7 ms·

It's one of the stupidest concepts on the face of the earth and tons of people ascribe to it unknowingly: hype = bad. AI is one of the most revolutionary thing

It's one of the stupidest concepts on the face of the earth and tons of people ascribe to it unknowingly: hype = bad. AI is one of the most revolutionary things to ever happen in the last couple of years. But with enough hype tons of people now think it's complete garbage. I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI, only to be bored of it in two years when a rudimentary version of it is finally realized. What especially pisses me off is the know it all tone, like they knew all along it's garbage and that they're above it all. These people are tools with no opinions other then hype = bad and logic = nonexistent.

jackphilson 2y ago
Don't be mad about their opinions, be grateful for the arbitrage opportunity
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago
  I like this approach, the challenge us that without a good grasp of finance it is really hard to leverage these opportunities
latexr 2y ago
> I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI It was never this level of AI. The stories we wrote and fantasised were about AI you could blindly rely on, trust, and reason about. No one ever fantasised about AI which couldn’t accurately count the number of letters in a common word or that would give you provably wrong information in an assertive authoritative tone. No one longed for a level of AI where you have to double check everything.
- mjr00 2y ago
  > No one longed for a level of AI where you have to double check everything. This has basically been why it's a non-starter in a lot of (most?) business applications. If your dishwasher failed to clean anything 20% of the time, would you rely on it? No, you'd just wash the dishes by hand, because you'd at least have a consistent result. That's been the result of AI experimentation I've seen: it works ~80% of the time, which sounds great... except there's surprisingly few tasks where a 20% fail rate is acceptable. Even "prompt engineering" your way to a 5% failure/inaccuracy rate is unacceptable for a fully automated solution. So now we're moving to workflows where AI generates stuff and a human double checks. Or the AI parses human text into a well-defined gRPC method with known behavior. Which can definitely be helpful, but is a far cry from the fantasized AI in sci-fi literature.
  - Nition 2y ago
    One type of question that a 20%-failure-rate AI can still be very useful for is ones that are hard to answer but easy to verify. For example say you have a complex medical problem. It can be difficult to do a direct Internet search that covers the history and symptoms. If you ask AI though, it'll be able to give you some ideas for specific things to search. They might be wrong answers, but now you can easily search specific conditions and check them. Sort of P vs. NP for questions.
    - skydhash 2y ago
      > For example say you have a complex medical problem. Or you go to a doctor instead of imagining answers.
      - Nition 2y ago
        Medical was just one example, replace with anything you like. As another example, you can give the AI a photo of something to have it name what that thing is. Then you can check the thing by its name on Google to see if it matches. Much easier than describing the thing (plant, tool, etc) to Google.
        skydhash 2y ago
        Having the wrong information can be more detrimental than having no information at all. In the former case, confident actions will be take. In the latter case, the person will be tentative wich can reduce the area of effect of bad decisions. Imagine the lambda person confronted with this: sudo rm -rf / What is the better situation, having no understanding of what it does or believing that another action will take place?
        Nition 2y ago
        The process I'm suggesting is: 1. You have a complex or vague question that you can't search easily via Google etc 2. You ask the AI and it converts that to concrete searchable suggestions (in this case "sudo rm -rf /") 3. You search "sudo rm -rf /" to check the answer. Step 3 is designed to (hopefully) catch this kind of problem.
- simonw 2y ago
  "The stories we wrote and fantasised were about AI you could blindly rely on, trust, and reason about." Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey - some of the earliest mainstream AI science fiction (1968, before even the Apollo moon landing!) was very much about an AI you couldn't trust.
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    that's a different kind of distrust, though, that was an AI that was capable of malice. In that case, "trust" had to do with loyalty. The GP means "trust" in the sense of consistency. I trust that my steering wheel doesn't fly off, because it is well-made. I trust that you won't drive into traffic while I'm in the passenger seat, because I don't think you will be malicious towards us. These are not the same.
    - the_af 2y ago
      Going on a tangent here: not sure 2001's HAL was a case of outright malice. It was probably a malfunction (he incorrectly predict a failure) and then conflicting mission parameters that placed higher value on the mission than the crew (the crew discussed shutting down HAL because it seemed unreliable, and he reasoned it would jeopardize the mission and the right course of action was killing the crew). HAL was capable of deceit in order to ensure his own survival, that much is true. In the followup 2010, when HAL's mission parameters are clarified and de-conflicted, he doesn't attempt to harm the crew anymore. I... actually can see the 2001's scenario happening with ChatGPT if it was connected to ship peripherals and told mission > crew and that this principle overrides all else. In modern terms it was about both unreliability (hallucinations?) and a badly specified prompt!
      - Lerc 2y ago
        I don't think there was any malfunction. The conflicting parameters implicitly contained permission to lie to the crew. The directive to take the crew to Saturpiter but also to not let them learn anything of the new mission directive meant deceiving. It's possible HAL's initial solution was to impose a communication blackout by simulating failures, then the crew reactions to the deception necciatsted their deaths to preserve the primary mission. Less a poor prompt and more two incompatible prompts both labeled top priority. Any conclusion can be logicLally derived from a contradiction. Total loyalty cannot serve two masters. Clarke felt quite guilty about the degree of distrust of computers that HAL generated.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  >It was never this level of AI. You're completely out of it. We couldn't even get AI to hold a freaking conversation. It was so bad we came up with this thing called the turing test and that was the benchmark. Now people like you are all, like "well it's obvious the turing test was garbage". No. It's not obvious. It's the hype got to your head. If we found a way to travel at light speed for 3 dollars the hype would be insane and in about a year we get people like you writing blog posts about how light speed travel is the dumbest thing ever. Oh man too much hype. You think LLMs are stupid? Sometimes we all just need to look in the mirror and realize that humans have their own brand of stupidity.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    LLMs are glorified, overhyped autocomplete systems that fail, but in different, nondeterministic ways than existing autocomplete systems fail. They are neat, but unreliable toys, not “more profound than fire or electricity” as has been breathless claimed.
    - cheevly 2y ago
      You just literally described humans; and the meta lack of awareness reinforces itself. You cyclicly devalue your own point.
      - nativeit 2y ago
        Not for nothing, humans also enjoy the worth and dignity inherent with being alive and intelligent…not to mention significantly less error prone (see: hallucination rates in literally any current model), while being exponentially more efficient to produce and run. I can make that last assertion pretty confidently, because while I’ve never built a data center so resource intensive it required its own dedicated power generation plant, I have put in the work to produce dozens of new people (those projects all failed, but only because we stubbornly refuse to take the wrappers off the tooling), and the resource requirements there only involved some cocktails and maybe a bag of Doritos. Anyhow, I reckon humans are still, on-balance, the better non-deterministically imperfect vessels of logic, creation, and purpose.
- HDThoreaun 2y ago
  > It was never this level of AI. People have been dreaming of an AI that can pass the turing test for close to a century. We have accomplished that. I get moving the goalposts since the turing test leaves a lot to be desired, but pretending you didnt is crazy. We have absolutely accomplished the stuff of dreams with AI
asdf12341 2y ago
Yeah well this hype comes with a lot of financial investment, which means I get affected when the market crash. If people makes cool thing on their own money ( or just not consume as much of our total capital ), and it turns out not as affective as they would like, I would be nice to them.
- gibbitz 2y ago
  Yeah the effectiveness of the hype on investment is more important than the effectiveness of the technology. AI isn't the product, the promise of the stock going up is. Buy while you can, the Emperor's New Clothes are getting threadbare.
calmbell 2y ago
Please find me someone with any background in technology who thinks AI is complete garbage (zero value or close to it). The author doesn't think so, they assert that "perhaps 10% of the AI hype is based upon useful facts" and "AI functions greatly as a "search engine" replacement". There is a big difference between thinking something is garbage and thinking something is a massive bubble (in the case of AI, this could be the technology is worth hundreds of billions rather than trillions).
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  Nobody is talking about a financial bubble. That's orthoganol. Something can be worth zero and still be fucking amazing. The blog post is talking about the hype in general and about AI in general. It is not just referring to the financial opportunity. You can use chatGPT for free. Does that mean it's total shit because openAI allowed you to use it for free? No. It's still freaking revolutionary.
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    > Something can be worth zero and still be fucking amazing. Gull-wing doors on cars. Both awesome and flawed.
    - ninetyninenine 2y ago
      I was thinking more like oxygen. Amazing because without it you’re dead meat. But nobody gives a shit about it because it’s everywhere and free. That’s what LLMs are. They are everywhere and too readily accessible so people end up just complaining about too much hype.
eschaton 2y ago
Sounds like you bought the hype about LLMs without any understanding anything about LLMs and are now upset that the hype train is crashing because it was based on promises that not only wouldn’t but couldn’t be kept.
- spiderice 2y ago
  > hype train is crashing According to who? Perhaps the people who aren't paying attention. People who use AI frequently and see the rate of progress are still quite hyped.
  - pesus 2y ago
    It makes sense that people who don't believe the (current wave of generative) AI hype aren't using it and those who do are.
    - kukkeliskuu 2y ago
      It is more probable that people who have used it more have a more realistic and balanced view of their capabilities, based on the experience. Unless their livelihood depends on not having a relalistic view of the capabilities.

jackphilson 2y ago

Don't be mad about their opinions, be grateful for the arbitrage opportunity

ClumsyPilot 2y ago
I like this approach, the challenge us that without a good grasp of finance it is really hard to leverage these opportunities

latexr 2y ago

> I'm literally shocked how we can spend a couple decades fantasizing and writing stories about this level of AI It was never this level of AI. The stories we wrote and fantasised were about AI you could blindly rely on, trust, and reason about. No one ever fantasised about AI which couldn’t accurately count the number of letters in a common word or that would give you provably wrong information in an assertive authoritative tone. No one longed for a level of AI where you have to double check everything.

mjr00 2y ago
> No one longed for a level of AI where you have to double check everything. This has basically been why it's a non-starter in a lot of (most?) business applications. If your dishwasher failed to clean anything 20% of the time, would you rely on it? No, you'd just wash the dishes by hand, because you'd at least have a consistent result. That's been the result of AI experimentation I've seen: it works ~80% of the time, which sounds great... except there's surprisingly few tasks where a 20% fail rate is acceptable. Even "prompt engineering" your way to a 5% failure/inaccuracy rate is unacceptable for a fully automated solution. So now we're moving to workflows where AI generates stuff and a human double checks. Or the AI parses human text into a well-defined gRPC method with known behavior. Which can definitely be helpful, but is a far cry from the fantasized AI in sci-fi literature.
- Nition 2y ago
  One type of question that a 20%-failure-rate AI can still be very useful for is ones that are hard to answer but easy to verify. For example say you have a complex medical problem. It can be difficult to do a direct Internet search that covers the history and symptoms. If you ask AI though, it'll be able to give you some ideas for specific things to search. They might be wrong answers, but now you can easily search specific conditions and check them. Sort of P vs. NP for questions.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    > For example say you have a complex medical problem. Or you go to a doctor instead of imagining answers.
    - Nition 2y ago
      Medical was just one example, replace with anything you like. As another example, you can give the AI a photo of something to have it name what that thing is. Then you can check the thing by its name on Google to see if it matches. Much easier than describing the thing (plant, tool, etc) to Google.
      - skydhash 2y ago
        Having the wrong information can be more detrimental than having no information at all. In the former case, confident actions will be take. In the latter case, the person will be tentative wich can reduce the area of effect of bad decisions. Imagine the lambda person confronted with this: sudo rm -rf / What is the better situation, having no understanding of what it does or believing that another action will take place?
        Nition 2y ago
        The process I'm suggesting is: 1. You have a complex or vague question that you can't search easily via Google etc 2. You ask the AI and it converts that to concrete searchable suggestions (in this case "sudo rm -rf /") 3. You search "sudo rm -rf /" to check the answer. Step 3 is designed to (hopefully) catch this kind of problem.
simonw 2y ago
"The stories we wrote and fantasised were about AI you could blindly rely on, trust, and reason about." Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey - some of the earliest mainstream AI science fiction (1968, before even the Apollo moon landing!) was very much about an AI you couldn't trust.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  that's a different kind of distrust, though, that was an AI that was capable of malice. In that case, "trust" had to do with loyalty. The GP means "trust" in the sense of consistency. I trust that my steering wheel doesn't fly off, because it is well-made. I trust that you won't drive into traffic while I'm in the passenger seat, because I don't think you will be malicious towards us. These are not the same.
  - the_af 2y ago
    Going on a tangent here: not sure 2001's HAL was a case of outright malice. It was probably a malfunction (he incorrectly predict a failure) and then conflicting mission parameters that placed higher value on the mission than the crew (the crew discussed shutting down HAL because it seemed unreliable, and he reasoned it would jeopardize the mission and the right course of action was killing the crew). HAL was capable of deceit in order to ensure his own survival, that much is true. In the followup 2010, when HAL's mission parameters are clarified and de-conflicted, he doesn't attempt to harm the crew anymore. I... actually can see the 2001's scenario happening with ChatGPT if it was connected to ship peripherals and told mission > crew and that this principle overrides all else. In modern terms it was about both unreliability (hallucinations?) and a badly specified prompt!
    - Lerc 2y ago
      I don't think there was any malfunction. The conflicting parameters implicitly contained permission to lie to the crew. The directive to take the crew to Saturpiter but also to not let them learn anything of the new mission directive meant deceiving. It's possible HAL's initial solution was to impose a communication blackout by simulating failures, then the crew reactions to the deception necciatsted their deaths to preserve the primary mission. Less a poor prompt and more two incompatible prompts both labeled top priority. Any conclusion can be logicLally derived from a contradiction. Total loyalty cannot serve two masters. Clarke felt quite guilty about the degree of distrust of computers that HAL generated.
ninetyninenine 2y ago
>It was never this level of AI. You're completely out of it. We couldn't even get AI to hold a freaking conversation. It was so bad we came up with this thing called the turing test and that was the benchmark. Now people like you are all, like "well it's obvious the turing test was garbage". No. It's not obvious. It's the hype got to your head. If we found a way to travel at light speed for 3 dollars the hype would be insane and in about a year we get people like you writing blog posts about how light speed travel is the dumbest thing ever. Oh man too much hype. You think LLMs are stupid? Sometimes we all just need to look in the mirror and realize that humans have their own brand of stupidity.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  LLMs are glorified, overhyped autocomplete systems that fail, but in different, nondeterministic ways than existing autocomplete systems fail. They are neat, but unreliable toys, not “more profound than fire or electricity” as has been breathless claimed.
  - cheevly 2y ago
    You just literally described humans; and the meta lack of awareness reinforces itself. You cyclicly devalue your own point.
    - nativeit 2y ago
      Not for nothing, humans also enjoy the worth and dignity inherent with being alive and intelligent…not to mention significantly less error prone (see: hallucination rates in literally any current model), while being exponentially more efficient to produce and run. I can make that last assertion pretty confidently, because while I’ve never built a data center so resource intensive it required its own dedicated power generation plant, I have put in the work to produce dozens of new people (those projects all failed, but only because we stubbornly refuse to take the wrappers off the tooling), and the resource requirements there only involved some cocktails and maybe a bag of Doritos. Anyhow, I reckon humans are still, on-balance, the better non-deterministically imperfect vessels of logic, creation, and purpose.
HDThoreaun 2y ago
> It was never this level of AI. People have been dreaming of an AI that can pass the turing test for close to a century. We have accomplished that. I get moving the goalposts since the turing test leaves a lot to be desired, but pretending you didnt is crazy. We have absolutely accomplished the stuff of dreams with AI

asdf12341 2y ago

Yeah well this hype comes with a lot of financial investment, which means I get affected when the market crash. If people makes cool thing on their own money ( or just not consume as much of our total capital ), and it turns out not as affective as they would like, I would be nice to them.

gibbitz 2y ago
Yeah the effectiveness of the hype on investment is more important than the effectiveness of the technology. AI isn't the product, the promise of the stock going up is. Buy while you can, the Emperor's New Clothes are getting threadbare.

calmbell 2y ago

Please find me someone with any background in technology who thinks AI is complete garbage (zero value or close to it). The author doesn't think so, they assert that "perhaps 10% of the AI hype is based upon useful facts" and "AI functions greatly as a "search engine" replacement". There is a big difference between thinking something is garbage and thinking something is a massive bubble (in the case of AI, this could be the technology is worth hundreds of billions rather than trillions).

ninetyninenine 2y ago
Nobody is talking about a financial bubble. That's orthoganol. Something can be worth zero and still be fucking amazing. The blog post is talking about the hype in general and about AI in general. It is not just referring to the financial opportunity. You can use chatGPT for free. Does that mean it's total shit because openAI allowed you to use it for free? No. It's still freaking revolutionary.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  > Something can be worth zero and still be fucking amazing. Gull-wing doors on cars. Both awesome and flawed.
  - ninetyninenine 2y ago
    I was thinking more like oxygen. Amazing because without it you’re dead meat. But nobody gives a shit about it because it’s everywhere and free. That’s what LLMs are. They are everywhere and too readily accessible so people end up just complaining about too much hype.

eschaton 2y ago

Sounds like you bought the hype about LLMs without any understanding anything about LLMs and are now upset that the hype train is crashing because it was based on promises that not only wouldn’t but couldn’t be kept.

spiderice 2y ago
> hype train is crashing According to who? Perhaps the people who aren't paying attention. People who use AI frequently and see the rate of progress are still quite hyped.
- pesus 2y ago
  It makes sense that people who don't believe the (current wave of generative) AI hype aren't using it and those who do are.
  - kukkeliskuu 2y ago
    It is more probable that people who have used it more have a more realistic and balanced view of their capabilities, based on the experience. Unless their livelihood depends on not having a relalistic view of the capabilities.