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by sensanaty·3y ago·view on hn ↗
Definitely. The tech is impressive but anyone I've spoken to thinks of it as Cleverbot 2.0, and among the more technically minded I've found that people mostly are indifferent. Hell, IRL most people I know don't think much of it, though on HN and elsewhere online I see a lot of people praising it as the next coming of Christ (this thread included) which puts it in a similar tier as crypto and other Web3 hypetrains as far as I'm concerned.

Every "AI" related business idea I've seen prop up recently is people just hooking up a textbox to ChatGPT's API and pretending they're doing something novel or impressive, presumably to cash in on VC money ASAP. The Notion AI is an absolute fucking joke of epic proportions in its uselessness yet they keep pushing it in every newsletter

And a funny personal anecdote, a colleague of mine tried to use ChatGPT4 when answering a customer question (they work support). The customer instantly knew it was AI-generated and was quite pissed about it, so the support team has an unofficial rule to not do that any more.

22 comments
>puts it in a similar tier as crypto

Comparisons between AI and crypto are horribly misguided IMO.

Is AI overhyped? Sure. However -

AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day.

Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction, a vehicle for speculation, and a platform for creating financial scams.

Everywhere??

That’s exactly the hype talk that’s going to burst this bubble.

Here’s tech’s dirty little secret. Despite all the screams about automation and universal basic income… the exact numbers where job replacement would show are in the labor productivity numbers. If GDP stays flat or grows while the number of jobs is reduced… bingo… you’d see that number climb.

Productivity has actually stayed flat or gone down over the last 15 years. Despite the fact that we’ve had trillion dollar corporate behemoths now. Despite that fact that we’re enabling a surveillance state Orwell couldn’t imagines. Despite the polarization we see. And teen anxiety going through the roof along teen/pre-teen suicides.

When you said AI (and in my view tech in general) are everywhere, I’m guessing this wasn’t what you meant…

I don't think the rub is with AI in general. Everyone working in tech knows how pervasive ML especially has become.

I think the contention is with AI suddenly being redefined as only referring to language models, and the view that intelligence has been solved by these models.

There has clearly been a massive marketing push to label these models as the "one true AI", both from companies and from AI influencers. This is where the echo chamber exists, and it's easy to get stuck in it.

Maybe I am wrong and we have solved intelligence. But I seriously doubt it.

> speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision

You know very well that that's not what GP is referring to. Speech to text, natural language translation, recommendation, and computer vision are all very useful things, but also were very much real and in consumer hands long before the current hype cycle.

Generative AIs are in their hype cycle. IMO the tech is overhyped to hell and back, but it will still probably yield better results than Crypto, there are legitimate uses for it. But those uses need to be ok with an 80% correct solution, which is not sufficient for all the things LLM hypelords are saying they can be used for and there is no path forward for closing that 20% gap.

So you aren’t infuriated by automated phone systems? Because let me tell you, the number of companies whose reputation has survived me having to deal with their fucking phone robot can be counted on my middle finger.
Crypto has been quite useful for me personally, from VPN payments to donating to locally forbidden causes.

AI only does bad things to me so far: surveillance, spam, fakes, search results poisoned, twitter and reddit closed up because of it etc.

Where is my automatic captcha solver? Where is a robot that will get me to a live person in a support call? Where is a spam filter that doesn't send all useful emails to spam? Where is a filter to hide fake reviews on Amazon? To fight against Amazon's crazy product ranking system? Such useful things are nowhere on the horizon.

This—100%. The AI revolution with LLMs is creating a new type of interface with computers—the AI interface. Will it kill us all? Eh, probably not. Will it completely change human civilization forever? Eh... maybe not? (But also maybe).

But what it already has begun to do, and will continue to do is change the way we interact with computers. The era of having a personal voice assistant that is capable, adaptable, and intuitive is VERY close and that is something that's exciting. Siri and Alexa are going to look downright primitive compared to what we'll have in the next 2-5 years and that is going to be VERY mainstream, and VERY useful for huge swaths of the population.

Crypto still hasn't proven itself to be useful in any way shape or form that isn't immediately over-shadowed by a different medium.

I mean. We can compare the hype pattern between the two and still acknowledge that one has utility while the other doesn't.

Both have resulted in a bunch of hopefuls starting companies, in order to attract mountains of venture capital. Companies that will only have a loose connection to the tech that drives the hype.

> AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day.

For most people that's a promise for the future, but beside some translation tools (who are far from perfect) there is not much.

For instance: semantic search is and was a big topic, but so far even ChatGPT is not a real answer, Stable Diffusion is very nice if you want to produce some cartoon alike graphics or some porn deepfakes, but just not ready for simple common photo editing tasks. OCRs have gotten better, but still nothing that "by magic" makes a badly scanned piece of paper into an almost-native clean pdf and so one.

Yes, there is much progress and potential, but not much for real world usages.

I hate to point this out but as a regular user, recommendation engines and search have not gotten better in the last, say, 10 years. (Although that may not be true in terms of selling advertising and propaganda, both of which I tend not to pay a lot of attention to.)

Likewise, speech to text and language translation are more available, but they're still pretty bad. And computer vision is much better than 10 years ago, but I wouldn't bet anyone's life on it.

And yet, the hype train is still gaining momentum. Having been through more than my share of AI winters, I can feel another one coming and it's going to be bad.

I'm not necessarily arguing that they're the same, but let's be honest with ourselves - crypto said the _same_ things as it was ramping up. Just replace all the applications of AI you listed with the many hypothetical use-cases crypto-pushers were listing out.

As always, sounds cool. Actually do some of it and then let's talk more.

The thing is that the specific technologies behind all of those very practical improvements are not what's being hyped up this bubble. Speech recognition, for example, usually involves a lot of audio preprocessing, followed by some form of RNN/LSTM/Transformer to generate candidates, followed by beam search to score and choose from candidates.

If you are a machine-learning practitioner, you should be familiar with all of those techniques and how they are used so that you can solve practical problems with them. But if you just read about AI in the news and figure you're going to found the next great startup and make a billion off it, you'll probably start by feeding a whole bunch of data into Tensorflow and then getting useless garbage out of it.

This hype bubble is specifically about LLMs, extremely large-parameter transformers that are trained on all the data OpenAI or Google can get their hands on. And then supposedly if you ask them the right questions, you will get useful answers back. For people that put in the time and experimentation to actually find the right questions and the right applications, that will probably be true - but the hype is that this will change everything, and it most certainly will not, just in the same way that beam search is frequently useful but it definitely does not change everything.

But slick promoters will nevertheless manage to use people's lack of knowledge to redirect billions of dollars in capital into their and their employees' pockets, the same way that slick promoters used crypto to redirect billions of dollars in capital into their and their employees' pockets.

The thing is, it's perfectly possible for something to possess hybrid qualities.

In the case of AI: both potentially quite useful (unlike crypto) and incredibly, toxically overhyped (just like crypto).

Ironically, the fact that a lot of people think "You it's actually kind of useful sometimes, therefore you can't compare it crypto/web3" is part of the engine that drives the hype.

Agreed, and when people seem to simply correlate them on no other quality than being widely observed in popular culture they lose me entirely.

The tech religious overhype train is here to stay. There has never been a more established need for calm honesty.

> Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction

Do you understand what a massive impact that has been? It has disrupted one of the largest industries on the planet, which is drug trafficking.

Financial services is the biggest industry on the planet but as soon as crypto is involved “a vehicle for speculation“ is invalid

So speaking of echo chambers…

It's not as clear cut really.

Overall economic productivity didn't shoot up in the last decade despite the dramatic progress we had in software and hardware (e.g. [1]), and it's not clear that AI/ML will dramatically change that. Yes searching pictures on my iphone by text is convenient and Netflix recommendations might be more addictive, but the path from that to ubiquitous economic prosperity, safety, and comfort (the technoutopia many here are striving for) is not clear at all. It's also not very clear if those marginal improvements are worth the substantial share of total human brainpower thrown at them.

[1] https://www.aei.org/economics/good-news-bad-news-on-us-produ...

And a tool to resist inflation and protect assets against theft, bank closures or government raids in countries where people are just barely surviving. You have a pretty Anglocentric viewpoint.
So, you're pretty much saying:

    AI is just like crypto, but better!
Not sure that's reaaaaaaaaaally going to bring people around.
What an asinine thing to say and it exhibits your lack of willingness or ability or willingness to understand both AI and cryptocurrency.
> Comparisons between AI and crypto are horribly misguided IMO.

Nope. The hype around AI by the AI bros is totally similar with the crypto bros back then.

> AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision...

Yet I guarantee that you don't trust any of their outputs for any serious applications and you need to constantly check for it's reliability since its output is often wrong, inaccurate or even outright nonsense. You don't trust it yourself, which that is the problem of this entire hype cycle.

On top that, it is all at the expense of the planet getting incinerated with no efficient alternatives to counter the amount of extreme waste of resources that these systems are consuming. [1] [2]

> Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction, a vehicle for speculation, and a platform for creating financial scams.

'never'

So Moneygram, Stripe, Checkout.com, etc using it is 'never amounted to anything'? If it was only for financial scams, all of them would have stopped using it a long time ago.

They simply didn't because financial scams on a transparent public ledger is a scammers nightmare and sounds like a very poor platform for creating financial scams.

But maybe you need to look outside of the AI bubble and see the trillions of dollars in which the banks have allowed in actual black market transactions by criminals in the FinCEN files [0] which is nothing compared to crypto.

[0] https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/ai-chatgpt-water-usage-envir...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/business/fincen-banks-sus...

[2] https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-water-185000-gallons-training...

AI will end up as Clippy 2.0 just as Crypto ended up as an overly secure payment processing platform.
I can evade taxes and government surveillance using crypto. That's value added for me.
I can evade taxes and government surveillance using crypto. That's value added for me.
>recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search

Both don't seem to work.

> Is AI overhyped?

no

calling something "hype" should not be a stand-in for data

Bitcoin has the potential to become the world’s reserve currency. Your smug dismissal of it is ignorant at best.

Consider how power structures (eg nation states) may change in such a future.

I teach college, and in the beginning days, everyone was screaming about "the students will have chatGPT write papers now".

Well, apart from the fact that chatGPT is really incapable of developing a thought, and also apart from the fact that half will fail to delete sentences like "I'm a language model, so I can't..." (insert gist of question here), it's painfully obvious if something is LLM generated.

The moment a sentence like "it's crucial to remember" pops up, I know what this is. Then, there's also the element that it always sounds like it's speaking to a child, and it avoids actually saying things unequivocally without some sort of disclaimer, as the legal department's CYA filter will ensure.

I remain thoroughly unimpressed by the entire venture. If this is Skynet 1.0, we're all safe for centuries to come.

There's a reason why most of the former web3 scammers now have "AI inventor" or "ChatGPT expert" in their profile tagline.

They gonna ruin even this technology with their hype marketing bullshit.

The issue I have with all the hype is not the technology itself, it will stay in one form or the other as a better interface for generalized instruction communications, but rather the scams and frauds that come with it.

Empty marketing promises where everybody advanced enough realizes that it cannot be true, and as a concept GPT is just throwing more averaged neurons to the problem instead of training more specialized expert transformers for multiple knowledge categories. Anybody remember IBM watson?

Why I always say that I don't do AI work is because people tend to think that sensorics (and neural nets that reduce a min/max problem space) already is AI. And I think it isn't. AI is where the bayesian approach is the bare minimum to deal with strategical decision making processes.

(Which probably makes this comment go to hell with downvotes but who cares :D)

I think there’s a meaningful difference between sota LLM tech and crypto. I’ve not yet seen a real problem which was better solved by crypto beyond just being not official money.

I’ve already used the openai api to automate several genuinely difficult things for myself. Mostly acting as a translator from natural language to structured output.

I do agree it is massively overhyped and there will be an inevitable sentiment correction.

> And a funny personal anecdote, a colleague of mine tried to use ChatGPT4 when answering a customer question (they work support). The customer instantly knew it was AI-generated and was quite pissed about it, so the support team has an unofficial rule to not do that any more.

My team raised a support issue with one of our suppliers due to some unexpected API behaviour and got an unusually flowery reply that completely contradicted the API documentation... fairly sure that was ChatGPT.

Honestly not that bothered about LLMs as they could be helpful in customer support particularly when agents might not be fluent English speakers (or just help when you're trying to be polite in adverse circumstances), but some basic proofreading would help. And don't let it hallucinate APIs.

My worry with AI is that even though it is very impressive and useful in many ways for real world applications, the Hype may end up making it another crypto.

Crypto was a great promise when it was invented and one can make the argument that it could have so many real world uses but it failed to live upto that expectation and one of the reasons is that it was over hyped way too quickly and ultimately became a tool for get rich quick, speculation, scams, dark web payments etc.

AI is already much better with its use BUT the hype is dangerous and we need to be careful. I see a lot of people starting "X-GPT.com" apps and touting 10K MRR in 2 months and what not. THis is what worries me. Every Tom, Dick and Harry is starting yet another AI tool. It can't be because they are so excited. It is because they see it as the new Crypto to get rich quick.

Overall, I think that AI is the new Crypto unfortunately not because it has no real world application (it does and is lot better than crypto) but because of the hype and everyone trying to cash in on it.

I have friends in academia who use GPT-4 to help with with research level code. TikTok just released an app where you can hum a song it will generate a full instrumental backing track.

This stuff can already do impressive things and its only getting better.

Douglas Hofstadter and Geoffrey Hinton both think that we are on the path to humans eventually being surpassed.

I would urge everyone to hold back their instinctive reaction to the usual SV hype and go and try GPT-4,Claude+, Mid Journey, RunwayML for a few weeks and come to their own conclusions.

Funny. As someone within the crypto community, you could switch « AI » with « Crypto » and the meaning would be the same to me. There’s even a worse sentiment, well deserved at this time, regarding cryptocurrencies.

And the answers below, reducing the industry to « drugs » go in the same vein. Stuff like Chainlink working with Swift is not common knowledge and even if it is, it is considered as another nothingburger.

Certain personalities and communication styles are able to generate useful prompts.

A 10% efficiency boost that some programmers are experiencing could translate into an extra 5 weeks off if you are smart about it, so it is quite life changing for some.

I parted ways with a team last year because I couldn't take the over complicated, jumble mess of "micro service" they were pushing. Redemption by pipeline and all that. A c-suite started gushing about ChatGPT by late 2022 and that was a red flag to me. A few months after I left they launched an "AI product". I looked into it. It was just a wrapper around OpenAI API. Lol. Glad I left.
I also don’t get what’s so great about putting another layer on top of ChatGPT and calling it a business plan. It seems like the lowest effort possible and you’ve done next to nothing interesting technically. Some of these projects don’t even seem to do what they say they’ll do well, and that’s probably because they really have no control over the data provider. Maybe this is my Dropbox HN moment, but it just seems lame.
To be fair, commenting on your customer support anecdote, you can get very good quality answers from chatgpt on common knowledge items. You just have to craft the prompt correctly.

I don't even start talking to it without the first instruction being "answer all following questions in the shortest form possible"

This cuts out 90% of the useless output such models generate.

> anyone I've spoken to thinks of it as Cleverbot 2.0, and among the more technically minded I've found that people mostly are indifferent.

I wonder if this is a regional thing, because traveling between the US Northeast and West coast I've found entirely the opposite.

I've had non-technical friends reach out to me in a panic worried that AI will disrupt humanity in just a few years, and even my 90-year non-technical grandmother recently remarked about her fears about what AI would bring in the next 5 years.

And among technical people: ever since I posted getting an AI related role my linked in I've been bombarded with old acquaintances trying to get ahead of the AI boom.

The funny thing is that I personally think that "AI" is useful but wildly over hyped right now. I do think it has some uses, but they aren't going to change the world in any fundamental way (but hey, if I'm wrong at least I'm in the right field).

It's not the current implementations that have us wigging out, it's the rate of improvement. We have no idea where we are on the 'S curve', but if it keeps getting exponentially better, this [and alpha, etc] has the potential to greatly* change society
The issue now is that for many people LLM = AI and AI = LLM.

Meanwhile, there are tons of applications you use everyday (and have for YEARS) using “AI”/ML for document search, text suggestion, NLP/NLU, intent recognition, STT/TTS, image similarity/classification/search and a myriad of other tasks. LLMs have sucked all of the oxygen out of the room and there are tons of “AI” companies/“engineers” now who have never even heard of any of these and are doing all kinds of bizarre (wrong) things to wedge these tasks into LLMs.

I cringe when I see people all of a sudden jumping on the “AI” hype train thinking an LLM (or even the ML approaches I listed) is a universal solution to everything. They are interesting and have use cases but please stop.

As someone that did use the original cleverbot, every time I use chatgpt I'm blown away.
> I see a lot of people praising it as the next coming of Christ (this thread included) which puts it in a similar tier as crypto and other Web3 hypetrains as far as I'm concerned.

Fair.

I'm definitely big on where it will be in the future (Iain M. Banks quote about Minds being the next thing to gods and on the other side), but there are a lot of grifters who are easy to spot with the following thought experiment:

If ChatGPT could actually, to use an example I've seen, "write a best selling novel", why is OpenAI selling you access to the API instead of writing all those books and selling them directly?

Many people lose their incredulity once more than a few sentences have been read.

By the time someone has read a second paragraph, they have internalized what was at the beginning, and to be told that those two paragraphs were fiction is now to attack the reader instead of the text.

As though reading were so laborious, there's a sunk cost fallacy.

It’s funny you say that, once you see a bit of of gpt content, it stands out.

One thing I will say is that it is a decent editor. If you feed it a document, it will produce pretty good suggestions about improvements etc.

Yeah, the people who know the most about AI are also the people who are least impressed with its capabilities.

It's supposed to be the other way around.

> I see a lot of people praising it as the next coming of Christ (this thread included)

We're still waiting ...

Comparing AI with religion is ridiculous.

Doesn't the next coming of Christ involve Rapture and Armageddon, if you take the people who believe in him seriously, which I wouldn't recommend?

And for that matter, aren't the people who believe in Christ all living in a delusional bubble inside a hermetically sealed reality denying echo chamber of over-promised and under-delivered miracles, which has been going on for thousands of years?

Can you name any AI companies who are doing anything as outrageous as declaring crackers are flesh and wine is blood, and that eating them will save your eternal soul (while calling for refusing to save the souls of anyone who supports gay marriage or abortion), and who even invented a special word "Transubstantiation" that tries to explain why you shouldn't trust your own lying eyes, and instead unquestioningly believe their unsubstantiated unscientific easily disproven claptrap, dogma, and brutally violent fairy tales?

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3764086-same-sex...

>Conservative Catholic bishops had called for the church not to offer communion to Biden or other pro-abortion rights politicians, but, in November of last year, the USCCB signaled an end to the debate by issuing a document on communion without mentioning the president or other politicians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation

>Transubstantiation (Latin: transubstantiatio; Greek: μετουσίωσις metousiosis) is, according to the teaching of the Catholic Church, "the change of the whole substance of bread into the substance of the Body of Christ and of the whole substance of wine into the substance of the Blood of Christ". This change is brought about in the eucharistic prayer through the efficacy of the word of Christ and by the action of the Holy Spirit. However, "the outward characteristics of bread and wine, that is the 'eucharistic species', remain unaltered". In this teaching, the notions of "substance" and "transubstantiation" are not linked with any particular theory of metaphysics.

At least the AI echo chamber isn't literally over-promising salvation and eternal life like religion has for millinia, and hasn't been perpetuated by governments and wars and crusades and inquisition for thousands of years, like religion inflicts on society.

AI has got a LONG LONG way to go and a shitload more people to torture and kill before it sinks to the level of religion and promises of the second coming of Christ, and it's already delivering a hell of a lot more useful tangible benefits than any religion ever did or ever will.