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Every app that adds AI looks like this

• ta988 3y ago
  Every substack post looks like this: 1. look at my emotional take on a hot topic 2. why don't you subscribe to my substack 3. ok i got you to the end? I have something to sell to you
  • rchaud 3y ago
    People don't write for free on the internet anymore. If it's free, it's a prelude to an ad of some sort.
    • ta988 3y ago
      I don't believe that's true, my RSS feed has more than I can read. Just that the people behind those blogs aren't desperate for attention or trying to find clients.
• eimrine 3y ago
  "Gimme a high six" is a nice joke considering that neural networks are notoriously bad at generating decent hands.
  • agentultra 3y ago
    The future crystal ball picture with the three fingers really seals the deal. I feel the same way as the author. Adding “AI,” to an app is a great way of signalling to me that you’re a schlocky salesperson who can’t wait to sell a lemon so you can make your alimony payments this month. Machine learning is fine and useful. “Stick an LLM on it,” is painfully obtuse. Now that every tech product and service is doing it it’s like the crypto craze all over again.
    • tremon 3y ago
      It's not missing a finger? If you're referring to the left-hand (for the viewer) pinky, it's curled and partially obscured by bijoux and by the ring finger, but the nail of that finger is visible pointing inwards toward the crystal ball.
      • agentultra 3y ago
        I see it now that you mention it! It looks a bit strange to me still. I mistakenly wrote it off as another example of failed AI hands.
  • sanderjd 3y ago
    I also caught that :) Nailed it.
  • sexy_seedbox 3y ago
    I laughed too, but if you've seen some of the latest SDXL models on Civitai, hands and fingers have been fixed. Some of the recent generated images are pretty realistic.
• deleted 3y ago
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• gmaster1440 3y ago
  > There are apps who use AI well. They don’t call it AI because they are not children. All of Google is AI. But you don’t see them bandying it around like a kid with new light up shoes. Except of course you do, and well before the recent generative AI hype too (which they've also leaned heavily into on the marketing side fwiw).
• the__alchemist 3y ago
  The "Absurd, honest comedy delivered twice a weekish through the vulnerable personal essays; type your email...!" popup showed up, coincidentally, superimposed over the second image, the "what are you stuck on" prompt. It took me a bit to figure out it wasn't part of the pic! At least the hypothetical AI page made me click something before asking for personal information.
  • tomrod 3y ago
    I had the same issue.
  • mdorazio 3y ago
    Same for me as well. I thought the author was making a self-aware joke about people breathlessly self-promoting on substack, but nope.
  • chankstein38 3y ago
    Is that what that says? I have noticed that every substack page pops up some stupid modal as you scroll down the page and, for the most part, it's made me avoid them when I can because it's just obnoxious. I'm contemplating a Chrome Extension or something that will auto close them but for now I just find that most of the time it's not worth clicking anyway. I just close it immediately without reading it like the internet has trained me to do with literally every modal. You want my attention? Put some call to action in the text I'm reading. A modal popping up mid-content asking for my email is just a good way to signal to me that you don't value your content and that you just wrote it so you can get my information. And sorry to those folks, I don't even read it.
    • KMnO4 3y ago
      Can you just block that element with your adblocker? FWIW, that’s just a Substack feature. It’s not like the authors all got together and decided they all wanted to make a modal pop up on scroll and interrupt your reading.
      • chankstein38 3y ago
• tomrod 3y ago
  Oh my god, this is exactly how I feel about AI hype. I've been in the "AI" space for quite awhile. The hype hurts, and it sets completely unrealistic expectations for both utility of the tools as well as the cost of the tools.
• skepticATX 3y ago
  The problem is that companies are throwing tons of garbage at the wall to see what sticks. And somehow, investors are rewarding them for this. Undoubtedly LLMs can be used to create useful features, but first companies will need to realize that 1) It will take more effort than throwing up a LLM front end for your product. 2) It's probably not going to be a flashy, "disruptive" feature. Something that makes user experience just 5% easier/more efficient is huge, but AI influencers won't breathlessly shill your feature if that's "all" that it does. 3) You have to think about problems to solve before thinking about solutions.
  • gear54rus 3y ago
    But isnt the whole startup model is throwing the garbage at the wall and seeing what sticks? It's about quick testing. Even the word venture in venture capital is fitting? I don't see any other way that it can work tbh. Do you?
    • skepticATX 3y ago
      Sure, but it's not just startups. How many Fortune 500 companies have started mentioning AI on earnings calls because it's what Wall Street wants to hear? How many companies are having internal "AI" hackathons that put the solution over the problem? (Am I the only one who has had to suffer through this?)
      • pharmakom 3y ago
        Optimising for dumb money trading on earnings call transcripts.
    • Ensorceled 3y ago
      I think there is a difference between "do people want a different kind of search engine" and "I'll wrap some marketing fluff around a prompt box like 500,000 other startups"
      • sharemywin 3y ago
• deleted 3y ago
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• Eumenes 3y ago
  Reminds me of the old Bootstrap days
  • butlike 3y ago
    The cycle repeats ad infinitum. Flip phones, where some slid up, others folded out. Some had iTunes but were dogshit otherwise. Then you had templating languages. Twig, Smarty, blade, etc. Then you had social media, where everyone wanted a piece of the Facebook pie. Then Crypto. Then NFTs. Now it's LLM. Tomorrow it will be something different.
• fernandotakai 3y ago
  maybe i'm dumb, but i don't see any place in my life right now where a bot (i refuse to call LLMs AI. they are not intelligent.) could help me. chatgpt? well, i used for some funny things (like writing a poem about an amazing sandwich my wife made), but i never think "let me use this" whenever i have a problem. image generation? i mean, maybe for memes? i tried bing-image-generator while high and had some laughs, but for the life of me i cannot see myself using it in any other way. i also tried the notion ai stuff, but honestly, i just prefer writing everything myself, since writing is a skill that needs improvement and you can only improve by actually doing it.
  • petabytes 3y ago
    As a programmer, it ended up being useful for a few things in the beginning, but I don't even use it anymore. Maybe every other week to reformat some text or make some boilerplate code.
    • butlike 3y ago
      GPT is really good for finding insertion points into large-breadth topics where you don't really know where to begin. I've found great joy in asking it particle physics questions. I don't know the math to google the right terms, but it's been really good about taking my layperson questions and translating it into answers that are digestible.
      • chankstein38 3y ago
        This with Bing so it searches for articles and reads and summarizes them has been great! I mean, admittedly it'd probably be better if it used a better search engine but at least with this workflow you know it's less likely to regurgitate garbage.
      • sharemywin 3y ago
        I've used it to find a couple of different python libraries. Asked is questions about top level ontologies and OWL. it was pretty insightful on the ontology stuff.
• deleted 3y ago
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• anonymoushn 3y ago
  Its not exactly reassuring that Google is "using AI" to send scam emails to my inbox and articles that keep repeating the keywords they are ostensibly about to the top of the SERP
• bunderbunder 3y ago
  I make (sigh) AI for a living, and arguably have been since before we started calling it AI. Based on my own first-hand experience, if the first thing a company has to say about a product or feature is that it's powered by AI, that is a strong signal that it isn't actually very useful. If they had found it to be useful for reliably solving one or more real, clearly-identified problems, they would start by talking about that, because that sends a stronger signal to a higher-quality pool of potential customers. The thing is, companies who have that kind of product are relatively rare, because getting to that point takes work. Lots of it. And it's often quite grueling work. The kind of work that's fundamentally unattractive to the swarms of ambitious, entrepreneurial-minded people looking to get rich starting their own business who drive most attempts at launching new products.
  • mbb70 3y ago
    Corollary: If a product marketed as AI is useful, that's a strong signal it's a logistic regression.
    • geysersam 3y ago
      *linear logistic regression I mean, a typical LLM is also logistic regression, but it's not linear.
    • PaulHoule 3y ago
      Even when I have a model that isn't logistic regression, there is always a logistic regression stage at the end for probability calibration. I mean, what good is a prediction that is 50% accurate? If you are classifying documents for a recommendation model a "up/down" classification is barely useful, a probability calibrated classification is golden. With no calibration you have an arXiv paper, with a calibration you can build a classifier into a larger system that takes actions under uncertainty. The generative paradigm holds progress back. You can ask ChatGPT to do anything and it will do it with 70-90% accuracy in all but the hardest cases. Screwing around with prompts can get you closer to the high end of that range, but if you want to do better than that you've got to define your problem well and go through a lot of the grindy work that you had to do with symbolic A.I. and have always had to do with machine learning. (You're going to need a large evaluation set to know how well your prompt-based solution works, and know that it didn't get broken by a software update, at the very least.) The image that comes to my mind, almost intrusively, is Mickey Mouse from the movie Fantasia where he shows various sins, laziness most of all https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VErKCq1IGIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VErKCq1IGIU So many of these efforts show off terrible quality control. There is a site that has posted about 250 galleries (at a rate of 2 day) of about 70 pornographic images a piece generated by A.I. At best the model generates highly detailed images including the stitching on the seams of clothes, clothing with floral prints matching cherry blossom trees in the background and sometimes crowds of people that really click thematically. Then you notice the girls with two belly buttons and if you look enough you'll see some with 7 belly buttons and realize the model doesn't really understand the difference between body parts and skin so there is a nipple that looks like part of the bra rather than showing through the bra, etc. Then there are the hideously distorted penises that are too long, too short, disembodied, duplicated, bifurcated, pointing in the wrong direction and would otherwise be nightmare fuel for anyone with castration anxiety. If the wizard was in charge he'd be cleaning these up, I mean looking at 150 images a day and culling the worst is less than an hour of work. But no, Mickey Mouse is in charge. "Chat" in "ChatGPT" is a good indication of what is going on because it is brilliant at chat where it can lean on a conversation partner to provide meaning and guidance and where the ability to apologize for mistakes really seduces people, even if it doesn't change its wrong behavior. The trouble is trying to get it to perform "off the leash" at a task that matters is a matter of pushing a bubble around under a rug, that "chasing an asymptote" situation is itself seductive and one of the worst problems in technology development that entraps the most sophisticated teams, but put it together with unsophisticated people who don't think systematically and a system which already has superhuman powers of seduction (e.g. "chat" as opposed to problem solving) and you are cruising for a bruising.
• zigman1 3y ago
  One would have thought that people within tech and all this "entrepreneurialism" would have a bit more of a rational and common sense, but it really seems that you can actually sell shit to everyone. I'm sad to see this shitfluencers on Twitter gaining so much traction. But it is a great filter to whom not to listen in this virtual flood of opinions and advices.
  • chankstein38 3y ago
    While I'm sure a lot of this is tech folks, I think part of the problem here is that it enabled any rando sleezeball off the street to be like "Hey I made an AI product. Look!" I've personally known a few of these folks at this point and yeah they don't actually even understand what they're doing half the time they're just watching youtube tutorials and setting things up not caring/realizing/whatever that what they're calling an "AI Product" is actually just a bot they connected to some API that they fed a really brittle system prompt into. But everyone should be impressed by them because they managed to ~follow a youtube tutorial~ set it up! (Sorry, kind of PTSD from one in particular)
    • zigman1 3y ago
      I know exactly what you mean, but this kind of people were sold on a particular idea of what being a founder/entrepreneuer is. Just grind hard and make products and at one point you will make it. They see emerging trends as opportunities without having a knowledge about them, and if they are lucky, they will convince some people to actually buy that. But again, one would think that venture capitalists who are throwing apparently, hundreds of millions of dollars into it, would have an eye to filter out this kind of characters.
      • blq10 3y ago
        Evaluating a business is tough. VC is like that because many of them missed many boats of very profitable startups in 2001 thru 2010, where "stupid business trick, now with software!" was almost always an OK bet. AI is the new dot com, which means we are at least one more bubble away from mass usefulness
• deleted 3y ago
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• MichaelRo 3y ago
  AI gold rush is the new underpants gnomes: https://imgur.com/a/x9isuwO https://imgur.com/a/x9isuwO Nobody's got any idea how that's actually going to turn into a profit but everyone's busy stealing underpants.
  • rchaud 3y ago
    More like the blockchain fad. Just as anybody can fork Ethereum to create their own shitcoin, anybody can throw a UI layer over Stable Diffusion and pat themselves on the back for their innovation.
• adtac 3y ago
  This is slightly tangential, but has anyone recently used ChatGPT for non-trivial programming tasks where you start typing a precise description of what you need from the system and by the time you finish writing it you realise there's a simple way to do it? It has happened to me several times and it was as if serialising the problem was the hard part, like that famous Einstein quote.
  • TillE 3y ago
    That's just classic rubber duck debugging, where explaining the problem forces you to organize your thoughts. It's a good practice!
  • rchaud 3y ago
    50% of my Github Issues posts never end up being submitted because writing it out for the understanding of others helps me find the solution myself.
• api 3y ago
  The speed with which AI has become the new hot thing everyone must have is dizzying to me. It seems like it happened over a span of weeks after ChatGPT went live. I wonder how much faster we can go. Can we have an entire tech hype bubble in one 24 hour period?
  • precompute 3y ago
    > Can we have an entire tech hype bubble in one 24 hour period? Those happen when person [X] says [controversial thing that's also a huge, earth-shattering claim] prior to [product launch]
• michaelteter 3y ago
  Hype trains exist in tech the same way they exist in the seedy world of multi-level-marketing (which unfortunately due to some past clients I have a lot of experience with). It doesn't matter _what_ you're selling. All that matters is that the hype train passes enough people that you can cash out your "investment". Each investment round is the cash out for previous ones, and the last round is the IPO, where ignorant (no negative connotation, just unknowing) public is left holding the bag of air. And like the MLM pyramid schemes, sometimes the product or service does have some value to some people. But it gets sold to anyone and everyone, most of whom have no use for it. Most products or services don't need AI. But for sure, you needed to say BLOCKCHAIN somewhere in your business plan a few years ago, and now you need AI. Eventually maybe we should just embrace hype trains and accept that people like to get excited about things they don't understand, or things that are imaginary. Just go ahead and sell them a dream. Put AI in your widget and make more money. It's ok. But don't believe your own hype.
  • emmender1 3y ago
    nailed it. i have been part of 3 hype-trains - dot-com, cloud, and now ai. missed w3/crypto. but, i havent such hype-trains in other parts of us/world.
    • wahnfrieden 3y ago
      You don’t speak Japanese / hang out on Japanese internet?
      • emmender1 3y ago
        no, but in other parts of the world, there is no sense that you will imminently a) change the world with some doodad gadget or b) be a millionaire by picking up a startup lottery ticket.
        • wahnfrieden 3y ago
          how do you know that if you don't speak other languages and hang out in their spaces?
• tjpnz 3y ago
  >All of Google is AI. But you don’t see them bandying it around like a kid with new light up shoes. Google Calendar has that stupid icon on a feature for auto-selecting where you'll attend a meeting based on your office schedule. They're just as capable of bandying about their bullshit applications for AI as everyone else.
  • hanspeter 3y ago
    They even have a whole suite of useless AI add-ons for Google Workspace https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/duet-ai https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/duet... (Well, the email add on is somewhat useful, while the generative AI for illustrations in Slides is outright laughable.)
• notbeuller 3y ago
  It so reminds me of Douglas Adam's Electric Monk from Dirk Gently: "The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they'd have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City. It had never heard of Salt Lake City, of course. Nor had it ever heard of a quingigillion, which was roughly the number of miles between this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah."
  • wodenokoto 3y ago
    When I read > Try Headspace AI. where one of our robots will meditate FOR YOU and then tell you all the lessons it learned.” I also thought of the electric monk, although for some reason I remembered it as being something that watched television for you.
• WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  I believe this is precisely why Apple avoids calling its own large language model features or other neural network-related things "AI". It's a very loaded term, very overhyped, carries a certain stigma, and it's not like that bubble didn't burst in the early 1990s or so.
• karaterobot 3y ago
  The only correction I'd make is that a lot of them ask you to create an account, or at least give them your email address, before you get to experience the magic.
  • renegade-otter 3y ago
    Which is most likely how they are making most of their money - by selling email lists.
• prmoustache 3y ago
  I was doing groceries the other day and ended up looking at a new CocaCola flavor said to be generated by AI. Looks to me like AI is just the new buzzword that replaced crypto and NFT and we will just see more of it for a few months until it calms down.
  • uoaei 3y ago
    "Generated by dart thrown at wall" doesn't quite have the same ring to it though it is effectively the digital version of that.
  • djaro 3y ago
    I saw that too, and it didn't really make sense to me in the sense that food is complicated. It needs to have the right ingredients in the right amounts to not spoil too quickly, to taste decent, to pass health regulations, etc. Coca Cola knew exactly what ingredients were available. So what role did the AI play besides being a glorified list.random()? That humans then used as a starting point to turn into an actual drink?
• rpastuszak 3y ago
  My (briefly viral) personal take: https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io - a huge chunk of my traffic comes from people who believe this is a real project, because AI tool catalogues keep hallucinating pitches for my AI PRODUCT - this almost won an award but I lost to a site with 3d rotating sandwiches - the silver lining: I met a guy who pivoted from startups to making beef jerky. We are a small, exclusive community known to some as the meatverse. I also made https://butter.sonnet.io https://butter.sonnet.io and people offered to pay me for it. Perhaps I should monetise my Medieval Content Farm with those native ads in blackletter: https://tidings.potato.horse https://tidings.potato.horse
  • tony_cannistra 3y ago
    Great projects, amazing work. I'm mostly here though to say thanks for the reminder about `.horse`, which I haven't seen since my friends and I would go on domain-buying blitzes and host static pages with repeating backgrounds of random images on them, in college.
    • rpastuszak 3y ago
      hehe do not underestimate the power of edibles and rash decisions! In all seriousness though, I like splitting my projects between two domains: .sonnet.io for the more serious stuff .potato.horse for anything that I might not want to put on my CV. (it's a good tradeoff between keeping one domain for everything and buying vanity domains en masse - which I used to be guilty of)
  • eru 3y ago
    > Perhaps I should monetise my Medieval Content Farm with those native ads in blackletter: https://tidings.potato.horse https://tidings.potato.horse I wanted to like that, but their font is fake. They don't even use the proper ſ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
    • rpastuszak 3y ago
      Thank you for that comment. I'm a bit of a typography nerd (and uſed to tranſlate manuſcripts, albeit in middle-Perſian, not Latin) and I DID conſider using it. β≠ß, right?
• TheCaptain4815 3y ago
  I wonder how differentiating 'AI Wrappers' can really be given the power of GPT4? There's definitely some use cases I've thought of w/ finetuning for very niche programming languages (Source Hammer from Counterstrike for example), but in my everyday use I haven't found anything that beats GPT4 + proper prompting.
  • brucethemoose2 3y ago
    I think this is better than GPT4 for storywriting/rp, especially with a custom grammar restriction and custom sampling parameters: https://huggingface.co/Sao10K/Euryale-1.3-L2-70B-GGUF https://huggingface.co/Sao10K/Euryale-1.3-L2-70B-GGUF Mistral 7B finetunes are pretty amazing as well. Not sure about the code generation side of things. Llama was actually really bad at this relative to other tasks, and I hear even 34B is pretty mediocre, but there are some more obscure foundational programming models I have not tried.
• VSpike 3y ago
  > All of Google is AI. But you don’t see them bandying it around like a kid with new light up shoes. I was at Google Cloud Next London yesterday and I hate to disappoint you but _everything_ seemed to be about AI. The keynote was about AI. The decor was all AI generated. Each breakout had to mention AI, to the point where a couple of speakers joked that they _weren't_ going to talk about AI. It was a bit depressing.
  • sexy_seedbox 3y ago
    I was at Google's recent Generative AI conference and their latest and greatest LLM can't even answer the "Sally has 3 brothers" question, embarrassing.
• hobofan 3y ago
  I think the key sentence is this: > But you don’t see them bandying it around like a kid with new light up shoes. Yes, because Google and other big players are not after VC money, while all the companies that put it in their marketing copy are.
  • NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
    No; that's totally untrue. Large, public firms which (by definition) have no VC money are doing it too. I mean ... Microsoft?
• tempodox 3y ago
  This article shows the appropriate amount of disrespect. > They don’t call it AI because they are not children. Word. But nobody will heed their appeal to “stop it”. The hype is just too sweet, and too many people want to believe in miracles.
• stetrain 3y ago
  Ah but what about <Productivity App> which now has a Magic AI Sidebar(tm) which is just a GPT-3 prompt that maybe has been fed a list of your document titles to be slightly more relevant.
• Subdivide8452 3y ago
  Kind of ironic that this site bothered me with one of those full screen, must-click-away, overlays trying to get me to subscribe to their newsletter.
  • capital_guy 3y ago
    is it ironic? that's just how substack works.
• wuliwong 3y ago
  I am a bit more optimistic or just unfazed by all the AI hype. After seeing these "hype trains" before, it just seems like part of our collective process of figuring out what works. Sure, I think optimizing these cycles to burn less capital would be good but I guess I'm actually on the side of having a bunch of people throwing a bunch of crap against the wall and seeing what sticks. :)
• marban 3y ago
  All valid points, but then you hit the bottom of the page to sign up for a (drumrolls), writing course.
• emmender1 3y ago
  I guess we are at that part of the hype-cycle where the initial excitement is turning into doubt. At this point, the vested interests (ai-vcs, startups, ai-researchers etc) must unleash a new wave of propaganda to keep the faith. eg: sama drops a tweet: "saw AGI yesterday in a dark alley", or musk says "optimus did a cartwheel - whoohoo", or lecunn publishes "chain of thought is all you need" on arxiv. methinks crypto had more legs than AI - at least the initial adopters made some quick cash out of it.
• always2slow 3y ago
  This seems like an AI written article bashing AI. Complete with a numbered list where the AI forgot how to count. Oh and it's literally just SEO article spam selling a "workshop". >I’m teaching a workshop soon! An Invitation 200 points at this time, next AI article by the author: How to game HN and get your article spam on the front page! (SIGN UP FOR MY NEWSLETTER TO CONTINUE READING)
• jklinger410 3y ago
  This article is lazy and contains very little value. I'm convinced the people commenting here have not read it.
  • brigadier132 3y ago
    Cynicism is a cheap way to appear smart and dumb people lap it up. So I'm not surprised it's upvoted to the top of HN.
    • sanderjd 3y ago
      This is true, but the article is also right about the current state of AI apps. I can't wait for the hype to die down, for the nonsense to die out, and for the signal to noise ratio to shoot up. There is tons of real signal in the space! Pure cynicism on it is not warranted. But it's also reasonable to point out how much noise there is at the moment.
  • sebzim4500 3y ago
    It may have no content, but it is very easy to read and confirms the pre-existing biases of nerdy contrarians. It will go far here.
    • rchaud 3y ago
      Is it possible that your own bias towards AI makes you somewhat blind to the scale of garbage AI tools being shoved in people's faces daily?
      • sebzim4500 3y ago
        Anything is possible, but it doesn't change the veracity of my comment.
  • sanderjd 3y ago
    Tend to agree about the article's content (though there are a couple good jokes), but what people are commenting on here is the thesis of the article, that the point we're at in the "generative AI" hype cycle is noisily creating a lot of useless crap.
• throwaway35934 3y ago
  I work for a Fortune 500 company. One of our senior technology execs was just listed on Business Insider's "Top 100 people in AI". Our company has no products that use AI. The closest we have come to actually doing anything with AI is a tiny trial of GitHub Copilot.
  • sanderjd 3y ago
    I'm sure this would out your company, but if you can say, I'm curious what the blurb said about why they were included in the list. I mean, I'm sure the real reason is "a PR person with good contacts at Business Insider", but I think it would be illuminating to know what the BS reason they wrote up is.
    • dboreham 3y ago
      Spoiler: all such "Top N people in X" lists are fake and somehow serve someone's business model.
  • BiteCode_dev 3y ago
    15 years ago I worked with a guy on NGO projets in Africa. The projects were either prototypes, concepts, in testing, or small scales. Plus he was honestly the type of manager that was better at talking than doing so I wouldn't say he was much involved in them apart from claiming he was doing good. Well, it worked because he was in the top 100 people of Time magazine the year after for "saving millions of children". That was my wake up moment about the medias.
    • rchaud 3y ago
      > Plus he was honestly the type of manager that was better at talking than doing Well yeah, who else would the media think to profile? When the media profiles OpenAI, most of the coverage will be on the CEO, who is more of a 'serial entrepreneur' than an AI specialist.
    • nonameiguess 3y ago
      It's pretty interesting to me to see these patterns of who gets credit and who doesn't. My ex-wife got off of active duty and joined the national guard to go to college nearly 20 years ago before she got back in as an officer through ROTC. While she was in the guard, she deployed with a civil affairs unit to Djibouti, which we have always maintained a permanent presence in to secure shipping lanes for oil. She was their supply sergeant and she identified a problem with the local water supply and got them all the equipment they needed to fix it, and in the process probably legitimately saved at least thousands of lives. She got a bronze star for it, but certainly no magazines will ever have heard of her. It's even more interesting that she got branch-detailed to the field artillery when she got back in, and I'm pretty sure she became the first female to ever command a combat unit in the Army when she filled in as XO of a forward line battery and they lost their permanent commander. But you'll never see her in a history book or read about her on Wikipedia because it was still illegal at the time for women to serve in combat units at all, and officially she was on the books as part of the brigade headquarters company, only filling in because they were severely understaffed. I try to keep her in mind when I feel like I'm being slighted at work and not getting sufficient recognition for accomplishments as I earn a salary triple what she gets as a Lieutenant Colonel now.
• didgetmaster 3y ago
  > I will pay money for you to not use the word AI anywhere on your app. Make that the premium tier and I will buy it... No you won't!
• brucethemoose2 3y ago
  What really amazes me is that, with all the money thrown at AI scams, the small group of "hero" generative AI tool maintainers on GitHub barely gets any funding. There are a few exceptions (like TheBloke getting funded for their quants, and GGML getting some seed money)... But stuff like InvokeAI, VoltaMl, koboldcpp/artbot and the AI Horde, Petals, the ControlNet dev and such should all be swimming in cash, but instead they are burnt out with basically nothing. And I'm sure there many more I don't know about.
  • mrweasel 3y ago
    Wasn't that the same outcome of the blockchain hype? Crypto-bros ran of with the money and a few developers getting little or no funding plucked away on GitHub. The main difference is that I see way fewer people defending the A.I. hype and people are generally much more critical and realistic about the application of LLMs.
    • brucethemoose2 3y ago
      These tools are actually great and useful though, right now. I wasn't as into crypto, but I mostly remember the tools being "neat right now, and very useful in the future." Stable Diffusion in particular has a huge community using it clustered around CivitAI, its just flying under the radar.
      • dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Stable Diffusion in particular has a huge community using it clustered around CivitAI While CivitAI has some monetization and may itself be doing well between that and whatever capital it has available to burn befor eit needs to be self-supporting, I get the sense that most of the creators tuning models and sharing there are scrambling for support, so I'm not sure that's really a refutation.
        • brucethemoose2 3y ago
          No, its not a sustainable business at all. But the population is huge. And most of the finetuners/mergerers are indeed not making much money, but (IMO) they are closer to "power users" than open source code maintainers, and shouldn't necessarily be raking money in like they are a lynchpin.
• sovietmudkipz 3y ago
  Off topic: Since AI has become an overloaded term and I like to build AI for video games (finite state machines, behavior trees, utility functions, etc) does anyone have a suggestion on what term to migrate to so when I say “I like writing AI for games” the listener knows what I’m referencing?
  • sanderjd 3y ago
    I don't think this is off topic, and I'm curious if anyone has a good answer. I see the same issue with people who work on "old school" machine learning techniques for the normal useful things that aren't "generative". Like, my company does a lot of time series forecasting, and sure, it's fine to market that as "AI", but that terminology has become a lot less useful for serious discussions of what we do, like with potential candidates. I guess just saying "ML" works fine, even though "generative AI" is also ML, but people don't tend to use that terminology for it much.
  • ben_w 3y ago
    I use "GOFAI" for that sort of thing: "Good Old Fashioned AI".
  • fragmede 3y ago
    intelligent agents (IA) (for video games)?
    • sovietmudkipz 3y ago
      This is my favorite. Thanks.
• mercurialsolo 3y ago
  Will the real slim shady please stand up? The current AI buzz is being ripped out by the wannabes - everything's marketing and buzz and being able to distinguish the genuine jumps forward is harder because we have made everything a wrapper around the same models - u have a diffusion and a transformer model - and u make it easy to call them - what do u get - a 100+ diffusion / transformer wrappers with a library of prompts - voila your new AI app / agent.
• danielbln 3y ago
  I for one hope the hype fever pitch dies down a little, because I love AI. Love LLMs, diffusion models, the various audio transformers. Live the ecosystem, love the PoCs, I just love it. I use some sort ot gen AI model every day to great avail. I can do without the marketing hype to be sure, but to me this technology is still exciting, even after working with it for the last 3+ years, it's just sci-fi AF.
  • sanderjd 3y ago
    Yeah this is the same take I have! This field is currently both genuinely amazing and very irritatingly hype-y. This is just the normal hipster take though; we're annoyed that something we love has "gone mainstream" and "sold out" :)
• ffitch 3y ago
  Building an LLM wrapper is quick money right now, thus the abundance of pointless businesses, and AI fatigue. I optimistically think that when the initial interest weans off, people will find creative ways to leverage generative ai in less obvious, but more practical fashion.
• Roark66 3y ago
  Well, not every one. I made an android locally run AI ESRGAN super resolution app (a year ago) to upscale your photos without uploading them "to the cloud" and it was a normal app with a normal UI. There was a free and a paid version (the only difference was ads I was planning to run every couple of uses, but at the level of usage there was no point enabling them). I say it was, because Google has likely pulled it from the store for not being upgraded to android 13 before the end of August. Not that many people were interested (about ~5 paid and 30 new free users per month) for about a year. So I'm not spending lots of time on it (it was me testing if people are interested in more private AI solutions, some are, but not the majority). Instead we have apps like ones described and they have 1mln+ installs so evidently people want them. If I had to make my living making mobile apps I'd probably make the exact same thing seeing their success.
• willsmith72 3y ago
  I totally disagree about canva, some of their "magic" tools are really useful. I don't care what they call it
• imiric 3y ago
  > All of Google is AI. > But you don’t see them bandying it around like a kid with new light up shoes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YivUOqd91Nk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YivUOqd91Nk
• mjr00 3y ago
  The most egregious one to me has been CircleCI's "Ask an AI about this error" option on failed builds. Always spits out something irrelevant at best or misleading at worst, and it does so in the typical ChatGPT high school essay voice, complete with superfluous intro and conclusion paragraphs. "Atlassian Intelligence" may be just as bad, though...
• rchaud 3y ago
  I call it the Canva-fication of AI. I was at the Hubspot CRM conference a month ago and every single vendor seemed to be using that accursed emoji in their marketing materials and websites.
• charles_f 3y ago
  It's a new hammer and everyone is trying to make up new nails to hit with it. Heard a pm say "hey we don't have anything about AI in there, what should we do with it" while reviewing the plan for next quarter. But hey the good thing is that we'll have to figure out AI solutions for the problems that bad ai generates
• throwuwu 3y ago
  Shit writing, shit take, [current thing], #1 on HN, how the mighty have fallen.
• tombert 3y ago
  I suspect it's going to be like Blockchain for awhile; companies are going to start rebranding themselves as "AI-first" or "AI-powered" just like camera companies [1] and iced tea companies [2] were doing with Blockchain back in 2017. I guess that's the price of progress; some entity invents/refines a cool piece of tech, people speculate about the future of that tech, and then they wonder why Company X isn't fully utilizing that tech. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KodakCoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KodakCoin [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp
• butz 3y ago
  I wonder how long until Microsoft will add "AI" to Calculator.
• throwaway9274 3y ago
  We still don’t know what LLMs are for. By this I don’t mean LLMs aren’t useful. We have known that there was novel behavior happening as early as GPT-2. GPT-3 represented a clearly novel transformative technology. But we still didn’t know what to do with it. The reason for this is that the people who come up with products are generally a different set of people from those who innovate novel ML models. The latter tend to be PhDs or the extremely mathematically talented. The former tend to be a mix of product-y software engineers & engineer-y product & strategy people. There were some products, GitHub Copilot being the breakaway. Knowledge needs time to diffuse, and a market demand is necessary to catalyze that quickly. Out of exasperation, OpenAI decided to take one of the most common prompting use cases on the GPT-3 beta playground, Q&A, and make a chat product, almost as a technology demonstrator. Then ChatGPT exploded to hundreds of millions of users. All hell broke loose. Every Fortune 500 promised a “generative AI” rollout. And of course, like feverish corporate-branded “metaverse” stuff it all sucks. You can’t “corporate partnership” and “internally accelerate” a technological shift of this magnitude. You can’t hire BCG to do it for you. And you can’t tack a model onto your existing product and call it done. LLMs and other new foundation models require fundamentally new products. They require new middleware to be deployed like vector databases, RAG frameworks, and agentic systems. Start ups are starting to crack these problems. But my fear is that when the bottom drops out of the corporate efforts, the investment attitudes will shift just as there’s the most work to be done.
  • dboreham 3y ago
    > We still don’t know what LLMs are for I have found the LLM concept to be tremendously valuable in illuminating my understanding of the operation of human brains (both mine and others). This mainly arose after reading Wolfram's article, then continued independent thinking along the same lines. Honestly by far the biggest coin dropping moment for me in 40 years, since I first heard John Searle talk. Note I don't actually use LLMs for anything.
  • janalsncm 3y ago
    LLMs have been more useful on the encoder side than the decoder side in my experience. Creating embeddings is useful in all sorts of ways. Specifically, if your business involves any sort of recommendation system, embeddings are useful. On the decoder side, the use cases are more subtle. Rarely do you want your product to be the raw output of a statistical language model. More often the output is an enabler of other things your business is doing. For example, you can use it to develop “doc queries”, which are queries that a doc might be surfaced under. This can help with cold start issues by supplementing existing doc info.
• hermitcrab 3y ago
  I write and sell software that uses a genetic algorithm to optimize seating layouts for weddings and event, but I have so far resisted using the dreaded "AI" anywhere on my site. At this point anything with an 'if' statement in it is "AI" as far as marketing people are concerned.
• tracerbulletx 3y ago
  I agree with the fact that there are a ton of low effort shitty companies riding the AI craze, but I think that cat looks pretty cool and it's still very impressive a computer could generate it.
• nullptr_deref 3y ago
  The problem also trickles to hiring and recruitment. Everyone and their parents are doing GenAI these days with multiple publications on top tier venues. What does this even mean? Was there a hype cycle before this period on some other niches that almost everyone is doing? In my life only I have seen one about web apps, then another on crypto. What was the bubble before that? Did everyone who started their career went through the route of hype cycles because the recruiters would call for interview? What are your opinions?
• Nickersf 3y ago
  I think we need to re-think the fundamental reasons for why we use computing technology. There was a time where computers were mainly used to assist humans in handling complex, tedious tasks. Specifically, tasks rooted in computation and organization of data. Today people expect, because they have been sold the idea that computers should do everything from drawing for them to fulfilling their social needs as a human. I think it's time to step back and really think about what the role of computers should be and how we as humans use computers. I remember when using the Internet and digital media were in their early stages. Compared to today there was a very small segment of the population doing those things. You were underground if you were playing video games on the Internet. Most computers lived in offices doing what they did best: office work. Maybe we've gone too far in the wrong direction.
• graypegg 3y ago
  Sometime on in this whole cycle and I still find LLM-prompts-as-the-interface extremely annoying. I have to pause and carefully think out the entirety of a task I want to do, I can’t just rely on a button being disabled or a confirmation dialog to realize I’m using a tool wrong. And then it usually does something bizarre and it’s hard to trace why it did that. LLMs are still insanely impressive for things where I would normally have a free form conversation. (Summarization, expansion, paint an image) but the cases like Microsoft Copilot where using it to change a setting in windows is actually more annoying than just asking where that setting is located. LLMs are the shittest version of a toolbar to me
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• nojvek 3y ago
  Machine learning is done with python, AI is with in powerpoint slides and marketing pages.
• rglover 3y ago
  "How we got here" can be summed up in one word: mimetics. Originality is the rarest thing in this world. Most people operate from a position of fear and competition [1]. The sad truth is that, generally, everybody just does what everybody else does because everybody else is doing it. [1] https://soundcloud.com/i-am-sovereign/solo-podcast-from-kapilguptamdcom-competition-breeds-parity-and-mediocrity https://soundcloud.com/i-am-sovereign/solo-podcast-from-kapi...
• 20wenty 3y ago
  You're not necessarily wrong, but you may also be throwing stones from a glass (Substack) house. Barely made it past the fold before I was nagged with a Substack popup.
• gspencley 3y ago
  Could be worse. Remember the crypto / blockchain hype of 2 weeks ago?
  • sexy_seedbox 3y ago
    You forgot the "Metaverse"
• poutrathor 3y ago
  So nobody's gonna comment that the guy in the painting is getting pickpocketed while watching the magic trick ? This is the real gem from this rant.
  • alexdobrenko 3y ago
    omg. I wrote the original piece and cannot believe I missed this
• smusamashah 3y ago
  Author shared screenshots but didn't mention the color "purple" or the shade of purple that is. Why every AI thing is now purple? Look at Shortwave, the really nice email app, they also turned AI and as a result have turned purple now. Look at their homepage. Too me it very much looks like when every when was integrating crypto in their tech in some form and they were all using these similar colors and gradients. Now when I see a site like this it basically turns me off. I really liked Shortwave, it was supposed to be the next Google inbox or better. Now it's AI.
• pronik 3y ago
  I remember a time some 25 years ago when shareware developers, years after Winamp, discovered that you could leave the rectangular UIs behind and make "skins" for their software. For several years everybody was adding skins for good or for bad reasons. It has become an indicator for me: if a new major version of a software has "Skins!!!" as the first item of the changelog, you could assume real innovation has stopped and you could reasonably expect its downfall in the next couple of months or years at most. In the case of AI it's a bit different for existing software and probably more of a hype train fueled by marketing departments than true lack of ideas. But the readiness to jump on these trains should be alarming, especially when long-existing features are suddenly being replaced by "AI". I hope this will end soon and after sifting through fad ideas we'll be left with few, but really usable products.
• somsak2 3y ago
  > All of Google is AI. But you don’t see them bandying it around like a kid with new light up shoes. From a few months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P-ein58laA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P-ein58laA