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"Years of gloom"? For my entire career in tech, anything that isn't the most extreme of optimistic view points has been relegated to unnecessary and destructiv

"Years of gloom"? For my entire career in tech, anything that isn't the most extreme of optimistic view points has been relegated to unnecessary and destructive pessimism. Tech can't stand "bad thoughts". We had a very necessary correction in this industry but people couldn't handle it and just completely lost their minds on AI. I say this as someone who works in AI very close to the metal (i.e. not just calling an API all day). While these tools are very impressive, when I talk to people outside of my area it's like they've all taken obscene quantities of some new stimulant and can't even connect with reality anymore. Even the AI "doomers" are, by my view, extreme optimistic because they don't see, or maybe just don't want to see, how much all of the public discourse on this subject is largely smoke and mirrors to drive yet another tech bubble. Personally I think this is just mass hysteria created by the increasing awareness of the fundamentally unsustainable nature of industrial society. Reading this article is like listening to some hallucinating maniac on the streets of SF scream at you about things that really aren't there.

bluefirebrand 3y ago
The view from outside of tech is very much "We went from having no AI to having ChatGPT overnight! Imagine how soon the future will be here, we could have a breakthrough for AI at breakfast tomorrow and talking companion robots the day after that!" And the doomers just add on "and the week after that we'll all be dead!" I'm personally not very impressed by the AI tools I've used. Sure they're a neat toy. They do seem to keep getting better. Maybe they'll be good enough one day for me to actually want to use them and feel it's a benefit.
- orand 3y ago
  > I'm personally not very impressed by the AI tools I've used. Sure they're a neat toy. They do seem to keep getting better. Maybe they'll be good enough one day for me to actually want to use them and feel it's a benefit. Unless you explain this statement, most people here are likely to dismiss everything you have to say on the topic of AI.
  - spencerflem 3y ago
    fwiw, I agree with them. It has its use cases, but 'hallucinations' or whatever you want to call them is a huge dealbreaker for everything I'd want to use ai for
    - opportune 3y ago
      Agreed but in my opinion the problem is more fundamental than just hallucinations, it involves plain inaccuracy and inability to reason. Try asking chatgpt or Gemini about something complex that you know all about. You’ll likely notice some inaccuracies, or thinking one related subject is more important than something else. That’s not even scratching the surface of the weird things they do in the name of “safety” like refusing to do work, paying lip service to heterodox opinions, or interjecting hidden race/gender prompts to submodels. It’s good at generalist information retrieval to a certain degree. But it’s basically like an overconfident college sophomore majoring in all subjects. Progressing past that point requires a completely different underlying approach to AI because you can’t just model text anymore to reason about new and unknown subjects. It’s not something we can tweak and iterate into in the near term. This same story has recurred after every single ML advance from DL, to CNN + RNN/LSTM, to transformers.
      - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
        > Agreed but in my opinion the problem is more fundamental than just hallucinations, it involves plain inaccuracy and inability to reason. > Try asking chatgpt or Gemini about something complex that you know all about. You’ll likely notice some inaccuracies, or thinking one related subject is more important than something else. That’s not even scratching the surface of the weird things they do in the name of “safety” like refusing to do work, paying lip service to heterodox opinions, or interjecting hidden race/gender prompts to submodels. For sure. On the other hand, I recently started to convert these AI hallucinations into a feature for me: it is like asking a person who is somewhat smart, but high on some hallucinogenic drug, on their opinion on a topic of your interest. Depending on the topic and your own intellectual openness, the result can be ... interesting and inspiring.
      - 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hinkley 3y ago
  Journalists love their overnight success stories. And it's most apparent when they are talking about some musician who worked their ass off for decades before being discovered. As if they sprung into existence as 30 year-olds, worked hard for a couple years, then became millionaires.
- lex-lightning 3y ago
  Count me unimpressed too Bing Copilot can’t even answer simple questions about businesses in a particular city without lying. When confronted, it will apologize and then repeat the same text verbatim. Zero reasoning happening.
- dpkirchner 3y ago
  > The view from outside of tech is very much "We went from having no AI to having ChatGPT overnight!" In their defense, for most people that is what happened. Sure, they've been using "AI" tools of varying degree for a long time (spellcheck, language translation), but now they have totally free access to something that behaves sorta like the AIs they've seen on the popular Star Trek shows -- where, incidentally, the AIs were also imperfect.
slongfield 3y ago
A decent amount of AI doomerism I've seen is classic criti-hype (as coined in [1], afaik)--it's promotion of the technology thinly disguised as critique. Fear mongering about AIs taking artists' or writers' job is yet another way of boasting about their capabilities. [1] https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5 https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-cr...
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  "My product is so good the world should be afraid of it" often comes from the mouths of the AI CEOs.
  - Cheer2171 3y ago
    Same with CEOs who say "Our tech is too powerful, we want to be regulated" while knowing that Congress can barely function to pass a budget.
hinkley 3y ago
I was really starting to feel like Abe Simpson at one point and then I read From Good to Great. The central thesis of that book is that you might work at a good company that avoids confronting 'brutal facts' but you will never find a Great company that does. You have to slay bad things to make a great company, and you have to identify them before they're chewing on something vital. Which means going out of your way to speculate about whether things are actually bad or just annoying.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dontparticipate 3y ago
> Tech can't stand "bad thoughts". > it's like they've all taken obscene quantities of some new stimulant and can't even connect with reality anymore It's hallucinogens. That's the drug of choice in tech. What that leads to, other than the obvious hallucinations, is an obsession with set and setting. Bad vibes will literally give you a bad trip and ruin your high. I've seen this with wealthy shroom heads over and over again. Their entire life becomes centered around making sure the set and setting are always perfect, which means any little bit of someone trying to talk some sense in to them, they get ignored. Once you start to think through the kinds of behaviors that shroom addicts would start to engage in, especially if they had the wealth and resources to facilitate their addiction, you'll see it everywhere. It's not the typical "ruin your life" kind of addiction, but it's having an impact on what kind of ideas are allowed among the SV venture types.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > It's hallucinogens. That's the drug of choice in tech To the degree Silicon Valley has a drug right now, it’s ketamine. (Before that, it was weed.)
  - kasey_junk 3y ago
    HGH and low dosage testosterone regimes seem popular as well.
    - clusterhacks 3y ago
      Seriously? That just seems ridiculous. Is this an aging thing, where folks are worried about low testosterone or something?
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I couldn't speak for silicon valley, but the personality changes you're describing as being associated with shrooms... those are not typical. I have a few friends in psychedelic assisted therapy and the effects I've noticed in them are the same effects I've noticed with regular psychedelic use outside of therapy: you don't identify the bad vibes and shy away from them, you end up making decisions that are uncomfortable in the sort term to improve things in the long term. Myself, I started going to college. Maybe it works differently among wealthy people. If you're in a cult of positivity, adding psychedelics to the mix is more likely to make you acutely away of the inauthenticity of the situation.
haswell 3y ago
> when I talk to people outside of my area it's like they've all taken obscene quantities of some new stimulant and can't even connect with reality anymore Can you share some examples of what you mean by this? I've encountered people who are excited about "AI", for sure, but who are excited because a problem that has plagued them for years suddenly became solvable. Excited because the way they used to learn about things just suddenly changed. Excited because there's a better way to do research than to scour the crappy results provided by the big search engines. There is absolutely an element of hype that far outstrips the reality, and after the single-function apps like "Summarize this paper for me" are monetized to death, we'll enter the trough of disillusionment, and some reality will set in. But there are absolutely transformative use cases unlocked by the latest generation of tools that are very real, exciting, and that enable a new generation of users to interact with computers in a way that was previously the stuff of science fiction. I've spent much of my career working on boring enterprise tech, building software that's not flashy, but gets work done. The problem space is extremely large, and the solution space is extremely inadequate. It's this vast space of unsolved business problems that make some of this hype more real, IMO. LLMs in particular will be transformative for many of the problems the big enterprise platforms solve, and have the potential to solve some of the messiest parts of operating in that space. I don't know that I agree with the "Years of gloom" characterization, and I agree that there are other underlying currents re: sustainability, but I can't help but feel this comment endorses a different problematic extreme. In the middle of the hysteria are real uses cases that will change how we interface with computers, and industries will be transformed/new categories created. Anecdotally, GPT4 has completely changed how I approach research and troubleshooting and has been saving me many hours on a regular basis. Weird error message in a linux log file? I'll provide some context and paste the error, and a few minutes later the issue is solved based on a decently good answer. Picking up a new language? I'll ask for example code to solve a very specific use case, and then keep returning when I run into errors. The rate of learning enabled this way is pretty remarkable. If the only thing that we get out of this craze are some extremely high quality LLMs with an accurate understanding of most human knowledge, that alone is an incredible jump forward.
FredPret 3y ago
> the fundamentally unsustainable nature of industrial society Nothing that goes against entropy is fundamentally sustainable. That doesn’t mean we can’t keep it going for time that is essentially infinite on human scales (unsustainable life has been kicking around on Earth for 3.7 billion years now). Defeatism is even more dangerous than hallucinating optimism.
- valar_m 3y ago
  Do you mind explaining what your comment means in layman's terms?
  - FredPret 3y ago
    Every process of life - breathing, moving, learning - takes energy. This is as true for the ants building their colonies as it is for us building our cities. Due to thermodynamics, this is a one-way process. In our case, it’s all fueled by the sun, which will keep burning for another few billion years. But even that counts being not not truly sustainable, since one day it must end. The whole universe is destined to die a cold heat death where nothing at all happens anymore. But that is a long time away and until then, we can build a beautiful civilization; we can learn and grow; and we can do so with nuclear & solar power. People saying that we’re all as good as dead are technically correct, but in a very unhelpful way.
bsdpufferfish 3y ago
Exactly. The ai car ethics news was always marketing to distract from the fact that it doesn’t work.
atleastoptimal 3y ago
As someone who works "close to the metal" in AI, do you really believe AI is just another "bubble" the way crypto was? I'm having a tough time finding the two even similar. It's clear how much potential it has to change things far more than even the most optimistic views of what crypto bros were touting as the future a few years ago.

bluefirebrand 3y ago

The view from outside of tech is very much "We went from having no AI to having ChatGPT overnight! Imagine how soon the future will be here, we could have a breakthrough for AI at breakfast tomorrow and talking companion robots the day after that!" And the doomers just add on "and the week after that we'll all be dead!" I'm personally not very impressed by the AI tools I've used. Sure they're a neat toy. They do seem to keep getting better. Maybe they'll be good enough one day for me to actually want to use them and feel it's a benefit.

orand 3y ago
> I'm personally not very impressed by the AI tools I've used. Sure they're a neat toy. They do seem to keep getting better. Maybe they'll be good enough one day for me to actually want to use them and feel it's a benefit. Unless you explain this statement, most people here are likely to dismiss everything you have to say on the topic of AI.
- spencerflem 3y ago
  fwiw, I agree with them. It has its use cases, but 'hallucinations' or whatever you want to call them is a huge dealbreaker for everything I'd want to use ai for
  - opportune 3y ago
    Agreed but in my opinion the problem is more fundamental than just hallucinations, it involves plain inaccuracy and inability to reason. Try asking chatgpt or Gemini about something complex that you know all about. You’ll likely notice some inaccuracies, or thinking one related subject is more important than something else. That’s not even scratching the surface of the weird things they do in the name of “safety” like refusing to do work, paying lip service to heterodox opinions, or interjecting hidden race/gender prompts to submodels. It’s good at generalist information retrieval to a certain degree. But it’s basically like an overconfident college sophomore majoring in all subjects. Progressing past that point requires a completely different underlying approach to AI because you can’t just model text anymore to reason about new and unknown subjects. It’s not something we can tweak and iterate into in the near term. This same story has recurred after every single ML advance from DL, to CNN + RNN/LSTM, to transformers.
    - aleph_minus_one 3y ago
      > Agreed but in my opinion the problem is more fundamental than just hallucinations, it involves plain inaccuracy and inability to reason. > Try asking chatgpt or Gemini about something complex that you know all about. You’ll likely notice some inaccuracies, or thinking one related subject is more important than something else. That’s not even scratching the surface of the weird things they do in the name of “safety” like refusing to do work, paying lip service to heterodox opinions, or interjecting hidden race/gender prompts to submodels. For sure. On the other hand, I recently started to convert these AI hallucinations into a feature for me: it is like asking a person who is somewhat smart, but high on some hallucinogenic drug, on their opinion on a topic of your interest. Depending on the topic and your own intellectual openness, the result can be ... interesting and inspiring.
    - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hinkley 3y ago
Journalists love their overnight success stories. And it's most apparent when they are talking about some musician who worked their ass off for decades before being discovered. As if they sprung into existence as 30 year-olds, worked hard for a couple years, then became millionaires.
lex-lightning 3y ago
Count me unimpressed too Bing Copilot can’t even answer simple questions about businesses in a particular city without lying. When confronted, it will apologize and then repeat the same text verbatim. Zero reasoning happening.
dpkirchner 3y ago
> The view from outside of tech is very much "We went from having no AI to having ChatGPT overnight!" In their defense, for most people that is what happened. Sure, they've been using "AI" tools of varying degree for a long time (spellcheck, language translation), but now they have totally free access to something that behaves sorta like the AIs they've seen on the popular Star Trek shows -- where, incidentally, the AIs were also imperfect.

slongfield 3y ago

A decent amount of AI doomerism I've seen is classic criti-hype (as coined in [1], afaik)--it's promotion of the technology thinly disguised as critique. Fear mongering about AIs taking artists' or writers' job is yet another way of boasting about their capabilities. [1] https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5 https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-cr...

TaylorAlexander 3y ago
"My product is so good the world should be afraid of it" often comes from the mouths of the AI CEOs.
- Cheer2171 3y ago
  Same with CEOs who say "Our tech is too powerful, we want to be regulated" while knowing that Congress can barely function to pass a budget.

hinkley 3y ago

I was really starting to feel like Abe Simpson at one point and then I read From Good to Great. The central thesis of that book is that you might work at a good company that avoids confronting 'brutal facts' but you will never find a Great company that does. You have to slay bad things to make a great company, and you have to identify them before they're chewing on something vital. Which means going out of your way to speculate about whether things are actually bad or just annoying.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dontparticipate 3y ago

> Tech can't stand "bad thoughts". > it's like they've all taken obscene quantities of some new stimulant and can't even connect with reality anymore It's hallucinogens. That's the drug of choice in tech. What that leads to, other than the obvious hallucinations, is an obsession with set and setting. Bad vibes will literally give you a bad trip and ruin your high. I've seen this with wealthy shroom heads over and over again. Their entire life becomes centered around making sure the set and setting are always perfect, which means any little bit of someone trying to talk some sense in to them, they get ignored. Once you start to think through the kinds of behaviors that shroom addicts would start to engage in, especially if they had the wealth and resources to facilitate their addiction, you'll see it everywhere. It's not the typical "ruin your life" kind of addiction, but it's having an impact on what kind of ideas are allowed among the SV venture types.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> It's hallucinogens. That's the drug of choice in tech To the degree Silicon Valley has a drug right now, it’s ketamine. (Before that, it was weed.)
- kasey_junk 3y ago
  HGH and low dosage testosterone regimes seem popular as well.
  - clusterhacks 3y ago
    Seriously? That just seems ridiculous. Is this an aging thing, where folks are worried about low testosterone or something?
__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
I couldn't speak for silicon valley, but the personality changes you're describing as being associated with shrooms... those are not typical. I have a few friends in psychedelic assisted therapy and the effects I've noticed in them are the same effects I've noticed with regular psychedelic use outside of therapy: you don't identify the bad vibes and shy away from them, you end up making decisions that are uncomfortable in the sort term to improve things in the long term. Myself, I started going to college. Maybe it works differently among wealthy people. If you're in a cult of positivity, adding psychedelics to the mix is more likely to make you acutely away of the inauthenticity of the situation.

haswell 3y ago

> when I talk to people outside of my area it's like they've all taken obscene quantities of some new stimulant and can't even connect with reality anymore Can you share some examples of what you mean by this? I've encountered people who are excited about "AI", for sure, but who are excited because a problem that has plagued them for years suddenly became solvable. Excited because the way they used to learn about things just suddenly changed. Excited because there's a better way to do research than to scour the crappy results provided by the big search engines. There is absolutely an element of hype that far outstrips the reality, and after the single-function apps like "Summarize this paper for me" are monetized to death, we'll enter the trough of disillusionment, and some reality will set in. But there are absolutely transformative use cases unlocked by the latest generation of tools that are very real, exciting, and that enable a new generation of users to interact with computers in a way that was previously the stuff of science fiction. I've spent much of my career working on boring enterprise tech, building software that's not flashy, but gets work done. The problem space is extremely large, and the solution space is extremely inadequate. It's this vast space of unsolved business problems that make some of this hype more real, IMO. LLMs in particular will be transformative for many of the problems the big enterprise platforms solve, and have the potential to solve some of the messiest parts of operating in that space. I don't know that I agree with the "Years of gloom" characterization, and I agree that there are other underlying currents re: sustainability, but I can't help but feel this comment endorses a different problematic extreme. In the middle of the hysteria are real uses cases that will change how we interface with computers, and industries will be transformed/new categories created. Anecdotally, GPT4 has completely changed how I approach research and troubleshooting and has been saving me many hours on a regular basis. Weird error message in a linux log file? I'll provide some context and paste the error, and a few minutes later the issue is solved based on a decently good answer. Picking up a new language? I'll ask for example code to solve a very specific use case, and then keep returning when I run into errors. The rate of learning enabled this way is pretty remarkable. If the only thing that we get out of this craze are some extremely high quality LLMs with an accurate understanding of most human knowledge, that alone is an incredible jump forward.

FredPret 3y ago

> the fundamentally unsustainable nature of industrial society Nothing that goes against entropy is fundamentally sustainable. That doesn’t mean we can’t keep it going for time that is essentially infinite on human scales (unsustainable life has been kicking around on Earth for 3.7 billion years now). Defeatism is even more dangerous than hallucinating optimism.

valar_m 3y ago
Do you mind explaining what your comment means in layman's terms?
- FredPret 3y ago
  Every process of life - breathing, moving, learning - takes energy. This is as true for the ants building their colonies as it is for us building our cities. Due to thermodynamics, this is a one-way process. In our case, it’s all fueled by the sun, which will keep burning for another few billion years. But even that counts being not not truly sustainable, since one day it must end. The whole universe is destined to die a cold heat death where nothing at all happens anymore. But that is a long time away and until then, we can build a beautiful civilization; we can learn and grow; and we can do so with nuclear & solar power. People saying that we’re all as good as dead are technically correct, but in a very unhelpful way.

bsdpufferfish 3y ago

Exactly. The ai car ethics news was always marketing to distract from the fact that it doesn’t work.

atleastoptimal 3y ago

As someone who works "close to the metal" in AI, do you really believe AI is just another "bubble" the way crypto was? I'm having a tough time finding the two even similar. It's clear how much potential it has to change things far more than even the most optimistic views of what crypto bros were touting as the future a few years ago.