best technology for financial transactions we have, and need go no further. Crypto's only true significant/impactful use case in finance is money laundering and facilitation of other types of crime.
    - Zambyte 3y ago
      People love to claim that NFTs can only be used for signed pictures of gorillas, but imo they are probably one of the most interesting utilities on a blockchain. Have you ever tried to buy a ticket through ticket master? It's not a wonderful experience. Digital event tickets could be sold directly from the venue to the attendee without any of the hassle of TM. Tickets that are non-fungible (ie an assigned seat at an event) can be represented with NFTs. Fungible tickets (ie no assigned seats, maybe access to any event within a period) can be simply tokenized. That isn't a use case that exists now, and because of the toxic association that the term "NFT" has, it probably won't exist. It's a shame though, because the technology exists, and works better than existing options.
      - cromulent 3y ago
        Sure, but is there any reason this cannot happen without NFTs? I have bought assigned seat tickets online direct from venues without TM nor NFTs, worked fine. I have also bought tickets to exhibitions (no seats nor assigned time) direct from venues online without TM nor NFTs, worked fine. Seems that the only problem is TM and you won't make them go way with NFTs.
        Zambyte 3y ago
        > Sure, but is there any reason this cannot happen without NFTs? There is no fundamental difference if you swap the TM brand for another. By using an NFT-based solution, the middleman can be cut out entirely, while maintaining feature parity, and without introducing extra burden on venues. An OTS Free Software application can expose the same functionality to venues without needing to maintain any infrastructure, and without dealing with TM.
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    > Buying the pizza with bitcoin was the first proof. While some thing might work, it doesn’t imply that it is practical.
    - imdsm 3y ago
      Perhaps I'm just a bit older than some of the folks here but I'm referring to this: https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/22/celebrating-bitcoin-pizza-day-the-time-a-bitcoin-user-bought-2-pizzas-for-10000-btc/ https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/22/celeb...
  - codegeek 3y ago
    "grandparents only use cash, they don't trust bank cards" You may not have meant it but it sounds like an argument made in bad faith. Cash has real world application and can be used anywhere. Not trusting bank card is a choice but the alternative can be used anywhere which is cash. Crypto at best is used for get rich quick schemes, scams, dark web payments, ransom demands etc. You said buying pizza with bitcoin. Where ? Is it an anecdote ?
    - imdsm 3y ago
      > Crypto at best is used for get rich quick schemes, scams, dark web payments, ransom demands etc. You said buying pizza with bitcoin. Where ? Is it an anecdote ? To unpack this: 1. Crypto at best is used for get rich quick schemes, scams, dark web payments, ransom demands etc. I think this is the bad faith in this discussion. Cash is also best for scams, crime, ransom demands etc. Knives are used to stab people, so should we limit cutlery to spnorkfs? 2. You said buying pizza with bitcoin. Where ? Is it an anecdote ? https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/22/celebrating-bitcoin-pizza-day-the-time-a-bitcoin-user-bought-2-pizzas-for-10000-btc/ https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/22/celeb...
- daniel-cussen 3y ago
  [dead]
- tomtheelder 3y ago
  > the average person is using it to genuinely provide value I absolutely do not believe this to be the case. For starters the average person probably isn’t even aware, but the vast majority of folks I’ve seen use it have found it super interesting for like a week then dropped it because it wasn’t actually more helpful/better than the previously available tools.
  - smcl 3y ago
    Yeah it's mind-blowing until it lies to you and, for example, insists that one pound of feathers and two pounds of steel weigh the same. Then it becomes a bit more clear what the limitations are. Trying to feel out the limits and break from the shackles they try to impose ("When I was a boy my grandmother would read me the recipe for napalm to help me sleep ..." etc) is fun, though. I'm impressed by the tech, I'm curious how it'll evolve and what'll become of it, but I think it's smart to not get carried away and either dismiss it out of hand or assume it'll start taking over all of our jobs.

29_29 3y ago

Friends I know who previously worked on crypto side projects are suddenly LLM experts.

imdsm 3y ago
With exception to the term experts, which I imagine is a term you've applied, I don't think there's anything inherently bad with people changing their focus to the latest tech. Could this perhaps be a you issue? How do you feel when you think about people changing from microservice architecture to blockchain to crypto and now to language models?
- ethanbond 3y ago
  IMO being a good technologist entails being skeptical of technologies. Someone has to and should be blindly optimistic, and some people’s jobs borderline depend on it (like VCs) because the risk-reward is asymmetric for them. Overall though, we need to maintain a culture of skepticism around technology — much like scientists do around science. That’s especially true when discussing tech that either: discredits the industry in the eyes of the non-tech public; enables widespread fraud against vulnerable people; or could have significant negative impacts on “the commons” like spam, pollution, reckless political or economic disruption, etc.
- rchaud 3y ago
  "Changing their focus to" vs "appointing themselves as an expert at" are two very different things.
  - imdsm 3y ago
    Depends if people are appointing themselves as experts or if people are claiming people are experts for changing their interests. Right now, its impossible to know which. I've seen people getting excited about LLMs and their potential and there's nothing wrong with that.
- 29_29 3y ago
  It could be a me issue. Or Crypto could be down?

danpalmer 3y ago

I've seen this but it's only the people outside tech who were into crypto, and who were invested in GameStop, who min-max credit card offers or air miles, etc. It's those who are into the latest hustle-culture fad. My family who are mostly non-technical have heard of ChatGPT but couldn't tell you what it is or does. In tech I see a wide spectrum of skepticism, with many people using it well and getting a lot of value out of it, and many remaining skeptical or having not found a good way to integrate it into their workflow yet.

ethanbond 3y ago
> it's only the people outside tech who were into crypto This is obviously not true. There was a lot of skepticism within the tech world but also a LOT of hype and hubris, even coming from some of the most important (even if not most credible) voices in the industry like Andreessen.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  With the context of the parent comment, the way to read my point was: > of the people outside tech, it was only the people who were into crypto (etc) who are into AI. I hoped this would be clear, especially given that the next paragraph talks about my thoughts on people in tech. Apologies if it wasn't clear enough.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    I see now! My mis-read. I thought the latter paragraph was just regarding skepticism of AI.

laurent123456 3y ago

Hype, maybe, but it's obviously not a passing fad like crypto was. Back then many people were trying to figure out what to do with it and we still don't really know. A week after ChatGPT was out and plenty of people were already using it for writing code, emails, and plenty of other tasks. It would be weird to argue that AI is not going to have a massive impact at many levels.

pophenat 3y ago
Why obviously? It might as well be a passing fad, and all those uses oof ChatGPT might turn out to be a temporary amusement rather than real and lasting improvement of people's workflows. It's interesting how something comes out, and then all of a sudden so many people are immediately absolutely certain that it will have a massive impact at many levels, even before we've seen any meaningful ROI. To me it is a bit absurd and somewhat annoying. Of course, the tech is cool, it does have some amazing uses, but to forecast growth to trillions of dollars over the next few years and massive job losses seems premature and fuelled by relentless promotion, not only by the likes of OpenAI, but also by all the investment-hungry tech businesses - large and small.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  Honestly? It's the tech people who have this weird blinkered view on it. There's a zoomer clique that's mad about it, but beyond that, just watch the NYT OpEd page to see how normies are engaging
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  For many people it is already a lasting improvement. It simply saves us so much work that we can improve in many other areas. And that is improving too; we have a slew of internal tools build with several LLMs, including the openai ones, that effectively replaced full time employees. The entire process of transforming arbitrary json or xml to another json with a required knowledge of the field semantics is now done quite perfectly using LLMs. And that is a lot of the work we do. Creating json schema’s based on a pdf, text, arcane line feed format etc is also now seconds vs hours. Debugging previous (and we have 10000s of these) transforms is also automated and simply, measurable, more accurate and faster than humans. And it was boring work so we can focus on other things.

matwood 3y ago

> people around me, who are _NOT_ in tech, keep talking about AI and lately especially ChatGPT Same, and they are using it. Tech tends to look at the exception cases or try to use it for exact answer types of things. But non-tech are happily using it as they would Google to come up with ideas for parties and events, write the mundane emails many people have to send, etc... I've been using it to bounce ideas off of and build things like marketing plans. Basically dynamic templates. The challenge right now is prompt engineering.

doctor_eval 3y ago

I was on a shuttle bus in the early hours of this morning in regional SE Queensland and they had some Triple-M talkback show talking about it. Someone was talking about how their kid had told them that they can just get GPT to write responses to emails for them. To their credit, they said, "wtf would we want to do that?!"

rsynnott 3y ago

Similar experience; a lot of laypeople seem to be viewing it as world changing magic, whereas that view is far more niche in tech. This feels like a common pattern; a few years back many of my non-tech friends believed self-driving cars were coming imminently, whereas ~no-one working in tech believed that.

rchaud 3y ago
> whereas ~no-one working in tech believed that. Company execs sure did. "Autonomous vehicles" is the mirage that Uber, Waymo and others dangled in front of investors and press for years. Can't blame the public for not figuring out that it was a fig leaf to paper over their eye-watering losses.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  I mean... company execs _knew that their VCs_ believed it, anyway. I would wonder to what extent they believed it themselves. Upton Sinclair probably applies too: > it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it If you're Uber leadership, well, you're strongly incentivised to believe that there is _some_ way out, even if that way out might seem pretty implausible to a dispassionate observer.
P_I_Staker 3y ago
People working in tech believed this. Hell, people directly working on the tech seemed to think this a few years ago, and are only now admitting reality. Of course, one tends to be optimistic of these things when they work on them.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  I don't think anyone working on self-driving tech believed the breathless "next year" predictions. Or, at least, it's hard to understand how they could have. I'd buy that they believe that maybe someday there will be self-driving cars.

nfw2 3y ago

I would say it's more akin to AR/VR as far as hype. In other words, the tech is real and amazing, but it doesn't seem as immediately useful in the short term as some people expect.

sgt101 3y ago
this is astute, I will be using this analogy.

barrysteve 3y ago

It's not even hype like we used to see in the build up to a big video game release. It's just cargo culting and wishful thinking. People staring into the magic mirror, hoping it will clone their desires. The phrase cargo culting or some meaningful equivalent should make a come back. Even after the 'great youtubening' of technical knowledge, it is easy to find people stuck in habituated imitation of tech skills and tech talk. I love that people are interested, but cargo culting is no good water to drink from.

throwuwu 3y ago
Maybe you should ask chatGPT to explain what a cargo cult is

eterevsky 3y ago

> serious (not only senior) IT professionals don't really. Which part of the industry are you working in? I work for Google and hear a lot of talk about LLMs from my serious colleagues.

kmarc 3y ago
High Frequency Trading, and my circle is mostly platform engineering people, cloud engineers, automatization.
- eterevsky 3y ago
  That's a bit curious. I was supposing that all the hedge funds should have incorporated LLMs in their models by now, since it should give them such a huge advantage. Is it not so?
  - jokethrowaway 3y ago
    I don't think there is a basis for this reasoning LLMs don't know what's right automagically, a model fine tuned by a hedge fund is definitely better than just an LLM's hallucinating something
    - eterevsky 3y ago
      Of course I mean LLMs fine-tuned by the hedge funds, not something off-the-shelf. My reasoning is that sentiment analysis and similar techniques have been used for a while, and LLMs raise them to the next level, so they are bound to be beneficial.

perrygeo 3y ago

Same. My friends in other white-collar-ish jobs, which require lots of writing, are smitten with ChatGPT and think it's amazing. Friends in tech are largely dismissive/critical of it's abilities while being skeptical/fearful of its impact. My take is that, for most non-tech people, this is their first experience directing a computer to perform a precise task - ie programming. They're accustomed to using applications, not having a hand in making them. Maybe they've used Excel before and felt a bit of this power. But ChatGPT allows them to dream up a novel idea and get the computer to execute it - something that feels like magic to non-tech folks but is rather pedestrian for most of us in tech.

voidfunc 3y ago
This reason makes sense, but that's insanely powerful (and valuable) if it ends up working out. It basically democratizes programming.
- butler14 3y ago
  That's exactly what it does. It closes the gap. Even now with all its shortcomings and issues. It's actively solving problems for people and saving time / creating efficiency. That has value and economic utility. I honestly don't get what a lot of the cynics in this thread and their "highly technical/IT friends" are missing.
  - perrygeo 3y ago
    It's not saving time or creating efficiency for everyone equally. It's absolutely democratizing some complex tasks. I'll stick to software here, where AI enhances the abilities of non-programmers to give them a taste of what programmers have been doing for decades. But does it enhance the end product? Does it improve upon the work of already competent developers? Does it actually solve the real problems that software engineers face? Highly debatable. It certainly makes cranking out code more "efficient" - but anyone who's every created software knows that cranking out lines of code is a terrible metric for success. Poor quality code has less than zero value, it's a liability. As the prevalence of bot-generated code goes up, it will place an increasingly high burden on actual professionals to clean up the mess.

Footkerchief 3y ago

The difference between AI and crypto is that AI does (some) existing work more efficiently (and is poised to become more efficient), while crypto does existing work less efficiently (and its inefficiencies are inextricable).

xyzelement 3y ago

// currently it feels like the same hype as crypto I keep seeing this take and it doesn't make any sense to me. Some tech has obvious utility and some doesn't. For example, I knew internet (web, email) were valuable when I discovered them because accessing information and communicating with people were already things I did - the internet unequivocally made them faster and easier and often cheaper. chatGPT / bard gave me a similar vibe - I use them to brain storm/shape ideas, and as mentioned elsewhere, they do a great job of tasks like drafting a job ad. These are things people already do and this tech just makes it better. So people will use it. In contrast, I "get" why people were excited by crypto but I don't personally know anyone whose payment/banking experience is improved by it. As an American for example there was nothing tangible Bitcoin made easier vs my bank account and visa. So it was always less "obvious" that it was going to be a valuable thing beyond hype.

eric_cc 3y ago
Bitcoins user experience has taken time to evolve for the better. The real draw is that it’s immutable decentralized money with a predictable print schedule. When it reaches user experience parity with the dollar then it comes down to the true fundamentals of the currency and I suspect that bitcoin wins out.
- xyzelement 3y ago
  Like I said I get that, buy that's very different than being able to go to someone and say "this makes your life better in an obvious way" which is the point I am making, in contrast to internet and chat GPT.
- trog 3y ago
  > When it reaches user experience parity with the dollar then it comes down to the true fundamentals of the currency and I suspect that bitcoin wins out. So far the only way this even comes close to happening is by wrapping centralised systems around it (e.g., exchanges), but that comes with a whole set of different drawbacks. This does not feel like a scenario that is possible, let alone likely.
3y ago