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I am surprised at the negativity and cynicism in this thread. I suppose the pendulum of hype has high amplitude. Just because AI isn’t going to be some kind of

I am surprised at the negativity and cynicism in this thread. I suppose the pendulum of hype has high amplitude. Just because AI isn’t going to be some kind of all-knowing sci-fi AGI doesn’t make it all a sham. The recent research models are miracles of technology - we can now get in ~15 minutes an undergraduate-level report (that would take an undergrad days or weeks) on almost any topic. That’s incredible! The capability of an AI model is approximately junior level in the fields I’ve tested it in (programming, law, philosophy, neuroscience). If you’d don’t see any possible uses for the technology, keep thinking about it.

quantumHazer 1y ago
How do you judge? Are you an expert in four different and complex fields? I'm not saying that LLMs are useless anyway, I'm just curious to know how you can judge a report as "undergraduate level".
- horhay 1y ago
  My brain just bleeps out "x-level" as a description of LLM output. It doesn't really make sense and is usually most used by Silicon Valley folk who can't even begin to quantify such definitions with any type of consistency.
- peterlk 1y ago
  I sent outputs to experts (friends )in those fields who provided me with some specific topic that is common to their niche. In general their feedback all aligned with: “yeah, this is pretty decent, but anyone who was a professional would know about <some hole in the output>”.
api 1y ago
I’ve been on HN for a very long time as you can probably tell from my user name. I lived through the incredible tech optimism of the late 90s into the early to mid 2000s. I miss that era, but then again many of its optimistic predictions were wrong. The failure of so much of that optimism to pan out has inspired a strong counter reaction of techno pessimism. Here’s a few of the optimistic ideas we had versus the reality. Optimism: the Internet will be a massive engine for decentralization and democracy. Reality: this one is exactly wrong. Networks drive centralization, winner take all markets, and empower authoritarians by making “command and control” much easier at all levels of society and in technology. Optimism: the Internet will be a huge engine for education and will place the collective knowledge of humanity into everyone’s hands. Reality: it did this, but nobody cares. People would rather scroll and stare at unbelievably vacant crap. What happened was that concurrent with the Internet delivering on this promise, Internet companies figured out how to build machines to hack the dopamine system to create ad platforms. We did think about this back then but vastly underestimated how successful it would be. I am just floored by the awesome brain rotting power of engagement algorithms and how well they steer people toward absolute garbage. Optimism: decentralized cryptocurrency. Reality: what was created to provide a decentralized democratized alternative to financial capitalism turned into an absurdist parody of financial capitalism, then into a pure casino, which is what it is today. Optimism: people will have privacy and control over their own digital world. Reality: lol. This one is also possible, but only for the tech savvy. What we didn’t understand was that making computers easy to use is so difficult that only very well funded companies can do it. Computers are actually incredibly confusing to 95% of people and require years to master, and the UI/UX aspect of making a product is often orders of magnitude more time consuming and costly than the more technical parts. I could write a lot more on the causes for these failed predictions, but a lot of it boils down to not thinking through the economic reality behind these things. The net turned into an addictive chum machine and a casino because it was not built from the ground up with a billing and payment system built in, and because making and delivering media is expensive. So that role was taken up by ads and other less savory things like surveillance. Now people think about the downsides first. When AI comes around, the first thought is “how will this ruin the world and fuck us?” That’s an over correction. We were too blindly optimistic before and are being too blindly pessimistic now.
- the_snooze 1y ago
  From the history you've summarized, I think we're at the right level of pessimism. All this tech is amazing, and the smart people who put in the work to make it happen should be proud of it. But at the end of the day, economics and game theory will drive the values that get propagated through the tech. The past several decades of technological progress have shown that values like "resiliency," "reliability," and "user empowerment" aren't at the top of the list, so why should we believe otherwise with AI and give it the benefit of the doubt? I like to put AI systems through its paces with low-stakes but easy-to-check sports trivia. It should absolutely ace that given the plethora of accurate data and text out there. Yet it fails again and again. "Reliability" is not a design priority for this technology.
  - api 1y ago
    I’ve toyed around with an ultimate heresy: that the Internet, or at least the way we built it, was a mistake, and that something more like the telecoms and their OSI channel based network would have been socially superior. The PC age was incredible. Jump in your time machine and go back and buy a decent PC in 1995, probably the height of the pre Internet PC era. It’d be kind of a big clunky box, sure, but the striking thing you’d find was a machine brimming with features and software almost all built primarily to serve the user of the machine. It was a product designed for you, the customer, full of attempts to deliver value to you. It was a product of the good kind of capitalism, the kind where you try to create and trade value for value. (BTW think on this and you’ll understand why libertarian thought was popular then. Capitalism didn’t look so bad in this era. A 90s PC was an argument that Ayn Rand was right.) You might use this PC to call BBSes, which were of course slow and very limited, but they too were either volunteer efforts aimed at building a community or services to serve, well, their users. Volunteer free or low cost BBSes were pubs, third spaces, while things like Compuserve were more like paid libraries, basically the pro version. Ten years later in 2005 you can already see this world giving way to the dystopia of today where you are the product and the machine is there as a host for things to hack your dopamine system. A telco OSI net would have been more expensive and limited. It would have been basically fast data calls. But it would have been point to point. Your PC would have called other PCs or PC services like with modems, just faster. No NAT and more importantly no unpermissioned access to your machine so no security armageddon driving the installation of firewalls that break end to end connectivity. You probably would have gotten cloud eventually but its role might be different. You might not have gotten the www as we know it, and that might not be a bad thing. You might not have gotten Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, and that’s like saying we might never have had the AIDS epidemic. Social media has been a pretty strong net negative for humanity. That network would probably have had a billing mechanism built in too. You’d be able to put up the equivalent of 1-900 numbers, services that automatically bill their callers. That would have allowed a profusion of small businesses serving and aggregating data with working business models that do not inevitably lead to enshittification. I’m just speculating of course. You can’t rerun history. But I do wonder if a more limited and managed network would have counter intuitively led to a more free, open, and decentralized computing landscape with an economic model centered around the user as the customer. Instead we’ve gone down this terrible road where the net and computer tech is primarily about delivering the user to the real customer: advertisers, political parties, and ultimately authoritarian political regimes. It’s becoming increasingly obvious to me that this ends with a command and control architecture where a small number of despotic god-kings drive humanity by mass dopamine system hacking with the assistance of AI. That is a dark, ugly future.
Kamq 1y ago
> That’s incredible! The capability of an AI model is approximately junior level in the fields I’ve tested it in (programming, law, philosophy, neuroscience). If you’d don’t see any possible uses for the technology, keep thinking about it. It is absolutely incredible from a technical perspective, but your next statement does not follow. In a lot of (most?) fields, juniors are negative ROI, and their main value is that they will eventually be seniors. If AI isn't on the road to that, then the majority of the hype has been lies, and it's negative value for a lot of fields. That changes AI from a transformative technology to an email summarizer for a lot of people.
lsy 1y ago
While the technology is indeed incredible, the question is not whether someone, somewhere, will find it useful for something, but whether the sorts of things it's useful for will economically justify the massive expenditure in both financial and human capital this trend is currently soaking up. E.g. if "undergraduate-level reports" were something there was a mass market for, the economics of university education would be pretty different. And the same goes for idle searches, sycophantic therapizing, blog article generation, and toy code development: there is a solid user base while costs are free or low, but that says little about whether there is an appetite to pay for these tools, especially if the prices are commensurate with the cost of operation.
- peterlk 1y ago
  I think you’re fixating on the specific example that I cited rather than imagining the possibilities of the technology. We now have: zero-shot classification capabilities for basically any task, performance that is consistent enough for independent LLMs to collaboratively produce robust long-form responses, the ability to produce almost any web UI element on command with functional hookups to an API. And that’s just LLMs. SAM2 has good performance for realtime object detection in video. Perhaps a more fruitful line of inquiry could be: what would the internet look like if every web application implemented support for A2A?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
hybrid_study 1y ago
So true. It's equivalent to someone saying "so you can search billions of internet pages - big deal" when Google first appeared; or someone saying to Guttenberg, "sure you can mass produce books, but you still gotta read them". It's as if cynics are jealous or so deeply trouble by the technology that their primary responses are mostly negative. Or they want a perfect solution (immediately, right this minute). Totally irrational.

quantumHazer 1y ago

How do you judge? Are you an expert in four different and complex fields? I'm not saying that LLMs are useless anyway, I'm just curious to know how you can judge a report as "undergraduate level".

horhay 1y ago
My brain just bleeps out "x-level" as a description of LLM output. It doesn't really make sense and is usually most used by Silicon Valley folk who can't even begin to quantify such definitions with any type of consistency.
peterlk 1y ago
I sent outputs to experts (friends )in those fields who provided me with some specific topic that is common to their niche. In general their feedback all aligned with: “yeah, this is pretty decent, but anyone who was a professional would know about <some hole in the output>”.

api 1y ago

I’ve been on HN for a very long time as you can probably tell from my user name. I lived through the incredible tech optimism of the late 90s into the early to mid 2000s. I miss that era, but then again many of its optimistic predictions were wrong. The failure of so much of that optimism to pan out has inspired a strong counter reaction of techno pessimism. Here’s a few of the optimistic ideas we had versus the reality. Optimism: the Internet will be a massive engine for decentralization and democracy. Reality: this one is exactly wrong. Networks drive centralization, winner take all markets, and empower authoritarians by making “command and control” much easier at all levels of society and in technology. Optimism: the Internet will be a huge engine for education and will place the collective knowledge of humanity into everyone’s hands. Reality: it did this, but nobody cares. People would rather scroll and stare at unbelievably vacant crap. What happened was that concurrent with the Internet delivering on this promise, Internet companies figured out how to build machines to hack the dopamine system to create ad platforms. We did think about this back then but vastly underestimated how successful it would be. I am just floored by the awesome brain rotting power of engagement algorithms and how well they steer people toward absolute garbage. Optimism: decentralized cryptocurrency. Reality: what was created to provide a decentralized democratized alternative to financial capitalism turned into an absurdist parody of financial capitalism, then into a pure casino, which is what it is today. Optimism: people will have privacy and control over their own digital world. Reality: lol. This one is also possible, but only for the tech savvy. What we didn’t understand was that making computers easy to use is so difficult that only very well funded companies can do it. Computers are actually incredibly confusing to 95% of people and require years to master, and the UI/UX aspect of making a product is often orders of magnitude more time consuming and costly than the more technical parts. I could write a lot more on the causes for these failed predictions, but a lot of it boils down to not thinking through the economic reality behind these things. The net turned into an addictive chum machine and a casino because it was not built from the ground up with a billing and payment system built in, and because making and delivering media is expensive. So that role was taken up by ads and other less savory things like surveillance. Now people think about the downsides first. When AI comes around, the first thought is “how will this ruin the world and fuck us?” That’s an over correction. We were too blindly optimistic before and are being too blindly pessimistic now.

the_snooze 1y ago
From the history you've summarized, I think we're at the right level of pessimism. All this tech is amazing, and the smart people who put in the work to make it happen should be proud of it. But at the end of the day, economics and game theory will drive the values that get propagated through the tech. The past several decades of technological progress have shown that values like "resiliency," "reliability," and "user empowerment" aren't at the top of the list, so why should we believe otherwise with AI and give it the benefit of the doubt? I like to put AI systems through its paces with low-stakes but easy-to-check sports trivia. It should absolutely ace that given the plethora of accurate data and text out there. Yet it fails again and again. "Reliability" is not a design priority for this technology.
- api 1y ago
  I’ve toyed around with an ultimate heresy: that the Internet, or at least the way we built it, was a mistake, and that something more like the telecoms and their OSI channel based network would have been socially superior. The PC age was incredible. Jump in your time machine and go back and buy a decent PC in 1995, probably the height of the pre Internet PC era. It’d be kind of a big clunky box, sure, but the striking thing you’d find was a machine brimming with features and software almost all built primarily to serve the user of the machine. It was a product designed for you, the customer, full of attempts to deliver value to you. It was a product of the good kind of capitalism, the kind where you try to create and trade value for value. (BTW think on this and you’ll understand why libertarian thought was popular then. Capitalism didn’t look so bad in this era. A 90s PC was an argument that Ayn Rand was right.) You might use this PC to call BBSes, which were of course slow and very limited, but they too were either volunteer efforts aimed at building a community or services to serve, well, their users. Volunteer free or low cost BBSes were pubs, third spaces, while things like Compuserve were more like paid libraries, basically the pro version. Ten years later in 2005 you can already see this world giving way to the dystopia of today where you are the product and the machine is there as a host for things to hack your dopamine system. A telco OSI net would have been more expensive and limited. It would have been basically fast data calls. But it would have been point to point. Your PC would have called other PCs or PC services like with modems, just faster. No NAT and more importantly no unpermissioned access to your machine so no security armageddon driving the installation of firewalls that break end to end connectivity. You probably would have gotten cloud eventually but its role might be different. You might not have gotten the www as we know it, and that might not be a bad thing. You might not have gotten Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, and that’s like saying we might never have had the AIDS epidemic. Social media has been a pretty strong net negative for humanity. That network would probably have had a billing mechanism built in too. You’d be able to put up the equivalent of 1-900 numbers, services that automatically bill their callers. That would have allowed a profusion of small businesses serving and aggregating data with working business models that do not inevitably lead to enshittification. I’m just speculating of course. You can’t rerun history. But I do wonder if a more limited and managed network would have counter intuitively led to a more free, open, and decentralized computing landscape with an economic model centered around the user as the customer. Instead we’ve gone down this terrible road where the net and computer tech is primarily about delivering the user to the real customer: advertisers, political parties, and ultimately authoritarian political regimes. It’s becoming increasingly obvious to me that this ends with a command and control architecture where a small number of despotic god-kings drive humanity by mass dopamine system hacking with the assistance of AI. That is a dark, ugly future.

Kamq 1y ago

> That’s incredible! The capability of an AI model is approximately junior level in the fields I’ve tested it in (programming, law, philosophy, neuroscience). If you’d don’t see any possible uses for the technology, keep thinking about it. It is absolutely incredible from a technical perspective, but your next statement does not follow. In a lot of (most?) fields, juniors are negative ROI, and their main value is that they will eventually be seniors. If AI isn't on the road to that, then the majority of the hype has been lies, and it's negative value for a lot of fields. That changes AI from a transformative technology to an email summarizer for a lot of people.

lsy 1y ago

While the technology is indeed incredible, the question is not whether someone, somewhere, will find it useful for something, but whether the sorts of things it's useful for will economically justify the massive expenditure in both financial and human capital this trend is currently soaking up. E.g. if "undergraduate-level reports" were something there was a mass market for, the economics of university education would be pretty different. And the same goes for idle searches, sycophantic therapizing, blog article generation, and toy code development: there is a solid user base while costs are free or low, but that says little about whether there is an appetite to pay for these tools, especially if the prices are commensurate with the cost of operation.

peterlk 1y ago
I think you’re fixating on the specific example that I cited rather than imagining the possibilities of the technology. We now have: zero-shot classification capabilities for basically any task, performance that is consistent enough for independent LLMs to collaboratively produce robust long-form responses, the ability to produce almost any web UI element on command with functional hookups to an API. And that’s just LLMs. SAM2 has good performance for realtime object detection in video. Perhaps a more fruitful line of inquiry could be: what would the internet look like if every web application implemented support for A2A?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

hybrid_study 1y ago

So true. It's equivalent to someone saying "so you can search billions of internet pages - big deal" when Google first appeared; or someone saying to Guttenberg, "sure you can mass produce books, but you still gotta read them". It's as if cynics are jealous or so deeply trouble by the technology that their primary responses are mostly negative. Or they want a perfect solution (immediately, right this minute). Totally irrational.