“The current climate in AI has so many parallels to 2021 Web3”

https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1612142423425138688

by szemy2 • 4 years ago

119 169 4 years ago

labrador• 4 years ago

If they mean as an investment or game in the tech stock casino then I'd agree

It's more or less a grifting industry at this point. The topic changes as people grow wise to the con, but the tactics stay the same.

Kaotique• 4 years ago

The difference for me personally: Web3/NFT/Crypto: what? why? DALL-E/ChatGPT: wow!

dgb23• 4 years ago

The main driver is technological advancement and the generated value is _obviously_ net positive.

Not saying that there aren't issues that need to be discussed, nor am I saying that there isn't any (unnecessary) hype. But the comparison to Web3 is a stretch.

The author addresses this:

One last thought -- don't overindex on the web3 <> LLMs comparison. Of course web3 was pure hot air while LLMs is real tech with actual applications -- that's not the parallel I'm making. The parallel is in the bubble formation social dynamics, especially in the VC crowd.

So aren't they just saying "hype is hype"?

(edited an incomplete sentence)

lm284692• 4 years ago

I agree, but it can be "wow that's good" without "wow that's going to replace very single creative job in the world by 2024" which a lot of people seem to expect

It's a bit like thinking autonomous parallel parking will automatically bring you fully autonomous cars soon

pigsty2• 4 years ago

I don’t think it’s that people expect it. It’s that some people absolutely despise the idea of artists and have some irrational desire to erase their jobs and automate it all.

These people usually aren’t people signing checks—just angry people online, and oftentimes tied in with political motivations. I don’t think many companies are licking their lips at the idea of firing artists (yet). They’re probably thinking about how they can use this to assist artists to get more done faster and at higher quality.

mrtksn3• 4 years ago

Web3/NFT/Crypto promises: Very clever and advanced tech, People will stop using the old stuff because they hate the government and want to save pennies.

Web3/NFT/Crypto realities: using it is expensive and hard, scams left and right and the government actually arrives but doesn't remedy the damages. People are not in to save pennies on transactions but to get rich quick.

DALL-E/ChatGPT promises: A statistical model that can generate text and images that are impressive but not always accurate. Also, the tech is not that magical, we just used so much data to train it.

DALL-E/ChatGPT reality: Wows everyone, people actually use it tirelessly for writing code, creating artwork, recreationally etc.

We will probably hit the limits soon and won't have GAI next year but the stuff already delivered is already useful. The crypto stuff might become useful but its nowhere near the hype.

bmitc5• 4 years ago

DALL-E/ChatGPT promises: A statistical model that can generate text and images that are impressive but not always accurate. Also, the tech is not that magical, we just used so much data to train it.
DALL-E/ChatGPT reality: Wows everyone, people actually use it tirelessly for writing code, creating artwork, recreationally etc.

That's a pretty generous if not biased take, is it not? For me personally, ChatGPT is underwhelming and hasn't done anything remotely impressive when I have used it. And there's a lot of fervor around people using it, but are there interesting use cases outside of advertising? And are there not a ton of harmful use cases? The internet is going to be absolutely filled to the brim with GPT generated junk.

notahacker• 4 years ago

OpenAI's actual promises are "to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity."

A chatbot that's relatively accurate at interpreting and summarising stuff compared with previous generation chatbots and an image generation algorithm that's actually pretty good are a damned sight more useful than NFTs which is why I agree with others that the comparison isn't helpful, but I don't think it's realistic to characterise OpenAI and AI enthusiasts in general as under-promising

spaceman_20202• 4 years ago

In this analogy, would OpenAI be the Ethereum-equivalent of AI space - actually innovative tech and some real world utility with a strong team of developers?

wellanyway5• 4 years ago

Ethereum-equivalent

What non-scam/non-marketing-bullshit-and-no-product-in-sight came out of Ethereum? I know a few people that work in related field and it's shady money managed by people with exorbitant personality issues doing endless POC that will be sold... one day... to someone... totally, dude, like, radically expensive...

spaceman_20202• 4 years ago

A very first-world perspective. I live in the third world. My currency keeps crashing every year. There are currency controls over how much foreign currency I can own. My government also randomly enacts haphazard financial policies, such as outlawing 86% of all circulating cash.

Crypto, especially stablecoins, has actually helped me protect my wealth. Real use case for me at least, and many others like me in the third world.

The world is bigger than you think, and their problems are more varied than you realize.

mikerg87• 4 years ago

Crooks and swindlers will find there way into anything where big money is likely to be hyped. Unlike web3 I actually see products being built from LLM.

ben_w4• 4 years ago

Possibly. I'm certainly excited by it, but unless there are patents involved (for all I know there might be, but I've not heard anything about that either way), I'd say 2022's headline AI look like they will be the next spreadsheet or the next spell-check/grammar-check rather than the next Google: any software that takes less than a few million to implement, is a race to the bottom with regard to monetisation.

cactusplant73742• 4 years ago

Very skeptical of this because the AI is so strong that safety and quality will always be an issue and if safety isn’t an issue the output may not be that interesting because the model is strongly curbed.

For example, I saw a Twitter post where a podcaster said the AI generated introduction for his podcast was better than anything he could write. I think the takeaway is that his writing isn’t that good and he also thinks boilerplate is impressive.

yao4203• 4 years ago

To me that is excellent. I hate emails and I’m admittedly not good at writing them.

I now type “write an email that says it was was nice meeting and getting to know the team. Send me the scope docs which I’ll fill out and return. Let’s schedule a status in two weeks”

It gives me a great email which I proofread and send in less than 2mins.

birdymcbird• 4 years ago

“The fact that investment is being driven by pure hype, by data-free narratives rather than actual revenue data or first-principles analysis. The circularity of it all -- hype drives investment which drives hype which drives investment. The influx of influencer engagement bait.”

Think this cynical. author good to see ads or marketing using hype for clicks. people do stuff to make money on latest trend, just nature.

but me dont know anything productive in web3. it hype through all way. English not me first language. writing use almost feel magic to have chatgpt clean and rewrite my posts. also used for coding examples. dont think this equal to web3. maybe need time to mature to billion dollar scale but me wouldnt bet money against

anotheryou3• 4 years ago

and yet AI has actual use cases %)

marginalia_nu5• 4 years ago

Most of them hinge upon incredible yet highly nebulous improvements to the technology to solve as-yet unsolved problems based on a lot of extrapolation based on hype and "dude trust me the next thing is gonna be great"'s from AI companies, and a generally poor understanding of how the technology works and what its limitations are.

The central logic error is something along the lines of "I don't understand the limitations of this technology, therefore it must have no limitations".

anotheryou3• 4 years ago

There is enough non-nebulous problems it will solve.

WalterSear4• 4 years ago

This just isn't the case. People are being productive with AI right now.

Crypto ran out of excuses for having no actual products outside of itself a long time ago. That is, apart from the money laundering and grift that it was used for from day one.

CuriouslyC• 4 years ago

Except that these deep learning models are currently useful, we've demonstrated that brute force scaling alone has the potential to improve them significantly, and there is a lot of room for architectural improvements to make them more efficient.

What's more, we're starting to see people stack/chain specially trained models to achieve very impressive workflows.

password543212• 4 years ago

You didn't read the thread.

qabqabaca• 4 years ago

As far as consumer interest goes, the problem with Web3 is it sells the means rather than the end. Nobody cares if your Twitter/Substack/Spotify Web3 alternative is decentralised or you own your own data on the platform. To win it has to be immediately useful and/or better than alternatives.

Content generation AI is so obviously useful to the majority of people and it does not require an understanding of how it works in order to be impressed by it.

ryanbrunner• 4 years ago

Impressive for sure. Usefulness is still being explored (outside of a few early things like Copilot).

The majority of people are still interacting with this stuff primarily as a toy, and while it's a much, much smaller leap to imagine how you'd use it in everyday life vs. something like web3, most people aren't yet, and I don't think it's an absolute certainty that they will (or at the very least, how universally they will).

marban• 4 years ago

My TikTok stream has been hijacked by pseudo-tech grifters who are promising the usual $1k/day by selling GPT-generated books on Amazon. Go figure.

rchaud6• 4 years ago

as has my Twitter with a giant wave of influencer bros who are all of sudden AI course experts and conveniently have discount codes for me to use.

api• 4 years ago

"We tend to overestimate the effect of technology in the short term and underestimate it in the long term."

The comparison with web3 is very excessive though. This AI stuff is at least somewhat actually useful. Web3 was a gigantic billion dollar bubble that produced very little in the way of things that are useful for any purpose, even playing around. It's one of the most vapid bubbles in history outside pure financial instrument bubbles.

snowwrestler• 4 years ago

Generative AI is good for SEO copy because it’s an AI talking to an AI. Google looks at text generated by ChatGPT and is like “wow, that’s exactly how I think about things.” They were trained on much of the same content: the web.

The biggest challenge for generative AI is its willingness to make things up. It’s fine when you’re playing around. Not so fine when you’re expecting it to actually help you in a real way.

I suspect this is why Google has not debuted such an interface despite literally decades of work on AI. You have to be able to bolt a “truth filter” onto the AI, which seems difficult.

wellanyway5• 4 years ago

Imagine training it on Vatican library. Butlerian jihad here we go.

superkuh• 4 years ago

Yep. The value/utility of the underlying technology doesn't really matter. The scammers will just switch to using whatever buzzwords are most hip and eventually people will associate the buzzword more with the scammers than the technology itself. This was taken to the extreme with cryptocurrency post-2015 where most people never even had an actual interaction with cryptocurrency but believe they know what it is from all the tangentially related scams they heard ads or news about.

The utility of AI can be real, just as the utility of bitcoin is, but it'll be drowned under things like "Quantum AI trading platform" or "NFT"s in the public perception.

WhiteNoiz3• 4 years ago

I blame much of the hype around the "metaverse" on crypto scammers. VR was arguably in a slow but steady growth phase centered around games until it got tied up with the overhyped and poorly defined buzz word, which also includes every hyped up technology in existence (AI, AR, Blockchain, etc). As a long time VR developer going back to 2015, it was hard to watch it happen.

klelatti6• 4 years ago

Something can be both technically incredibly impressive, genuinely useful and yet at the same dramatically over-hyped. That may be the case for AI today although the range of possible outcomes makes the latter point genuinely unclear.

The difference for me is that Web3 was never shown to be at all useful.

password543212• 4 years ago

The comparison is between the level of hype not the technology itself. If you take the time to read the thread he is more than well aware of the practical aspects of AI.

klelatti6• 4 years ago

I know that - I read the thread - and I respect Chollet and the fact that he knows an awful lot more about AI than I do. I personally don't think though that the comparison to Web3 is helpful even with the clarification deep in the thread.

loveparade• 4 years ago

The difference for me is that Web3 was never shown to be at all useful.

Because nobody agrees what web3 even means, it's a totally useless term, not that dissimilar to AGI or consciousness, which nobody can properly define. People who hate crypto define web3 in terms of all the negative stuff, while people who have a vested interested in pumping token prices (like VCs) will define web3 in terms of all the potentially positive stuff.

I believe that the that fundamentals of crypto are incredibly useful and will eventually be adopted, and have been in meany places, but all the web3/NFT/etc stuff (whatever that means) is just useless hype and ponzi schemes.

Crypto has a much more negative image because it's full of scams, but that doesn't mean anything. It's just significantly easier to create scams with crypto because money is at the very base layer, than it is to create scams with AI. But that doesn't imply anything about the usefulness of these technologies.

CipherThrowaway• 4 years ago

I believe that the that fundamentals of crypto are incredibly useful and will eventually be adopted, and have been in meany places, but all the web3/NFT/etc stuff (whatever that means) is just useless hype and ponzi schemes.

Could you elaborate? It's been 15 years since the bitcoin paper and I still don't see where the game changing commercial applications of crypto are beyond the black/grey market uses for which it has already been adopted.

rchaud6• 4 years ago

People who hate crypto define web3 in terms of all the negative stuff,

What is a web3 website/product that can be called a hit?

ht85• 4 years ago

Web3 outs grifters like no other thing before, so there's that.

dustymcp• 4 years ago

This made me chuckle abit, not that you are wrong i dont know. But it reminds me of how my parents generation understood the internet, full of scams and grifters :)

littlestymaar• 4 years ago

François Chollet already have a response[1] for you in his thread:

One last thought -- don't overindex on the web3 <> LLMs comparison. Of course web3 was pure hot air while LLMs is real tech with actual applications -- that's not the parallel I'm making. The parallel is in the bubble formation social dynamics, especially in the VC crowd.

[1] https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/fchollet/status/1612178630494...

klelatti6• 4 years ago

The first tweet says ‘the current climate in AI’ and ‘everyone’.

But actually it’s just social bubbles especially in VCs.

It’s not a response or a clarification it’s a change to the meaning of his headline.

michaelcampbell• 4 years ago

Can AI predict when people will start writing longer form articles on a platform that doesn't artificially restrict you to paragraphs?

readingnews• 4 years ago

I was going to ask that too, but now I wonder, is 280 characters actually a paragraph?

NDizzle• 4 years ago

Maybe I slept through it, but what was Web3 in 2021?!

mandis• 4 years ago

any points serious enough to merit a reply?

wellanyway5• 4 years ago

Little part of twitter was very excited. I guess we are supposed to be very impressed.

WinstonSmith84• 4 years ago

The problem is people and their expectations after a sudden technology jump:

- 15 years ago we got smartphones and people expected laptops and desktop computer to go away (within the next few years)

- we got web3 and people expected suddenly banks, tradfi, etc. to go away

- we got ChatGPT 2 months ago and now what? Google dead? School / university irrelevant? Threat to humanity?

There will be incremental improvements for AI, it will slowly become more part of our life, like it happens for these other techs

Mystery-Machine• 4 years ago

When you say "people" I hope that you mean "minority of people". Yes, I've heard people saying that laptops will go away. Some people said that. Yes. Some people.

Web3 is just laughable. Again, some people.

Google is obviously not dead.

However, I think with AI, there's a huge potential. It will change the world, the way some things are done and some jobs are gonna go away and new jobs will appear. Much more disrupting than a f web3 joke.

rchaud6• 4 years ago

Laptops sort of have gone away, in the sense that the smartphone has become many people's first computing device over the past decade.

Adults who did not own a computing device before the smartphone, may choose to continue living their lives without a laptop/desktop. Kids who have grown up with iPads and Chromebooks at school may look for mobile options in college first instead of a standard Mac/Windows laptop.

version_five• 4 years ago

What I find interesting is there has been a (percieved) massive change in the popular opinion re "AI". If you got an AI story on HN 6 months ago, there were all kinds of "it's just statistics" comments (also incorrect). Now the mood has changed and all the laypeople are gushing about how great it is.

Otoh, my impression is people who have been involved in ML for a while didn't have any sea change in their opinion of the technology based on the recent advances. These were predictable, but cool, extensions of things that were already known, and represent a fundamental advance in polish and marketing, rather than technology.

My point is that the public discourse is now mostly dominated by people looking to profit from hype, not people who actually have experience in the technology, which is of course going to lead to a web3 type feel

Incidentally, below is my prediction for 2023 from new year's eve. I didn't think it would start becoming apparent so quick: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34197033

rchaud6• 4 years ago

My point is that the public discourse is now mostly dominated by people looking to profit from hype

Precisely, and they will do untold damage when it comes to educating normal people about what AI can and cannot do.

izzygonzalez• 4 years ago

Can you elaborate on what sort of damage you’re imagining, or give an example?

mihaic• 4 years ago

I actually think AI is much more like VR or 3D-cinema tech than Web3: it sounds like it might be a game changer, but nobody actually likes the new medium that much after the initial cool factor. AI generated images are much more impressive though, and some things will be unique.

In the next decade, I see AI to tackle a special category of problems: those that shouldn't be solved, or else the system as a whole gets worse -- chat bots for customer support, absurd amount of content creation. There's much more content today than 20 years ago, and yet my enjoyment has gone down. If I were a member of congress, I'd be surely thinking about ways to slow this down.

jackmott423• 4 years ago

Every day I see one or two new thought pieces on how AI is not actually good/capable/impressive or how AI is overhyped. I have seen zero thought pieces on how AI is amazing and hyped. Meanwhile a lot of people are having fun with, or doing useful things with, StableDiffusion and ChatGPT.

The negative takes are mostly correct in all the limitations they talk about, but what they miss is how amazing these things are despite these limitations. These things are remarkably simple and limited yet they can generate realistic photos of myself in places I've never been, wearing clothes I've never worn, doing things I've never done, with a quick text sentence. Or nearly pass the bar exam.

On top of that a lot of the limitations have straightforward ways to address, many of which are already in progress. It is going to get really interesting. StableDiffusion knows nothing about the images it is produces, its just repeated denoising with image targets. It doesn't really understand anything about your text either, its just matching up tags. But both of those things can easily change. Put a big language model in front of it to better understand text. Already variants of these image models have depth information. Next up 3d object information, maybe next models of physics so it can understand how things would actually work in the scene, and so on.

going to get wild.

arcturus172• 4 years ago

but what they miss is how amazing these things are despite these limitations

The author of this Twitter thread is François Chollet, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, creator of Keras and major contributor to TensorFlow, and author of Deep Learning in Python, considered by many a seminal book in introductory DL...

I'd say he understands how amazing these things are despite the limitations, and he specifically says in the thread that it's an amazing time to be building DL apps.

logicchains• 4 years ago

The author of this Twitter thread is François Chollet, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, creator of Keras and major contributor to TensorFlow, and author of Deep Learning by Python, considered by many a seminal book in introductory DL...

That sounds like someone who's great at API design, not a deep learning researcher.

Jensson2• 4 years ago

I have seen zero thought pieces on how AI is amazing and hyped.

You didn't see this one? There are many more, but I remembered this one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34086462

jackmott423• 4 years ago

You know, I did. Thanks for pointing that out.

dcolkitt2• 4 years ago

Don’t think anybody doubts that the current achievements are intellectually impressive. The issue for VCs is how valuable are they from a business perspective. Creating photos of people in places they’ve never been is really cool, but realistically how much money will people actually pay for that?

For AI to be as valuable as current rounds are implying it has to actually be capable of replacing your lawyer, your accountant, your software engineer. ChatGPT is nowhere near accurate enough to do that. It’s the same issue we ran into with super cruise control versus fully autonomous driving. Or speech recognition. Early progress was fast. Last mile in AI is always brutal.

Maybe there’s some argument to say ChatGPT won’t replace your lawyer or software engineer but will make them 20% more efficient. Possible. Though I’m still skeptical. ChatGPT’s unparalleled ability to create really convincing sounding errors is a big hidden negative productivity drag.

a4isms2• 4 years ago

Having lived through hype wave after hype wave after hype wave in tech over the last forty-fifty years, the commentary about the behaviour of VCs resonated. I wonder if part of why VCs back so many copycat companies in hype cycles is a structural incentive to just invest money in things that are getting press, raising the VCs profile and attracting more deal flow and limited partners.

This led to idle speculation: If it was possible to short early-stage startups that VCs were backing, there would be as much incentive for the media to discuss a startup’s shortcomings and vapourware promises as there is to repeat their breathless braggadocio.

hackitup72• 4 years ago

I think there is some truth to the statement, although many VCs that I've met are really sharp and thoughtful. Not at all the caricature of greasy tech illiterates that sometimes gets thrown around. You kind of can't generate good returns if you aren't able to think about the long-term trajectories of industries.

But I think that with the bubble times of 2018-2021 a lot of people entered the industry or changed their behavior because it was trendy and cool, and they have been way more down to ride the hype cycle rodeo.

a4isms2• 4 years ago

I have also met many intelligent and thoughtful investors. I am speaking only to the systemic effects of a kind of marketplace for information that overvalues hype, and undervalues criticism.

My speculative musing is that if people could take short positions in startups and not just coattail on as one of a group of investors, I wonder if we’d get a lot fewer breathless PR puff-pieces and a lot more cases for pessimism around certain types of hype cycle investments, backed by investors betting their own moeny against the hype.

ackbar03• 4 years ago

Powell needs to keep raising rates

juujian• 4 years ago

What's annoying is that I have seen not one realistic idea come out of this. This is not some kind of alien technology, it is a concrete algorithm. You cannot just say 'this will revolutionize everything' and then refuse to elaborate. It is hard to integrate this into an existing project, and it does not solve the agency issue that we already had, which is that AI can talk, but it cannot make decisions for you. So more emasculated chat bots that nobody wants to talk to. And how big a market is copy editing really? To publish something based on chatgpd you still need to put in a ton of work, because it does not check its sources and makes stuff up. So how is AI really better than 5 years ago other than that it's a better writer with a better style? That wasn't the problem 5 years ago, and it is not today.

sharemywin3• 4 years ago

In it's current iteration I go to it before I go to google for a lot questions(mostly coding questions)

I like that I can ask specific questions and get specific answers to my questions. Not samples that may or may not be close to what I'm looking for.

if it it's wrong I can try to clarify it. Does it work 100% of the time no. But I feel like it adds value.

The big question is what can GPT4 do.

rchaud6• 4 years ago

You cannot just say 'this will revolutionize everything' and then refuse to elaborate.

This is intentional, as most of the low-hanging fruit of AI transformation are things people either don't care about, or think would be a net negative. Like replacing junior publicists with AI-written PR copy. What difference would that make to the consumer? Very little if any.

On the other hand, replacing real human art (as you might see on The New Yorker cartoons or The Economist) with AI-generated images may make some readers unhappy.

l33tman• 4 years ago

The killer feature with ChatGPT is that you can interactively refine a result. Your skill as a writer for a magazine for example now can be that you're good at recognizing good writing and can articulate how it can be made better, but you don't need to be a good writer yourself anymore. This was absolutely not possible 5 years ago or even 1 year ago.

ChatGPT doesn't need to be a "chat" product. It's an interactive stateful tool.

mrguyorama8• 4 years ago

but it cannot make decisions for you

Oh you poor soul. AI is already making decisions for and about you, and policy will often prefer that automated decision over a human one, or worse, will farm out the "human appeal" to what is basically an internal Fiverr system that requires the humans to only take about 60 seconds for each appeal and can not possibly make good decisions.

I know from my work that a high quality human review of a simple situation with significant data labeling and highlighting important and relevant info to be reviewed costs about $1. If you are spending any less than that on a human review of arbitrary data with arbitrary rules you should consider it worse than a coin flip.

Isinlor• 4 years ago

People overestimate what's possible short-term and under-estimate what's possible long term.

Current AI models have three main limitations:

- rapid skill acquisition. Example: someone invents a new programming language. Something like Elm or Rust. Humans can start using it right after reading a "quick start" page and few tutorials from the authors of the new language. How much training data will GPT-style models need to start using that language? A lot, like output of hundreds or thousands of people. This needs to go down by a factor of 10x to 100x to match humans.

- agency, or taking actions guided towards a goal. Example: Can you ask GPT-like model to book a flight ticket for you? Help it help you learning Photoshop? New IDE? Test your latest app or indie game and find bugs? No. The ability of current models is still not good enough to be useful to an average person with regard to interacting with outside world.

- acting in the physical world. Example: An average human can learn to drive enough to pass a driving test in the order of 100 hours during a driving course. How far away are we from a system that can control humanoid-style robot to learn to drive in the order of 100h? Currently, we can't do it with billions of dollars with specially designed hardware. Using humanoid robot to control a car is not even useful as a benchmark for the state of the art machine learning systems.

IMO the currently existing systems like ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion are worth all put together in the range of $10B to $100B in the next 3-5 years.

Future systems that will address all 3 limitations mentioned above may be literally the whole reachable universe changing if we decide to build self-replicating space probes (Von Neumann probes). We know that there are physical systems that are not very intelligent but capable of exponential growth like viruses or bacteria (humans too).

The main limitation of biological systems is their adaptability, especially to lack of water. If robots can build other robots avoiding bottlenecks of human intellectual and manual labor then the robots are limited only by resources and energy available. We have plenty of both on Earth and Solar system is full of it.

Also, I'm just talking about human-like abilities. All of that is possible without involving concepts like superintelligence. Bacteria are not very smart, but they can multiply exponentially.

The spread of possibilities is enormous.

All of that hinges on your timelines on the 3 above mentioned limitations. It's like predicting when atomic bomb will be possible. It may not happen for decades, or there may be right this very moment someone with an idea that will make it all possible.

karmasimida2• 4 years ago

I don't agree with this, like strongly.

What is web3 actually? I don't think there is a definition people can agree on. So even bashing web3 as if it is anything other than at best a vaporware, worst case a scam, is fruitless and not grounded in reality.

Let's talk about the current climate in AI part. From his tweet, he seems to point to Sam Altman's statement that GPT-3.5+ is going to 'civilization transformation'. Well, if you follow Altman's past statements, he likes to make grandiose statements like this, and at the end of day, it is more of his personal style of speech than anything else.

So let's back to the comparison of web3 vs GPT style AI agents. I would argue, the latter is indeed, partially already a reality. Imagine if you have a multiple modular in-context learning agents, then here is the opportunity: A machine that is programmable through natural language and examples/demonstrations. The level of automation potential is going to insane, even scary. What if we hook it up with some robotic arms? If someone makes this work, we will have a factory that can make many many things, at the same time, in the same place, with little human involvement. This, of course, is going to fundamentally change wide range of industries, or capitalism itself and will have geopolitical implications.

Havoc• 4 years ago

Key difference I think is that Ai while overhyped will definitely have an enduring impact at least partially. With web3 etc that part was less clear

rayiner• 4 years ago

Seems like it has more parallels to the AI Winter of the 1970s. https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-winter

In particular the collapse of faith in the future of Tesla’s full self driving, and self-driving cars generally, has been palpable.

iambateman• 4 years ago

This is a lazy tweet.

ChatGPT is trivially useful in a lot of cases...The other day I asked it to write marketing copy for a project and it wrote _better_ marketing copy than I could have written in an hour. On another project, I spent 10 minutes integrating the OpenAI library and was programmatically receiving incredible results with almost no effort.

The nature of predicting the future means that there will be periods of overconfidence. In the case of Web3 (taken to mean blockchain/crypto/digital coins), the overconfidence was fueled by a core ponzi scheme combined with truly extraordinary returns for early speculators. But AI has no ponzi scheme attached to it so the comparison breaks down. My uncle cannot gamble his retirement on a mysterious promise of überwealth from a man with wild hair and no financial experience.

AI companies will have lots of false starts but 2022 was a transformational year and we are only getting started.

thesausageking• 4 years ago

Read the whole thread. Francis is the creator of Keras and an AI engineer at Google. He knows his stuff.

He calls out ads/marketing/copywriting as one area where ChatGPT is effective. His point is that the scope of things beyond that use case is probably a lot more limited than people are assuming.

rapsey2• 4 years ago

Just because he is an engineer does not mean he can predict how near future AI products will turn out.

Web3 was a circle jerk within the crypto community. It only convinced fools.

Recent GPT/stable diffusion products universally blow people away with their output.

Engineers and everyone else regularly dismiss new tech for its shortcomings and completely miss the forest for the trees.

onurcel• 4 years ago

argument by authority?

He also said pytorch was just a hype. It looks like he just doesn't like things he didn't do himself.

jillesvangurp• 4 years ago

I would say code generation and documenting is another one. The UX for this is a bit sucky but I've been pretty blown away with chat gpt's ability to generate, translate, and explain existing code.

I actually started trying to learn rust using chat gpt. I can just ask it to explain bits I don't understand ... and it does.

There's a lot of content generation in the legal and medical sphere that is probably also pretty much something where chat gpt could be helpful. Dangerous of course when it gets it wrong. But still, I could see this being a useful tool for researchers in all sorts of fields to quickly dig through a lot of information. Basically, chat gpt is trained on more stuff than a single human will be able to read.

I think this whole space is maybe bottlenecked on imagination. We have a lot of AI experts with not a whole lot of other expertise not seeing the forest for the trees. OpenAI employs a few geniuses but their product is basically a chat box and an API.

As I was remarking to a friend the other day: so they have chat gpt, pretty decent speech to text, and amazing text to speech .... so why can't I talk to chat gpt and listen to the answer? Such an obvious thing to do. Surely somebody thought of that. I mean inside OpenAI. I know there's a multitude of openai powered proofs of concept by third parties. But they don't seem to have the ambition to support a finished product so far.

choxi• 4 years ago

Also keep in mind that his reference point for “overhype” is people claiming AGI within 2-3 years.

Terretta4• 4 years ago

Read the whole thread. Francis is the creator of Keras and an AI engineer at Google. He knows his stuff.

I read the thread, it actually starts with him saying:

"If this had been a blog post and not a random spur-of-the-moment train of thoughts, I wouldn't have made the AI/web3 comparison. It was counterproductive, as it is what most folks are now focusing on. The two are, in fact, very much not the same."

So you can have the "appeal to authority" but the authority now says that was bad and should not have done it. :-)

He continues:

"I meant to compare the surrounding hype generation dynamics (as discussed towards the end of the thread). Expectations unmoored from reality becoming a universally accepted, self-evident canon once the same narratives have been repeated enough times in the echo chamber."

hypertele-Xii• 4 years ago

I'm guessing your salary depends on you thinking that AI-generated marketing copy is a Good Thing™.

To me, it just sounds like more dystopian attention spam. If absolutely all marketing copy vanished overnight never to return, in my opinion the world would be a better place.

mrguyorama8• 4 years ago

I'm hoping we haven't hit the "uncanny valley" of ML generated text yet, and we will get to a point where something very deep in our brain is able to pick up that ML generated text isn't something coming from a genuine person (much like how lots of people intuitively understand that marketing copy is valueless) and viscerally react to it in a negative way.

It would be the only possible defense against this dystopian crap.

pmlnr• 4 years ago

ChatGPT is trivially useful in a lot of cases

Spam?

dcolkitt2• 4 years ago

So far, when asked what's the use case for ChatGPT/LLMs, the sole answer with clear PMF is marketing copy. Agree it is very good for that. Just as crypto had very clear PMF for cross-border payments and stablecoins in middle income countries without dollarized banking. The problem is neither of these use cases is sufficient to justify peak valuations. (OpenAI is currently raising at $30bn.)

Like crypto, there are other potential use cases on the horizon for LLMs. The problem is the tech is still far too clunky, unreliable and impractical for the foreseeable future. LLMs are subject to a devastating hallucination problem, where they confidently report clearly erroneous data. And there is no solution in sight. Marketing copy is one of the sole major use cases, where random inaccuracies is mostly not catastrophic. But you're never going to trust LLMs to write code or legal contracts or technical documentation or even your own emails until the hallucination issue is drastically improved.

That leaves us with a few other niches that are, frankly not very monetizable. ChatGPT is very good at writing student essays, but students don't have very much money to spend. Makes a fun chatbot, but people are unlikely to pay much of anything to have a chat companion.

Like crypto, AI is a case of really intellectually interesting technology that nerdsniped a lot of smart people. Like crypto, AI has a few small (in terms of market size) use cases where there's clear PMF. Like crypto, there are potentially a lot of other much larger use cases that the nerdsniped smart people are imagining. Like crypto, these large use cases are going to require a lot of fundamental improvements to the tech itself before they become feasible. Like crypto in 2021, AI valuations in 2023 are treating those large scale use cases as imminent rather than long-term speculative.

(Note this isn't a statement about which tech has a brighter long-term future. It's still more than possible to believe (as many on HN do) that AI will be transformative over the next couple decades and crypto is vapor. But the point is AI valuations are implying that it's going to be transformative over years not decades, and it's pretty clear that's not the case. There are parallels with crypto in 2021, where regardless of the long-term promise, the short-term returns simply cannot support the valuations.)

isoprophlex• 4 years ago

From the thread, the author states that spam/"marketing content creation" is the only viable area of application.

This is consistent with the primary learning from the 2020-2021 class of GPT-3 startups (a category of startups willed into existence by VCs and powered by hype), which is that commercial use cases have been falling almost entirely into the marketing and copywriting niches.

netman21• 4 years ago

I too have lived through many hype cycles. I jumped on one in 1992 and created one of the first ISPs in Michigan. That changed my career path from automotive to tech. It was an exciting time as thousands of ISPs were launched.

I completely ignored the hype around blockchain, NFTs, etc. I even block anyone who says they are a blockchain expert on Linkedin.

But I am all in on leveraging LLM for new business use cases. My mind is blown at what we can do with DaVinci 3.5 and looking forward to evaluating 4.0. ChatGPT is a demonstrator. DaVinci is ushering in the next wave of innovation.

Terretta4• 4 years ago

Jumped same time (the year it became legal to make money on the Internet, which I think was '93), co-founding an ISP and web agency.

And fully agree with you, except that I think DLT (distributed ledger technology) has use cases, for instance, ATMs in grocery stores.

Meanwhile Mid-Journey and text-davinci-003 are super impressive in making interesting things from probabilistic blends of other things.

ChatGPT is like decades of Bayesian "reasoning" or probabilistic (aka "evidenced-based whatever") free association finally having a creative application and outlet.

peter-m80• 4 years ago

I find AI products incredibly useful and I save a lot of time by using them; I have paid subscriptions to MJ and OpenAI and I use them frequently.

On the contrary, web3 is nothing more than empty promises.

sharemywin3• 4 years ago

I still think social authentication and S3 replacements are valid use cases for web3.

as for GPT I think it is revolutionary. And it is the first chatbot that I prefer to work with over google. Way easier to use than google.

If it becomes a paid service(assuming the pricing is right) I feel it's incentives align better than googles with mine.

Where things get messed up is recommending products and services. If it can stick to a no pay to rank type of service than it would revolutionize the economy.

No assistant is perfect but seems to do better then a lot of human assistants.

Will it be perfect in the future no, but I think if it can offer some kind of confidence factor to it's answers that would go a long way.

rafaelero• 4 years ago

I find it hard to overhype the immense progress we had in the last two years in AI. All that hype is deserved.

more_corn• 4 years ago

This is a dangerous assertion. Web3 never had any “there there” No coherent use case, no value add. Smart contracts? Maybe. No proposed use case actually requires or benefits from blockchain. The currencies were always blatant speculation. A cabdriver in OKC recently told me he was “invested” in diesel coin. A) wtf is that and B) in what way is that an investment (you know where you dedicate capital to a value engine and when value is created you get out more than you put in)

AI as it exists TODAY has the potential (with a bit of prompt engineering and a free account) to assist everyone in their jobs. It will disrupt the software industry, art, writing, education, law, science.

Specialized AI assistants already exist and work startlingly well. It can write at a college level. It can code at a college level. It can learn specialized knowledge worker skills in a trivial amount of time. (Law for example)

It’s ok to not be optimistic. But if you discount it entirely you’re in for a bad time in the coming year, three years, five years.

Actually no, do whatever you want. Ai will come as a surprise to something like 6 billion people. There’s no harm to me in you being part of that group. And frankly the existence of different opinions about the future is a great hedge every society makes.

nsm• 4 years ago

I am really looking forward to AI that can help us solve hard biology and engineering issues (say nuclear reactor design, materials science) practically. Or an AI that will help solve coordination problems by telling us exactly where to compromise and how to negotiate so that everyone will agree to say relax zoning regulations. I know there are things like AlphaFold and probably lots of proprietary things in niche industries I'll never hear about because no mainstream media is going to cover that. Are there such examples?

I find the likes of ChatGPT wonderful, but in the end image and copy generation seems like a very first world/"content creator" use case that won't help us solve critical problems.

“The current climate in AI has so many parallels to 2021 Web3”

Related Stories