3 ms·

Simple minds want to believe one simple thing and then rationalize everything else to force consistency with that one simple idea. If you want to believe the s

by panarky 4mo ago

Simple minds want to believe one simple thing and then rationalize everything else to force consistency with that one simple idea. If you want to believe the simple idea that AI is mostly hype, then you'll get stuck in a multi-year loop talking about stochastic parrots, ridiculous valuations, and doomer scaredycats. But the real world isn't so simple. Multiple seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time. Some AI is useless. Some is incredibly powerful and useful even though it makes mistakes. Some companies are wildly overvalued. Some extremely large and expensive companies will quadruple from here. Some frightening scenarios will look silly in hindsight. Other frightening things will happen that none of the doomers foresee. It would be great to explore those new ideas and possibilities. It's so boring rehashing the same old tired and worn out ideas like "they're just hyping the danger to pump their shares up."

dundarious 4mo ago
What you have written does not seem to be in close contact with the OP. He talks positively about the GLM news and whatnot. He is highly skeptical only of the "doom" scenarios, including upending most or a massive amount of jobs, and how that is deployed to keep the investment machine working at such breakneck pace.
jrflowers 4mo ago
I love this website because people will write stuff like “I believe the hype because my brain is big, ‘believing the hype’ is actually very complex and cannot be embraced by lesser intellects”
- bigyabai 4mo ago
  "I cannot be contradicted because I can hold conflicting viewpoints" was Chomsky's bit, HN can only take credit for imitating it.
  - jrflowers 4mo ago
    “Dario Amodei doesn’t seem like he can tell the future” - Simple. Pedestrian. The roughshod cogitation of a country oaf. “Maybe he can” - Complex. Divine, possibly? A breathtaking filigree of nuance, like an Alex Grey painting of conceptual allemande.
- scarmig 4mo ago
  There are reasonable anti- and pro-AI views. There are also unreasonable ones on both sides, and it's best if they are ignored. However, on a site like HN or Reddit, you're far more likely to hear squawking about "stochastic parrots" or a rant about AI water usage than the mirror on the pro-AI side, making them harder to ignore.
  - jrflowers 4mo ago
    It’s funny that a lot of what gets framed as pro- vs anti- AI arguments would be better described as past/present vs future arguments. If one guy is saying “that’s a stochastic parrot” and the second guy says “it’s going to achieve apotheosis and bring about global communism or feudalism or whatever while maximizing shareholder value” they’re not arguing about technology, they’re arguing about the second guy’s status as a clairvoyant. You could post “fortune tellers used to be considered fraudsters and charlatans” and reasonably expect a “Get a load of the Luddite over here. Go raise a barn, Josiah!” response on the internet these days despite not mentioning AI or technology at all
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
sublinear 4mo ago
> Some AI is useless. Some is incredibly powerful... It would be great to explore those new ideas and possibilities. I agree, but it's not so mysterious what will win out. Even if the criticism is repeated so often, that's because much of it is still valid. LLMs are not AGI. A statistical model of language helps fill in gaps. This is super useful for new and much improved UI/UX ideas that converge with better accessibility. Similar is true for generating images, video, audio, etc. There are situations where it's the right tool for expressing an idea. What we need is a sense of maturity. The limitations are very clear to everyone now, and we're already past the disillusionment. If we can rein in the abuse, there should be a good path forward. The technology is already boring and that's a very good sign.
dodu_ 4mo ago
[dead]
- scarmig 4mo ago
  Regardless of whether you believe in doom or not, it's this kind of wild, willful misunderstanding that makes people roll their eyes and dismiss you. Yes, people at Anthropic (and OpenAI, for that matter!) really, genuinely do believe AI poses a potential existential threat to humanity; every single one that I know personally believes that. This has been pointed out hundreds of times, and to simply dismiss it as marketing hype by crypto bros to increase IPO valuations long ago passed into the realm of conspiracy thinking.
  - dodu_ 4mo ago
    > genuinely do believe AI poses a potential existential threat to humanity; every single one that I know personally believes that. This has been pointed out hundreds of times, and to simply dismiss it as marketing hype by crypto bros to increase IPO valuations long ago passed into the realm of conspiracy thinking. "They are not in a thought bubble YOU are in the thought bubble" I am absolutely BTFO'd, you got me.
    - scarmig 4mo ago
      No; I'm only stating that your model of reality is off, and I'm correcting it. No, the folks at the frontier labs do not believe they are trying to scam people with an NFT-tier fraud, and their warnings are not an attempt at marketing hype.
      - dodu_ 4mo ago
        [flagged]
        deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
        4mo ago
jamiek88 4mo ago
[flagged]
chongli 4mo ago
Some AI is useless The question is not whether AI is useful. It is useful, full stop. The question is whether AI is useful enough to justify valuations that dwarf the GDP of all but the top 20 countries in the world. As it stands right now, it's not even close! The leaked OpenAI financials put these AI companies in the same profitability territory as utilities, with zero justification for these crazy valuations.
- scarmig 4mo ago
  Technically, it's the time discounted rate of future profits that determine valuations. If you take it as a given that they will provide exactly as much value as they do today, then, yes, your question has the obvious answer of no. If you think AI will provide greater value in the future, the answer depends on the value you think it will have.
  - chongli 4mo ago
    Technically, it's the time discounted rate of future profits that determine valuations Close, it's the time-discounted expectation of future returns. This seems related to future profits but it need not be. Historically, stocks tend to perform poorly after IPOs. There's no guarantee that (say) Anthropic's stock price would ever recover after a post-IPO drop. The recent attempts by Anthropic et al. to circumvent the usual rules for inclusion in indices have raised red flags all over the place, with many calling it a naked attempt to raid everyone's pension funds for hundreds of billions in ill-gotten capital.
- snowe2010 4mo ago
  > The question is not whether AI is useful. It is useful, full stop. And nukes are useful by some metric too. AI (llms) is not useful in any way that we as humanity should be pushing for. It’s more harmful than good in every way possible. It’s honestly astounding to me that everyone’s ethics are so weak as to believe that somehow these incredible destructive companies are somehow good for humanity.

by panarky 4mo ago

dundarious 4mo ago

What you have written does not seem to be in close contact with the OP. He talks positively about the GLM news and whatnot. He is highly skeptical only of the "doom" scenarios, including upending most or a massive amount of jobs, and how that is deployed to keep the investment machine working at such breakneck pace.

jrflowers 4mo ago

I love this website because people will write stuff like “I believe the hype because my brain is big, ‘believing the hype’ is actually very complex and cannot be embraced by lesser intellects”

bigyabai 4mo ago
"I cannot be contradicted because I can hold conflicting viewpoints" was Chomsky's bit, HN can only take credit for imitating it.
- jrflowers 4mo ago
  “Dario Amodei doesn’t seem like he can tell the future” - Simple. Pedestrian. The roughshod cogitation of a country oaf. “Maybe he can” - Complex. Divine, possibly? A breathtaking filigree of nuance, like an Alex Grey painting of conceptual allemande.
scarmig 4mo ago
There are reasonable anti- and pro-AI views. There are also unreasonable ones on both sides, and it's best if they are ignored. However, on a site like HN or Reddit, you're far more likely to hear squawking about "stochastic parrots" or a rant about AI water usage than the mirror on the pro-AI side, making them harder to ignore.
- jrflowers 4mo ago
  It’s funny that a lot of what gets framed as pro- vs anti- AI arguments would be better described as past/present vs future arguments. If one guy is saying “that’s a stochastic parrot” and the second guy says “it’s going to achieve apotheosis and bring about global communism or feudalism or whatever while maximizing shareholder value” they’re not arguing about technology, they’re arguing about the second guy’s status as a clairvoyant. You could post “fortune tellers used to be considered fraudsters and charlatans” and reasonably expect a “Get a load of the Luddite over here. Go raise a barn, Josiah!” response on the internet these days despite not mentioning AI or technology at all

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

sublinear 4mo ago

> Some AI is useless. Some is incredibly powerful... It would be great to explore those new ideas and possibilities. I agree, but it's not so mysterious what will win out. Even if the criticism is repeated so often, that's because much of it is still valid. LLMs are not AGI. A statistical model of language helps fill in gaps. This is super useful for new and much improved UI/UX ideas that converge with better accessibility. Similar is true for generating images, video, audio, etc. There are situations where it's the right tool for expressing an idea. What we need is a sense of maturity. The limitations are very clear to everyone now, and we're already past the disillusionment. If we can rein in the abuse, there should be a good path forward. The technology is already boring and that's a very good sign.

dodu_ 4mo ago

[dead]

scarmig 4mo ago
Regardless of whether you believe in doom or not, it's this kind of wild, willful misunderstanding that makes people roll their eyes and dismiss you. Yes, people at Anthropic (and OpenAI, for that matter!) really, genuinely do believe AI poses a potential existential threat to humanity; every single one that I know personally believes that. This has been pointed out hundreds of times, and to simply dismiss it as marketing hype by crypto bros to increase IPO valuations long ago passed into the realm of conspiracy thinking.
- dodu_ 4mo ago
  > genuinely do believe AI poses a potential existential threat to humanity; every single one that I know personally believes that. This has been pointed out hundreds of times, and to simply dismiss it as marketing hype by crypto bros to increase IPO valuations long ago passed into the realm of conspiracy thinking. "They are not in a thought bubble YOU are in the thought bubble" I am absolutely BTFO'd, you got me.
  - scarmig 4mo ago
    No; I'm only stating that your model of reality is off, and I'm correcting it. No, the folks at the frontier labs do not believe they are trying to scam people with an NFT-tier fraud, and their warnings are not an attempt at marketing hype.
    - dodu_ 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
      - 4mo ago

jamiek88 4mo ago

[flagged]

chongli 4mo ago

Some AI is useless The question is not whether AI is useful. It is useful, full stop. The question is whether AI is useful enough to justify valuations that dwarf the GDP of all but the top 20 countries in the world. As it stands right now, it's not even close! The leaked OpenAI financials put these AI companies in the same profitability territory as utilities, with zero justification for these crazy valuations.

scarmig 4mo ago
Technically, it's the time discounted rate of future profits that determine valuations. If you take it as a given that they will provide exactly as much value as they do today, then, yes, your question has the obvious answer of no. If you think AI will provide greater value in the future, the answer depends on the value you think it will have.
- chongli 4mo ago
  Technically, it's the time discounted rate of future profits that determine valuations Close, it's the time-discounted expectation of future returns. This seems related to future profits but it need not be. Historically, stocks tend to perform poorly after IPOs. There's no guarantee that (say) Anthropic's stock price would ever recover after a post-IPO drop. The recent attempts by Anthropic et al. to circumvent the usual rules for inclusion in indices have raised red flags all over the place, with many calling it a naked attempt to raid everyone's pension funds for hundreds of billions in ill-gotten capital.
snowe2010 4mo ago
> The question is not whether AI is useful. It is useful, full stop. And nukes are useful by some metric too. AI (llms) is not useful in any way that we as humanity should be pushing for. It’s more harmful than good in every way possible. It’s honestly astounding to me that everyone’s ethics are so weak as to believe that somehow these incredible destructive companies are somehow good for humanity.