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It’s why it keeps looking exactly like NFT’s and crypto hype cycles to me: Yes the technology has legitimate uses, but the promises of groundbreaking use cases

It’s why it keeps looking exactly like NFT’s and crypto hype cycles to me: Yes the technology has legitimate uses, but the promises of groundbreaking use cases that will change the world are obviously not materialising and to anyone that understands the tech it can’t. It’s people making money off hype until it dies and move on to the next scam-with-some-use.

guardian5x 1y ago
AI looks exactly like NFTs to you? I don't understand what you mean by that. AI already has tons more uses.
- waldrews 1y ago
  One is a technical advance as important as anything in human history, realizing a dream most informed thinkers thought would remain science fiction long past our lifetimes, upending our understanding of intelligence, computation, language, knowledge, evolution, prediction, psychology... before we even mention practical applications. The other is worse than nothing.
StopDisinfo910 1y ago
I don’t remember when NFTs and cryptos helped me draft an email, wrote my meetings minutes for me or allowed me to easily search information previously locked in various documents. I think there is this weird take amongst some on HN where LLMs are either completely revolutionary and making break through or utterly useless. The truth is that they are useful already as a productivity tool.
- bgnn 1y ago
  Exactly this. What we expect from them is our speculation. In reality nobody knows the future and there's no way to know the future.
  - bgnn 1y ago
    Wow I didn't expect this to be down voted. I guess there are people who knows the future.
- ktallett 1y ago
  The hype surrounding them is not as a pa and tbh a lot of these use cases already have existing methods that work just fine. There are ways to find key information in files already, and speedy meeting minutes is really just a template away.
  - rkuodys 1y ago
    What I see LLMs at this point is simplified input and output solutions with reduced barriers of entry. So application could become more widespread. Now that I think of it, maybe this AI era is not electricity, but rather GUI - like the time when Jobs(or whoever) figured out and adopted modern GUI on computers allowing more widespread uses of computer
    - ktallett 1y ago
      Do they only have reduced barriers of entry if you aren't fussed about the accuracy of the output? If you care that everything works correctly and is factually correct, do you not need the same competency as just doing the task by hand.
    - flir 1y ago
      It's a good analogy because the key development does seem to have been the interface. Instead of wrapping it up as a text autocomplete (a la google search), openai wrapped it up as an IM client, and we were off to the races.
  - Flamentono2 1y ago
    Absolutly not true I was not able to get meeting transcription in that quality that cheap ever before. I followed dictation software for over a decade and tx to ML the open source software is suddenly a lot better than ever before. Our internal company search with state of the art search indexes and search software was always shit. Now i ask an agent about a product standard and it just finds it. Image generation never existed before. Building a chatbot in a way that it actually does what you expect and its more complicated than answering the same 10 theoretical features it can do was hard and never really good and it now just works. Im also not aware of any software rewriting or even writing documents for me, structer them etc.
- lazide 1y ago
  Having tried to use various tools - in those specific examples - I found them either pointless or actively harmful. Writing emails - once I knew what I wanted to convey, the rest was so trivial as to not matter, and any LLM tooling just got in the way of actually expressing it as I ended up trying to tweak the junk it was producing. Meeting minutes - I have yet to see one that didn’t miss something important while creating a lot of junk that no one ever read. And while I’m sure someone somewhere has had luck with the document search/extract stuff, my experience has been that the hard part was understanding something, and then finding it in the doc or being reminded of it was easy. If someone didn’t understand something, the AI summary or search was useless because they didn’t know what they were seeing. I’ve also seen a LOT of both junior and senior people end up in a haze because they couldn’t figure out what was going on - and the AI tooling just allowed them to produce more junk that didn’t make any sense, rather than engage their brain. Which causes more junk for everyone to get overwhelmed with. IMO, a lot of the ‘productivity’ isn’t actually, it’s just semi coherent noise.
  - silon42 1y ago
    > Writing emails - once I knew what I wanted to convey, the rest was so trivial as to not matter, and any LLM tooling just got in the way of actually expressing it as I ended up trying to tweak the junk it was producing. +1 LLM will help you produce the "filler" nobody wants the read anyway.
    - DennisP 1y ago
      That's ok, the recipient can use an LLM to summarize it. In the end, we'll all read and write tight little bullet points, with the LLM text on the wire functioning as the world's least efficient communication protocol.
  - denvrede 1y ago
    +1 for all of the above. > Meeting minutes - I have yet to see one that didn’t miss something important while creating a lot of junk that no one ever read. Especially that one. In the beginning for very structured meetings with a low number of participants it seemed to be ok but once they got more crowded, maybe not all are native speakers and took longer than 30 minutes (like workshops) it went bad.
- cornholio 1y ago
  For now, the reasoning abilities of the best and largest models are somewhat on par with those of a human crackpot with an internet connection, that misunderstands some wild fact or theory and starts to speculate dumb and ridiculous "discoveries". So the real world application to scientific thought is low, because science does not lack imbeciles. But of course, models always improve and they never grow tired (if enough VC money is available), and even an idiot can stumble upon low hanging fruits overlooked by the brightest minds. This tireless ability to do systematic or brute-force reasoning about non-frontier subjects is bound to produce some useful results like those you mention. The comparison with a pure financial swindle and speculative mania like NFTs is of course an exaggeration.
  - Xmd5a 1y ago
    I see myself in these words: >that misunderstands some wild fact or theory and starts to speculate dumb and ridiculous "discoveries" >even an idiot can stumble upon low hanging fruits overlooked by the brightest minds.
  - datadrivenangel 1y ago
    I want an idiot to stumble on the low hanging fruits of my meeting minutes.
- apwell23 1y ago
  > wrote my meetings minutes why is this such a posterchild for llms. everyone always leads with this. how boring are these meetings and do ppl actually review these notes? i never ever saw anyone reading meeting minutes or even mention them. Why is this usecase even mentioned in LLM ads.
  - batty_alex 1y ago
    I think the same thing every time. I've never had anyone read my meeting notes and they're better off in some sort of work order system anyways. All I'm hearing is an appeal to making the workplace more isolating. Don't talk to each other, just talk to the machine that might summarize it wrong
  - SiempreViernes 1y ago
    Indeed, it seems doubtful that an org having so structurless meetings that they are struggling to write minutes is capable of having meetings for which minutes serves any purpose beyond covering ass.
  - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
    Because meeting minutes are hard, annoying to do and LLMs are good at it. To be blunt, I think most HNers are young software developers, never attend any meetings of significance and don’t have to deal with many différent topics so they fail to see the usefulness because they are not in a position to understand it. The tails are everywhere like people mentioning work orders which is something extremely operational. If nothing messy and complicated is discussed in the meetings you attend, it’s no surprise you don’t get why minutes are useful or where the value is. It doesn’t mean there is no value.
    - apwell23 1y ago
      ok i'll take your word for it that people read meeting notes.
      - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
- squidbeak 1y ago
  I think imagination may be the reason for this. Enthusiasts have kept that first wave of amazement at what AI is able to do, and find it easier to anticipate where this could lead. The pessimists on the other hand weren't impressed with its capabilities in the first place - or were, and then became disillusioned for something it couldn't do for them. It's naturally easier to look ahead from the optimistic standpoint. There's also the other category who are terrified about the consequences for their lives and jobs, and who are driven in a very human way to rubbish the tech to convince themselves it's doomed to failure. The optimists are right of course. A nascent technology at this scale and with this kind of promise, whose development is spurring a race between nation states, isn't going to fizzle out or plateau, however much its current iterations may come short of any particular person's expectations.
  - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    > It's naturally easier to look ahead from the optimistic standpoint. It is similarly easy to look ahead from a pessimist standpoint (e.g. how will this bubble collapse, and who will pay the bill for the hype?). The problem rather is that this overhyped optimistic standpoint is much more encouraged from society (and of course from the marketing). > There's also the other category who are terrified about the consequences for their lives and jobs, and who are driven in a very human way to rubbish the tech to convince themselves it's doomed to failure. There is also a third type who are not terrified of AI, but of the bad decisions managers (will) make because of all this AI craze.
    - squidbeak 1y ago
      No, I meant it's easier for optimists to look ahead at the possibilities inherent in the tech itself, which isn't true of pessimists, who - as you show - see instead the pattern of failed techs in it, whether that pattern matches AI or not. If you can see the promise, you can see a gap to close between current capability and accomplished product. The question is then whether there's some barrier in that gap to make the accomplished product impossible forever. Pessimists tend to have given up on the tech already, so to them any talk about closing that gap is idle daydreaming or hype.
- mountainriver 1y ago
  I don’t remember when they wrote half my code in a fraction of the time for my high paid SWE job. I do have a bad memory from all the weed though, so who knows
Flamentono2 1y ago
We already have breakthroughs. Benchmark results which have been unheard of before ML. Alone language translation got so much better, voice syntesis, voice transcription. All my meetings now are searchable and i can ask 'ai' to summarize my meetings in a relative accurate way impossible before that. Alphafold made a breakthrough in protein folding. Image and Video generation can now do unbelievable things. Realtime voice communication with computer. Our internal company search suddenly became usefull. I have 0 use case for NFT and Crypto. I have tons of use case for ML.
- uludag 1y ago
  I'm sure there's many people out there who could say that they hardly use AI but that crypto has made them lots of money. At the end of the day searching work documents and talking with computers is only desirable inasmuch as they are economically profitable. Crypto at the end of the day is responsible for a lot of people getting wealthy. Was a lot of this wealth obtained on sketchy grounds? probably, but the same could be said AI (for example, the recent sale of windsurf for an obscene amount of money).
  - littlestymaar 1y ago
    > is only desirable inasmuch as they are economically profitable. The bug difference is that they are profitable because they create value, when cryptocurrencies are a zero sum game between participants. (It is in fact a negative-sum game, since some people are getting paid to make the thing work so that others can gamble on the system).
  - Flamentono2 1y ago
    Crypto is not making people rich, it is about moving money from Person A to Person B. And sure everyone who got the money from others by gambling are biased. Fine with me. But in comparision to crypto, people around me actually use AI/ML (most of them).
    - nodar86 1y ago
      Every activity that is making people rich is by definiton moving money from Person A to Person B.
sailingparrot 1y ago
> to anyone that understands the tech it can’t. This is a ridiculous take that makes me think you might not « understand the tech » as much as you think you do. Is AI useful today ? That depends on the exact use case but overall it seems pretty clear the hype is greater than the use currently. But sometimes I feel like everyone forgets that ChatGPT isn’t even 3 years old, 6 years ago we were stuck with GPT-2 whose most impressive feat was writing a non sense poem about a unicorn, and AlphaGo is not even 10 years old. If you can’t see the trend and just think that what we have today is the best we will ever achieve, thus the tech can’t do anything useful, you are getting blinded by contrarianism.
- vrighter 1y ago
  If there is a single objective right answer, the model should output a probability of 1 for it, and 0 for everything else. Ex. If I ask "Is a sphere a curved object?" The one and only answer is "100% yes" not "I am 99% sure it is" (and once in a while actually say it isn't) This is pretty much impossible to achieve with current architectures (which aren't all that different to those of old, just bigger). If they did, then they'd be woefully overfitted. They can't be made reliable. Anyone who understands the tech does know this.
  - sailingparrot 1y ago
    > Anyone who understands the tech does know this Yes, and this is does not mean the technology can never be useful. I work everyday with that have false beliefs about a tech, I have a friend that until recently thought there were rivers on the moon, and some believe climate change is a hoax, I often forget things people told me and they have to tell me again. Are humans not useful at anything ?
    - vrighter 1y ago
      If someone responds with "no" to that question even once, then yes, I don't consider them trustworthy for anything involving complex thought.
littlestymaar 1y ago
> It’s why it keeps looking exactly like NFT’s and crypto hype cycles to me: Yes the technology has legitimate uses AI have legitimate uses, cryptocurrency only has “regulations evasion” and NFT has literally no use at all, though. But that's very true that the AI ecosystem is crowded with grifters who feed on baseless hype, and many of them actually come from cryptocurrencies.
jstummbillig 1y ago
I think people are mostly bad at value judgements, and AI is no exception. What they naively wished the future was like: Flying cars. What they actually got (and is way more useful but a lot less flashy): Cheap solar energy.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > What they naively wished the future was like: Flying cars. This future is already there: We have flying cars: they are called "helicopters" (see also https://xkcd.com/1623/ https://xkcd.com/1623/).
  - AstralStorm 1y ago
    Oh they're not even close in availability as cars, much harder to operate, much more expensive and tend to fall out of the sky. Thank you for providing an example that directly maps to usefulness of ANN in most research though.
    - AngryData 1y ago
      Helicopters don't just fall out of the sky, atleast not any different than planes fall out of the sky, they can auto-rotate to the ground without engine power.
      - agurk 1y ago
        You are absolutely correct about autorotation and helicopters not falling out of the sky. There is one nuance that the rotor blades still need to be able to rotate for this, and a failed gearbox can prevent that. Anecdotally that feels like the most common cause when I read about another crash in the North Sea.
      - vunderba 1y ago
        True but even lowering collective and letting autorotation take over you still hit the ground REALLY hard - enough to sustain injuries to your back and neck in some cases. Glide ratios in GA (like highwing cessnas) is much more forgiving assuming you can find a place to put down.
helloplanets 1y ago
I'd be interested in reading some more from the people you're referring to when talking about experts who understand the field. At least to the extent I've followed the discussion, even the top experts are all over the place when it comes to the future of AI. As a counterpoint: Geoffrey Hinton. You could say he's gone off the deep end on a tangent, but I definitely don't his incentive is to make money off of hype. Then there's Yann LeCun saying AI "could actually save humanity from extinction". [0] If these guys just out of touch talking heads, who are the new guard people should read up on? [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/27/godfather-of-ai-raises-odds-of-the-technology-wiping-out-humanity-over-next-30-years https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/27/godfather...
ccppurcell 1y ago
LLMs have blown crypto and nfts off the map, at least for normies like me. I wonder what will blow LLMs off the map?
mountainriver 1y ago
Code assistants alone prove this to be false.
edanm 1y ago
> the promises of groundbreaking use cases that will change the world are obviously not materialising and to anyone that understands the tech it can’t. In what world is this obviously not materializing? Plenty of people use GenAI for coding, with some claiming we're approaching the level of GenAI being able to automate vast portions of a developer's job. Do you think this is wrong and the people saying this (some of them very experienced developers) are simply mistaken or lying? Or do you think it's not a big deal?

guardian5x 1y ago

AI looks exactly like NFTs to you? I don't understand what you mean by that. AI already has tons more uses.

waldrews 1y ago
One is a technical advance as important as anything in human history, realizing a dream most informed thinkers thought would remain science fiction long past our lifetimes, upending our understanding of intelligence, computation, language, knowledge, evolution, prediction, psychology... before we even mention practical applications. The other is worse than nothing.

StopDisinfo910 1y ago

I don’t remember when NFTs and cryptos helped me draft an email, wrote my meetings minutes for me or allowed me to easily search information previously locked in various documents. I think there is this weird take amongst some on HN where LLMs are either completely revolutionary and making break through or utterly useless. The truth is that they are useful already as a productivity tool.

bgnn 1y ago
Exactly this. What we expect from them is our speculation. In reality nobody knows the future and there's no way to know the future.
- bgnn 1y ago
  Wow I didn't expect this to be down voted. I guess there are people who knows the future.
ktallett 1y ago
The hype surrounding them is not as a pa and tbh a lot of these use cases already have existing methods that work just fine. There are ways to find key information in files already, and speedy meeting minutes is really just a template away.
- rkuodys 1y ago
  What I see LLMs at this point is simplified input and output solutions with reduced barriers of entry. So application could become more widespread. Now that I think of it, maybe this AI era is not electricity, but rather GUI - like the time when Jobs(or whoever) figured out and adopted modern GUI on computers allowing more widespread uses of computer
  - ktallett 1y ago
    Do they only have reduced barriers of entry if you aren't fussed about the accuracy of the output? If you care that everything works correctly and is factually correct, do you not need the same competency as just doing the task by hand.
  - flir 1y ago
    It's a good analogy because the key development does seem to have been the interface. Instead of wrapping it up as a text autocomplete (a la google search), openai wrapped it up as an IM client, and we were off to the races.
- Flamentono2 1y ago
  Absolutly not true I was not able to get meeting transcription in that quality that cheap ever before. I followed dictation software for over a decade and tx to ML the open source software is suddenly a lot better than ever before. Our internal company search with state of the art search indexes and search software was always shit. Now i ask an agent about a product standard and it just finds it. Image generation never existed before. Building a chatbot in a way that it actually does what you expect and its more complicated than answering the same 10 theoretical features it can do was hard and never really good and it now just works. Im also not aware of any software rewriting or even writing documents for me, structer them etc.
lazide 1y ago
Having tried to use various tools - in those specific examples - I found them either pointless or actively harmful. Writing emails - once I knew what I wanted to convey, the rest was so trivial as to not matter, and any LLM tooling just got in the way of actually expressing it as I ended up trying to tweak the junk it was producing. Meeting minutes - I have yet to see one that didn’t miss something important while creating a lot of junk that no one ever read. And while I’m sure someone somewhere has had luck with the document search/extract stuff, my experience has been that the hard part was understanding something, and then finding it in the doc or being reminded of it was easy. If someone didn’t understand something, the AI summary or search was useless because they didn’t know what they were seeing. I’ve also seen a LOT of both junior and senior people end up in a haze because they couldn’t figure out what was going on - and the AI tooling just allowed them to produce more junk that didn’t make any sense, rather than engage their brain. Which causes more junk for everyone to get overwhelmed with. IMO, a lot of the ‘productivity’ isn’t actually, it’s just semi coherent noise.
- silon42 1y ago
  > Writing emails - once I knew what I wanted to convey, the rest was so trivial as to not matter, and any LLM tooling just got in the way of actually expressing it as I ended up trying to tweak the junk it was producing. +1 LLM will help you produce the "filler" nobody wants the read anyway.
  - DennisP 1y ago
    That's ok, the recipient can use an LLM to summarize it. In the end, we'll all read and write tight little bullet points, with the LLM text on the wire functioning as the world's least efficient communication protocol.
- denvrede 1y ago
  +1 for all of the above. > Meeting minutes - I have yet to see one that didn’t miss something important while creating a lot of junk that no one ever read. Especially that one. In the beginning for very structured meetings with a low number of participants it seemed to be ok but once they got more crowded, maybe not all are native speakers and took longer than 30 minutes (like workshops) it went bad.
cornholio 1y ago
For now, the reasoning abilities of the best and largest models are somewhat on par with those of a human crackpot with an internet connection, that misunderstands some wild fact or theory and starts to speculate dumb and ridiculous "discoveries". So the real world application to scientific thought is low, because science does not lack imbeciles. But of course, models always improve and they never grow tired (if enough VC money is available), and even an idiot can stumble upon low hanging fruits overlooked by the brightest minds. This tireless ability to do systematic or brute-force reasoning about non-frontier subjects is bound to produce some useful results like those you mention. The comparison with a pure financial swindle and speculative mania like NFTs is of course an exaggeration.
- Xmd5a 1y ago
  I see myself in these words: >that misunderstands some wild fact or theory and starts to speculate dumb and ridiculous "discoveries" >even an idiot can stumble upon low hanging fruits overlooked by the brightest minds.
- datadrivenangel 1y ago
  I want an idiot to stumble on the low hanging fruits of my meeting minutes.
apwell23 1y ago
> wrote my meetings minutes why is this such a posterchild for llms. everyone always leads with this. how boring are these meetings and do ppl actually review these notes? i never ever saw anyone reading meeting minutes or even mention them. Why is this usecase even mentioned in LLM ads.
- batty_alex 1y ago
  I think the same thing every time. I've never had anyone read my meeting notes and they're better off in some sort of work order system anyways. All I'm hearing is an appeal to making the workplace more isolating. Don't talk to each other, just talk to the machine that might summarize it wrong
- SiempreViernes 1y ago
  Indeed, it seems doubtful that an org having so structurless meetings that they are struggling to write minutes is capable of having meetings for which minutes serves any purpose beyond covering ass.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  Because meeting minutes are hard, annoying to do and LLMs are good at it. To be blunt, I think most HNers are young software developers, never attend any meetings of significance and don’t have to deal with many différent topics so they fail to see the usefulness because they are not in a position to understand it. The tails are everywhere like people mentioning work orders which is something extremely operational. If nothing messy and complicated is discussed in the meetings you attend, it’s no surprise you don’t get why minutes are useful or where the value is. It doesn’t mean there is no value.
  - apwell23 1y ago
    ok i'll take your word for it that people read meeting notes.
    - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
squidbeak 1y ago
I think imagination may be the reason for this. Enthusiasts have kept that first wave of amazement at what AI is able to do, and find it easier to anticipate where this could lead. The pessimists on the other hand weren't impressed with its capabilities in the first place - or were, and then became disillusioned for something it couldn't do for them. It's naturally easier to look ahead from the optimistic standpoint. There's also the other category who are terrified about the consequences for their lives and jobs, and who are driven in a very human way to rubbish the tech to convince themselves it's doomed to failure. The optimists are right of course. A nascent technology at this scale and with this kind of promise, whose development is spurring a race between nation states, isn't going to fizzle out or plateau, however much its current iterations may come short of any particular person's expectations.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > It's naturally easier to look ahead from the optimistic standpoint. It is similarly easy to look ahead from a pessimist standpoint (e.g. how will this bubble collapse, and who will pay the bill for the hype?). The problem rather is that this overhyped optimistic standpoint is much more encouraged from society (and of course from the marketing). > There's also the other category who are terrified about the consequences for their lives and jobs, and who are driven in a very human way to rubbish the tech to convince themselves it's doomed to failure. There is also a third type who are not terrified of AI, but of the bad decisions managers (will) make because of all this AI craze.
  - squidbeak 1y ago
    No, I meant it's easier for optimists to look ahead at the possibilities inherent in the tech itself, which isn't true of pessimists, who - as you show - see instead the pattern of failed techs in it, whether that pattern matches AI or not. If you can see the promise, you can see a gap to close between current capability and accomplished product. The question is then whether there's some barrier in that gap to make the accomplished product impossible forever. Pessimists tend to have given up on the tech already, so to them any talk about closing that gap is idle daydreaming or hype.
mountainriver 1y ago
I don’t remember when they wrote half my code in a fraction of the time for my high paid SWE job. I do have a bad memory from all the weed though, so who knows

Flamentono2 1y ago

We already have breakthroughs. Benchmark results which have been unheard of before ML. Alone language translation got so much better, voice syntesis, voice transcription. All my meetings now are searchable and i can ask 'ai' to summarize my meetings in a relative accurate way impossible before that. Alphafold made a breakthrough in protein folding. Image and Video generation can now do unbelievable things. Realtime voice communication with computer. Our internal company search suddenly became usefull. I have 0 use case for NFT and Crypto. I have tons of use case for ML.

uludag 1y ago
I'm sure there's many people out there who could say that they hardly use AI but that crypto has made them lots of money. At the end of the day searching work documents and talking with computers is only desirable inasmuch as they are economically profitable. Crypto at the end of the day is responsible for a lot of people getting wealthy. Was a lot of this wealth obtained on sketchy grounds? probably, but the same could be said AI (for example, the recent sale of windsurf for an obscene amount of money).
- littlestymaar 1y ago
  > is only desirable inasmuch as they are economically profitable. The bug difference is that they are profitable because they create value, when cryptocurrencies are a zero sum game between participants. (It is in fact a negative-sum game, since some people are getting paid to make the thing work so that others can gamble on the system).
- Flamentono2 1y ago
  Crypto is not making people rich, it is about moving money from Person A to Person B. And sure everyone who got the money from others by gambling are biased. Fine with me. But in comparision to crypto, people around me actually use AI/ML (most of them).
  - nodar86 1y ago
    Every activity that is making people rich is by definiton moving money from Person A to Person B.

sailingparrot 1y ago

> to anyone that understands the tech it can’t. This is a ridiculous take that makes me think you might not « understand the tech » as much as you think you do. Is AI useful today ? That depends on the exact use case but overall it seems pretty clear the hype is greater than the use currently. But sometimes I feel like everyone forgets that ChatGPT isn’t even 3 years old, 6 years ago we were stuck with GPT-2 whose most impressive feat was writing a non sense poem about a unicorn, and AlphaGo is not even 10 years old. If you can’t see the trend and just think that what we have today is the best we will ever achieve, thus the tech can’t do anything useful, you are getting blinded by contrarianism.

vrighter 1y ago
If there is a single objective right answer, the model should output a probability of 1 for it, and 0 for everything else. Ex. If I ask "Is a sphere a curved object?" The one and only answer is "100% yes" not "I am 99% sure it is" (and once in a while actually say it isn't) This is pretty much impossible to achieve with current architectures (which aren't all that different to those of old, just bigger). If they did, then they'd be woefully overfitted. They can't be made reliable. Anyone who understands the tech does know this.
- sailingparrot 1y ago
  > Anyone who understands the tech does know this Yes, and this is does not mean the technology can never be useful. I work everyday with that have false beliefs about a tech, I have a friend that until recently thought there were rivers on the moon, and some believe climate change is a hoax, I often forget things people told me and they have to tell me again. Are humans not useful at anything ?
  - vrighter 1y ago
    If someone responds with "no" to that question even once, then yes, I don't consider them trustworthy for anything involving complex thought.

littlestymaar 1y ago

> It’s why it keeps looking exactly like NFT’s and crypto hype cycles to me: Yes the technology has legitimate uses AI have legitimate uses, cryptocurrency only has “regulations evasion” and NFT has literally no use at all, though. But that's very true that the AI ecosystem is crowded with grifters who feed on baseless hype, and many of them actually come from cryptocurrencies.

jstummbillig 1y ago

I think people are mostly bad at value judgements, and AI is no exception. What they naively wished the future was like: Flying cars. What they actually got (and is way more useful but a lot less flashy): Cheap solar energy.

aleph_minus_one 1y ago
> What they naively wished the future was like: Flying cars. This future is already there: We have flying cars: they are called "helicopters" (see also https://xkcd.com/1623/ https://xkcd.com/1623/).
- AstralStorm 1y ago
  Oh they're not even close in availability as cars, much harder to operate, much more expensive and tend to fall out of the sky. Thank you for providing an example that directly maps to usefulness of ANN in most research though.
  - AngryData 1y ago
    Helicopters don't just fall out of the sky, atleast not any different than planes fall out of the sky, they can auto-rotate to the ground without engine power.
    - agurk 1y ago
      You are absolutely correct about autorotation and helicopters not falling out of the sky. There is one nuance that the rotor blades still need to be able to rotate for this, and a failed gearbox can prevent that. Anecdotally that feels like the most common cause when I read about another crash in the North Sea.
    - vunderba 1y ago
      True but even lowering collective and letting autorotation take over you still hit the ground REALLY hard - enough to sustain injuries to your back and neck in some cases. Glide ratios in GA (like highwing cessnas) is much more forgiving assuming you can find a place to put down.

helloplanets 1y ago

I'd be interested in reading some more from the people you're referring to when talking about experts who understand the field. At least to the extent I've followed the discussion, even the top experts are all over the place when it comes to the future of AI. As a counterpoint: Geoffrey Hinton. You could say he's gone off the deep end on a tangent, but I definitely don't his incentive is to make money off of hype. Then there's Yann LeCun saying AI "could actually save humanity from extinction". [0] If these guys just out of touch talking heads, who are the new guard people should read up on? [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/27/godfather-of-ai-raises-odds-of-the-technology-wiping-out-humanity-over-next-30-years https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/27/godfather...

ccppurcell 1y ago

LLMs have blown crypto and nfts off the map, at least for normies like me. I wonder what will blow LLMs off the map?

mountainriver 1y ago

Code assistants alone prove this to be false.

edanm 1y ago

> the promises of groundbreaking use cases that will change the world are obviously not materialising and to anyone that understands the tech it can’t. In what world is this obviously not materializing? Plenty of people use GenAI for coding, with some claiming we're approaching the level of GenAI being able to automate vast portions of a developer's job. Do you think this is wrong and the people saying this (some of them very experienced developers) are simply mistaken or lying? Or do you think it's not a big deal?