[HN Gopher] Place Your Bets
___________________________________________________________________
Place Your Bets
Author : cpach
Score : 118 points
Date : 2023-02-25 15:34 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.antipope.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.antipope.org)
| phillipcarter wrote:
| Can't speak for consumer applications, but in the niche of
| developer tools the recent advancements in AI are anything but
| garbage.
| gizmo wrote:
| LLM based chatbots are already more useful than all of crypto
| combined. Whereas crypto wastes energy as "proof of work" AI
| models try to be as energy-efficient as possible. The energy
| needed to train these LLMs is also 10,000 times less, so let's
| not act like they're in the same universe.
|
| Moreover, training the base layer of a LLM has to be done only
| once (for each generation) and subsequent training for domain
| specific purposes can happen on top of the base layer. This means
| these AI startups are not going to require an unlimited number of
| GPUs.
|
| Another big difference is that fundamental AI insights are what
| drives these AI innovations. Throwing more training data at a
| neural network is not what makes ChatGPT different from older
| generations of chatbots (although ChatGPT certainly does benefit
| from its huge training data set). Transformers for example are a
| new development, first introduced in a 2017 paper "Attention is
| all you need".
|
| It's unclear if LLMs will turn out to be a big deal. Maybe this
| will turn out just to be another AI summer. Too early to tell.
| But cynicism is unwarranted here.
| gessha wrote:
| > Another big difference is that fundamental AI insights are
| what drives these AI innovations.
|
| Bigger models, more compute, more data, better compute have
| driven a lot of the performance of ML post-2013.
|
| For ChatGPT specifically, the secret sauce is the addition of
| human-vetted conversations [1].
|
| In general fundamental AI insights come when - (1) somebody
| does something that works incredibly well and others try to
| explain it. Transformers are arguably an example of this
| although there's a ton of attention literature before that.
|
| - (2) a ton of people make incremental steps towards a goal and
| at some point it becomes actually useful. ChatGPT is an example
| of this one.
|
| The point I'm trying to make is fundamental AI is boring, slow,
| rarely drives AI innovations and that's not a bad thing. What
| drives AI innovations is really good UI and good data both of
| which are hard to nail down.
|
| [1] https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/#methods
| icemelt8 wrote:
| Only difference in this case is, AI has actual real positive use
| cases, compared to Crypto which just burned coal.
| golergka wrote:
| A lot of white collar professionals that I personally know, who
| didn't write a single line of code in their entire life's, use
| ChatGPT daily. Sure, when you just ask it questions, it
| hallucinates bullshit a lot. But when you ask it to process your
| input, for example, to write a professional sounding document
| based on your hectic bullet points, it's stellar. And a lot of
| white collar work is exactly this.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Crypto is still way bigger. I don't think the comparison holds.
| ChatGPT is mostly jsut a tool, whereas crypto is hyped as somehow
| replacing the current financial system or even 'world order'.
| There is considerable hype, but not on the level seen with
| crypto.
| pototo666 wrote:
| Before ChatGPT I spent around 200 usd per month to practice
| German with German native speakers for 2 months.
|
| Then I use ChatGPT to practice German and I am very happy about
| the experience. AI can't replace real human yet. But I'm already
| willing to practice with ChatGPT given my current use case and my
| budget. It's not 10x better, but 20x cheaper. From my experience,
| AI is not hype.
|
| Imagine integrating a more fine tuned AI and text-to-speech
| feature to make a better AI teacher. Such an app already exists,
| I believe. I'm waiting for a German and Japanese one.
| orzig wrote:
| This is a great example of a concrete use case. It is well
| known that tutors are far more effective than generalized
| learning, and everybody's anecdotal experience is that
| immersion is the best way to learn a language (suggesting that
| the interactive effect of tutors is at least as strong in this
| domain)
|
| A quick Duck Duck Go search suggests that capturing just a
| fraction of this market is worth >>$1B. To me that feels
| categorically different than crypto, even if a few grifters are
| also adding froth to the space.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/257656/size-of-the-globa...
| ginkoutest wrote:
| Where did you find these German native speakers to practice
| with? And you said "such an app already exists", but not for
| German and Japanese. Do you know the name? I have a lot of
| experience building language learning services so am very
| curious to hear what you feel is currently missing in your
| current tools to learn German/Japanese.
| vasco wrote:
| I really have little respect for any opinions that shame the use
| of electricity for things like training AI models. Being mad at
| it for crypto I can at least understand. But this should be at
| about the millionth place in the list of things to complain about
| electricity waste. And if that's how you prioritize your worries,
| I'm not sure how to trust any other opinions.
| dpflan wrote:
| It makes me wonder, what is the energy consumption of a what it
| takes to nurture a human to be an expert in something?
|
| Discussions of the intelligence in the LLMs as an emergent
| property of differentiating the model on troves of quality
| data, raise the question of how a human gains its intelligence.
| Starting from scratch, a child and a LLM, how can you compare
| their intelligence when provided with the same training data?
| What happens? What is the comparable intelligence of the two?
|
| We sit here analyzing the energy cost of training a LLM,
| developing artificial intelligence. We have to compare that to
| the energy costs of human intelligence. One may argue we are
| here because of the previous energy use of civilizations prior.
| jstx1 wrote:
| A child doesn't start from scratch, they have billions of
| years of evolution encoded in their DNA.
| dpflan wrote:
| Can one argue that the random initialization of a model is
| akin to this starting point? A human brain has reached a
| morphogenetic starting point thanks to much evolution, a
| process full of randomness.
| jstx1 wrote:
| > Can one argue that the random initialization of a model
| is akin to this starting point?
|
| It's a starting point but it's random, unlike the
| starting point of a human being which is very very not
| random.
| dpflan wrote:
| All right, let's dig deeper, I like your responsiveness.
|
| Imagine if the LLM were randomly provided the same
| starting point as human brain...what happens?
|
| Is evolution a differentiable process?
| pixl97 wrote:
| An LLM doesn't start from scratch, it's ran on computer
| hardware...
|
| The particular problem with talking about humanity is our
| biological functions are deeply intertwined with our
| intelligence functions.
|
| Some things are programmed in, like cellular behavior,
| organ building, what to do with these systems after you eat
| food. The two bottom parts of the brain are rather well
| developed at birth that control these functions.
|
| The cerebrum is rather undeveloped in comparison, and
| that's where the "thinking" happens, at least in terms of
| what we call intelligence and consciousness. While it comes
| preprogrammed with any number of subroutines, the amount of
| what we would consider data is minimal, and in our young
| years a huge amount of energy is spent exercising the brain
| so it works properly in the reality it exists. In children
| that is deprived from stimulation and real world experience
| (think extreme abuse), the brain underdevelops and it can
| become impossible for them to learn some things or think in
| particular ways.
|
| Do not underestimate the amount of work that must be
| performed for an infant to become a thinking machine.
| dpflan wrote:
| Thank you for bringing up the hardware perspective for
| LLM intelligence development.
| [deleted]
| bawolff wrote:
| I think its both.
|
| AI stuff has made some legit impressive advances recently.
|
| A bunch of people interested in getting rich quick smell the gold
| rush.
| diydsp wrote:
| Exactly. That's the eigenrhythm of present day capitalism.
| Throw money to likely candidates, see what sticks. Speculators
| always capture headlines. Crytpo is chugging quietly along.
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| You've just summed up the core of the Gartner Hype Cycle in a
| nutshell.
| derbOac wrote:
| I think this sort of skepticism is healthy -- I think
| explainability and overfitting doesn't get enough attention for
| example -- but AI strikes me as a bit different from crypto in
| that it's creeping into our everyday lives. Instructors are
| wrestling with assignment submissions, you wrestle with the
| uncanny valley in customer support lines, and people are posting
| about their troubled relationships with Bing in various places.
|
| If crypto had been showing up everywhere to the same extent, I
| think these discussions would be a bit different. That's not to
| say there isn't rampant hype in AI but I do think there's a
| continuum from blatant fraud to truly life-changing tech with
| plenty of grey, and AI is closer to the genuine end of the
| spectrum.
|
| My guess is AI isn't monolithic either, just as I don't think
| crypto was. Some areas of AI will probably end up having been
| overhyped more than others.
|
| I agree with the sentiment of the post that sometimes I think
| semi-fraudulent to outright fraudulent overhype is a defining
| feature of our time. I wish the institutions responsible for
| public discourse would approach things accordingly.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > but AI strikes me as a bit different from crypto in that it's
| creeping into our everyday lives.
|
| Taking this further: Crypto was creeping into our lives, but
| only in the FOMO sense; People thought they needed to invest in
| crypto because other people were going to invest in crypto and
| they didn't want to miss out. The actual use cases of crypto
| aren't attractive to most people, aside from ideological or
| law-evading circumstances.
|
| AI is different because people are rushing to actually use it
| for their own benefit. Investors are rushing to place their
| bets, but we already see big companies deploying AI in the real
| world in ways that are being used by the general public.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| While the author's prediction may or may not come true, this text
| has a weird conspiracy vibe in my opinion. Especially parts
| trying to imply that by some mysterious way NN are trained on
| GPUs and manufacturers are pushing AI to sell more cards, not
| unlike the rush to get GPUs for crypto. It's almost as if GPUs
| have been specifically built to handle massive parallelism with
| specialized models offering machine learning optimizations!
| However, the cards used for these vocations are different: while
| you used to be able to mine cryptocurrencies with consumer GPUs,
| training AI models is done on professional hardware with more
| emphasis on VRAM. Training something serious like ChatGPT is far
| from easy (if at all possible) for a startup. And AI projects
| have arguably become more useful to the everyday consumer than
| crypto currency ever was. Either way, AI is certainly a huge
| buzzword, but for now, it's living up to the hype. Who knows
| what'll happen three years into the future.
| hanniabu wrote:
| GPUs aren't need for blockchain. Bitcoin is stuck in the past and
| is a shame it's what everyone looks at, along with the misnomer
| "cryptocurrency". Ethereum is the leader in the space and the
| only one innovation and uses PoS which can run a validator on
| very little hardware, such as a raspberry pi.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Disapppointing summary from someone whose imagination should
| allow them to see more.
|
| Generative text models might spit out "garbage", but this
| "garbage" has been more interesting than the garbage we have seen
| before in how it breezes through the Turing test.
|
| It's telling that not a word was said about image generation,
| which is benefitting from the same GPU usage, has not stopped
| progressing, and produces stuff that creates economic value. Like
| in this example: https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2023/02/us-co...
|
| The author seems to identify with VCs too much, if all the AI
| hype means is more grift. Sure, that might be a factor, but the
| general condemnation of the sector is too much.
| noman-land wrote:
| I know this forum is full of businessy types but it's still
| amazing to me to hear so many people saying crypto has no use
| cases and AI is already proving useful. I have my own healthy
| skepticisms about both, and see some really interesting use cases
| in both. Obviously there are and will continue to be donothing
| hucksters with magic potions, like in any industry, especially
| new and misunderstood ones. They will do their ruinings with no
| concern for actual progress.
|
| However can we take stock of a few things here?
|
| Crypto:
|
| - opt-in, democratizing
|
| - privacy preserving, data protecting
|
| - open, transparent, auditable, provable
|
| - peer to peer
|
| - extremely cheap to participate
|
| AI:
|
| - trained and used without consent
|
| - massive data ingesting and processing
|
| - closed, blackbox, censored, inscrutable
|
| - centrally, corporately controlled
|
| - prohibitively expensive to participate
|
| So when I hear people saying that crypto is dead and has no use
| cases, and AI is useful already and is solving real world
| problems, I think I know what kinds of problems they are trying
| to solve.
|
| The examples I'm seeing so far of people getting "real world"
| uses out of AI are like downright grotesque to me. Writing cover
| letters? Making "content" for marketing websites? Writing emails?
|
| Who wants this? Only the makers of these things want them. Not
| the receivers. As if the corporate internet couldn't get any more
| boring and derivative, let's put it all in a big pile and then
| churn out infinite replicas of it in a vast grey fog.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Upvoted because someone is publicly defending cryptocurrency on
| HN. I appreciate your bravery. You are right on those points.
|
| The AI take has some valid criticisms but overall is the wrong
| assessment. People can use it to make spam, sure, but they can
| also use it for a thousand other things. To generate pretty
| much any type of text content. The only way that is not useful
| is if you just don't place value on natural language at all.
| Its a pretty important part of our world. But beyond that it
| can be used to create a natural language interface to many
| types of systems that would otherwise need to be programmed by
| a person.
| rnosov wrote:
| There are plenty of LLMs that are completely open source that
| you can use (like BLOOM for example). There's also a massive
| original use case of machine translation for LLMs which is a
| real world problem. AI image generation seems WAY more useful
| thing to me than say NFTs.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Crypto has almost no use cases for the average person over the
| system the average person is already using. Crypto has a huge
| amount of risk over the average system the average person is
| already using. This dramatically reduces the perceived value of
| Crypto. Again, Crypto has uses, but not at the value put on
| individual tokens when compared to cash.
|
| When looking at your AI description, if used in the same light,
| Linux should have won the world and Windows and all other
| proprietary software shouldn't exist. And yet here we are with
| billions/trillions in market value around proprietary software.
| noman-land wrote:
| Some variation or piece of GNU/Linux is running on the vast
| majority of computing devices on the planet. One could argue
| it and its core philosophies have enabled most of the tech
| industry in part _by_ being free. If that 's not winning, I
| don't know what is. No one has starry eyes about it because
| people aren't making out like bandits being gate keepers to
| the tech. It's free, it's open. It's so free and ubiquitous
| that it's not even considered. It's just a bedrock tool. Like
| the hammer, or a fire. Has fire "lost" because it has a low
| market value?
|
| Regarding crypto use cases, while they're obviously still
| being explored, the core features remain:
|
| opt-in, democratizing, privacy preserving, data protecting,
| open, transparent, auditable, provable, p2p, cheap
|
| These are things you get when you use an open platform like,
| say, Ethereum, or whatever next iteration.
|
| "The average person," whatever that means on a planet of 8
| billion, may not need these things among stable, prosperous
| governments, with low corruption, upstanding law enforcement,
| and equal protection under the law, but anyone who lives
| outside those golden scenarios, either today or in the
| future, might desire such features. They might even help them
| survive.
| colesantiago wrote:
| At least AI does not lose your money in a random flash crash.
|
| There _are_ no legitimate use cases of crypto. End of story.
| noman-land wrote:
| Then don't opt-in.
| colesantiago wrote:
| I don't think that large companies or individuals have a
| choice when ransomware hits them and they need to pay in
| crypto to save their documents.
|
| Definitely not a good look for crypto is it?
| noman-land wrote:
| It's kind of a non-sequitur. That's like if I said that
| Linux is opt-in and then you said "I don't think that
| individuals have a choice in the matter when they get
| kidnapped by a drug cartel and forced to run their IT
| infrastructure". Yeah, nothing is opt-in if you're being
| forced by a criminal to use it. What?
| colesantiago wrote:
| Now what you've just done is a complete fanciful
| strawman.
|
| > It's kind of a non-sequitur.
|
| Nope, the difference with my argument is that this is
| actually happening in the real world. Ransomware gangs
| trying to destroy companies data and they can only use
| crypto to save their documents, which is one of the
| reasons why the crypto is very appealing for criminals.
|
| Nothing entirely wrong with that, except that proves my
| point. There are no legitimate use cases of crypto, and
| usually the current financial system does better if not
| more than what crypto tries to make even worse.
| ctoth wrote:
| The thing I find most suspicious/fishy/smelly about the current
| article is that Charley is a cracking good writer who has just
| found that a machine might be able to take his job. Now, of
| course, AI is all a giant scam. It's been steadily progressing in
| a way that connected people could see since GPT-2[0]. But only
| now, with the clouds on the horizon is it clearly and obviously
| some conspiracy.
|
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his
| salary depends on his not understanding it."
|
| [0]: GPT-2 As Step Toward General Intelligence:
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/19/gpt-2-as-step-toward-g...
| i_dont_know_ wrote:
| A huge difference between ChatGPT and crypto, though is that the
| latter literally offers to print money.
|
| The former, what, lets you make low-quality internet content a
| little more easily? It's harder to share the long-term 'get-rich-
| quick' benefits (though, of course many are trying right now).
| There's an initial bump right now as various content mediums try
| to cope with ChatGPT content, but once that stabilizes, I don't
| see the long-con grift that the author is mentioning being
| possible in the same way.
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| If you think cryptocurrencies are in any way comparable to the
| recent progress in artificial intelligence, I'm sorry but you're
| a Luddite.
|
| If you'd have presented anybody reading this with ChatGPT two
| years ago, they simply would not have believed it was possible.
|
| This kind of step change in AI ability is interesting enough in
| itself without having some kind of insidious and completely
| unsubstantiated conspiracy theory behind it.
|
| > This is _not_ a coincidence.
|
| I despise this kind of writing -- writing with 100% confidence
| and then providing zero evidence. It reminds me very much of my
| reading of writing from "the election was rigged!!!" conspiracy
| morons. 10 minutes of my life I'll never get back.
| thanhhaimai wrote:
| > If you'd have presented anybody reading this with ChatGPT two
| years ago, they simply would not have believed it was possible.
|
| 2 years ago, Google Lambda was available internally for
| dogfooding. The hype was high for a couple months, and then it
| dropped off after the entertainment and novelty value wanned.
| It even led to a series of articles about a person claiming it
| to be sentient.
|
| So yes, 2 years ago, plenty of people would have believed it
| was possible.
| logarhythmic wrote:
| Ok fine, but they could've just said 4 years ago instead and
| their fundamental point would've remained the same. The rate
| of progress is staggering.
| siva7 wrote:
| Never heard of Google Lambda nor any of the people i know of.
| In contrast even my Grandma asks me about ChatGPT
| htag wrote:
| Your appeal to popularity misses the entire point of the
| article. Maybe your Grandma knows about ChatGPT because PR
| firms are generating discussion.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > If you'd have presented anybody reading this with ChatGPT two
| years ago, they simply would not have believed it was possible.
|
| I'm having a hard time believing it now, it's just an amazing
| amount of progress in a short amount of time.
|
| > I despise this kind of writing
|
| Me too. It's suggesting that there's some kind of cabal that
| somehow decided it was time to crash crypto and get everyone to
| go after AI. Are there bandwagons? Definitely and they
| eventually go too far as with crypto - and quite possibly AI
| will experience something similar _if_ it doesn 't deliver on
| it's promises. But it's not like there's a bunch of guys in a
| smoke filled room somewhere who are driving this. Crypto was
| largely driven by cheap money (0% interest rates for several
| years) and artificially low electricity prices. Investment in
| AI now with much higher interest rates means that some people
| think they're going to get a better return on their money. It
| seems less bubbly in this kind of monetary environment.
| [deleted]
| bwanab wrote:
| That actually wasn't what he said. He said the _hype_ around
| cryptocurrencies was comparable to the _hype_ around AI. That
| 's a very different statement than you're putting into his
| mouth. If you've ever read any of his books (they tend to be
| very good), you know that he's not a Luddite and has a lot to
| say about future technologies including AI.
| rpdillon wrote:
| > I despise this kind of writing -- writing with 100%
| confidence and then providing zero evidence.
|
| This bit struck me as well. Ironically, it's the same sort of
| bullshit that folks criticize AI for.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Both right and wrong. There will be bubble, grifters and there
| will be a lot of pets.ai , but I think that unlike crypto the
| technology is sound, impressive and promising.
|
| The advice to be cautious with investing is a sound one.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| I think people who seem overly eager to call chatGPT and stable
| diffusion and similar models "bullshit generators", and dismiss
| them because of that is missing something large.
|
| In Machine Learning itself, we consider two classes of
| models/algorithms, discriminative and generative. Up until six
| months ago, the best work we had in ML was all discriminative,
| and humans were irreplaceable when it came to content generation.
| All of a sudden we have good generative models and a way to
| cheaply generate vast amount of content and ideas, some of which
| are good and some of which are terrible. I predict this shift
| will also shift the associated humans' roles from "generator" to
| "discriminator", who will be cherry-picking and editing AI
| generated articles or images (much faster) rather than creating
| them from scratch (much slower). Yes, it will take a slighlty
| different set of skills in the human worker, but if you can't see
| how that productivity boost can help humanity, I ont know what to
| say.
| [deleted]
| samdcbu wrote:
| While some of the recent hype around AI may be due to VCs and the
| industry looking for the next big thing, it's a bit absurd to
| think that AI orgs like OpenAI and Stability were holding back
| research and then only released it once the crypto bubble popped.
|
| This article also misunderstands the differences between the
| various types of GPUs and seems to think they are fungible.
|
| Large models like GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion are trained using
| cloud compute, most likely clusters of Nvidia A100s. No one was
| ever using those for mining because it wouldn't have been
| profitable. Similarly, no large models are being trained on
| second hand GPUs used for mining.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> Much of what passes for "journalism" these days is just
| stenographers feverishly copying the press-releases they're
| spoon-fed. Real journalism is a niche sector, and unless you
| subscribe to the exhorbitantly priced newsletters of the high-end
| analysts who are paid to work full-time studying the sector, what
| you're seeing on the news websites and in the newspapers is the
| product of PR firms paid to push AI. And you really need to ask
| who is paying them._
|
| That's the money shot, right there.
|
| I'm old enough to remember Walter Cronkite.
| [deleted]
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| I really hope one of the AI startups (stealth or already public)
| gets some more traction, especially among smaller scale hardware.
| Nvidia is an AI tyrant.
|
| But I guess we are probably stuck with Intel/AMD/Apple... because
| who else is going to make affordable PCIe desktop cards, much
| less squeeze into laptops?
| ilaksh wrote:
| Within the next five years or so there will be a completely new
| hardware paradigm based on something like "crossbar arrays" or
| memristors that is orders of magnitude more efficient for ML
| tasks. This provides an opportunity for new startups. They will
| eventually probably be acquired by Nvidia, Intel or AMD though.
| pixl97 wrote:
| This is my take on it too. Any technology that significantly
| reduces the cost of running AI is of immediate value to any
| company performing a lot of AI simulations currently.
| screamingninja wrote:
| I disagree with Charlie Stross's comparison of the hype
| surrounding AI applications to the cryptocurrency bubble. He
| suggests that much of the AI hype is driven by the same grifters
| and hucksters that were previously involved in the cryptocurrency
| market. While both industries have seen a surge in investment,
| they are fundamentally different. Cryptocurrencies were based on
| speculative investments with little intrinsic value, whereas AI
| has the potential to revolutionize many industries and improve
| human lives. Charlie's skepticism and pessimism towards AI
| startups seems misplaced, as there are already many successful AI
| applications in use today. While caution is always advised when
| investing, writing off the entire AI industry based on
| comparisons to cryptocurrency seems shortsighted.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It is funny how NFTs and crypto fell off the radar so quickly. It
| happened so quickly that prices didn't collapse because hardly
| anybody trades anymore.
|
| I think people like Eliezer Yudkowsky are worked up about ChatGPT
| because it bullshits so much better than them.
|
| That said, I look at this library
|
| https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/quicktour
|
| which can do 13 different things and text generation is only one
| of them. Most of them involve setting up well defined problems
| (e.g. being smart) and building training sets (e.g. working hard)
| and aren't the shortcut that people think ChatGPT is.
|
| As I see it things that I was struggling with just a few years
| ago are downright easy, there is no doubt "the new AI" will find
| useful uses but somehow ChatGPT strikes at a vulnerable place in
| many people's psychology.
| ilaksh wrote:
| If you have a real-world text-related task that is somewhat
| complex then you can use a custom prompt with OpenAI's API to
| achieve it within a few days. I can imagine someone hiring you
| for something like that and you charging them $20,000 for two
| weeks of completely wasted time due to whatever cognitive or
| philosophical hang up you have with using the more powerful
| pre-trained model.
| rjsw wrote:
| There are a lot of "bullshit jobs". Not needing people to do
| those jobs anymore will be a benefit to anyone paying for them,
| less so for those previously getting paid.
| drdrey wrote:
| > the cryptocurrency bubble took a bit over a decade to implode,
| but back in 2011 I prediced its demise within, yeah, 1-3 years
|
| In 2011 crypto was only Bitcoin and the market cap was likely
| under $1B
|
| Today the market cap hovers around $1T after a 75% drawdown.
|
| OP points at the 75% drawdown and claims "I told you so", while
| completely ignoring the rest of the graph.
| Karellen wrote:
| > If you're thinking about investing in AI startups now? My
| advice is to avoid them like the plague [...] it's too late, and
| you'll wake up one morning only to discover you've had your
| pockets picked.
|
| > I give it about 1-3 years until the crash. (Although I tend
| towards optimism: the cryptocurrency bubble took a bit over a
| decade to implode, but back in 2011 I prediced its demise within,
| yeah, 1-3 years.)
|
| What I'm reading is, I _should_ invest in AI startups now, and
| cash out 90% of my investment in 3 years time while things are
| still going well. Maybe cash out 30% of whatever remains each
| year after that, until the crash.
| jsnell wrote:
| Investments in startups aren't very liquid. You're unlikely to
| be able to cash out at will, and definitely not at a regular
| schedule like that.
| legrande wrote:
| If you need to know where we are in the hype cycle, check out
| this curated list of every AI project currently active:
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hwBf_TnSxwhkfnJTVpUNAJWS...
|
| It's mind blowing that we have something blossoming out of
| nowhere that has real-world use-cases and is genuinely improving
| people's lives.
|
| I have tools to write the perfect e-mail, remove the background
| from photos, write copy for my clients' websites, and tools to
| help me code faster. It's all very brilliant stuff.
| LelouBil wrote:
| The different thing this time is that non-technical people are
| using ChatGPT and Stable diffusion.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I know a number of people working with LLMsat startups. None of
| them have ever even considered working on a crypto product.
| skwirl wrote:
| I am puzzled by all the hot takes stating that ChatGPT (and other
| similar tools) outputs garbage and is being "discredited" when I
| have personally found it to be an incredibly useful tool that I
| have been using daily pretty much since it was first released.
| The only thing being discredited, in my mind, are the people who
| rush to be contrarian about something they don't actually seem to
| understand or have taken any time to use.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It's a double-edged sword, IMO.
|
| On the one hand, GPT and AI is immediately usable and arguably
| quite cool to the layman. It's not a perfect system, but it can
| write Bash scripts and handle your resignation email. Anyone
| who does copywriting or programming for a living will probably
| find a couple uses for it. It's fairly cheap, and it's
| definitely "worth it" more than analogs like Cryptocurrency.
|
| ...on the other hand, though, AI is kinda a bubble. It's our
| nature to put our hopes and dreams (and money) into the most-
| promising fields of computing; that's fine. But AI truly has
| limited application - anything that requires accountability,
| determinism or trust is a bad fit for AI. When you really
| whittle down the places you can apply AI, it looks a bit like
| those 4D theaters from the early 2000s - a cool concept for
| _some_ stuff, but experience-ruining for others. The eager
| over-application of AI will be the bubble, not the technology
| itself.
| jonahx wrote:
| Reminds me of the mid-90s "it's just the yellow pages" hot
| takes about the internet.
| indymike wrote:
| The question is, what are you using it for and how much is
| required to automate you out of the loop?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There seem to be two kinds of people: ones who see the mistakes
| ChatGPT makes and the ones who don't.
|
| If I was a scam artist today I would be very happy to find
| people of the second kind to victimize.
|
| Secondly I'd be very concerned that the second kind of person
| is working at the hospital dispensing drugs or on the beat as a
| cop or doing any kind of job where mistakes could have
| consequences. They're not just going to be making mistakes and
| letting other people's mistakes go by, they are going to be
| denying it and making excuses about it.
|
| If ChatGPT has a core competence it is that people give it the
| deference that they give to high status people, who are used to
| just saying whatever comes into their head and having people
| just nod. I think of the story of "the Emperor's new clothes"
| where the Emperor pulls off something that not everybody could
| do.
|
| These concerns converge in the 419 scams which deliberately
| filter for the second kind of person with deliberately poor
| grammar and spelling. Amazingly there are people who have $10
| million dollars to lose who fall for this! I wonder if there is
| somebody evil, bright, hard-working and ambitious who is HFRL
| training a model right now to do romance scams.
| siva7 wrote:
| Somehow i believe the critiques and opponents of the current
| AI wave are as much prone to hallucinating their critique as
| is ChatGPT with facts.
| [deleted]
| greedo wrote:
| When my "genius" boss first heard about ChatGPT etc., he was
| convinced that this would end up replacing all the developers
| in our org. I told him that the more likely COA was that it
| would replace all the middle managers who just collate TPS
| reports to push to the VPs.
|
| He was not amused.
| jonahx wrote:
| This is a false dichotomy.
|
| I'm acutely aware of ChatGPT's mistakes, have spent lots of
| time investigating them, and _still_ find immense value in
| the tool.
|
| While it's true that many less technical people will end up
| treating it as an oracle, let's not conclude that it's
| impossible to understand what it is and use it productively
| despite its flaws.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I've frequently been the 'final assembly programmer' for
| projects that were started by some fresher that got to what
| looked like 90% done by management but it was unsound
| underneath and that last 10% took 50% or more of the work.
|
| There is nothing I find more fatiguing than pushing a
| bubble around underneath a rug in a system that eventually
| has to be carefully taken and inspected bit by bot and a
| huge amount of work put into figuring out what exactly is
| wrong with it and fixing it.
|
| I'm afraid the ChatGPT enthusiast is going to walk away
| from a looming disaster thinking they and ChaptGPT is so
| brilliant, probably never realize the harm they did, and if
| they do they'll be contemptuous of the low-status 'grinds'
| who take so long to make things right.
| jonahx wrote:
| > There is nothing I find more fatiguing than pushing a
| bubble around underneath a rug in a system that
| eventually has to be carefully taken and inspected bit by
| bot
|
| Couldn't agree more
|
| > I'm afraid the ChatGPT enthusiast is going to walk away
| from a looming disaster thinking they and ChaptGPT is so
| brilliant
|
| Also agree.
|
| But none of this detracts from ChatGPT's value or
| incredible power.
|
| It just means that it will also cause many problems.
| Maybe once you net everything out the balance sheet is
| negative. I think you could make that argument for social
| media, for example. But the point is moot, because it's
| here, and its influence is only beginning.
| 41amxn41 wrote:
| Whatever. Despite its occasional mistakes, I have found it to
| be incredibly useful.
| zedadex wrote:
| > There seem to be two kinds of people: ones who see the
| mistakes ChatGPT makes and the ones who don't
|
| Agreed; it quickly became apparent once I found myself
| entering the 'seeing its rough edges' camp.
|
| Once you've _tried_ breaking it and can see the limits of an
| LLM you'll find yourself wishing for an AI assistant, but
| knowing what is and isn't possible makes managing one's
| expectations with new technologies easier.
|
| I'm still generally an optimist with these new techs because
| they're still very cool and potentially useful interfaces to
| existing technologies, but I agree with you in that it's too
| easy to get caught up deferring to it like it's some techie
| oracle (and that the tendency for people to want to do so is
| concerning).
|
| I used to think people wouldn't "simply accept" the types of
| systems in _Minority Report_ or _Psycho-pass_, to the extent
| that I found it to be immersion-breaking. But, concerningly,
| it seems folks are happy and willing to give up that
| deference (in what's probably a well-studied sociological
| observation I'm simply unaware of the term for). Scary stuff.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I love _Psycho-Pass_ , it's the best police sci-fi anime
| since _Patlabor_.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| I'm one of the ones who sees ChatGPT's mistakes. It makes
| lots of them. Some are very dumb.
|
| But the idea that it's a fraud or a scam or whatever label
| the naysayers choose to put on it is just wrong. It makes
| mistakes, but it also provides a lot of value when used
| correctly.
|
| Consider the many use cases where you don't need to rely on
| its "knowledge" at all - just this morning, I used it to
| write some marketing emails. I've got a paragraph about the
| company that I give it, plus some specifics about the
| particular email, and it knocks out something that's entirely
| useable in seconds.
|
| There are plenty of tasks like this, in which it's creating
| something based on your input, in which it is immediately and
| clearly useful. Just because there are use cases where it
| fails doesn't make it a scam.
| charles_f wrote:
| It's useful, it's incredible, but everyone wants it to be a
| revolution, similarly as crypto currency was supposed to be,
| which it's not.
| LelouBil wrote:
| The bing stuff can get very wild. But I think the reason they
| aren't making it widely available yet (and won't for a while)
| is that it's just a test for "ChatGPT that can search the web"
| the same way that ChatGPT was (is?) a public test.
| rnk wrote:
| So enlighten us with some examples of useful things you found.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| My partner is looking for a new job, and ChatGPT has been an
| amazing help in writing the cover letters that recruiters
| can't stop asking for. Previously, she would spend hours
| molding her previous cover letter to the job description. Now
| she can just give the job description and a bullet point list
| of her relevant experiences, and spend 15 minutes on the
| ChatGPT output to polish it a little bit and correct any
| potential misstatements.
| lemmiwinks wrote:
| You know how many minutes I "spend molding [my] previous
| cover letter to the job description"? 15 minutes. If you
| spend more than that, you are clearly doing it wrong.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I tried using chatGPT to write me a cover letter and
| targeted resume given my full resume and the job
| description. It gave me the cover letter and the resume -
| but it made stuff up to match the job description. I have a
| masters degree but it gave me a PhD, for example (I'm not
| sure why it did this as the job requirements were Masters
| of PhD, I guess it figured a PhD was better). I'm pretty
| sure I would have easily gotten an interview for the
| position based on that cover letter + resume as it was
| essentially a perfect fit to the job description, but the
| interview would've gone badly.
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| That's why the 15 minute review process afterwards, at
| least for a cover letter the factual errors are glaring
| enough that they can be caught easily, and simple enough
| that they can be edited out in that time. It's not at the
| stage where I can write my partner a job application bot
| that scrapes job boards and fires off 50,000 applications
| per second, but the productivity gain is obvious.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| This to me is what I see want to see as the fallacy in
| the anti-ChatGPT argument, but at the same time have to
| acknowledge as the real danger. I think AI paired with a
| human, as you are describing, can be more effective and
| efficient than either on their own. However, I've never
| seen it stay that way in commercial applications. So I'm
| afraid that the smallest drive towards cost-cutting will
| lead to removal of the human in the loop or at least
| tighten throughout expectations so much that the human
| intervention is in practice more often missing than not.
|
| Not sure what to do about this. I want ChatGPT as a tool
| available to me, but I don't want any service provider I
| interact with to use it because I know they'll fuck it up
| eventually and I'll get worse service.
| endisneigh wrote:
| You realize if this becomes the norm cover letters will
| simply be made meaningless. One could argue they already
| are.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Win-win!
| polygamous_bat wrote:
| As they should be! I do not know why they are not
| already, but as I said recruiters can't seem to stop
| asking for them. But be assured that I won't mourn them
| once they are gone, and if ChatGPT gets us there faster
| then I am grateful for it.
|
| Edit: on second thought, I believe "Editing ChatGPT
| output" might be a valuable job skill in the future, and
| maybe a good cover letter would give recruiters some
| signals in that way.
| ams92 wrote:
| Cover letters already are meaningless.
| cpach wrote:
| This is actually a perfect use-case IMHO.
| shaunsingh wrote:
| If you treat it as a surpercharged search engine on a
| compressed snapshot of the internet in 2021, then its quite
| useful. If theres ever a function I forgot, but I know how to
| explain what it does in natural language, chatGPT most of the
| time can find me what I'm looking for. On some more obscure
| bugs or if I'm sorting through a new codebase, chatGPT can
| help me out from time to time to understand new topics.
|
| Of course, we shouldn't rely on chatGPT. It has give me wrong
| and insecure code before. However, its a nice tool to have
| around
| skwirl wrote:
| >Of course, we shouldn't rely on chatGPT. It has give me
| wrong and insecure code before. However, its a nice tool to
| have around
|
| You 100% should verify any code generated by ChatGPT - but
| this goes for any code found off the internet. I have come
| across bad Stack Overflow code committed to codebases
| before.
| furyofantares wrote:
| I think what's making these hyperinformed hallucinators
| useful for coding right now is that fact checking is
| fundamentally a big part of our work. There's a bare
| minimum that must be done to even think anything has been
| accomplished at all, that it runs and does what we
| expected on the most basic input, but then we are also
| used to writing tests and reading code critically.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I wonder what a learning model with the ability to test
| feedback from executing its code in an interpreter would
| look like? I know there are different groups testing
| things like integrating the ability for LLMs to use
| tools, wondering how this will pan out in the end.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Not them, but a short list based on my chat history:
|
| - Explained why a python variable in a closure was saying it
| was not assigned, after several minutes of googling/SO failed
| me (needed the nonlocal keyword, different from js)
|
| - Explained the difference in several slightly-different C++
| lists, which I couldn't google because the differences were
| mostly special chars
|
| - Wrote _working_ powershell code to output a list that has
| every string in $list1 that is not in $list2, _on the first
| try_ , after I struggled for over an hour to do the same (and
| google/SO failed me).
|
| - Explained the difference between two batfiles for the Intel
| Fortran compiler after google failed me
|
| - Generated some really cool D&D statblocks
|
| -Unbeknownst to us players, generated a really creative heist
| dungeon that our DM ran us through (he thanked ChatGPT as his
| "co-DM" at the end). This one is particularly notable because
| the man works at a _hiring agency_ , he's not exactly a
| techie.
| orwin wrote:
| +1 for the DMing. I mostly use it to generate data for my
| dev/test tables, but the two times I used it for DMing, I
| gained hours. Also live when the player go somewhere really
| unexpected (it wasn't my campaign).
|
| Tangent:
|
| Google is less and less useful (as is SO for 'old'
| languages). I look into a mix of reddit, github issues,
| github code and SO depending on the issue. Hopefully this
| advice helps you if Chatgpt/copilot can't.
| bnralt wrote:
| > after several minutes of googling/SO failed me ** > and
| google/SO failed me
|
| This is what I've been noticing as well. There have been
| many times when I spend 5-10 minutes trying to figure
| something out with Stack Overflow and Google, not getting
| anywhere, and then ChatGPT immediately gives me the answer.
| I'm not sure how anyone who considers Stack Overflow useful
| would think that ChatGPT is useless.
|
| Do I need to verify the answers? Sure. But I have to do the
| same thing with answers on Stack Overflow. Even if I'm
| using official documentation, I need to verify that what I
| think it's saying is what it's actually saying
| (particularly when it's as unclear as it often is).
|
| What's even more interesting is that I keep running into
| people who are finding completely different uses for it.
|
| The critique here is like a lot of other critiques I've
| seen. They seem to come from people who haven't spent much
| if any time working with it, but have read some articles
| about how it's not infallible and decided that meant it was
| junk (though this piece goes the extra mile when it hints
| that big GPU is behind it all). What's striking to me is
| the lack of intellectual curiosity on display.
| skwirl wrote:
| Sure, it's an unending stream of things, but here are some
| recent examples from my history:
|
| -Had it extract some gnarly string manipulation logic in a
| MySQL where clause into a function. It wrote clean, well
| commented code, and even explained what a regex did in a
| comment.
|
| -Had it explain to me how macOS plist files worked, how to
| view them, how to edit them
|
| -Asked it what some lines in an ssh config file did and it
| clearly explained it to me
|
| -Dropped in some XML from a spring applicationcontext file
| that was doing something I didn't quite understand and it
| explained it to me. Asked how I would change something about
| it and it told me how, explained how it worked, and provided
| example xml
|
| -Gave it a SQL Server CREATE TABLE statement and asked it to
| create the equivalent CREATE TABLE statement for MySQL 8,
| which it successfully did
|
| My only complaint has been how sometimes the system has been
| unavailable. I now pay for the $20/month subscription and
| that has been resolved.
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Tech people seem to fall into the 'perfect is the enemy of
| good' trap super easily.
|
| They can't see progress in front of their faces. Be it the
| internet, crypto, EVs, reusable rockets - they're all seen as
| jokes until they aren't.
|
| AI is a juggernaut. If you can't see it I'm kind of envious
| because the reality around the corner is potentially
| terrifying.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think of the story from Lem's _Cyberiad_ about the 8 story
| high 'thinking machine' that insisted 2+2=5, got angry like
| the Bing chatbot when it was told it was wrong, then broke
| loose from its foundations and chased Trurl and Klapucius
| into the mountains.
|
| People will learn the hard way there is no market for
| machines that get the wrong answers. There are plenty of
| places where people will accept one kind of imperfection or
| another and that's fine, but when it comes to an accounting
| bot that screws up your taxes it is not fine.
|
| (Funny I have seen a few chatbots that claim they are busy as
| soon as you tell them they are wrong about something and I
| wonder if that is because they've been trained on many
| examples where things really went south when somebody called
| out somebody's mistake.)
| bottlepalm wrote:
| Like I said, your hang up on perfection is blinding you to
| the rate of progress and potential consequences.
| morelisp wrote:
| I share your reflection on the current state and
| foreseeable future effectiveness of AI, but
|
| > People will learn the hard way there is no market for
| machines that get the wrong answers.
|
| I fear this is wildly untrue.
|
| To take your example: The wealthy won't use the accounting
| bot. Everyone else won't have the time/energy/means to
| recoup whatever it cost them.
|
| In software development one only needs look around to see a
| world of "markets" - that is, profitable opportunities -
| for wrong answers (bad designs, useless products, orders of
| magnitude of inefficiency).
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Scary isn't it?
| pixl97 wrote:
| >People will learn the hard way there is no market for
| machines that get the wrong answers.
|
| Eh, in machines there are markets for machines that get it
| occasionally wrong as long as the defect rate is lower and
| or cheaper than the human equivalent defect rate cost. So
| I'd say that's a really bad take on the last few hundred
| years of industrialization.
|
| In accounting there are really two different sets of things
| going on at once. There are 'the numbers' of which we'd run
| in a calculator, but then there is interpretation of the
| written rules in relation to the numbers you input. If your
| business is in any way complex, take your numbers to 3
| different firms and see if even two come back with anything
| close to the same number. Hell, in the same damned firm we
| commonly see that two auditors will come up with different
| numbers and a supervisor had to look at the rule in
| question and make a judgement call on what they think the
| IRS agent would accept.
|
| Now, don't confuse that with me thinking that using ChatGPT
| is a good idea to do the above. We are not there yet.
| braindead_in wrote:
| The hype around ChatGPT is massive! I haven't seen this much buzz
| since the iPhone launch. Back in 2008, I remember having debates
| with my friends about the future of Nokia just a few days after
| it launched. Since then, I've witnessed the rise and fall of
| several tech waves, including mobile apps, cloud, SaaS, and
| crypto. It's been exciting to see so many people ride these waves
| and create wealth in the process. Will I be one of the lucky ones
| this time around is the only question.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| Machine learning has a decade-long track record of adding value
| to consumers and companies in various sectors. Crypto does not.
| There's probably too much hype, but it's not completely
| unfounded.
| jstx1 wrote:
| Just because a bunch of crypto grifters are finding a new field
| to dip into doesn't mean that there hasn't been a lot of genuine
| progress in AI in the past 6 months.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Aside from dumping a very large amount of compute and human-
| supervised learning into existing technology, what major
| progress has been made in the past six months?
| jstx1 wrote:
| You don't need to be dismissive - demonstrating what can be
| achieved with a lot of data/compute and additional human-
| supervised learning is progress.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > You don't need to be dismissive
|
| Read it again, but this time turn off your preconception. I
| asked a question I wanted to hear a legitimate answer for.
| I am very interested to hear where this is headed (to the
| best of our ability to predict). The results we can get
| with sufficient computing power is quite interesting, but
| is it reaching the point of rapidly diminishing returns?
| What's the next step in this evolution, beyond making the
| training faster or adding more parameters to the model?
| [deleted]
| devmunchies wrote:
| Easy. We're getting better at prompt engineering.
| pixl97 wrote:
| You mean things like GPT showing theory of mind at the level
| of a 9 year old, something that many people were arguing may
| not ever happen and/or if it did we were still a long way
| away from it just a few years ago?
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| I mean, Stable Diffusion came out mid August (almost exactly
| 6 months ago) and the past six months have seen tons of
| refinement by hobbyists, so we went from having what amounted
| to a tech demo with practically closed access to a _really
| functional_ diffusion model that you can run on your average
| gaming machine. I 'd say that's kind of major.
| sircastor wrote:
| I suspect that there are plenty of Crypto enthusiasts who would
| say the say the same thing about crypto - the tragedy is that
| if the grifters are successful it's going to poison the AI
| market for another 5-10 years.
| bawolff wrote:
| I think there is a fundamental difference when you have an
| actual usecase.
|
| You can do useful things with AI, the market can reward
| people for being useful, and push out the stupid things.
|
| You can't really do useful things with crypto. The ecosystem
| was a gradient between straight up fraud, to sketchy
| financial engineering projects that well technically not a
| scam are right on the border of being one. There is no room
| to reward actual progress so obviously the money is going to
| get dumped into the sketchy shit.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-02-25 23:02 UTC)