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I'm getting more and more convinced that tech people are living in a dangerous bubble re: the generative AI boom. I've been talking to people outside this bubbl

• minimaxir 2y ago
  Unfortunately, the anti-AI discourse is a vocal minority in the grand scheme of things. As long as engagement metrics are up and the marginal benefits outweigh the marginal costs, the AI slop will continue. Boomers using Meta AI to create nonsensical images on Facebook and WhatsApp aren't complaining about it on social media.
  • ks2048 2y ago
    I'm not sure its Boomers who create these images. It's Boomers who reply "Amen" to a pictures of six-fingered Jesus wrapped in an American flag. (Actually I'm not quite sure - maybe it's just mostly bots replying to other bots...?)
    • Maken 2y ago
      It's all bots. Humans are hidden in the margins of modern internet.
  • rchaud 2y ago
    Boomers aren't making them. They are the captive audience in Facebook groups. I predict that around October, the content on those pages will switch to political stuff (at least for American audiences).
• AlexandrB 2y ago
  There's already plenty of resentment aimed at "big tech". Gen AI will probably accelerate it.
  • surfingdino 2y ago
    Gen AI is the worst thing that happened to AI research. It is a bullshit generation machine that feeds resentment towards all technologies that make up the broad field of AI.
    • wkat4242 2y ago
      The same thing with meta verse. That hype is the worst thing that happened to VR. Now everyone treats it like a good for nothing flop. While it is good for some things. Just not for everything those retarded investors wanted it to be.
  • o11c 2y ago
    I choose to interpret "Gen AI" along the lines of "Gen X", "Millennial", and "Gen Z".
• probably_wrong 2y ago
  Here's my two hot takes on that topic. First, you are on HN, a website full of entrepreneurs betting their savings on AI companies. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" [1]. Remember that the CEO of OpenAI used to be the president of HN. Second, remember NFTs? Bitcoin? Perhaps even MongoDB [2]? Tech lives and dies on hype and AI is the newest one. This too shall pass. [1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
  • wkat4242 2y ago
    The President of YC's board, allegedly. Which he never was because that position didn't actually exist until after he left. There's been numerous articles about that recently. Not to undermine your point, the techbroism is strong here but facts are facts
  • rchaud 2y ago
    Bitcoin and crypto come with a get-rich-quick stench that turns off most people. AI hype is much more dangerous because it mixes real use cases, to push enthusiastic viewpoints for LLM slop.
  • luzojeda 2y ago
    Did NFTs and Bitcoin indirectly cause a bullish rally such as the one we are seeing on Nvidia? Genuine question here. Because that's what scares me the most, what will happen with Nvidia.
    • rsynnott 2y ago
      I’d argue IBM to some extent; around 2016 the markets did get somewhat excited about its blockchain efforts (all but forgotten today). Nothing on the scale of the current thing, mind you. > Because that's what scares me the most, what will happen with Nvidia. What’s your concern? Ultimately if the bubble bursts, its stock price will fall, presumably. But, well, stock prices fall, life goes on.
  • 2y ago
• ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  > I'm getting more and more convinced that tech people are living in a dangerous bubble You don't need the rest of this sentence. They are. Almost everyone I talk to in the Valley of Silicon speaks of broad trends in... I mean, anything really, in how people use technology, in what people need cars for, in what people eat, in what goods typically cost, genuinely any topic of sufficient breadth that escapes the technology itself, as though they have not been on planet earth since roughly 2009. It is astonishing how well insulated from common concerns tech workers are, which is probably how we got shit like Juicero, an incredibly overbuilt, over-spec, ludicrously designed wifi-connected machine to squeeze a fucking bag. And it explains a bunch of their other incredibly stupid ideas, like e-scooters. This is why, I am sorry, but I simply do not put a lot of stock (literally, and metaphorically) into the opinions of SV's elites. That's like, a bubble in a damn bubble. That's a bubbled subset of people who haven't had a normal experience of being human for who knows how long, inside a bubble of people who largely do not share the same reality as me. Bringing it back to what I was replying to: you are absolutely right about the common folk's experience with AI. It's an annoying thing being shoved into tons of products they use, that seemingly no one asked for, that doesn't work. And it's a massive, 400 foot tall neon sign, telling them that big tech doesn't give a fuck about them, what they want, or anything else besides sign up for the subscription dumbass.
  • holtkam2 2y ago
    Couldn’t one make the argument that EVERYONE is in a bubble of sorts? I (one of the SV tech workers you mention) was recently in rural Georgia for a cousin’s wedding, where I was shocked to learn that many people in the area considered the previous presidential election to have been stolen. I wanted to scream “you need to get out of your bubble!”
    • myaccountonhn 2y ago
      You can, the issue is more that SV has way too little understanding of the world for the influence it has.
      • ToucanLoucan 2y ago
• password54321 2y ago
  Perplexity is one of the only tools that I think takes great advantage of LLMs strengths (pattern matching, interpolation) while also making up for its weaknesses (hallucinations, lack of ability for novel contribution/thought) by using it for summarisation with search.
  • wkat4242 2y ago
    It's not even that special imo. Openwebui does the same locally when you enable search engine integration. It's not really rocket science
    • deleted 2y ago
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• BeFlatXIII 2y ago
  > And it's starting to alarm me that nobody in tech appears to care about this and is just going "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead". That kind of arrogant dismissal of popular mood and forcing unwanted change on people is how resentment and revolution happen. Tell that to the schoolchildren who excitedly use AI to do all the busywork for them.
  • AlexandrB 2y ago
    Isn't this going to be crippling once they're in a situation where the actually need some of the skills they skipped learning?
    • lmm 2y ago
      It might, in a world where school busywork had anything to do with learning useful skills.
  • Yodel0914 2y ago
    Except that schools are making kids do more and more on paper, in class, in order to combat AI usage.
    • BeFlatXIII 2y ago
      There was a discussion on /r/professors about this exact issue. The big downside they identified with blue exam books is that 90 minutes or 2 hours or whatever with no spell checker is insufficient time for most students to have developed appropriately deep insights for college-level work.
• wkat4242 2y ago
  I think AI has a place in this world. As does virtual reality, the previous hype. The problem with these hypes is, the overstressed business types that think it is the key to the future for everything. Almost nothing is the next internet. And in a year or so when they don't see their 2000% payoff, they will consider it a flop, which will also harm the genuine efforts that were made and usecases where the tech does add value. It's the overexpectations that hurt it. The problem starts happening when you shoehorn it into a bunch of shit for the sake of it, where it adds no value and often even degrades it. Like what everyone is now doing with AI. Especially Microsoft. It's great for some stuff, like making summaries. It's not GenAI and if we try to use it as such (as Nadella is doing) the bubble will burst sooner rather than later and that's bad for the tech community as a whole. I find the journey super interesting however from a personal tech interest point of view and I love playing with it locally. But I'm not blind to its glaring limitations and I don't care whether it makes money or not, I'm just into it for the tech. It's the money boys that keep blowing good stuff up.
  • rchaud 2y ago
    VR doesn't have anywhere near the same level of fossil fuel emissions as AI though.
    • AlexandrB 2y ago
      Crypto certainly does.
      • rchaud 2y ago
        Every company and their mothers aren't piling into it hoping to strike gold though.
        • rsynnott 2y ago
          They kind of were at one point. It’s sort of been memory-holed now, but some years back, everyone was trying to hawk a private blockchain, or their own cryptocurrency, or whatever. Even very big companies.
• rchaud 2y ago
  The AI power brokers are all getting rich by hyping up the tech to the high heavens, while pooh-pooing AI ethics and safety concerns. Governments are following in lock step so as not to appear "anti-innovation". I don't see revolution on the cards. Maybe a giant market correction once the hype wears off and pension funds figure out that throwing more H100 GPUs into the mix isn't going to make AGI happen any faster, and that there there's no real road to profitability for startups making shitty genAI chatbots, images and music.
• medhir 2y ago
  Think it’s worth calling out that many people in tech have significant reservations about the reckless push of generative AI into just about every product — the issue is the executive class that insists on chasing hype and potential short-term stock growth over everything else.
  • deleted 2y ago
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• joe_the_user 2y ago
  I actually know two ordinary people who pay to use ChatGPT. One uses it to write sex education policy statement and the other uses it for D&D narrative descriptions. But I understand lots of people are very annoyed by it and with things like this, reasonably so. The problem that revolution only comes from desperation, not annoyance. If health care, rents, the experience of flying and traffic, global warming and so-forth hasn't produced a revolution, generative AI won't. And this situation is pretty much what has brought-about the present "death by a thousand paper-cuts" world.
  • rsynnott 2y ago
    _Sex education policy statements_? I mean, how many can one possibly need to write? What does the LLM bring to it?
    • lmm 2y ago
      That's probably the reason for using an LLM - you need to write dozens (one for each nominal entity, and a new one each time they nominally update their objectives/etc.) that are essentially indistinguishable, but directly copy/pasting would be noticed.
• luzojeda 2y ago
  Same. Anecdata I know yadda yadda. But I don't know one single person that is hyped about _consuming_ art or any content generated by AI. Only people producing content with generative AI and expecting a financial benefit are the excited ones. And I might guess they are not that keen into consuming AI generated content as well. It's all about who is the sucker that pays for all the slop.
• cageface 2y ago
  I'd go further and that lately, for the average person, tech is causing at least as many problems as it solves. The public internet is a chaotic mess of scams and ripoffs. Social media is a cesspool that many people still feel obligated to participate in. Dating apps are an exercise in masochism, etc etc. What actual problems are we solving for these people?
• unraveller 2y ago
  Highway to the danger boom, baby. You see much more arrogant posts referring to their superior human skills over AI. The hubris of forcing all social interactions to take place in big tech walled gardens that want to replace you with A.I. is titillating.
• deleted 2y ago
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