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Interesting analysis. Suprised HN is so negative towards AI (and that the positive:negative ratio to AI is about the same as it was for Crypto a few years ago!)

• greenthrow 3y ago
  HN isn't negative on "AI" in a vacuum. HN is negative on AI hype which is completely out of control.
• kcorbitt 3y ago
  (author here) Yes, I was surprised that AI didn't have more positive sentiment overall! Subjectively, the two flavors of AI-negative sentiment I've seen most commonly on HN are (1) its potential to invade privacy, and (2) its potential to displace workers, including workers in tech. I think that (1) was by far the most common concern up until around the ChatGPT release, at which point (2) became a major concern for many HN readers.
  • cft 3y ago
    The most negative argument about GPT-like AI for me is that it has summed up all world's information into only one "correct" opinion. Bing chat for example terminates the conversation and offers you to apologize when you reply that it's incorrect and you don't like its biases. With the old search engines, at least, in theory, you could get links to websites with different points of view.
    • HPsquared 3y ago
      Microsoft is going to be especially sensitive in this area, given their experience with Tay and "user-guided sentiments" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
  • fallingknife 3y ago
    Would be interesting to compare with overall sentiment on HN over time. I feel like it has gotten more and more bitter and negative over the time I've been here.
    • JohnFen 3y ago
      My personal outlook about how AI has been developing has certainly become increasingly dark with time. I still have a hope, though, that things won't be as bad as I fear.
      • ies7 3y ago
        Because the majority of those ai "startups/founders" were blockchain startups before this and big data startup before that and "any buzzword tech" before that too. They will pivot their vision to the next toy after this too.
  • btilly 3y ago
    I would be curious. What happens if you divide it not by comments, but by commenters? How much is sentiment being shaped by a vocal minority who is always saying the same thing, and how much does it seem to be a broad-based sentiment among the overall audience that occasionally responds?
    • jay_kyburz 3y ago
      yeah, really good point. I've noticed on some topics a few users come out of the woodwork and post a lot.
    • johnnyanmac 3y ago
      absolutely. One fun thing I learnt about reddit is how blocking just a few hyper commenters can suddenly make a post 10x calmer. You should definitely take into account the frequency of the users commenting with data like this.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • Manfred 3y ago
    There was nothing about the ethical question of training models on copyrighted content? Nothing about centralizing power even further in big tech companies? Nothing about AI flooding the world with mediocre content and wrong information? These are genuine questions, not critique on your statement.
    • apeters 3y ago
      Centralizing power is a good point. It feels like a huge dependency with a bunch of money involved. I cannot _not_ see it clumping to a sentiment comparable to "you either AWS' or have no idea what cloud/network/cluster means". We use these things like it’s actually "something". It’s not. We don’t build things with it. We configure other people’s software. It’s born to be promoted as the next big enterprise stuff. You either know how to configure it or are not enterprise-worthy. And that farts. Being dependent on someone else’s stuff has never turned out good. Well, I mean. You can also not give a duck and squeeze out all the money. Work a job, abandon it and jump on the next train. Feels useless, doesn’t it?
  • devjab 3y ago
    I’m curious as to your conclusions on point (2). We use GPT daily but see nothing with it that threatens tech workers. At least not in any sense that we haven’t seen already, with how a two or three developers can basically do what it took one or two teams to do 25 years ago. In terms of actually automating any form of ”thinking” tech work, LLMs are proving increasingly terrible. I say this as someone who work in a place where GPT writes all our documentation except for some very limited parts of our code base which can’t legally be shared with it. It increasingly also replaces our code-generation tools for most ”repetitive” work and it auto-generates a lot of our data-models based on various forms of inputs. But the actual programming? It’s so horrible at it that it’s mostly used as a joke. Well, except that it’s also not used like that by people who aren’t CS educated. The thing is though, we’ve already had to replace some of the “wonderful” automation that’s being cooked up by Product Owners, BI engineers and so on. Things which work, until they need to scale. This is obviously very anecdotal, but I’m very underwhelmed and very impressed by AI at the same time. On one hand it’s frighteningly good at writing documentation… seriously, it wrote some truly amazing documentation based on a function named something along the lines of getCompanyInfoFromCVR (CVR being the Danish digital company registry) and the documentation GPT wrote based on just that was better than what I could’ve written. But tasked with writing some fairly basic computation it fails horribly. And I mean, where are my self driving cars? So I think it’s a bit of a mix. But honestly, I suspect that for a lot of us, LLMs will generate an abundance of work when things need to get cleaned up.
    • idonotknowwhy 3y ago
      Try out a local language model for the docs you can't get chatgpt to write. You can run small quantized models on apple silicon if you have it. I've been using a 70B local model for things like this and it works well
    • wizzwizz4 3y ago
      > I say this as someone who work in a place where GPT writes all our documentation > But the actual programming? It’s so horrible at it that it’s mostly used as a joke. Please, for the sake of your future selves, hire someone who can write good documentation. (Or, better still but much harder, develop that skill yourself!) GPT documentation is the new auto-generated Javadoc comments: it looks right to someone who doesn't get what documentation is for, and it might even be a useful summary to consult (if it's kept up-to-date), but it's far less useful than the genuine article. If GPT's better than you at writing documentation (not just faster), and you don't have some kind of language-processing disability, what are you even doing? Half of what goes into documentation is stuff that isn't obvious from the code! Even if you find writing hard, at least write bullet points or something; then, if you must, tack those on top of that (clearly marked) GPT-produced summary of the code.
• wnevets 3y ago
  >Interesting analysis. Suprised HN is so negative towards AI (and that the positive:negative ratio to AI is about the same as it was for Crypto a few years ago!) I would be curious to know many HNers were previously burned by crypto. Fool me once, etc.
• monero-xmr 3y ago
  Crypto has objectively increased my net worth by many zeroes, while AI has a lot of hand-wavey "productivity gains" while the self driving cars I was promised are being banned for homicide...
  • __loam 3y ago
    Congratulations on finding your greater fools.
    • kridsdale3 3y ago
      Exactly. The guy was like "Well, I found a huge nugget of gold in the Klondike while everyone around me was made destitute, therefore abandoning your family to stand in a freezing river for two years is objectively good."
  • ryneandal 3y ago
    Dan Olson is FAR more eloquent than I will ever be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA&t=9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA&t=9s
    • monero-xmr 3y ago
      2.5 hour video to tell me why you are smarter than me, no thanks
  • joegibbs 3y ago
    Check out my next world-changing invention, a Stripe form where a million people can send me twenty bucks each…
• mdgrech23 3y ago
  I feel like the value of crypto going up is backed by solid economics. There is only ever going to be so much of it so losing your money to inflation isn't a risk. People die and don't tell anyone their keys, people forget their keys so we're constantly losing crypto too, w/ currency this is taken into account and print new dollars not w/ crypto. I also think it reflects a general sentiment here in the states and probably China too that we're barreling toward a fucked up never world and crypto is some kind of safe guard against that. In times of uncertainty people turn this gold, this is very much a digital gold.
  • dragonwriter 3y ago
    > I feel like the value of crypto going up is backed by solid economics. There is only ever going to be so much of it so losing your money to inflation isn't a risk. This is solid economics iff you assume that crypto has a utility for which there is no substitute which does not share the same supply constraint feature, and even then its not solid economics for a current investment unless you also assume that that utility is the entire basis for its current valuation. Because even if it has a nonsubstitutable utility, if that's not the basis of its current value, then the "solid economics" is that there is some price it could reach from which further value drop because of supply (of substitutes) will not erode value, but there is no guarantee of what that level is.
    • Closi 3y ago
      Agreed! It's backed by solid economics if you believe a load of things that aren't backed up by solid economics.
  • z3phyr 3y ago
    Gold does not require much infrastructure or utility to keep existing, and it is operable by anyone with hands or less.
  • acdha 3y ago
    > There is only ever going to be so much of it so losing your money to inflation isn't a risk. This comment feels like it’s 2013 and there hasn’t been a decade of people creating thousands of other tokens and forks, or realizing that high volatility in liquidity or exchange rates is more of a problem than the levels of currency inflation we commonly see (the price increases we’ve seen for the last couple years are most of the inflation we’ve seen and that practice would be unaffected). It especially misses the understanding that deflation is much worse for anyone who isn’t already rich. The model that anyone who bought a decade ago deserves to be fabulously rich is … unlikely to be popular with the rest of the world.
• adverbly 3y ago
  > The obvious difference is that AI has abundant use-cases, while Crypto only has tenuous ones. Hacker News comment sentiment is not a reliable measurem of what the average hacker news developer thinks. For one, only people who are very invested about something will post about it. For two, many comments are probably not from developers and instead from fake accounts. It does not seem surprising to me that both of these factors would be in favor of a more positive sentiment for crypto. People that like it seem to really like it and talk about it a lot, and there is a large financial incentive for numerous actors to create fake accounts and comments.
  • deleted 3y ago
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• jl6 3y ago
  I’m not negative towards AI, but I know how hype cycles work - even for genuinely good tech. I’m not looking forward to the coming waves of scammers and grifters and snake oil salesmen in this space.
  • tracerbulletx 3y ago
    Wait you mean you don't like having every single Data adjacent professional on LinkedIn sending you their personal newsletter to let you know how much they know and how incredibly "involved" and expert at "AI" they are?
• mattlondon 3y ago
  There is a lot of negativity about the way it is used I think. Most people will agree that LLMs are pretty neat, but now instead of every startup being "like Uber but for ..." they are "like chatGPT but for ...". Everyone is trying to chuck AI into their products and most of the time there is no need, or the product is just a thin fine-tune over an existing LLM model that adds essentially near-zero value. HN is fairly negative on that sort of thing I think (rightly so IMO)
  • __loam 3y ago
    I think a major problem that is going to become more and more obvious is that AI is actually pretty expensive compared to good old deterministic computing. If there's a way to solve a problem without resorting to sending an inference request to a gpu cluster, we should do it that way. Otherwise you're wasting electricity.
    • willsmith72 3y ago
      For now it is. If it continues to be the best way to solve problems, the cost will drop with time
    • Closi 3y ago
      More expensive to run but cheaper to write. Engineers are expensive, so actually the cost/benefit analysis is a little more complex and different problems will have different solutions.
      • __loam 3y ago
        The proliferation of extremely expensive algorithms isn't necessarily good. A lot of ink has been spilled about how much useless work crypto does. We should consider the impact of AI on the total computational resources of the species carefully.
    • hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
      Let's zeroth-order a single GPT-4 query as using 0.01 kWh (which is probably massive overkill for most queries but we'll roll with it). Let's high ball US residential electricity prices are about 25¢ per kWh. So 25¢ of electricity gets us 100 GPT-4 queries. $25 gets us 10_000. Let's low ball average US developer salaries at a cool $100_000/yr. 50 40 hour weeks in a year makes 2_000 working hours makes $50 per hour. So with our very generous margins all working against us, a US developer would have to be making 20_000 GPT-4 queries an hour, or a little over 5 per second, in order to end up costing in electricity what he is making salary-wise. I have no real point to this story except that electricity is much cheaper than most people have a useful frame of reference for. My mom used to complain about teenage me not running the dishwasher at full load until I worked out that the electricity and water together costed about 50¢ a run and offered her a clean $20 to offset my next 400 only three-quarters full runs. Your bonus programming tip: Many programming languages let you legally use underscores to space large numbers! Try "million = 1_000_000" next time you fire up Python.
• jampekka 3y ago
  I'd guess HN is negative towards hype in general. "AI" is very much full of hype. What happened with previous AI hypes, the term AI was abandoned and the techniques and disciplines were "rebranded". Probably will happen again. When something works and we start to understand how and when it works (and especially when it doesn't) it stops being "AI" and becomes something more boring.
• __loam 3y ago
  It's not obvious to me whether we've actually found a good killer app for generative AI yet, unless you consider chatgpt or sites like midjourney the killer apps. A lot of the new wave of ai startups are just wrappers for gpt. I don't think that adds a ton of value over just asking gpt-4 your query as opposed to subscribing to a billion different ai services. I also question the value of ai art in general when everyone involved in creative labor thinks you're a piece of shit for using it.
  • Closi 3y ago
    I certainly consider ChatGPT to be one killer app. Copilot to be another. Midjourney to be another - or at least diffusion based image editing tools which can be brought into photo and video editing workflows. The killer app here is probably integration of diffusion models into apps like Photoshop (and eventually video). Some real virtual assistant applications seem right around the corner (i.e. a real life J.A.R.V.I.S seems like an inevitability within the year rather than a pipe dream, and to me would be a killer app) And then lots of other killer apps are pretty obvious to imagine with development (e.g. customer service applications like IT helpdesks, Computer game dialogue where you can really influence interactions...)
    • __loam 3y ago
      I guess I'm wondering if LLMs as customer service agents are actually going to be good or if it's just going to be another layer of indirection I need to get through to talk to a human. Is the video game dialog actually going to be good or will it fall flat compared to hand crafted narrative. Do I actually like copilot butting in with suggestions when I'm trying to program something.
      • Closi 3y ago
        LLMs will be good replacements for a portion of customer service queries (eg where’s my order, help me fix this common computer issue etc), and will probably be a bad replacement for other queries (eg complaint handling), but it doesn’t have to fix all for it to transform the sector and be a killer app. Video game dialogue remains to be seen, but I already find ChatGPT based text adventures super fun! So I suspect there will be demand for both handcrafted static stories and AI dynamically-generated stories (ie they can be different things, one doesn’t have to replace the other, just like email didn’t immediately replace the post service). I don’t know if you enjoy copilot, but for me it’s definitely supercharges my productivity.
• JohnFen 3y ago
  > Maybe there is added negativity considering it is a technology where there is clearly a potential threat to jobs on a personal level I'm not worried about this on a personal level, but I'm very worried about the wider risk of too many people being put out of work too quickly. That's my biggest concern with these tools.
• jejeyyy77 3y ago
  HN is made of real people. People with emotions - like FOMO/jealousy/threatened etc. I get the sense that a lot of people feel like they missed the boat be it crypto, or AI, etc.
• tester756 3y ago
  >Suprised HN is so negative towards AI I feel like it is overrated and overhyped It sucks because that's impressive field, but over decade of hype on self-driving cars and now naivety of experts being replaced by chat bot is annoying Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying those things don't work, just not as good as people try to convince us
  • pixl97 3y ago
    The problem with self driving cars is we are.. putting the cart before the horse. That is a lot of the hard issues with driving are preemptive knowledge issues. I see a ball rolling towards the road from the left. I as a human know that, one the ball will likely roll out in front of me, and two, a kid/person may be following that. Now if you see a blowing trash bag, you probably aren't going to take any risky corrective action to avoid it. The problem just a vision knowledge system is a ball and blowing trashbag are just objects that have the same priority. You have no categorization system of the relative meaning and dangers behind each action. But things start getting weird when you couple LLMs with vision knowledge. Really, it's much too slow currently, but in multi-modal systems objects get depth of meaning. That trash bag can be identified, and a low risk can be assigned to it. While the ball can also be identified and a high risk assigned to it. Along with a bunch of other generalization that humans typically do.
• themagician 3y ago
  > Surprised HN is so negative towards AI (and that the positive:negative ratio to AI is about the same as it was for Crypto a few years ago!) I'm not. AI tools will have huge benefits in some industries. But the main use case that people will experience (at least, the use case they recognize) on a daily basis will be scams and frustration. That's why people are negative. Not because the technology is bad or does not have uses, but because the average experience that people will consciously have will be negative. It's already impossible to know what's real and what's not. Customer service is already majority bots. You'll never be able to talk to a human again if you have an issue with something. Blackmail and ransomware scams are going to get dialed up to 11. Everything is going to be automated in the most annoying ways possible. People are going to lose their jobs. Most of the jobs that will be lost are "meaningless," but our society revolves around meaningless jobs because they provide order, income and—as a consequence—dignity. All of that is going out the window. Crypto had a purpose that no one actually cared about. No one cared until people started to see the scam potential and then it took off. AI is going to do the same thing. AI tools will revolutionize medicine, engineering, manufacturing, and logistics. There will be huge benefits for all of humanity. But you won't think about this day-to-day. You'll just be bombarded by more (and better) scams more quickly. I am amazed at what AI tools can do already. Had these tools existed 10 or 15 years ago my entire life would be different. Better? I have no idea. Maybe, maybe not. But even if it would have been better I know enough to know that I would not recognize that.
  • pixl97 3y ago
    The one issue with AI and you not thinking about it day to day, is you'll only see it where it makes mistakes, or it performs criminal actions. It's the IT effect. When IT does it's job right, everyone asks why you pay them, then IT screws up, everyone will ask why you pay them. Things just working is transparent and we don't notice it's even there.
• verdverm 3y ago
  Crypto also had many use-cases and what we are seeing is reality of LLMs. They are not the magic pixy dust you can just sprinkle on and get better outcomes. There are a lot of complications and downsides that come with them.
• gumballindie 3y ago
  I dont think people are negative about ai, but rather about how its built and what it’s used for. At least that’s my case. Ai is a great tool, but training it on people’s property, without permission or recognition is harmful. Equally using it to manipulate people, spread misinformation and generate spam is detrimental to tech overall. Worse, spreading fear and claiming to want using it to replace people - after stealing their work - instead of creating value and new industries is just petty. Therefore i will forever hold the people that promote ai in that manner in contempt to the end of time. To see so many smart people simply fall for and parrot the idiocy that ai will replace workers is sad. Sam altman and his bros knew that FUD works and went that path. The sheeple followed. Instead ai should be promoted as what it is - a job and growth creator and should be built honouring people’s property. It can be done and should be done that way.