7 ms·

Why I don't ride the AI Hype Train

85 points by mertbio 1y ago

baq 1y ago
Foundation models are basically compressed databases of a big chunk (75%?) of human knowledge and the query language is English (...and many others) and you're saying it's a bubble to be ignored. Meanwhile, model providers are serving millions if not billions of tokens daily. Don't want to say this is a dropbox comment class blog post, but certainly it... ignores something.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- stockerta 1y ago
  And those same providers are burning how much money each day with this shit?
  - Applejinx 1y ago
    And carbon. Not just money. There's more externalities to it than just burning money.
  - monsieurbanana 1y ago
    Because they want to control as much of the market as possible, everyone and their dog is using LLMs for work and mails and groceries. That doesn't change their usefulness, if tomorrow they all increase the price x10 it will remain useful for many use cases. Not to mention than in a year or two the costs might go down an order of magnitude for the same accuracy.
- singingfish 1y ago
  Yeah, there's useful, but not that useful. It help to think of them as "language extrusion confabulation machines" to understand the actual limitations.
- _heimdall 1y ago
  While I agree the model is a huge compressed database of written human text, I think its a stretch to call much of what was scrape off the internet as knowledge and I don't personally see it as using language as a query language. I expect a query language to be deterministic, and I expect the other end of the query to only return data that actually exists. LLMs are neither of those, so to me they are impressive natural language engines but they aren't ready a tool for querying human knowledge.
- smcl 1y ago
  I think what they're saying is that the whole "This is going to solve everything" hype around LLMs is a bubble. I think it's undeniable LLM technology will persist in some form as it definitely has uses. But I don't think it will be the trillion-dollar industry that is being touted, I don't think many of these companies will survive on their own without being swallowed up by some bigger FAANG entity (heavily dependent, as they are, on VC funding)
  - tmaly 1y ago
    There is always money to be made with hype. But the amount of investment being made in AI is beyond reasonable in my mind. They will not see the ROI. We have good enough AI right not to increase productivity. I don't see us getting to AGI with the current architecture bearing some new type of breakthrough.
- candiddevmike 1y ago
  IMO, LLMs are a neat technical phenomenon that were released to the public too soon without any regard to their shortcomings or the impact they would have on society.
  - akkad33 1y ago
    It's a way to get free training data
  - pornel 1y ago
    It's funny that when OpenAI developed GPT-2, they've been warning it's going to be disruptive. But the warnings were largely dismissed, because GPT-2 was way too dumb to be taken as a threat.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- Aldipower 1y ago
  And the article starts with exactly this. The big chunk consists ~50% of stolen data!
- xigoi 1y ago
  > Foundation models are basically compressed databases of a big chunk (75%?) of human knowledge and the query language is English (...and many others) and you're saying it's a bubble to be ignored. Wake me up when I can access this database without having to rely on the whims of an evil megacorporation.
- jaredcwhite 1y ago
  GenAI tech demos: wildly impressive. Using them productively & ethically and without getting sucked into a modern-day religious cult: virtually impossible. Yes, I suppose humanity can pat itself on the back that it has managed to invent something which seems so whiz-bang cool and also is so utterly, utterly ghastly…all at the same time.
sneak 1y ago
> Some companies, like Meta, went even further. They didn’t just use web content—they also used pirated books to train their models. (The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem) If a regular person did this, they’d probably get into serious trouble. But when billion-dollar companies do it, they usually get away with it. Someone should tell Anna’s Archive. The US’s criminal enforcement is very much biased into the “rules for thee, but not for me” category, but invoking it here is a trope. Anyone can get away with piracy on the scale of Books3 or The Pile. The reason random people don’t make models is because the hardware and power costs are fucking astronomical, not because they can’t get away with downloading the training data. These sort of hot takes are just as wrong as the breathless “AGI is right around the corner” ones. AI is hugely transformative, and anyone who thinks it’s overhyped doesn’t know the SOTA. It will likely be the single biggest technological advancement of our lifetime.
- Calavar 1y ago
  > Anyone can get away with piracy on the scale of Books3 or The Pile. The obvious counter example would be Aaron Swartz
  - sneak 1y ago
    1. He did it non-anonymously as a form of activism, which seems like an obvious bias toward martyrdom. An argument can be made that he chose fame over effectiveness, just like Assange did. 2. We don’t know if he would have gotten away with it or not. Mental illness killed him via suicide, not the federal indictment. There are several EXTREMELY large pirate libraries in operation presently that anyone can use. They are actively getting away with it, likely because they are explicitly staying anonymous.
- edg5000 1y ago
  No, I think the book pirating thing is different than an individual pirating. It's like comparing genocide to murder. A few murders, not great. A few genocides? Really not cool. This book thing at Meta is something we should never forget. It revealed how utterly broken the US is in this regard, hope they get it sorted. Without the rule of law you'll get a shit country.
bshepard 1y ago
On a more conceptual angle, Landrebe and Smith's "Why Machine's Will Never Rule the World" clarifies the limits of computation w/r/t complex dynamic systems. Here is the core argument: "an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim: 1. Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system. 2. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer.
- edg5000 1y ago
  This is what I believed intuitively, but the reality is more nuanced. I'd rephrase it to: "We can't create something better than humans". A tractor can outplow a human easily just like an LLM can outwork a human on menial, easily verifiable tasks.
- david-gpu 1y ago
  A denser-than-air vehicle that could equal or exceed bird flight --sometines called an airplane-- is for mathematical reasons impossible, for two specific reasons: 1. Bird flight is a capability of a complex dynamic system -- the bird's musculoskeletal system and its brain. 2. Systems of these sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a machine.
- siwatanejo 1y ago
  That core argument reads like a word salad, no offense.
- jiggawatts 1y ago
  This kind of argument is nonsense. It boils down to: "This previously solved problem is unsolvable." The previous solution is a biological brain, and the future solutions are mechanical, but that doesn't matter. Even if it did, such arguments involve little more than waving one's hands about and claiming that there's some poorly specified fundamental difference. There isn't.
edg5000 1y ago
Google has been crawling the web. I think it's about limiting to 1Hz per IP. This means a site with 100 000 pages will take 24 hours to crawl. The crawler could send requests as fast as possible, just distributed across IPs. If I put a website up, everything goes as long as people don't DDoS me. A human crawls at ~1Hz, if a bot tries 1000Hz, this is a denial of service attack. It's hard to block since you can't rate limit IPs due to many people sharing the same IP. So you need heuristics, cookies, etc. Putting paywalled content in the AI is not cool though (such as books), nobody was anticipating this, people got effed unexpectedly. This is piracy on hyperscale. Not fair.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
JKCalhoun 1y ago
> Ever since ChatGPT came out, the tech world has jumped on a new hype train—just like it did before with crypto, NFTs, and the metaverse. Personally, I eschewed all of those — except for LLMs. I'm convinced this one's for real. People though can use "hype" to mean a number of things. AGI by the end of the year? Hype. Decimation of white-collar jobs? Hype. Fundamentally new paradigm and tech the world will have to adapt to? Not hype at all. > Eventually, these companies tried something new: agents. Yeah, that one's still on the hype shelf for me. > This floods social media and websites with low-quality, copy-paste content. No! Welp, there goes social media. ;-) > ChatGPT has around 500 million weekly active users, but only around 20 million of them actually pay for a subscription. That means the vast majority of people think it’s not worth $20 a month. You could say the same for YouTube (and likely wildly surpass that scenario). When you offer a free version, don't be surprised if most users (meekly raises hand) save their pocket money for something else. These are early days and people are sussing out what the thing can do for them. > To me, Apple stands out. They aren’t trying to build a chatbot that knows everything. Instead, they’re focused on using AI as a tool to help people interact with their apps and data in smarter ways. That feels like Apple in gap-filling mode: trying to show the world they're doing something while smart people are trying to figure out what Apple really ought to be doing. They have their own chip dies — could perhaps do a dedicated LLM client architecture that allows it to run on-device? It makes you wonder what Jony Ives (and investors) could possibly be thinking when Apple could easily pivot and own the aiPhone market. Waiting for my own aiPhone someday — with encrypted history saved to my cloud account. Wondering what it will be like for future generations who will have had a personal confidant for decades — since they were teenagers…
- JohnMakin 1y ago
  This is the appropriate view, but the market’s gone all in on hype so we must deal with the consequences when the hype doesnt deliver. It was the same for me with the blockchain/web3 hype craze - I saw interesting game changing applications but nothing anywhere near what the market was going nuts for. the funniest thing is that hype train seamlessly transitioned to “AGI” without batting an eye or an ounce of shame.
  - 1y ago
JCM9 1y ago
The “we don’t need as many workers because AI” line from CEOs isn’t sticking. It might work for a quarter or two but sooner or later these companies must answer hard questions on why they’re not getting measurable returns from massive investments in AI. That day is coming and it’s going to be really ugly. Same for many of these “AI companies” that are burning through cash in a race to the bottom towards a commodity with no real prospects for a sustainable business model. The tech is cool, and can be useful, but the business aspects of all this is a forrest full of dry timber waiting for one strike of lightning to burn the whole thing to the ground.
- conception 1y ago
  I think the thing is that it’s not a massive investment to displace a worker. You can spend ten grand a month on AI tools before you start running into the cost of a single low end tech employee. That’s a lot of AI tools.
  - JCM9 1y ago
    The problem with this picture though is you’re spending 10 grand a month on a product someone else is losing 10 grand a month selling you. It’s beginning to look like a house of cards. The finances of many of these companies are on shaky grounds and they claim “profit” without accounting for the true costs of what they’re doing (eg not counting model training in the COGS when the useful life of a model in 2025 is very limited). When investors realize the returns won’t be there and shut off the free cash taps the party will be over.
    - spacemadness 1y ago
      The problem generally starts with “we need our own nuclear power plants to power this tech.”
      - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
        For the geeky non-serious sci-fi kid in me it's wild to live in the future, where there is serious talks of building independent from the grid nuclear power plants to power AIs. Because one of the big things from all the pre-thinking about AI was that we definitely DON'T want to be able to turn their power off remotely. Glad removing that capability is already in the plan. Totally doesn't seem sketchy.
brookst 1y ago
This is a terrible article, apparently one of those that starts with a title and then goes in search of every possible argument to support the conclusion. The whole thing is bad and disingenuous (somehow the very real impact of excessive crawling by AI companies in an indictment of the value of the output). And it just gets worse. For instance: > If you’re looking something up [on a search engine], you usually type a few keywords and get a list of links. But with a chatbot, you have to write full sentences, and how fast you can type limits how fast you can interact. Then, instead of getting quick, scannable links, you get a big block of text. You read it—but you’re always aware it might be wrong. On a regular search engine, you can judge a source just by looking at the domain of the website, the design of the page or even reading the “About” page. Got that? Chatbots make you type whole sentences, and instead of a short list of links the reader can easily scan, click through, analyze quality of graphic designs, and read the obviously-totally-trustworthy About pages to determine accuracy… you get answers in one place that could be wrong. The fact that all chatbots include citations that you can click to do the same rigorous design-based fact checking is omitted, presumably because it would weaken the argument. There are legit reasons to dislike the ethics of AI companies, and there are legit reasons believe this is a dot bomb style bubble, and there are legit reasons to be skeptical that the tech has enough headroom to reach AGI. But this article just puts little bits of each in a blender and hopes for the best. It’s funny because while decrying “hype”, it uses all the same cheap and lazy rhetorical techniques as the worst AI hypesters. Further illustrating the “you become what you hate” principle, I suppose.
- edg5000 1y ago
  Agreed!
- jiggawatts 1y ago
  > Chatbots make you type whole sentences I've noticed that I've solved quite a few problems simply by being forced to spell out the precise problem statement to an AI bot. I knew the answer as soon as I had finished typing the question out in full, and watching the AI confirm my suspicions was superfluous but gratifying. I also now feel guilty for not providing the same level of detail to other people that I've tasked with something.
hoseja 1y ago
"Waaah waah they didn't ask permission to read the internet" Meanwhile unintentionally ultrarlhfrelevant title photo.
feizhuzheng 1y ago
wait until the real gold comes out
matsemann 1y ago
I don't have anything particular against using AI tools in my workday in the future. I just don't want to spend my time experimenting with it now, and have no need to be on the bleeding edge. If in a year things are stable and useful, I can just learn whatever is vogue then. You won't miss out by not jumping on the train now. Most tools I use were made long before I started my career as a software engineer, and still I got up to speed. There is no big moat that experienced developers won't be able to quickly get over.
teddyh 1y ago
Someday, somebody might use “AI” to simulate the viewing of ads, and since AI might perfectly simulate viewing an ad, but will not spend money as a result, the whole ad economy will collapse.
- b112 1y ago
  You're my hero (gets to work diligently on this)
- lompad 1y ago
  So what you're basically saying is, we need AI-AdNauseam as quickly as possible. Thank you for the idea. Considering how many free offerings there are, this might actually just work.
- guappa 1y ago
  Ads industry is already way way overvalued.
- owebmaster 1y ago
  It won't change much because the majority of views are already bots. People will still pay, even more, for the small % that are real.
brap 1y ago
So what I got from this article was: 1. They train on website data without permission 2. They require a lot of electricity 3. Kids use them to cheat on homework And honestly this is where I stopped reading. I’m the biggest AI hater but none of these are good arguments against AI (I would argue that #3 is actually an argument for AI). If this is what you’re leading with then I’m not particularly interested in reading the rest.
- edg5000 1y ago
  What do you hate about it? Because LLM companies take away the hardfought control gained by the the individual from their moated castle?
- kyykky 1y ago
  Do you prefer that kids don’t learn anything?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
pknerd 1y ago
Will be using AI to summarize this HN disucssion and finding insights.
dizhn 1y ago
You have to kind of bury your head in the sand to claim it is all hype. > They’re just tools. If they disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn’t affect how I work or live. This sounds like prepper mentality? Or is it more objectively sound like quitting Facebook?
reedf1 1y ago
I have my own misgivings about AI - but this article certainly misses the mark.
simonw 1y ago
Author's conclusion here is pretty much where I'm at too: > In the end, I see AI for what it is: a powerful but limited tool—not a revolution, not a replacement for human thinking, and definitely not something worth worshipping. How much of a "revolution" it is depends on your field though. I think computer programming is still the field that is most impacted by potential productivity improvements from these tools.
- tim333 1y ago
  There's a difference between current AI which is not a revolution and future AI which does have the potential for something like the industrial revolution.
  - insane_dreamer 1y ago
    Except that future AI has been predicted for a long time now. Are we really much closer to AGI than we were 10 years ago?
    - tim333 1y ago
      I'm kind of a believer in Kurzweil / Moore's law stuff that you can predict when it'll turn up by extrapolating hardware progress. That has always had the human level date around 2030.
      - insane_dreamer 1y ago
        That assumes you can estimate the hardware requirements needed for the creation of AGI.
        tim333 1y ago
        Yeah. You can estimate roughly what you need for something functionally equivalent to a brain. It comes out around 100 TFLOPS give or take a couple of zeros so we kind of have that now which gives people five years to sort the algorithms if it's going to be 2030.
akkad33 1y ago
To me it's just a new way of representing information that makes information on the web easily accessible to people. So in a way it's a breakthrough just like Google was a breakthrough. Google's pagerank represented the web as a graph and you could easily go to related pages. Gpts embed concepts in a high dimensional space and there are links between them that makes it easy to query this knowledge représentation. So I don't think it will replace humans so much as disrupt the knowledge industry just like Google
lvl155 1y ago
The hype is on OpenAI not AI. AI is nothing new. It’s been around for a very long time and it will continue to get better as a function of data and compute. Remember the dotcom days? People got hyped on Netscape, AOL, Cisco, etc. There will be plenty of those this time around too.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
moconnor 1y ago
> I use them myself... I don’t pay for them. This seems to be a common disconnect. If you're using the free version of ChatGPT, you don't get to see what everybody else is seeing, not even close. > None of the past “big things” were pushed like this. They didn’t get flooded with billions in investment before proving themselves Oh, sweet summer child ^^ I assume Mert was not around to witness the internet boom and bust. Exactly this happened. There is a lot of conflation in this article. It cites a lot of ethical concerns around the sourcing and training of data, expected job losses and the issues around that, but those are not reasons to doubt the _efficacy_ of AI. There are surprisingly few and weak arguments as to why the hype is not justified, presumably because the author hasn't used powerful models (see above). It's possible to believe the hype is real and still to find AI unethical. But this article just mixes it all into a big pot of "AI bad" without addressing the cognitive dissonance required to believe both "AI is not very useful" and "AI will eliminate problematic numbers of jobs".
sega_sai 1y ago
To be honest, this is getting tiring, every day we have multiple articles on HN how AI is all hype, 'stochastic parrots' and so on. I think it is becoming fashionable among some people to be a AI/LLM sceptic. Certainly there are people who overhype AI/LLMs. Also any discussion of AGI is a mere speculation at this point, but you can't deny that LLMs are revolutionary tools, and we are still learning their limits. I find it bizarre when people deny that.
franze 1y ago
as someone who is running claude code as admin (with sudo pwd in claude.md) on my laptop and on a server - and it completely changed how I interact with computers - I honestly can not fathom the ongoing dismissal of AI as the one thing that will changes everbodies future. the jobs killed by AI is for me mostly zero sum thinking in action, also all AI companies seem to be just one AI company instead of a (currently) healthy competition. and apparently all users are duped cause they suddenly are up to a 100x more productive. and yes, the energy needed is horrible (is AI now over bitcoin or still below). the anecdotes ad hallucinations are true, but what about the success stories? ie faster vacation research? the fact that now everybody with chatgpt has now access to a world class team of doctors (where perviously often there was none). yes, criticism of AI and AI companies is good and necessary. said that: even if all technological progress would stop right now it is the most meaningful technological change I experienced in the last 25 years I am working it/web stuff.
jaxr 1y ago
Lost me un the first section. It's like when anti-vaxers say vaccines are bad because they were developed unethically. It's just a bad argument. Also, I learned about Bitcoin when it was worth 8 USD and got obsessed with the tech but always thought it was over hyped. I never owned one Satoshi. I still think crypto ended up being hype and not adding real value to the world. But I could be very very wealthy if I had jumped to that hype train XD. I think with all the hype, AI does provide some real value to the world. That's the train I'm jumping in.
ozim 1y ago
Author is a software dev and still 90% of what he understands from it is “there is a box you ask smart machine silly questions and it answers like human does or can generate a funny cat”. There is more to it but it requires more effort to learn and see for yourself instead of repeating laundry list of “why is it bad” things posted by all the other AI doomers.
jsnell 1y ago
This genre of writing is quite hard to engage with productively. It is really long due to throwing everything at the wall. Doesn't matter if the argument is obsolete, a lie, unprovable, or actually a legit and we'll researched complaint. Into the article it goes. For people who want to believe the author, this flooding the zone approach is catnip. They get the confirmation they need. The people who don't want to believe the author will just dismiss the entire article after the first argument they recognize as invalid. And for the people in the middle, it's impossible to have a good discussion about the article and get a better understanding because there are too many unrelated arguments packed together. Trying to rebut or support just one of them just feels like a waste of time. If you're trying to write an effective anti-AI article, it really would be way more effective to pick the 1-2 strongest points (whatever they are).
- s_ting765 1y ago
  I was frustrated by the author's article but for reasons different than yours. Their title is clickbait and implies a personal viewpoint. I kept reading to see any personal reasons for why they dislike AI. Everything they mention you can google in 5 mins and read for yourself what other people think about AI. The only personal reason comes at the end where he says he would never log in to use an AI product. The entire rant could have been a tweet.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
> But here’s the thing—none of the past “big things” were pushed like this. They didn’t get flooded with billions in investment before proving themselves. I think the DotCom bubble would fit the above description (smaller numbers of $, but similar hype).
spacemadness 1y ago
“We might raise a generation that doesn’t know how to write essays, can’t read and understand long articles, can’t communicate well, and struggles with real relationships.” I think we entered this reality a while ago from the rampant use of social media, dating apps, and short form content.
shantnutiwari 1y ago
sorry, but thats a misleading title. The article is more like "Everything I hate about the AI companies" You can hate (or at least disagree with) how companies like OpenAi work, and still believe in their hype (or at least that they will make good money). Everyone hate cigarette companies yet they continue giving great stock returns. Most of the article is standard complaint we've heard before. Im not defending OpenaI (or MEta or whatever), but these complaints have been heard a million times. Why is this on the front page?
Emeryhughes3 1y ago
[dead]

85 points by mertbio 1y ago

baq 1y ago

Foundation models are basically compressed databases of a big chunk (75%?) of human knowledge and the query language is English (...and many others) and you're saying it's a bubble to be ignored. Meanwhile, model providers are serving millions if not billions of tokens daily. Don't want to say this is a dropbox comment class blog post, but certainly it... ignores something.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
stockerta 1y ago
And those same providers are burning how much money each day with this shit?
- Applejinx 1y ago
  And carbon. Not just money. There's more externalities to it than just burning money.
- monsieurbanana 1y ago
  Because they want to control as much of the market as possible, everyone and their dog is using LLMs for work and mails and groceries. That doesn't change their usefulness, if tomorrow they all increase the price x10 it will remain useful for many use cases. Not to mention than in a year or two the costs might go down an order of magnitude for the same accuracy.
singingfish 1y ago
Yeah, there's useful, but not that useful. It help to think of them as "language extrusion confabulation machines" to understand the actual limitations.
_heimdall 1y ago
While I agree the model is a huge compressed database of written human text, I think its a stretch to call much of what was scrape off the internet as knowledge and I don't personally see it as using language as a query language. I expect a query language to be deterministic, and I expect the other end of the query to only return data that actually exists. LLMs are neither of those, so to me they are impressive natural language engines but they aren't ready a tool for querying human knowledge.
smcl 1y ago
I think what they're saying is that the whole "This is going to solve everything" hype around LLMs is a bubble. I think it's undeniable LLM technology will persist in some form as it definitely has uses. But I don't think it will be the trillion-dollar industry that is being touted, I don't think many of these companies will survive on their own without being swallowed up by some bigger FAANG entity (heavily dependent, as they are, on VC funding)
- tmaly 1y ago
  There is always money to be made with hype. But the amount of investment being made in AI is beyond reasonable in my mind. They will not see the ROI. We have good enough AI right not to increase productivity. I don't see us getting to AGI with the current architecture bearing some new type of breakthrough.
candiddevmike 1y ago
IMO, LLMs are a neat technical phenomenon that were released to the public too soon without any regard to their shortcomings or the impact they would have on society.
- akkad33 1y ago
  It's a way to get free training data
- pornel 1y ago
  It's funny that when OpenAI developed GPT-2, they've been warning it's going to be disruptive. But the warnings were largely dismissed, because GPT-2 was way too dumb to be taken as a threat.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
Aldipower 1y ago
And the article starts with exactly this. The big chunk consists ~50% of stolen data!
xigoi 1y ago
> Foundation models are basically compressed databases of a big chunk (75%?) of human knowledge and the query language is English (...and many others) and you're saying it's a bubble to be ignored. Wake me up when I can access this database without having to rely on the whims of an evil megacorporation.
jaredcwhite 1y ago
GenAI tech demos: wildly impressive. Using them productively & ethically and without getting sucked into a modern-day religious cult: virtually impossible. Yes, I suppose humanity can pat itself on the back that it has managed to invent something which seems so whiz-bang cool and also is so utterly, utterly ghastly…all at the same time.

sneak 1y ago

> Some companies, like Meta, went even further. They didn’t just use web content—they also used pirated books to train their models. (The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem) If a regular person did this, they’d probably get into serious trouble. But when billion-dollar companies do it, they usually get away with it. Someone should tell Anna’s Archive. The US’s criminal enforcement is very much biased into the “rules for thee, but not for me” category, but invoking it here is a trope. Anyone can get away with piracy on the scale of Books3 or The Pile. The reason random people don’t make models is because the hardware and power costs are fucking astronomical, not because they can’t get away with downloading the training data. These sort of hot takes are just as wrong as the breathless “AGI is right around the corner” ones. AI is hugely transformative, and anyone who thinks it’s overhyped doesn’t know the SOTA. It will likely be the single biggest technological advancement of our lifetime.

Calavar 1y ago
> Anyone can get away with piracy on the scale of Books3 or The Pile. The obvious counter example would be Aaron Swartz
- sneak 1y ago
  1. He did it non-anonymously as a form of activism, which seems like an obvious bias toward martyrdom. An argument can be made that he chose fame over effectiveness, just like Assange did. 2. We don’t know if he would have gotten away with it or not. Mental illness killed him via suicide, not the federal indictment. There are several EXTREMELY large pirate libraries in operation presently that anyone can use. They are actively getting away with it, likely because they are explicitly staying anonymous.
edg5000 1y ago
No, I think the book pirating thing is different than an individual pirating. It's like comparing genocide to murder. A few murders, not great. A few genocides? Really not cool. This book thing at Meta is something we should never forget. It revealed how utterly broken the US is in this regard, hope they get it sorted. Without the rule of law you'll get a shit country.

bshepard 1y ago

On a more conceptual angle, Landrebe and Smith's "Why Machine's Will Never Rule the World" clarifies the limits of computation w/r/t complex dynamic systems. Here is the core argument: "an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim: 1. Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system. 2. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer.

edg5000 1y ago
This is what I believed intuitively, but the reality is more nuanced. I'd rephrase it to: "We can't create something better than humans". A tractor can outplow a human easily just like an LLM can outwork a human on menial, easily verifiable tasks.
david-gpu 1y ago
A denser-than-air vehicle that could equal or exceed bird flight --sometines called an airplane-- is for mathematical reasons impossible, for two specific reasons: 1. Bird flight is a capability of a complex dynamic system -- the bird's musculoskeletal system and its brain. 2. Systems of these sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a machine.
siwatanejo 1y ago
That core argument reads like a word salad, no offense.
jiggawatts 1y ago
This kind of argument is nonsense. It boils down to: "This previously solved problem is unsolvable." The previous solution is a biological brain, and the future solutions are mechanical, but that doesn't matter. Even if it did, such arguments involve little more than waving one's hands about and claiming that there's some poorly specified fundamental difference. There isn't.

edg5000 1y ago

Google has been crawling the web. I think it's about limiting to 1Hz per IP. This means a site with 100 000 pages will take 24 hours to crawl. The crawler could send requests as fast as possible, just distributed across IPs. If I put a website up, everything goes as long as people don't DDoS me. A human crawls at ~1Hz, if a bot tries 1000Hz, this is a denial of service attack. It's hard to block since you can't rate limit IPs due to many people sharing the same IP. So you need heuristics, cookies, etc. Putting paywalled content in the AI is not cool though (such as books), nobody was anticipating this, people got effed unexpectedly. This is piracy on hyperscale. Not fair.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

JKCalhoun 1y ago

> Ever since ChatGPT came out, the tech world has jumped on a new hype train—just like it did before with crypto, NFTs, and the metaverse. Personally, I eschewed all of those — except for LLMs. I'm convinced this one's for real. People though can use "hype" to mean a number of things. AGI by the end of the year? Hype. Decimation of white-collar jobs? Hype. Fundamentally new paradigm and tech the world will have to adapt to? Not hype at all. > Eventually, these companies tried something new: agents. Yeah, that one's still on the hype shelf for me. > This floods social media and websites with low-quality, copy-paste content. No! Welp, there goes social media. ;-) > ChatGPT has around 500 million weekly active users, but only around 20 million of them actually pay for a subscription. That means the vast majority of people think it’s not worth $20 a month. You could say the same for YouTube (and likely wildly surpass that scenario). When you offer a free version, don't be surprised if most users (meekly raises hand) save their pocket money for something else. These are early days and people are sussing out what the thing can do for them. > To me, Apple stands out. They aren’t trying to build a chatbot that knows everything. Instead, they’re focused on using AI as a tool to help people interact with their apps and data in smarter ways. That feels like Apple in gap-filling mode: trying to show the world they're doing something while smart people are trying to figure out what Apple really ought to be doing. They have their own chip dies — could perhaps do a dedicated LLM client architecture that allows it to run on-device? It makes you wonder what Jony Ives (and investors) could possibly be thinking when Apple could easily pivot and own the aiPhone market. Waiting for my own aiPhone someday — with encrypted history saved to my cloud account. Wondering what it will be like for future generations who will have had a personal confidant for decades — since they were teenagers…

JohnMakin 1y ago
This is the appropriate view, but the market’s gone all in on hype so we must deal with the consequences when the hype doesnt deliver. It was the same for me with the blockchain/web3 hype craze - I saw interesting game changing applications but nothing anywhere near what the market was going nuts for. the funniest thing is that hype train seamlessly transitioned to “AGI” without batting an eye or an ounce of shame.
- 1y ago

JCM9 1y ago

The “we don’t need as many workers because AI” line from CEOs isn’t sticking. It might work for a quarter or two but sooner or later these companies must answer hard questions on why they’re not getting measurable returns from massive investments in AI. That day is coming and it’s going to be really ugly. Same for many of these “AI companies” that are burning through cash in a race to the bottom towards a commodity with no real prospects for a sustainable business model. The tech is cool, and can be useful, but the business aspects of all this is a forrest full of dry timber waiting for one strike of lightning to burn the whole thing to the ground.

conception 1y ago
I think the thing is that it’s not a massive investment to displace a worker. You can spend ten grand a month on AI tools before you start running into the cost of a single low end tech employee. That’s a lot of AI tools.
- JCM9 1y ago
  The problem with this picture though is you’re spending 10 grand a month on a product someone else is losing 10 grand a month selling you. It’s beginning to look like a house of cards. The finances of many of these companies are on shaky grounds and they claim “profit” without accounting for the true costs of what they’re doing (eg not counting model training in the COGS when the useful life of a model in 2025 is very limited). When investors realize the returns won’t be there and shut off the free cash taps the party will be over.
  - spacemadness 1y ago
    The problem generally starts with “we need our own nuclear power plants to power this tech.”
    - _DeadFred_ 1y ago
      For the geeky non-serious sci-fi kid in me it's wild to live in the future, where there is serious talks of building independent from the grid nuclear power plants to power AIs. Because one of the big things from all the pre-thinking about AI was that we definitely DON'T want to be able to turn their power off remotely. Glad removing that capability is already in the plan. Totally doesn't seem sketchy.

brookst 1y ago

This is a terrible article, apparently one of those that starts with a title and then goes in search of every possible argument to support the conclusion. The whole thing is bad and disingenuous (somehow the very real impact of excessive crawling by AI companies in an indictment of the value of the output). And it just gets worse. For instance: > If you’re looking something up [on a search engine], you usually type a few keywords and get a list of links. But with a chatbot, you have to write full sentences, and how fast you can type limits how fast you can interact. Then, instead of getting quick, scannable links, you get a big block of text. You read it—but you’re always aware it might be wrong. On a regular search engine, you can judge a source just by looking at the domain of the website, the design of the page or even reading the “About” page. Got that? Chatbots make you type whole sentences, and instead of a short list of links the reader can easily scan, click through, analyze quality of graphic designs, and read the obviously-totally-trustworthy About pages to determine accuracy… you get answers in one place that could be wrong. The fact that all chatbots include citations that you can click to do the same rigorous design-based fact checking is omitted, presumably because it would weaken the argument. There are legit reasons to dislike the ethics of AI companies, and there are legit reasons believe this is a dot bomb style bubble, and there are legit reasons to be skeptical that the tech has enough headroom to reach AGI. But this article just puts little bits of each in a blender and hopes for the best. It’s funny because while decrying “hype”, it uses all the same cheap and lazy rhetorical techniques as the worst AI hypesters. Further illustrating the “you become what you hate” principle, I suppose.

edg5000 1y ago
Agreed!
jiggawatts 1y ago
> Chatbots make you type whole sentences I've noticed that I've solved quite a few problems simply by being forced to spell out the precise problem statement to an AI bot. I knew the answer as soon as I had finished typing the question out in full, and watching the AI confirm my suspicions was superfluous but gratifying. I also now feel guilty for not providing the same level of detail to other people that I've tasked with something.

hoseja 1y ago

"Waaah waah they didn't ask permission to read the internet" Meanwhile unintentionally ultrarlhfrelevant title photo.

feizhuzheng 1y ago

wait until the real gold comes out

matsemann 1y ago

I don't have anything particular against using AI tools in my workday in the future. I just don't want to spend my time experimenting with it now, and have no need to be on the bleeding edge. If in a year things are stable and useful, I can just learn whatever is vogue then. You won't miss out by not jumping on the train now. Most tools I use were made long before I started my career as a software engineer, and still I got up to speed. There is no big moat that experienced developers won't be able to quickly get over.

teddyh 1y ago

Someday, somebody might use “AI” to simulate the viewing of ads, and since AI might perfectly simulate viewing an ad, but will not spend money as a result, the whole ad economy will collapse.

b112 1y ago
You're my hero (gets to work diligently on this)
lompad 1y ago
So what you're basically saying is, we need AI-AdNauseam as quickly as possible. Thank you for the idea. Considering how many free offerings there are, this might actually just work.
guappa 1y ago
Ads industry is already way way overvalued.
owebmaster 1y ago
It won't change much because the majority of views are already bots. People will still pay, even more, for the small % that are real.

brap 1y ago

So what I got from this article was: 1. They train on website data without permission 2. They require a lot of electricity 3. Kids use them to cheat on homework And honestly this is where I stopped reading. I’m the biggest AI hater but none of these are good arguments against AI (I would argue that #3 is actually an argument for AI). If this is what you’re leading with then I’m not particularly interested in reading the rest.

edg5000 1y ago
What do you hate about it? Because LLM companies take away the hardfought control gained by the the individual from their moated castle?
kyykky 1y ago
Do you prefer that kids don’t learn anything?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

pknerd 1y ago

Will be using AI to summarize this HN disucssion and finding insights.

dizhn 1y ago

You have to kind of bury your head in the sand to claim it is all hype. > They’re just tools. If they disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn’t affect how I work or live. This sounds like prepper mentality? Or is it more objectively sound like quitting Facebook?

reedf1 1y ago

I have my own misgivings about AI - but this article certainly misses the mark.

simonw 1y ago

Author's conclusion here is pretty much where I'm at too: > In the end, I see AI for what it is: a powerful but limited tool—not a revolution, not a replacement for human thinking, and definitely not something worth worshipping. How much of a "revolution" it is depends on your field though. I think computer programming is still the field that is most impacted by potential productivity improvements from these tools.

tim333 1y ago
There's a difference between current AI which is not a revolution and future AI which does have the potential for something like the industrial revolution.
- insane_dreamer 1y ago
  Except that future AI has been predicted for a long time now. Are we really much closer to AGI than we were 10 years ago?
  - tim333 1y ago
    I'm kind of a believer in Kurzweil / Moore's law stuff that you can predict when it'll turn up by extrapolating hardware progress. That has always had the human level date around 2030.
    - insane_dreamer 1y ago
      That assumes you can estimate the hardware requirements needed for the creation of AGI.
      - tim333 1y ago
        Yeah. You can estimate roughly what you need for something functionally equivalent to a brain. It comes out around 100 TFLOPS give or take a couple of zeros so we kind of have that now which gives people five years to sort the algorithms if it's going to be 2030.

akkad33 1y ago

To me it's just a new way of representing information that makes information on the web easily accessible to people. So in a way it's a breakthrough just like Google was a breakthrough. Google's pagerank represented the web as a graph and you could easily go to related pages. Gpts embed concepts in a high dimensional space and there are links between them that makes it easy to query this knowledge représentation. So I don't think it will replace humans so much as disrupt the knowledge industry just like Google

lvl155 1y ago

The hype is on OpenAI not AI. AI is nothing new. It’s been around for a very long time and it will continue to get better as a function of data and compute. Remember the dotcom days? People got hyped on Netscape, AOL, Cisco, etc. There will be plenty of those this time around too.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

moconnor 1y ago

> I use them myself... I don’t pay for them. This seems to be a common disconnect. If you're using the free version of ChatGPT, you don't get to see what everybody else is seeing, not even close. > None of the past “big things” were pushed like this. They didn’t get flooded with billions in investment before proving themselves Oh, sweet summer child ^^ I assume Mert was not around to witness the internet boom and bust. Exactly this happened. There is a lot of conflation in this article. It cites a lot of ethical concerns around the sourcing and training of data, expected job losses and the issues around that, but those are not reasons to doubt the _efficacy_ of AI. There are surprisingly few and weak arguments as to why the hype is not justified, presumably because the author hasn't used powerful models (see above). It's possible to believe the hype is real and still to find AI unethical. But this article just mixes it all into a big pot of "AI bad" without addressing the cognitive dissonance required to believe both "AI is not very useful" and "AI will eliminate problematic numbers of jobs".

sega_sai 1y ago

To be honest, this is getting tiring, every day we have multiple articles on HN how AI is all hype, 'stochastic parrots' and so on. I think it is becoming fashionable among some people to be a AI/LLM sceptic. Certainly there are people who overhype AI/LLMs. Also any discussion of AGI is a mere speculation at this point, but you can't deny that LLMs are revolutionary tools, and we are still learning their limits. I find it bizarre when people deny that.

franze 1y ago

as someone who is running claude code as admin (with sudo pwd in claude.md) on my laptop and on a server - and it completely changed how I interact with computers - I honestly can not fathom the ongoing dismissal of AI as the one thing that will changes everbodies future. the jobs killed by AI is for me mostly zero sum thinking in action, also all AI companies seem to be just one AI company instead of a (currently) healthy competition. and apparently all users are duped cause they suddenly are up to a 100x more productive. and yes, the energy needed is horrible (is AI now over bitcoin or still below). the anecdotes ad hallucinations are true, but what about the success stories? ie faster vacation research? the fact that now everybody with chatgpt has now access to a world class team of doctors (where perviously often there was none). yes, criticism of AI and AI companies is good and necessary. said that: even if all technological progress would stop right now it is the most meaningful technological change I experienced in the last 25 years I am working it/web stuff.

jaxr 1y ago

Lost me un the first section. It's like when anti-vaxers say vaccines are bad because they were developed unethically. It's just a bad argument. Also, I learned about Bitcoin when it was worth 8 USD and got obsessed with the tech but always thought it was over hyped. I never owned one Satoshi. I still think crypto ended up being hype and not adding real value to the world. But I could be very very wealthy if I had jumped to that hype train XD. I think with all the hype, AI does provide some real value to the world. That's the train I'm jumping in.

ozim 1y ago

Author is a software dev and still 90% of what he understands from it is “there is a box you ask smart machine silly questions and it answers like human does or can generate a funny cat”. There is more to it but it requires more effort to learn and see for yourself instead of repeating laundry list of “why is it bad” things posted by all the other AI doomers.

jsnell 1y ago

This genre of writing is quite hard to engage with productively. It is really long due to throwing everything at the wall. Doesn't matter if the argument is obsolete, a lie, unprovable, or actually a legit and we'll researched complaint. Into the article it goes. For people who want to believe the author, this flooding the zone approach is catnip. They get the confirmation they need. The people who don't want to believe the author will just dismiss the entire article after the first argument they recognize as invalid. And for the people in the middle, it's impossible to have a good discussion about the article and get a better understanding because there are too many unrelated arguments packed together. Trying to rebut or support just one of them just feels like a waste of time. If you're trying to write an effective anti-AI article, it really would be way more effective to pick the 1-2 strongest points (whatever they are).

s_ting765 1y ago
I was frustrated by the author's article but for reasons different than yours. Their title is clickbait and implies a personal viewpoint. I kept reading to see any personal reasons for why they dislike AI. Everything they mention you can google in 5 mins and read for yourself what other people think about AI. The only personal reason comes at the end where he says he would never log in to use an AI product. The entire rant could have been a tweet.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

> But here’s the thing—none of the past “big things” were pushed like this. They didn’t get flooded with billions in investment before proving themselves. I think the DotCom bubble would fit the above description (smaller numbers of $, but similar hype).

spacemadness 1y ago

“We might raise a generation that doesn’t know how to write essays, can’t read and understand long articles, can’t communicate well, and struggles with real relationships.” I think we entered this reality a while ago from the rampant use of social media, dating apps, and short form content.

shantnutiwari 1y ago

sorry, but thats a misleading title. The article is more like "Everything I hate about the AI companies" You can hate (or at least disagree with) how companies like OpenAi work, and still believe in their hype (or at least that they will make good money). Everyone hate cigarette companies yet they continue giving great stock returns. Most of the article is standard complaint we've heard before. Im not defending OpenaI (or MEta or whatever), but these complaints have been heard a million times. Why is this on the front page?

Emeryhughes3 1y ago

[dead]