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I just watched The Big Short I felt a bit eery how much the groupthink around mortgages matched todays AI hype. The unwillingness to listen to critical advice.

I just watched The Big Short I felt a bit eery how much the groupthink around mortgages matched todays AI hype. The unwillingness to listen to critical advice. To question the value. Data science depts who measure such things are often vilified. It’s a kind of depressing job landscape in this way. You either go with the, often top down, groupthink against the face of measured evidence, or you’re labeled a cynical naysayer and your career suffers.

chasd00 3y ago
just use your skills, i.e. mop, and soak of the cash.
sillysaurusx 3y ago
Well, don’t be cynical about it. One thing that I think a lot of us could benefit from is learning how to present a point in a way that people will listen. The key is to harness that hype — use your point to unlock some pent up energy for a new direction, rather than merely try to say it can’t work. A lot of endeavors can work, even if only a little. Find some aspect of it that can, and flip the problem around. Even if the whole thing is mostly bogus, is there a small part that isn’t? Latch onto that. Or go elsewhere. The wonderful part about AI is that the whole world’s problems are up for grabs. Part of why there’s so much unfounded hype is because of how many real advances have recently become possible. This period in history will never come again. It’s also a rare time in history that an individual can make lots of progress. Most of us need to be a part of big groups to do anything worthwhile, in most fields. But in this case lone wolves often have the upper hand over established organizations.
- x86x87 3y ago
  Yes. Don't tell the emperor that he has no clothes. Instead innovate and introduce a hybrid between his current clothes and old fashion textiles. Who know? In time they may end up covering their junk.
- softwaredoug 3y ago
  To be clear, I'm mostly excited. But I also think its reasonable to be skeptical and try to educate stakeholders on the realities of the situation. My controversial take on AI is its actually a better time to take things slow, experiment, study, see what works. Not dump TONS of money and cash and get too distracted. Because nobody (besides big tech) has fully figured out how to make a product that makes a profit. Its not clear users want a chatbot (aside from ChatGPT)... But things could change.
  - chung8123 3y ago
    I think the issue is, right now AI is a race. We have the Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, and Amazon's of the world with their massive compute and bankrolls racing to see who can build the biggest moat around an AI service. The massive upfront spending is hoping to hit the winning lottery ticket and spending slowly may leave you out of the drawing. As compute costs and requirements come down LLMs will be ubiquitous everywhere.
    - akomtu 3y ago
      It's the Manhattan Project 2.0. The AI, once created, won't be that hard to replicate, but those who fail to create it early, will be sidetracked later. The race among big tech is the american way of doing such projects: fund a few companies, let them compete and pick the winner.
      - __loam 3y ago
        This industry is so arrogant lmao. The Manhattan project? Get fucking real.
- tayo42 3y ago
  > It’s also a rare time in history that an individual can make lots of progress. Most of us need to be a part of big groups to do anything worthwhile, in most fields. But in this case lone wolves often have the upper hand over established organizations. I'm curious why you think this is true? My feeling as a broke individual trying to catch up on ml is that there are some simple demos to do. But scaling up requires a lot of compute and storage for an individual. Acquiring datasets and training are cost prohibitive. I'm only able to play around with some really small stuff because by dumb luck a few years ago I bought a gaming laptop with a nvidia gpu in it. The impressive models that are generating the hype are just a different league. Love to hear to how I am wrong though?
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    It’s true that you need compute to do large experiments, but the large experiments grow out of small ones. If you can show promising work in a small way, it’s easier to get compute. You can also apply to TRC to get a bunch of TPUs. They had capacity issues for a long time but I’ve heard it’s improved. Don’t focus on the hype models. Find a niche that you personally like, and do that. If you’re chasing hype you’ll always be skating towards the puck. My original AI interest was to use voice generation to make Dr Kleiner sing about being a modern major general. It went from there, to image gen, to text gen, and kaboom, the whole world blew up. I was the first to show that GPTs can be used for more than just language modeling — in my case, playing chess. Wacky ideas like that are important to play around with, because they won’t seem so wacky in a year.
    - tayo42 3y ago
      Thats interesting, at a glance the TRC thing looks more altruistic and impactful than what I had in mind for learning or making money. I'll have to keep it in mind if I do, do something share worthy ever. Thanks!
  - jebarker 3y ago
    Another area where there's potential for an individual to make lots of progress is in theory and mechanistic interpretation. Although it's not where the money is, it's probably not rapid progress and it's really hard.
- diogenes4 3y ago
  > The wonderful part about AI is that the whole world’s problems are up for grabs. Most of the world's problems aren't technological, unfortunately for us in tech. There's little it can do against the momentum of capital tearing this globe apart.
mrtksn 3y ago
IIRC, the movie ends with a joke on how those responsible were punished only to reveal that they walked away with the loot. You almost never see a group punishment, unless you lost as a group against another organization. So, if all the AI stuff goes bust in a year or two those who benefited from the bubble will keep their benefits. Also, there’s a possibility that it doesn’t go bust and user us into AGI era and win big.
- gymbeaux 3y ago
  JS devs were/are paid the big bucks because !!"false" == !!"true" and so on.
  - mrtksn 3y ago
    Decided to remove the JS part, lots of people made their fortune on battling its oddities.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
epups 3y ago
What is the measured evidence that AI is hype right now?
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  Companies with massive valuations that have no product to sell or aren't making any profit. This is what I've heard anyway (not a stock guy). Some economic schools of thought say that when interest rates are low and money is practically free (historically speaking), you get a lot of bad/risky ideas (boom & bubble) and an inevitable correction of a bust. The bust is accelerated when all of a sudden you have to rise the interest rates to fight inflation and the money is no longer easy to get. All those companies being held afloat by the free money start collapsing. Again, we should make statements on data and I'll just be upfront that I haven't done much research in this area, but considering the sheer amount of AI startups and jobs and conferences and so on with very few transformative products...I would eventually expect a market correction in the form of another AI winter like what happened in the 80s when all the massive government acts defense research dollars dried up. The difference is it'll be far less severe. You'll still have plenty of AI research at the universities and large companies, but maybe not hundreds of questionable startups. This is all just conjecture on my part though.
  - nightski 3y ago
    That and even established companies with other products/services but who have seen massive market cap increases due to AI hype.
  - andrewmutz 3y ago
    > Companies with massive valuations that have no product to sell or aren't making any profit That's not enough to demonstrate that AI is just hype. Every technological breakthrough has opportunists trying to make a buck riding along the hype. In the 90s, Pets.com and webvan didn't prove that the internet was just hype. I am one of the people who is completely bought in to the idea that AI in general (and LLMs in particular) are going to lead to products that are extremely useful to the world. I absolutely think that most of the gen AI startups will fail and that valuations are too high, but I still believe that massively impactful/useful products will also be born.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

chasd00 3y ago

just use your skills, i.e. mop, and soak of the cash.

sillysaurusx 3y ago

Well, don’t be cynical about it. One thing that I think a lot of us could benefit from is learning how to present a point in a way that people will listen. The key is to harness that hype — use your point to unlock some pent up energy for a new direction, rather than merely try to say it can’t work. A lot of endeavors can work, even if only a little. Find some aspect of it that can, and flip the problem around. Even if the whole thing is mostly bogus, is there a small part that isn’t? Latch onto that. Or go elsewhere. The wonderful part about AI is that the whole world’s problems are up for grabs. Part of why there’s so much unfounded hype is because of how many real advances have recently become possible. This period in history will never come again. It’s also a rare time in history that an individual can make lots of progress. Most of us need to be a part of big groups to do anything worthwhile, in most fields. But in this case lone wolves often have the upper hand over established organizations.

x86x87 3y ago
Yes. Don't tell the emperor that he has no clothes. Instead innovate and introduce a hybrid between his current clothes and old fashion textiles. Who know? In time they may end up covering their junk.
softwaredoug 3y ago
To be clear, I'm mostly excited. But I also think its reasonable to be skeptical and try to educate stakeholders on the realities of the situation. My controversial take on AI is its actually a better time to take things slow, experiment, study, see what works. Not dump TONS of money and cash and get too distracted. Because nobody (besides big tech) has fully figured out how to make a product that makes a profit. Its not clear users want a chatbot (aside from ChatGPT)... But things could change.
- chung8123 3y ago
  I think the issue is, right now AI is a race. We have the Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, and Amazon's of the world with their massive compute and bankrolls racing to see who can build the biggest moat around an AI service. The massive upfront spending is hoping to hit the winning lottery ticket and spending slowly may leave you out of the drawing. As compute costs and requirements come down LLMs will be ubiquitous everywhere.
  - akomtu 3y ago
    It's the Manhattan Project 2.0. The AI, once created, won't be that hard to replicate, but those who fail to create it early, will be sidetracked later. The race among big tech is the american way of doing such projects: fund a few companies, let them compete and pick the winner.
    - __loam 3y ago
      This industry is so arrogant lmao. The Manhattan project? Get fucking real.
tayo42 3y ago
> It’s also a rare time in history that an individual can make lots of progress. Most of us need to be a part of big groups to do anything worthwhile, in most fields. But in this case lone wolves often have the upper hand over established organizations. I'm curious why you think this is true? My feeling as a broke individual trying to catch up on ml is that there are some simple demos to do. But scaling up requires a lot of compute and storage for an individual. Acquiring datasets and training are cost prohibitive. I'm only able to play around with some really small stuff because by dumb luck a few years ago I bought a gaming laptop with a nvidia gpu in it. The impressive models that are generating the hype are just a different league. Love to hear to how I am wrong though?
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  It’s true that you need compute to do large experiments, but the large experiments grow out of small ones. If you can show promising work in a small way, it’s easier to get compute. You can also apply to TRC to get a bunch of TPUs. They had capacity issues for a long time but I’ve heard it’s improved. Don’t focus on the hype models. Find a niche that you personally like, and do that. If you’re chasing hype you’ll always be skating towards the puck. My original AI interest was to use voice generation to make Dr Kleiner sing about being a modern major general. It went from there, to image gen, to text gen, and kaboom, the whole world blew up. I was the first to show that GPTs can be used for more than just language modeling — in my case, playing chess. Wacky ideas like that are important to play around with, because they won’t seem so wacky in a year.
  - tayo42 3y ago
    Thats interesting, at a glance the TRC thing looks more altruistic and impactful than what I had in mind for learning or making money. I'll have to keep it in mind if I do, do something share worthy ever. Thanks!
- jebarker 3y ago
  Another area where there's potential for an individual to make lots of progress is in theory and mechanistic interpretation. Although it's not where the money is, it's probably not rapid progress and it's really hard.
diogenes4 3y ago
> The wonderful part about AI is that the whole world’s problems are up for grabs. Most of the world's problems aren't technological, unfortunately for us in tech. There's little it can do against the momentum of capital tearing this globe apart.

mrtksn 3y ago

IIRC, the movie ends with a joke on how those responsible were punished only to reveal that they walked away with the loot. You almost never see a group punishment, unless you lost as a group against another organization. So, if all the AI stuff goes bust in a year or two those who benefited from the bubble will keep their benefits. Also, there’s a possibility that it doesn’t go bust and user us into AGI era and win big.

gymbeaux 3y ago
JS devs were/are paid the big bucks because !!"false" == !!"true" and so on.
- mrtksn 3y ago
  Decided to remove the JS part, lots of people made their fortune on battling its oddities.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

epups 3y ago

What is the measured evidence that AI is hype right now?

7thaccount 3y ago
Companies with massive valuations that have no product to sell or aren't making any profit. This is what I've heard anyway (not a stock guy). Some economic schools of thought say that when interest rates are low and money is practically free (historically speaking), you get a lot of bad/risky ideas (boom & bubble) and an inevitable correction of a bust. The bust is accelerated when all of a sudden you have to rise the interest rates to fight inflation and the money is no longer easy to get. All those companies being held afloat by the free money start collapsing. Again, we should make statements on data and I'll just be upfront that I haven't done much research in this area, but considering the sheer amount of AI startups and jobs and conferences and so on with very few transformative products...I would eventually expect a market correction in the form of another AI winter like what happened in the 80s when all the massive government acts defense research dollars dried up. The difference is it'll be far less severe. You'll still have plenty of AI research at the universities and large companies, but maybe not hundreds of questionable startups. This is all just conjecture on my part though.
- nightski 3y ago
  That and even established companies with other products/services but who have seen massive market cap increases due to AI hype.
- andrewmutz 3y ago
  > Companies with massive valuations that have no product to sell or aren't making any profit That's not enough to demonstrate that AI is just hype. Every technological breakthrough has opportunists trying to make a buck riding along the hype. In the 90s, Pets.com and webvan didn't prove that the internet was just hype. I am one of the people who is completely bought in to the idea that AI in general (and LLMs in particular) are going to lead to products that are extremely useful to the world. I absolutely think that most of the gen AI startups will fail and that valuations are too high, but I still believe that massively impactful/useful products will also be born.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]