Please don't mention AI again

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/

by ludicity • 2 years ago

968 562 2 years ago

ludic.mataroa.blog

danielovichdk• 2 years ago

Thank you!

tuatoru• 2 years ago

If anyone wants to know the definition of "trenchant", read this blog post.

JSDevOps2• 2 years ago

Brilliant

angrydingo• 2 years ago

good stuff

yawpitch• 2 years ago

so I'm going to choose to take that personally and point out that using the word AI as some roundabout way to sell the labor of people that look like me to foreign governments is fucked up, you're an unethical monster, and that if you continue to try { thisBullshit(); } you are going to catch (theseHands)

And (theseFeets) in (yourNutz).

I'm going to ask ChatGPT how to prepare a garotte and then I am going to strangle you with it, and you will simply have to pray that I roll the 10% chance that it freaks out and tells me that a garotte should consist entirely of paper mache and malice.

Sadly it’s got a much greater than 10% chance of getting a garotte wrong.

bfuller• 2 years ago

A garotte is a device or weapon used for strangulation. It typically consists of a cord or wire, sometimes with handles at each end to provide better grip and leverage. The garotte is used by wrapping it around a person's neck and tightening it, cutting off the air supply and causing asphyxiation. Historically, garottes have been used for execution and assassination due to their silent and deadly nature. In modern contexts, they are often associated with covert or criminal activities.

welp

delichon• 2 years ago

No actually it isn't cute to threaten to break their neck if someone mentions a topic you don't like.

yifanl• 2 years ago

Things would be substantially more productive if boardroom meetings allowed more definitive responses than "We'll circle back to that later". This is the other extreme.

fuzzfactor• 2 years ago

You're correct.

It would be so much bolder and more mature if he threatened to run with scissors or hold his breath until he turned blue ;)

He may have some good points but might be more detracting than helping them stick.

nonplus• 2 years ago

Some of us won't ever know about his good points since we tuned out (left his web a page) due to the authors juvenile tone.

remoquete2• 2 years ago

I hear you, the tone might be too much to some. But it's also part of what makes it so fresh and almost a McSweeney's article.

busterarm3• 2 years ago

As opposed to the rampant _passive aggression_ that permeates every discussion and meeting of every workplace.

This entire comments section is exemplary of the industry at large. We're doing fucking _engineering work_ "professionally" and the bitching is 50:1 on his tone versus his actual ideas.

The entire professional class has been brought to its knees by a culture that demands we tiptoe around everyone's insecurities.

shrimp_emoji• 2 years ago

Lol he fell for the data science meme

foundart• 2 years ago

Interesting analysis wrapped in satire

theletterf• 2 years ago

Tone aside, the post contains some hard truths. I'm curious to see what the HN audience think of the point the author makes.

marssaxman• 2 years ago

I love his point and I love his exuberantly colorful tone.

thrillgore• 2 years ago

The audience isn't getting to see it because it's getting flagged as it shows up.

dang13• 2 years ago

We know organic interest when we see it, so I merged all the comments into this one (the first) and re-upped it. Meta explanations here if it's the kind of thing you like:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40734677

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40734700

Tiberium• 2 years ago

I myself have formal training as a data scientist, going so far as to dominate a competitive machine learning event at one of Australia's top universities and writing a Master's thesis where I wrote all my own libraries from scratch. I'm not God's gift to the field, but I am clearly better than most of my competition - that is, practitioners who haven't put in the reps to build their own C libraries in a cave with scraps, but can read textbooks and use libraries written by elite institutions.

I really didn't have any illusions on the article after reading this - apparently the author believes that anyone who hasn't written a C library is below him.

And also, this author is known to make articles that are full of ranting and have rage titles, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34968457

anigbrowl• 2 years ago

It worked for DHH. The substance is significantly better than I expected from the opener.

acureau• 2 years ago

Glad I'm not the only one put off by that. Though it's nice of him to signal so early on that his words aren't worth reading

smoothbenny6• 2 years ago

Maybe I'm misinterpreting but it seems like he considers himself a part of the "practitioners who haven't put in the reps to build their own C libraries in a cave with scraps, but can read textbooks and use libraries written by elite institutions" not above them

lolinder4• 2 years ago

Except for that in the sentence right before that he says that he did write his own C libraries from scratch, which I think means that the only reasonable interpretation of the "practitioners..." clause is that those are the people people that he describes as his "competition" who he is "clearly better than".

I'd really like to read it that way, but I'm afraid he actually did come across that arrogant.

financltravsty2• 2 years ago

Please note that Ludic is partly writing for himself to vent about the massive disappointment it is working in tech after all he's been through and partly as a rallying cry for others who can relate to being primarily surrounded by well-spoken incompentents.

If you subdue the urge to write him off based on his emotionally expressive writing, you'll find a lot of poignant observations you wouldn't get from more civilized venues (e.g. HN, famous tech influencers, thinkers, and execs, etc.).

Ludic's blog is a one-man 4chan board, minus the racism, sexism, and so on.

blast8• 2 years ago

and have rage titles, for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34968457

Uh yeah that's a bit like telling the same joke over and over. In fact it is the same joke.

talldayo• 2 years ago

This is just what happens, though. We were promised computer proliferation, and got locked-down squares with (barely) free internet access and little else to get excited for besides new ways to serve API requests. The future of programming isn't happening locally. Crypto, AI, shitty short-form entertainment, all of it is dripping from the spigot of an endless content pipeline. Of course people aren't changing the world on their cell-phone, all it's designed to do is sign up for email mailing lists and watch YouTube ads.

So I really don't actually know what the OP wants to do, besides brutalize idiots searching for a golden calf to worship. AI will progress regardless of how you gatekeep the public from percieving it, and manipulative thought-leaders will continue to schiester idiots in hopes of turning a quick buck. These cycles will operate independently of one-another, and those overeager idiots will move onto the next fad like Metaverse agriculture or whatever the fuck.

asveikau2• 2 years ago

by 2021 I had realized ... it was also largely fraudulent. Most of the leaders that I was working with clearly had not gotten as far as reading about it for thirty minutes ... Most of the market was simply grifters and incompetents (sometimes both!) leveraging the hype to inflate their headcount so they could get promoted, or be seen as thought leaders.

This was true of web tech in the 2000s, social media and mobile apps in the 2010s, crypto, now AI...

There's substance behind most of these topics, they're intellectually interesting, useful to people etc., but they tend to be largely grift, hype, office politics, narcissists tryina narcissist.

ToucanLoucan• 2 years ago

Tech as an industry is addicted to hype bubbles, and addiction in people and in large groups of people fosters bad decision making, skewed priorities, and over the long haul does great harm.

asveikau2• 2 years ago

I feel like a simpler explanation is that the money involved attracts lots of shallow people trying to make a buck, who do not care about the substance or technology.

bryanrasmussen• 2 years ago

this guy keeps threatening violence in his blog posts, has anyone ever had to fight him? How tough is he actually?

chibi_giant• 2 years ago

No one that has fought him is here to tell the tale.

aakresearch5• 2 years ago

Judging by what he puts in the open in his other articles, an accomplished fencer he is, so there must be a few who had to fight!

ludicity3• 2 years ago

Author here. Someone sent me this comment this morning (along with a note saying: "I am not afraid of you") and it absolutely sent me. Probably because he knows I am of exactly average height and exactly average build, and I quit Muay Thai after one day of getting conditioned against knees-to-the-stomach.

But if you don't tell anyone, I won't tell anyone.

boffinAudio9• 2 years ago

I found the perfect use case for AI, it might interest you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40736501

Let me know if you need any further help with the subject.

snazz• 2 years ago

If you're interviewing for job at a company you're not familiar with, what are some good heuristics (and/or questions to ask) to politely get a sense of whether it's run by buzzword bingo enthusiasts?

__s• 2 years ago

If you ask how they handle hard problems they'll tell you about AI solving it soon

cfeduke2• 2 years ago

If its tech and they want a 30-45 minute interview with live coding on something like hackerrank - especially if whatever brain teaser they've chosen has absolutely nothing to do with the field they operate in - I'd put the chances around 80%.

kjkjadksj8• 2 years ago

Easy. Is the interview process a dehumanizing process, or is it not a process at all and you are treated as a potential friend and colleague? Are they trying to sell you on the team and project or are they merely hazing their applicants? That will tell you more than any heuristic about the culture of working at this company.

softwaredoug• 2 years ago

The jump to AI capabilities from data illiterate leadership is of such a pattern...

It reminds me of every past generation of focusing on the technology, not the underlying hard work + literacy needed to make it real.

Decades ago I saw this - I worked at a hardware company that tried to suddenly be a software company. Not at all internalizing - at every level - what software actually takes to build well. That leading, managing, executing software can't just be done by applying your institutional hardware knowledge to a different craft. It will at best be a half effort as the software craftspeople find themselves attracted to the places that truly understand and respect their craft.

There's a similar thing happening with data literacy where the non data literate hire the data literate, but don't actually internalize those practices or learn from them. They want to continue operating like the always have, but just "plug in AI" (or whatever new thing) without changing fundamentally how they do anything

People want to have AI, but those company's leaders struggle with basic understanding of statistical significance, basic fundamentals of experimentation, and thus essentially destroy any culture needed to build the AI-thing.

a_bonobo• 2 years ago

Do they struggle with the basics, or do they just not care?

I'm in a similar situation with my own 'C-suite' and it's impossible to try and make them understand, they just don't care. I can't make them care. It's a clash of cultures, I guess.

pushfoo6• 2 years ago

TL;DR: Yes, and I think that's why some of these comments are so hostile to OP.

it's impossible to try and make them understand, they just don't care. I can't make them care. It's a clash of cultures, I guess.

That seems to be what OP's cathartic humor is about. It's also (probably) a deliberate provocation since that sub-culture doesn't deal well with this sort of humor.

If that's the case, you can see it working in this thread. Some of the commenters with the clearest C-suite aspirations are reacting with unironic vitriol as if the post is about them personally.

I think most of those comments already got flagged, but some seemed genuine in accusing OP of being a dangerously ill menace to society, e.g. "...Is OP threatening us?"

In a sense, OP is threatening them, but not with literal violence. He's making fun of their aspirations, and he's doing so with some pretty vicious humor.

zer00eyz12• 2 years ago

'C-suite' and it's impossible to try and make them understand,

I think we should do a HN backed project, crowd funded style.

1. Identify the best P-hackers in current science with solid uptake on their content (citations).

2. Pay them to conduct a study proving that C levels who eat crayons have higher something... revenue, pay, job satisfaction, all three.

3. buy stock in crayons

4. Publish and hype, profit.

5. Short crayons and out your publication as fraud.

6. Profit

Continue to work out of spite, always with a crayon on hand for when every someone from the C-suite demands something stupid and offer it to them.

A man can dream... I feel like this is the plot to a Hunter S Thompson writes Brave new World set in the universe of Silicon Valley.

I should be a prompt engineer.

kjkjadksj8• 2 years ago

The issue its that its not just with technology, but absolutely anything that could be loosely defined as an expert-client relationship. Management always budgets less time and money than what anyone with expertise in the subject would feel is necessary. So most things are compromised from the outset, and if they are successful its miraculous that the uncredited experts that moved heaven and earth overcame such an obstinate manager. Its no wonder most businesses fail.

jiggawatts2• 2 years ago

This is a common problem across all fields. A classic example is that you don't change SAP to suit your particular business, but instead you change your business to suit SAP.

ranger207• 2 years ago

Senior management's skill set is fundamentally not technical competence, business competence, financial competence, or even leadership competence. It's politics and social skills (or less charitably, schmoozing). Executives haven't cared about the "how" of anything to do with their business since the last generation of managers from before the cult of the MBA aged out

swedonym• 2 years ago

Wow, thoroughly entertaining (though slightly deranged) read. Did not expect to see a RA Salvatore reference in this, that brought me back.

ggm2• 2 years ago

I deleted my comment to the author's chutzpah. It had a bit of "IamTheMainCharacter" and "IamAveryStableGenius" qualities. The thing is, I agree with them, even if I want to say "dial the ego down mate" -and after all if you cannot parade your worth on your own blog, where can you?

Still. I prefer self-deprecating. Maybe you don't get seniority in his space if you don't sell.

aakresearch5• 2 years ago

May I point you to the "Compliments" section of his blog, in your search for self-deprecating.

patrickrafferty• 2 years ago

The commentary on Scale's "2024 AI readiness chart" is so spot on

dieselgate• 2 years ago

I probably agree with a lot of the points the author makes but abhor the style and tone this is written in.

oofbey• 2 years ago

I abhor the style and disagree with most of their comments.

dang13• 2 years ago

You deserve credit for saying that so even-keeledly. Usually people just do the same thing back.

ajkjk• 2 years ago

Love the tone and the comments, personally.

pech0rin• 2 years ago

Author makes good points but suffers from “i am genius and you are an idiot” syndrome which makes it seem mostly the ranting of an asshole vs a coherent article about the state of AI.

bongodongobob• 2 years ago

Especially since most "data scientists" turn spreadsheets into reports for the C suite, I'd argue that his entire role fits into the same arguments he makes against AI. Like he says, unless you're doing things on the cutting edge, I don't think most businesses have seen positive outcomes from employing data "scientists" or "engineers". They just take people's excel spreadsheets and make them prettier, taking approximately one quarter to implement each into Power BI.

Also being 5 years into his career thinking he actually groks how it all works is adorable. I get the impression he has the idea that work is supposed to be a rewarding passion project rather than getting shit done for your boss. Give me all the cushy bullshit AI projects please. I can play with the toys for 6 months and come back with whatever and it will be perfectly acceptable. Either "this is great, super helpful for the company" or "welp, the tech isn't there yet, but at least we tried". That's called riding the gravy train.

aakresearch5• 2 years ago

I've recently read through many of the author's articles and also through his LinkedIn content, and came to the opposite conclusion. The intentional "In-Your-Face-Trolling" style is intended as a cover for "Impostor Syndrome in Overdrive", which lots of us suffer. Yet he was able to fool so many! Just check the "Compliments" section on his website :)

I made the following comment about him in a conversation with a coworker: " The guy who authored the article is mad. Certifiably mad. Just spewing around pure unadulterated truth. (LinkedIn link goes here) What does it tell about me (or anybody) who so far hadn't found anything in his writings to disagree about? "

Krazam (search YouTube) is the other example of largely the same. But because it is visual it is a bit more obvious.

camillomiller3• 2 years ago

LOL nah, mate’s just Australian

TeMPOraL10• 2 years ago

What does it tell about me (or anybody) who so far hadn't found anything in his writings to disagree about?

It tells they're too excited by the delivery and aren't thinking about the merit of what's being said.

Same mistake people made with all those "tells it as it is" vloggers and pundits.

pushfoo6• 2 years ago

TL;DR: This is intentional hyperbole and satire

1. "ludic" means playful[1].

2. The blog's tagline implies this is satire:

"Wow, if I was the leader of this person's company I would immediately terminate them." [2]

It seems like most of the comment thread failed to pick up on this.

That's understandable. The post's humor is a style which won't make sense if you're not fluent in both English and online culture.

Even if you understand the style, you also might not like it.

1. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ludic

2. https://ludic.mataroa.blog/

busterarm3• 2 years ago

There's so much about this guy's work that just flies over most peoples' heads, but that's fine by me. Most people don't get it, regardless of what _it_ is.

This is the only blog that I actively look forward to reading.

aakresearch5• 2 years ago

won't make sense if you're not fluent in both English and online culture.

I am not fluent in either and I'm in love with his style and substance!

JasonSage2• 2 years ago

It seems like most of the comment thread failed to pick up on this.

At that point, is it a problem of most of the comment thread, or the way it was written?

I may say something that comes across really snarky to my coworker. Just because I didn't mean it to be snarky does not mean that it won't be interpreted that way.

Also, I have a feeling a lot of the comment thread are fluent in both English and online culture. This doesn't come across as a good-faith argument.

It's like I say something that comes across as snarky, my coworker confronts me about it, and I say "oh don't worry about it, if you came from low-context culture you would understand." It's very demeaning. Not to mention unsympathetic.

jsnell3• 2 years ago

The post's humor is a style which won't make sense if you're not fluent in both English and online culture.

Oh, please. That's like saying that only native speakers with a university degree can understand a 6 year old's fart jokes.

The humor in this article is juvenile shock-jocking. It starts from the trashy clickbait headline, and is never elevated past that. There's no particular sophistication needed to understand it. It's just not particularly funny or insightful; it's just taking some rote complaints about AI and the hype cycle, and threatening to kill people in various graphic ways. Hilarious.

bdw5204• 2 years ago

I think he's polarizing because he's right about the industry and everybody on both sides knows it. Many people in the industry are just selling snake oil. There's also a ton of idiots such as the people who misconfigure cloud software to waste half a million dollars of company money. A truth teller comes off as an a-hole to people who don't want particular truths to be told.

margalabargala3• 2 years ago

A truth teller comes off as an a-hole to people who don't want particular truths to be told

If someone is repeatedly threatening physical violence, as the author of this post is, that also tends to come off as an a-hole to some people even if the threats are not genuine.

I agree the author of this post is saying accurate things, and that will piss people off, too.

So we have two completely separate ways in which someone might think the author is an a-hole. They aren't all trying to hide some truth, like you imply.

rplnt• 2 years ago

I have read only a few sentences, so it can't be the hard truths that give off this vibe. Saying you are one of the greats based on things someone inexperienced would list underlined by the very short time in the industry comes off as arogant.

boffinAudio9• 2 years ago

Many people in the industry are just selling snake oil

We have always been selling snake oil - its just the inexperienced and those who have never shipped anything of any value to the world that feel that the snake oil is where the buck stops - but those of us who have shipped tons of snake oil know that eventually that oil congeals and becomes an essential substance in the grinding wheels of industry.

Which this wanker (Disclaimer: Australian, can use it if I wanna, since I know a lot about snakes, too..) seems to not have fully understood yet, as there is a great deal of evidence to support the fact that their experience is mostly academic, and hasn't actually resulted in anything being shipped.

Academics seem too often to forget that software is a service industry and in such a context, snakes and oil are very definitely par for the course.

Nobody cares if you implemented the important bits all by yourself - what are your USERS doing with it? Oh, you don't have actual users? Then please STFU and let the snake wranglers get on with it ..

ppeetteerr• 2 years ago

It's a polarizing style of communication but the message is on point.

torginus3• 2 years ago

Author sounds like a young person who feels like he's a god among men just for the fact that he's implemented the algortihms and understands the math and engineering behind the libraries most DS's just pip install.

Which is weird coming from a generation of devs, where actually doing this work yourself was the norm.

As for DS, from what little I've experienced from the field, he sounds right. Most people come in without a mathematically rigorous education, they talk fancy, but what they end up doing is pulling in dependencies from a pre-written library and using those without understanding the theory behind them.

They also ignore the fact that 99% of the value in data science is created by taking good data, understanding the domain, in which case fancy algorithms are unnecessary. And the acquisition of said things needs good data engineering, not data science.

But more often than not, the credit and prestige goes to folks who pull in fancy ML algorithms and run extensive experiments and build massive ML pipelines, feeding in truckloads of tangentially relevant data.

pineaux4• 2 years ago

You start quite condescending but then basically acknowledge what the author is saying. Most DS's, even "from your generation" probably don't write their own tools. I bet you are even guilty of this too. No need to do some implicit grandstanding.

camillomiller3• 2 years ago

Americans not getting Aussies is the best part of this thread

kelnos7• 2 years ago

Author sounds like a young person

I almost laughed out loud when he said he started working as a data scientist in 2019. Five years is not a very long time. And he claims he already had identified the entire field as full of fraud in the first two years of that!

I agree with a lot of the article's points, but the author took a serious credibility hit with me after asserting that two years of from-scratch experience is enough time to evaluate an entire subfield of computer science.

intended3• 2 years ago

Author has a writing style that he likes to use, which gives him the ability to speak about certain topics with less struggle.

Its getting into the art/performance category of code blogs.

charles_f• 2 years ago

And that makes it enjoyable to read if you are inclined to that style

torginus3• 2 years ago

“i am genius and you are an idiot” syndrome

which is a weird thing, since I think in fields where most people can be assumed to be smart, there's usually not that much differentiation in cognitive ability.

Just for reference, if we take IQ as a proxy measure for intelligence, an average group of people (say, a high school class, a council meeting), the worst 10% will have an IQ of <80 with the best 10% will have an IQ of >120.

That's the difference of 40 points, and its a common enough scenario for most people to get a feel of what it's like.

In contrast, lets say you have a room of professionals, who have been screened to be in the top 10% of the population (not a huge stretch) as a cutoff. In this scenario, you'd need 100k people in this hypothetical room to get a similarly large IQ gap.

While I think the author might be a sharp guy, and probably studied his field deeper than most, to say there's an insurmountable chasm between him and the rest of his readers might be a bit of a stretch.

But hey, if you want to sell your unique genius as your upscale consulting brand, I guess this is how you market yourself.

pineaux4• 2 years ago

I don't think that is the goal of this blog. I think he is bragging a bit because he is afraid people will ask: "Who is this nobody that talks about AI as if he knows anything about it?" He is trying to qualify himself to give this opinion. He uses a hyperbolic style. I for one like it. But I like style and care less about the background of people to be honest. I think a good analysis is a good analysis regardless of who makes it.

ehnto4• 2 years ago

I don't disagree entirely, but there is a pretty strong hint of the self-aware dry humour typical of Australians. I think he believes what he's saying, but they're probably not taking themselves that seriously or literally.

boffinAudio9• 2 years ago

humour

The word you should have used is authoritarianism, which this writer has, alas, in spades.

Your users are more important than your sense of self worth, in this industry.

Nobody ships ego. We ship working software: to users who find it valuable.

ehnto4• 2 years ago

I am talking about people, not politics. Unless you think individual Australians, are well known for their personal authoritarianism?

I don't find myself conducting much authoritarianism but admittedly I do keep a pretty tight grip on the movements of my budgies. It's for their own good you see.

andrei_says_4• 2 years ago

I feel his frustration with the grifters, the kool aid drinkers and makers.

For me the writing felt authentic and entertaining. Emotionally charged but rightfully so. It is incredibly disturbing to see people lying with a straight face and getting insane investments.

matrix87• 2 years ago

but suffers from “i am genius and you are an idiot” syndrome

But he's still nowhere near as unhinged as the rabid AI bullshittery shitting up the airwaves for the past year

Not a lot of room for nuance when the subject matter is this polluted. Typical HN convention of preferring nuance to outright dismissal is bad at filtering BS

soraminazuki• 2 years ago

When I see people getting hyped up about AI, I just roll my eyes and move on. But now, quite a few people in the anti-AI camp are getting more hyped up than its promoters, jumping at the throats of anyone who dares mention the term. The recent harassment campaign from Mastodon folks toward the iTerm2 dev was a particularly disturbing one.

I personally would stay far far away from either of these two camps.

CyberDildonics• 2 years ago

suffers from “i am genius and you are an idiot” syndrome which makes it seem mostly the ranting of an asshole vs a coherent

Very true. A thread about it here is a hat on a hat.

Gormo2• 2 years ago

It seems like “I am genius and you are an idiot syndrome" and "ranting of an asshole" are on opposite ends of the spectrum, and directly in opposition to each other.

The very sort of hypemongers and grifters the author complains about often hide unsustainable claims behind complicated language and opaque terminology, with the intent of portraying themselves as experts and making clear-headed criticism seem uneducated or uninformed in comparison.

The author here is making a deliberate choice to use a ranty tone to cut through that sort of bullshit, and in doing so, successfully expressed his frustration with the pervasive level of hype in AI discussions.

jauntywundrkind2• 2 years ago

Already [flagged] [dead] at least 8 times, as linked by @greyface3- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40733576

Which is a pity. The style is excellent & so wonderful, is a critical relief, after suffering through insane out of this world hype-bordering-religion. At least to me; he doesn't read as menacing, he reads as being on a justifiably distraught polemic against total madness that's allowed to pointlessly suck up all the oxygen in the room.

We should be flipping our shit (if not each other) that we have to put up with this endless exuberant schucksterism. That robs us of agency & pollutes our noosphere with inauthentic bullshitting.

dang13• 2 years ago

Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40725329. Meta explanations here if it's the kind of thing you like:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40734677

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40734700

TZubiri• 2 years ago

Someone's angry and resentful at software developers and business people interested in AI. Ok. The author also takes some kind of authority stance as a "data scientist" being uniquely qualified to talk about the subject.

The article follows the format of sections with titles as interrupted quotes from people "mentioning AI" and the author shutting them up, let's see what amazing arguments they offer for "not talking about AI"

" "III. We've Already Seen Extensive Gains From-" When I was younger, I read R.A Salvatore's classic fantasy novel, The Crystal Shard. There is a scene in it where the young protagonist, Wulfgar, challenges a barbarian chieftain.... "

Just at a glance, we have business people on one side talking about income and how to increase it. On the other we have an enraged nerd talking about his favourite high-fantasy fake world. Gee, I wonder whose side I should be on, is this an ad for AI hype?

" Well this is me. Begging you. To stop lying. I don't want to crush your skull, I really don't.

But I will if you make me."

... Is OP threatening us?

I say this unironically now OP, this sounds like schizophrenic, I won't suggest you "take your meds", but at least consult a psychiatrist if you haven't already.

__loam• 2 years ago

So business people are seeing increase income related to AI

They sure are spending a lot of money on graphics cards!

globalnode2• 2 years ago

oh jeez stop it, its embarrassing.

llm_trw2• 2 years ago

started working as a data scientist in 2019
Just Use Postgres, You Nerd. You Dweeb.

I'm really sick and tired of kids coming in and shitting on what we had to do to search a tb worth of data in 2009 (or 2004).

A computer in 2019 (or 2024) has enough power to run postgress queries to extract statistics from columns.

Yeah, great.

Now try running that stack on an iphone 7 and report your results back. We didn't create all that complexity for shits and giggles, we did it because it was at the edge of what was possible and the companies that got it right made billions.

jayd162• 2 years ago

try running that stack on an iphone 7

Why?

llm_trw2• 2 years ago

Because that's the average machine we had to use back then.

imchillyb• 2 years ago

Quite vulgar for a topic that doesn’t require any vulgarity. I was put off by the f bombs.

popalchemist• 2 years ago

Disgruntled aspy with no social awareness vibes.

nrki• 2 years ago

Or just Australian.

jauntywundrkind2• 2 years ago

It doesn't require it, but it sure feels good!

Mostly the world has to sit back and suffer for this clown car of over enthused business types promising us that their AI will make all our lives better. Mostly the world has to let this weirdly quasi-cultish hype run unchecked.

I'm frelling pissed about it. I frelling miss personal computing being an aspiration; I wish we were actually improving systems. Instead we're investing billions to make machines good bullshitters. It's enormously relieving seeing such rancorous disgust on display here.

infrawhispers• 2 years ago

This rings true and is also hilarious. I am tired of the AI hype/grift that seems to pervade the industry - funnily enough some of these same promoters were on the blockchain/crypto hype that was going to revolutionize every industry on earth.

There is meat to recent advances in Machine Learning…but the revenue / savings for actual businesses will need to start coming in if this hype is going to be sustainable for the next 16-24 months.

moose_man4• 2 years ago

I feel like OpenAI took this thing out of the oven too soon or packaged in a way which misrepresents its nature. The power of AI isn't to answer your technical support questions or be your AI personal assistant, it's in the manic creativity that convinced people they were talking with a human (albeit a slight unhinged one.) But that energy had to be nerfed for business use cases and in of itself is problematic for monetization. So what we're left with after they've been nerfed is basically an iteration on what we already had, not the world changing technology that we were promised.

tavavex6• 2 years ago

I honestly don't think OpenAI anticipated it becoming as big of a deal, and they had to lean into grandiose expectations once it did become a big deal. They didn't have a grandiose marketing campaign to my memory - the only reason their tech exploded overnight was because it was something that made an average person interested. News of previous GPT versions and primitive image generators were passed around among techy people for years before that point. Maybe there's a threshold of generation quality, at which a user perceives it as something that can rudimentarily "understand" the input, and isn't just a generic chatbot.

lucubratory2• 2 years ago

Deleted because it was unnecessarily inflammatory.

tymscar• 2 years ago

Funny how those academics and professionals like François Chollet and Yann LeCun are on the skeptic side, and a vast number of vocal proponents are old NFT pushers.

lucubratory2• 2 years ago

Or Geoffrey Hinton, or Ilya Sutskever, or Yoshua Bengio, oh look those are already the three most cited researchers in deep learning. François and LeCunn shouldn't be categorised together anyway, François is a reasonable person and LeCunn was the second-best head of AI at Meta until the best head of AI at Meta used theories Yann LeCunn has railed against for years to release some of the best AI research Meta has ever released only to get replaced as head by Yann because Yann was better at corporate politics.

exabrial• 2 years ago

There you have it - what are you most interested in, dear leader? Artificial intelligence, the blockchain, or quantum computing?6 They know exactly what their target market is - people who have been given power of other people's money because they've learned how to smile at everything, and know that you can print money by hitching yourself to the next speculative bandwagon.

Nailed it.

anon2912• 2 years ago

I don't see how AI, quantum and block chain are at all equivalent.

Block chain has no use.

AI and quantum hage obvious uses if they work.

Quantum is not close to working now. It's where AI was at in the 80s/90s.

AI may not be perfect but there is no denying that the GPTs were a dramatic shift.

zer00eyz12• 2 years ago

GPTs were a dramatic shift

IT was a massive leap forward for a 50 year old idea.

IF it takes another 50 years to make a leap of equal size, we might get to AGI before the heat death of the the universe.

I don't see how AI, quantum and block chain are at all equivalent.

If we shut them off tomorrow what do YOU need to replace in your life without them?

financltravsty2• 2 years ago

Blockchain is used as a stand-in financial system for those who don't or can't use the incumbent ones (for banking, commerce, gambling, and so on).

AI is nowhere close to delivering on its promises. But it's pretty useful for many tasks.

Quantum computers are vaporware. Quantum sensors are already here and game-changing. But just like AI, has failed to live up to hype.

---

Crypto is already here and makes good on its promises: decentralized finance.

Full disclosure: I do not own any crypto besides negligible sums in forgotten wallets.

cfeduke2• 2 years ago

I don't see how AI, quantum and block chain are at all equivalent.

It's not that there is any claim to equivalency, its that these are the technology trends that are most useful - the trend itself, nevermind any sort of usable technology - for those who grift.

safety1st• 2 years ago

Yeah, this is pretty spot on, unfortunately.

Most people don't really comprehend how much money there is in the hands of people at the top that just... falls down to whatever random stuff those people are getting worked up about at the moment. The vast majority of it ends up being nonproductive and it really does get allocated based on what those people see in their Twitter feeds. This is a much more pronounced problem than it was 20 years ago because of all the money printing governments have done, in general if you are connected to the government and banks, you will be the largest beneficiary of that type of action. None of this stuff is really subjected to market economics, it either flows through some kind of government/NGO bureaucracy or from someone who controls a monopoly or something similar to one. The waste and inefficiency in this modern pseudo-command-economy is mind blowing to behold.

kjkjadksj8• 2 years ago

Not only do people merely get worked up of course. Theres grifters and plenty of nepotism. Sometimes people in positions of power expand the system solely to make contracts for people connected to them, ostensibly for some benefit but with the amount of waste and unaccounted for money once leaving one org and entering for another intentions are sufficiently masked. And even if peoples intentions were plainly unmasked, everyone at the top of the org are probably just as leveraged and isn’t going to stop the music just to appease the little man that propaganda defanged 100 years ago in this country.

blast8• 2 years ago

I swear this particular rant style is derived from earlier writers who I've read, probably many times, but don't remember. It feels completely familiar, way more so than someone who started working in 2019 could possibly have invented ex nihilo. They're good it though! And somebody has to keep the traditions going.

p1necone2• 2 years ago

It feels a little bit like a James Mickens rant, but not as funny (not a jab at the author of this, James Mickens is just really funny).

qrohlf• 2 years ago

Definitely reminded me of the classic Mickens usenix login;logout columns! Just overall a very engaging communication style for adding some entertainment value to what might otherwise be pretty dry to read in one sitting.

busterarm3• 2 years ago

A little bit of Maddox, a little bit of BOFH.

fenomas3• 2 years ago

I get what you mean but I have to disagree about this one being good. Epic rants are fun when there's a cold hard point being made, and the author uses the rant format to make the point irrefutably clear and drive it cruelly home.

Here, if you strip away the guff about how smart the author is and how badly he wants to beat up people who disagree, I have no idea what he's trying to say. The rest reads like "these companies who want to use AI are bad, and instead of using AI they should try not being bad", and such. Ok?

blast8• 2 years ago

I was trying to be nice but yeah, "i'm smarter" and "i crush your skull" are not witty. There are nice twists of phrase in there though. The kid has potential!

zzeniou86• 2 years ago

Maybe Wilhelm Reich with his book 'Listen, Little Man!'?

labrador• 2 years ago

Maddox was the originator of this style afaik. He's been at it for over 20 years.

https://maddox.xmission.com/

whamlastxmas• 2 years ago

Reminded me of this too

jerhewet• 2 years ago

Hunter S. Thompson.

metabolian• 2 years ago

It has a kind of seanbaby, somethingawful vibe.

meanmrmustard92• 2 years ago

This is just conversational australian english

xwolfi4• 2 years ago

Ed Zitron maybe ? Writes on crypto, AI, musk the same way.

rKarpinski2• 2 years ago

Please don't mention AI again

Editorialized & not the title of the post.

dang13• 2 years ago

You're right, but "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again" is definitely linkbait, so we had to change it by the site guideline "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I confess to being a bit self-indulgent in coming up with the edit—I thought it would be hilarious to flip it to something meek and passive aggressive.

Normally when we edit a title according to that guideline, we search earnestly for a representative and neutral phrase from the article itself. In this case "earnest' and "neutral" aren't much of a fit so I felt it more in the authorial spirit to troll a little.

rKarpinski2• 2 years ago

Ah didn't realize you modified it. That makes sense.

Since the original author submitted I thought it was misleading.

loeg• 2 years ago

How did you decide that the original title is linkbait?

keiferski5• 2 years ago

One thing I’ve noticed with the AI topic is how there is no discussion on how the name of a thing ends up shaping how we think about it. There is very obviously a marketing phenomenon happening now where “AI” is being added to the name of every product. Not because it’s actually AI in any rigorous or historical sense of the word, but because it’s trendy and helps you get investment dollars.

I think one of the results of this is that the concept of AI itself increasingly becomes more muddled until it becomes indistinguishable from a word like “technology” and therefore useless for describing a particular phenomenon. You can already see this with the usage of “AGI” and “super intelligence” which from the definitions I’ve been reading, are not the same thing at all. AGI is/was supposed to be about achieving results of the average human being, not about a sci-fi AI god, and yet it seems like everyone is using them interchangeably. It’s very sloppy thinking.

Instead I think the term AI is going to slowly become less marketing trendy, and will fade out over time, as all trendy marketing terms do. What will be left are actually useful enhancements to specific use cases - most of which will probably be referred to by a word other than AI.

elromulous• 2 years ago

+1.

What happened to ML? With the relatively recent craze precipitated by chatgpt, the term AI (perhaps in no small part due to "OpenAI") has completely taken over. ML is a more apt description of the current wave.

keiferski5• 2 years ago

Yep, the difference is that ML doesn’t have the cultural legacy of the AI concept and thus isn’t as marketable.

floren• 2 years ago

After the AI Winter, people started calling it ML to avoid the stigma.

Eventually ML got pretty good and a lot of the industry forgot the AI winter, so we're calling it AI again because it sounds cooler.

zer00eyz12• 2 years ago

Open AI was betting on AI, AGI, Super inteligence.

Look at the google engineer who thought they had an AI locked up in the basement... https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/13/23165535/google-suspends-...

MS paper on sparks of AGI: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/sparks-...

The rumors that OpenAI deal with MS would give them everything till they got to AGI... A perpetual license to all new development.

All the "Safety people" have left the OpenAi building. Even musk isnt talking about safety any more.

I think the bet was that if you fed an LLM enough, got it big enough it would hit a tipping point, and become AGI, or sentient or sapient. That lines up nicely with the MS terms, and MS's on paper.

I think they figured out that the math doesn't work that way (and never was going to). A prediction of the next token being better isnt intelligence any more than weather prediction will become weather.

jhbadger2• 2 years ago

What happened to ML?

It's cyclical. The term "ML" was popular in the 1990s/early 2000s because "AI" had a bad odor of quackdom due to the failures of things like expert systems in the 1980s. The point was to reduce the hype and say "we're not interested in creating AGI; we just want computers to run classification tasks". We'll probably come up with a new term in the future to describe LLMs in the niches where they are actually useful after the current hype passes.

sk11001• 2 years ago

the term AI (...) has completely taken over

Maybe if you go by article titles it has. If you look at job titles, there are many more ML engineers than AI engineers.

konfusinomicon2• 2 years ago

I make it a point to use ML in every work meeting or interaction where AI is the subject. it has not gained traction.

gwd• 2 years ago

What happened to ML?

Well for one, five years ago, anyone doing machine learning was doing their own training -- you know, overseeing the actual learning part. Now, although there is learning involved in LLMs, you as the consumer aren't involved in that part. You're given API access (or at best a set of pre-trained weights) as a black box, and you do what you can with it.

TrapLord_Rhodo• 2 years ago

AI -> Machine learning -> Deep Learning -> LLM's - LMM's -> ?

mrcartmeneses• 2 years ago

Turbo

johnnyanmac2• 2 years ago

Yeah, happens everytime. Remember when people were promising blockchain but had nothing to show for it (sometimes, not even an idea)? Or "cloud powered" for apps that barely made API calls? Remember when every and anything needed an app, even if it was just some static food menu?

It's obvious BS from anyone in tech, but the people throwing money aren't in tech.

I think the term AI is going to slowly become less marketing trendy, and will fade out over time, as all trendy marketing terms do. What will be left are actually useful enhancements to specific use cases - most of which will probably be referred to by a word other than AI.

it'll die down, but the marketing tends to stick, sadly. we'll have to deal with if AI means machine learning or LLMs or video game pathfinding for decades to come.

Animats3• 2 years ago

Remember when people were promising blockchain but had nothing to show for it (sometimes, not even an idea)?

They're still on r/Metaverse_blockchain. Every day, a new "meme coin". Just in:

"XXX - The AI-Powered Blockchain Project Revolutionizing the Crypto World! ... Where AI Meets Web3"

"XXX is an advanced AI infrastructure that develops AI-powered technologies for the Web3, Blockchain, and Crypto space. We aim to improve the Web3 space for retail users & startups by developing AI-powered solutions designed explicitly for Web3. From LLMs to Web3 AI Tools, XXX is the go-to place to boost your Web3 flow with Artificial Intelligence."

somenameforme• 2 years ago

In the beginning I think some, if not many, people did genuinely think it was "AI". It was the closest we've ever gotten to a natural language interface and that genuinely felt really different than anything before, even to an extreme cynic. And I also think there's many people that want us to develop AI and so were trying to actively convince themselves that e.g. GPT or whatever was sentient. Maybe that Google engineer who claimed an early version of Bard was "sentient" even believed himself (though I still suspect that was probably just a marketing hoax).

It's only now that everybody's used to natural language interfaces that I think we're becoming far less forgiving of things like this nonsense:

---

- "How do I do (x)."

- "You do (A)."

- "No, that's wrong because reasons."

- "Oh I'm sorry you're 100% right. Thank you for the correction. I'll keep that in mind in the future. You do (B)."

- "No that's also wrong because reasons."

- "Oh I'm sorry you're 100% right. Thank you for the correction. I'll keep that in mind in the future. You do (A)."

- #$%^#$!!#$!

---

pineaux4• 2 years ago

I love this. I want a t-shirt with this

maigret• 2 years ago

Yes, it's a language model, not a reasoning model. But people got confused at the start.

stn_za• 2 years ago

"So, when will you be updating yourself to not provide the same wrong answer in future, or when I ask it later in a new session"

"No."

TeMPOraL10• 2 years ago

It's only now that everybody's used to natural language interfaces that I think we're becoming far less forgiving (...)

Sort of, kind of. Those natural language interfaces that Actually Work aren't even 2 years old yet, and in that time there weren't many non-shit integrations released. So at best, some small subset of the population is used to the failure modes of ChatGPT app - but at least the topic is there, so future users will have better aligned expectations.

another2another• 2 years ago

It was the closest we've ever gotten to a natural language interface and that genuinely felt really different

Agreed, but I think we'll soon start to discover that interacting with systems as if they were text adventure games of the 80's is also going to get pretty weird and frustrating, not to mention probably inefficient.

Yizahi4• 2 years ago

There was a great post here about this specific possibility, that NN crowd has effectively convinced themselves in the supernatural abilities of their NNs:

https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

ben_w10• 2 years ago

In the beginning I think some, if not many, people did genuinely think it was "AI".

Most people don't know what the academic discipline of AI involves, I've noticed a bit of that even on this website. LLMs, even the worst of them, are objectively is a member of the set of things which is termed AI by those working in that field.

(though I still suspect that was probably just a marketing hoax).

He was fired for saying that it was sentient, and they didn't release the model externally at the time, and they only made Bard available in response to the competition from OpenAI/ChatGPT.

jerieljan• 2 years ago

I'd like to think that AI right now is basically a placeholder term, like a search keyword or hot topic and people are riding the wave to get attention and clicks.

Everything that is magic will be labeled under AI for now, until it gets seated into their proper terms and are only closely discussed by those who are actually driving innovation in the space or are just casually using the applications in business or private.

intended3• 2 years ago

Hallucinations!

A generative tool can’t Hallucinate! It isn’t misperceiving its base reality and data.

Humans Hallucinate!

ARGH. At least it’s becoming easier to point this out, compared to when ChatGPT came out.

DidYaWipe2• 2 years ago

Amen. But if you do, you'll still be attacked by apologists. Per the norm for any Internet forum... this one being a prime example.

keiferski5• 2 years ago

Great example. People will say, “oh that’s just how the word is used now,” but its misuse betrays a real lack of rigorous thought about the subject. And as you point out, it leads one to make false assumptions about the nature of the data’s origin.

mdp20216• 2 years ago

Calculators compute; they have to compute reliably; humans are limited and can make computing mistakes.

We want reliable tools - they have to give reliable results; humans are limited and can be unreliable.

That is why we need the tools - humans are limited, we want tools that overcome human limitation.

I really do not see where you intended to go with your post.

Gormo2• 2 years ago

If "hallucination" refers to mistaking the product of internal processes for external perception, then generative AI can only hallucinate, as all of its output comes from inference against internal, hard-coded statistical models with zero reconciliation against external reality.

Humans sometimes hallucinate, but still have direct sensory input against which to evaluate inferential conclusions against empirical observation in real time. So we can refine ideas, whatever their origin, against external criteria of correctness -- this is something LLMs totally lack.

daemin2• 2 years ago

I liken current LLMs to that one uncle that can answer and has an opinion on everything even though he has actually no knowledge of the thing in question. Never says "I don't know", and never learns anything for more than a few moments before forgetting.

surfingdino7• 2 years ago

Couldn't agree more. We are seeing gradual degradation of the term AI. LLMs have stolen attention of the media and the general population and I notice that people equate ChatGPT with all of AI. It is not, but an average person doesn't know the difference. In a way, genAI is the worst thing that happened to AI. The ML part is amazing, it allows us to understand the world we live in, which is what we have evolved to seek and value, because there is an evolutionary benefit to it--survival; the generative side is not even a solution to any particular problem, it is a problem that we are forced to pay to make bigger. I wrote "forced", because companies like Adobe use their dominant position to override legal frameworks developed to protect intellectual property and client-creator contracts in order to grab content that is not theirs to train models they resell back to the people they stole content from and to subject ourselves to unsupervised, unaccountable policing of content.

lolinder4• 2 years ago

I wrote "forced", because companies like Adobe use their dominant position to override legal frameworks developed to protect intellectual property and client-creator contracts in order to grab content that is not theirs to train models they resell back to the people they stole content from and to subject ourselves to unsupervised, unaccountable policing of content.

Adobe is an obnoxious company that does a lot of bad things, but it's weird to me seeing them cast in a negative light like this for their approach to model training copyright. As far as I know they were the first to have a genAI product that was trained exclusively on data that they had rights to under existing copyright law, rather than relying on a free use argument or just hoping the law would change around them. Out of all the companies who've built AI tooling they're the last one I'd expect to see dragged out as an example of copyright misbehavior.

barber_the_dope• 2 years ago

Very well written and thoughtful comment. Thank you.

davidgerard2• 2 years ago

The term "artificial intelligence" was marketing from its creation. It means "your plastic pal who's fun to be with, especially if you don't have to pay him." Multiple disparate technologies all called "AI", because the term exists to sell you the prospect of magic.

namaria2• 2 years ago

The 'intelligence' label has been applied to computers since the beginning and it always misleads people into expecting way more than they can deliver. The very first computers were called 'electronic brains' by newspapers.

And this delay between people's mental images of what an 'intelligent' product can do and the actual benefits they get for their money once a new generation reaches the market creates this bullwhip effect in mood. Hence the 'AI winters'. And guess what, another one is brewing because tech people tend to think history is bunk and pay no attention to it.

space_oddity2• 2 years ago

Newspapers often mislead people about stuff in general...

atoav• 2 years ago

The grifter is a nihilist. Nothing is holy to a grifter and if you let them they will rob every last word of its original meaning.

The problem with AI, as perfectly clear outlined in this article, is the same as the problem with the blockchain or with other esotheric grifts: It drains needed resources from often already crumbling systems¹.

The people falling for the hype beyond the actual usefulness of the hyped object are wishing for magical solutions that they imagine will solve all their problems. Problems that can't be fixed by wishful thinking, but by not fooling yourself and making technological choices that adequately address the problem.

I am not saying that LLMs are never going to be a good choice to adequately address the problem. What I am saying is that people blinded by blockchain/AI/quantum/snakesoil hype are the wrong people to make that choice, as for them every problem needs to be tackled using the current hype.

Meanwhile a true expert will weigh all available technological choices and carefully test them against the problem. So many things can be optimized and improved using hard, honest work, careful choices and a group of people trying hard not to fool themselves, this is how humanity managed to reach the moon. The people who stand in the way of our achievements are those who lost touch with reality, while actively making fools of themselves.

Again: It is not about being "against" LLMs, it is about leaders admitting they don't know, when they do in fact not know. And a sure way to realize you don't know is to try yourself and fail.

¹ I had to think about my childhood friend, whose esotheric mother died of a preventable disease, because she fooled herself into believing into magical cures and gurus until the fatal end.

fragmede3• 2 years ago

That is funny, because of all the problems with LLMs, the biggest one is that they will lie/hallucinate/confabulate to your face before saying I don't know, much like those leaders.

mdp20216• 2 years ago

AGI is/was supposed to be about achieving results of the average human being, not about a sci-fi AI god

When we build something we do not intend to build something that just achieves results «of the average human being», and a slow car, a weak crane, a vague clock are built provisionally in the process of achieving the superior aid intended... So AGI expects human level results provisionally, while the goal remains to go beyond them. The clash you see is only apparent.

I think the term AI is going to ... will fade out over time

Are you aware that we have been using that term for at least 60 years?

And that the Brownian minds of the masses very typically try to interfere while we proceed focusedly and regarding it as noise? Today they decide that the name is Anna, tomorrow Susie: childplay should remain undeterminant.

keiferski5• 2 years ago

Building something that replicates the abilities of the average human being in no way implies that this eventually leads to a superintelligent entity. And my broader point was that many people are using the term AGI as synonymous with that superintelligent entity. The concepts are very poorly defined and thrown around without much deeper thought.

Are you aware that we have been using that term for at least 60 years?

Yes, and for the first ±55 of those years, it was largely limited to science fiction stories and niche areas of computer science. In the last ±5 years, it's being added to everything. I can order groceries with AI, optimize my emails with AI, on and on. It's become exceptionally more widespread of a term recently.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

And that the Brownian minds of the masses very typically try to interfere while we proceed focusedly and regarding it as noise? Today they decide that the name is Anna, tomorrow Susie: childplay should remain undeterminant.

You're going to have to rephrase this sentence, because it's unclear what point you're trying to make other than "the masses are stupid." I'm not sure "the masses" are even relevant here, as I'm talking about individuals leading/working at AI companies.

maeln• 2 years ago

One thing I’ve noticed with the AI topic is how there is no discussion on how the name of a thing ends up shaping how we think about it. There is very obviously a marketing phenomenon happening now where “AI” is being added to the name of every product. Not because it’s actually AI in any rigorous or historical sense of the word, but because it’s trendy and helps you get investment dollars.

I was reading one famous book about investing some times ago (I don't remember which one exactly, I think it was a random walk into wall st, but don't quote me on that) and one chapter at the beginning of the book talk about the .com bubble and how companies, even ones who had nothing to do with the web, started to put .com or www in their name and were seeing an immediate bump in their stock price (until it all burst, as we know now).

And every hype cycle / bubble is like that. We saw something similar with cryptocurrencies. For a while, every tech demos at dev convention had to have some relation to the "blockchain". We saw every variation of names ending in -coin. And a lot of company, that where not even in tech, had dumb project related to the blockchain, which for anyone slightly knowledgeable with the tech it was clear that it was complete BS, and they almost all the time were quietly killed off after a few month.

To a much lesser extent, we saw the same with "BigData" (who even use this word anymore?) and AR/VR/XR.

And now its AI, until the next recession and/or the next shiny thing that makes for amazing demos pops-out.

It is not to say that it is all fake. There is always some genuine business that have actual use case with the tech and will probably survive the burst (or get brought up and live on has MS/Google/AWS Thingamajig). But you have to be pretty naïve if you think 99% of the current AI company will live in the next 5 years, and believe their marketing material. But it doesn't matter if you manage to sell before the bubble pop, and so the cycle continue.

immibis3• 2 years ago

Long Island Iced Tea renamed to Long Island Blockchain for a stock price bump.

konfusinomicon2• 2 years ago

AI should be re-acronymed to mean Algorithmic Insights. artificial intelligence is akin to a ziplock bag doing algebra with no external interactions

jszymborski• 2 years ago

I say LLM when Im talking about LLMs, I say Generative ML when I'm talking about Generative ML, and I say ML when I'm talking about everything else.

I don't know what AI is, and nobody else does, that's why they're selling you it.

RaftPeople4• 2 years ago

Typically at this point in the hype cycle a new term emerges so companies can differentiate their hype from the pack.

Next up: Synthetic Consciousness, "SC"

Prediction: We will see this press release within 24 months:

"Introducing the Acme Juice Squeezer with full Synthetic Consciousness ("SC"). It will not only squeeze your juice in the morning but will help you gently transition into the working day with an empathetic personality that is both supportive and a little spunky! Sold exclusively at these fine stores..."

lproven5• 2 years ago

« A new generation of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robots and computers, with the new GPP feature.”

“GPP feature?” said Arthur. “What's that?”

“Oh, it says Genuine People Personalities.”

“Oh,” said Arthur, “sounds ghastly.”

A voice behind them said, “It is.” The voice was low and hopeless and accompanied by a slight clanking sound. They span round and saw an abject steel man standing hunched in the doorway.

“What?” they said.

“Ghastly,” continued Marvin, “it all is. Absolutely ghastly. Just don't even talk about it. Look at this door,” he said, stepping through it. The irony circuits cut into his voice modulator as he mimicked the style of the sales brochure. “All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.”

space_oddity2• 2 years ago

Names carry powerful connotations and significantly shape how we think about and interact with technology

kelnos7• 2 years ago

There is very obviously a marketing phenomenon happening now where “AI” is being added to the name of every product.

This isn't really a new phenomenon, though. The only thing new about it is that the marketing buzzword of the day is "AI". For a little while prior it was "machine learning". History is littered with examples of marketers and salespeople latching onto whatever is popular and trendy, and using it to sell, regardless if their product actually has anything to do with it.

habosa• 2 years ago

This post has an unnecessarily aggressive style but has some very good points about the technology hype cycle we're in. Companies are desperate to use "AI" for the sake of using it, and that's likely not a good thing.

I remember ~6 years ago wondering if I was going to be able to remain relevant as a software engineer if I didn't learn about neural networks and get good with TensorFlow. Everyone seemed to be trying to learn this skill at the same time and every app was jamming in some ML-powered feature. I'm glad I skipped that hype train, turns out only a minority of programmers really need to do that stuff and the rest of us can keep on doing what we were doing before. In the same way, I think LLMs are massively powerful but also not something we all need to jump into so breathlessly.

johnnyanmac2• 2 years ago

I empathize with it, but ultimately it's fruitless. This happens with every big tech hype. They very much want people to keep talking about it. It's part of the marketing, and tech puts a lotta money into marketing.

But that's all it is, hype. It'll die down like web3, Big Data, cloud, mobile, etc. It'll probably help out some tooling but it's not taking our jobs for decades (it will inevitably cost some jobs from executives who don't know better and ignore their talent, though. The truly sad part).

zer00eyz12• 2 years ago

Go back further:

At a point in time the database was a bleeding edge technology.

Ingres (Postgres)... (the ofspring of Stonebreaker), Oracle, ... Db2? MSSQL? (Heavily used but not common)... So many failed DB's along the way, people keep trying to make "new ones" and they seem to fade off.

When was the last time you heard someone starting a new project with Mongo, or Hadoop? Postgres and Maria are the go to for a reason.

roenxi7• 2 years ago

It'll die down like web3, Big Data, cloud, mobile, etc

At least half of those the promise was realised though - mobile is substantially bigger than the market for computers and cloud turned out to be pretty amazing. AWS is not necessarily cost effective but it is everywhere and turned out to be a massive deal.

Big Data and AI are largely overlapping, so that is still to play. Only web3 hasn't had a big win - assuming web3 means a serious online use case for crypto.

"Die down" in this context means that the hype will come, go and then turn out to be mostly correct 10 years later. That was largely what happened in the first internet boom - everyone could see where it was going, the first wave of enthusiasm was just early. I don't think any technology exists right now that will take my job, but I doubt that job will exist in 20 years because it looks like AI will be doing it. There are a lot of hardware generations still to land.

nutrie2• 2 years ago

I’ve been doing just fine ignoring AI altogether and focusing on my thing. I only have one life. Fridman had a guy on his podcast a while ago, I don’t remember his name, but he studies human languages, and the way he put it was the best summary of the actual capabilities I’ve heard so far. Very refreshing.

blast8• 2 years ago

Who was that?

zer00eyz12• 2 years ago

This post has an unnecessarily aggressive style

Im not sure its "unnecessary".

He is, very clearly venting into an open mic. He starts with his bonfides (a Masters, he's built the tools not just been an API user). He adds more through out the article (talking about peers).

His rants are backed by "anecdotes"... I can smell the "consulting" business oozing off them. He cant really lay it out, just speak in generalities... And where he can his concrete examples and data are on point.

I dont know when angry became socially unacceptable in any form. But he is just that. He might have a right to be. You might have the right to be as well in light of the NONSENSE our industry is experiencing.

Maybe its time to let the AI hate flow though you...

advael6• 2 years ago

As someone who spent an inordinate amount of time trying very hard to be less angry despite having a lot of good reasons to be, a chunk of which overlap with this piece, I get a lot of dismissal from people who seem to think any expression of any negative emotion, especially anger, deeply discredits a person on its own. It's so pervasive that I find even addressing it to be refreshing, so thank you

surfingdino7• 2 years ago

He did what some of us want to do in meetings with clients. I hear and read all those BS arguments he's used as headings every week. It's insane.

AceJohnny22• 2 years ago

I take it as humorous hyperbole, in the style of McSweeney's, like It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/its-decorative-gourd-sea...

throwaway20372• 2 years ago

I agree. A bunch of his other posts have similar style. I like it. It is witty, mixed in with serious technical subjects!

ludicity3• 2 years ago

Author here. I spent Thursday evening with my vocal teacher, where we mostly giggled because I couldn't hit the F required to start Billy Joel's "Movin' Out". So yes, it was most decidedly humorous hyperbole, and it has been taken this way by like, everyone that's not on Hackernews. Genuinely astonished that it isn't as obvious to other people as it was to you, but something I learned quickly is that you simply can't control how your words are perceived, and it isn't possible to waterproof sufficient long-form content.

To be honest, this is kind of nice, because my girlfriend recently told me that I'm "extremely unthreatening" because of all the improv theater, fencing, music, reading, and writing. Now I know at least a few people on the internet are threatened by me. I'm a loose cannon, on the verge of totally unrestrained violence. I'm two steps removed from a dinosaur, and if someone looks at me funny, who KNOWS what'll happen.

freeopinion• 2 years ago

In the last few years I have come to think of AI as transformative in the same way as relational databases. Yes, right now there's a lot of fad noise around AI. That will fade. And not everyone in IT will be swimming in AI. Just like not everyone today is neck deep in databases. But databases are still pretty fundamental to a lot of occupations.

Front-end web devs might not write SQL all day, but they probably won't get very far without some comprehension. I see AI/ML becoming something as common. Maybe you need to know some outline of what gradient descent is. Maybe you just need some understanding of prompt engineering. But a reasonable grasp of the priciples is still going to be useful to a lot of people after all the hype moves to other topics.

yosito• 2 years ago

Honestly, I couldn't get past the violent language. Why do we give people who speak like this any respect. It's completely inappropriate.

elktown• 2 years ago

I'm curious to know if you avoid movies/TV-shows in a similar manner?

openmajestic• 2 years ago

I agree that the world isn't changing tomorrow like so much of the hype makes it out to be. I think I disagree that engineers can skip this hype train. I think it's like the internet - it will be utterly fundamental to the future of software, but it will take a decade plus for it to be truly integrated everywhere. But I think many companies will be utterly replaced if they don't adapt to the LLM world. Engineers likewise.

Worth noting that I don't think you need to train the models or even touch the PyTorch level, but you do need to understand how LLMs work and learn how (if?) they can be applied to what you work on. There are big swaths of technology that are becoming obsolete with generative AI (most obviously/immediately in the visual creation and editing space) and IMO AI is going to continue to eat more and more domains over time.

lordofmoria• 2 years ago

Even if it’s meant as tongue-in-cheek, it comes off as dismissive and carries a certain smugness that I find particularly irritating.

And the smugness feels especially unfounded because the author clearly has decided to double down on their views even though it’s not at all evident that they’ve taken the time to interact with the tech as an end user (which millions upon millions have, last time I checked). They’ve just not gotten it, or: yes, it is you, not me.

This is just another form of rote, unthinking (anti) hype. It reminds me of the smugness that Balmer had towards the iPhone.

zer00eyz12• 2 years ago

Even if it’s meant as tongue-in-cheek,

It is not this.

There is actual anger there, he's pointing out WHY he's pissed.

it’s not at all evident that they’ve taken the time to interact with the tech as an end user (which millions upon millions have, last time I checked)

He covers this point, in depth in the article. From a few angles.

lmm• 2 years ago

In the case that the technology continues to make incremental gains like this, your company does not need generative AI for the sake of it. You will know exactly why you need it if you do, indeed, need it. An example of something that has actually benefited me is that I keep track of my life administration via Todoist, and Todoist has a feature that allows you to convert filters on your tasks from natural language into their in-house filtering language. Tremendous! It saved me learning a system that I'll use once every five years. I was actually happy about this, and it's a real edge over other applications. But if you don't have a use case then having this sort of broad capability is not actually very useful. The only thing you should be doing is improving your operations and culture, and that will give you the ability to use AI if it ever becomes relevant. Everyone is talking about Retrieval Augmented Generation, but most companies don't actually have any internal documentation worth retrieving. Fix. Your. Shit.

This is purely wishful thinking. We're good at making rigorous well-organised stuff and we hope that will somehow continue to be a useful skill. But actually there's no evidence that a half-baked bullshit generator isn't going to outperform carefully written documentation, to the point that carefully writing documentation becomes a waste of resources.

I swear to God, I am going to study, write, network, and otherwise apply force to the problem until those resources are going to a place where they'll accomplish something for society instead of some grinning clown's wallet.

Bet. Go on, actually have a go at doing this. You'll find it's much harder than you think and what looks like success will usually turn out to be actively counterproductive.

kjkjadksj8• 2 years ago

If you write the documentation as you write the code its not very time consuming since you kind of have to write up good notes anyhow to roadmap what the heck you are doing next. One issue is people are lazy and often code first, document later, which becomes a slog for a bad end product that chatgpt might outperform.

globalnode2• 2 years ago

it is refreshing, whether you agree 100% or not, the runaway hype of AI entraps many.

edit: those knocking his style i think may miss the point that hes acting. its a show. noone is like that. (i hope)

blast8• 2 years ago

you do not need AI for anything

I'd so have preferred this to be true, and to ignore the AI thing (mainly to avoid any effort to change any of my habits in any way). But as an end user I can say that this is wrong. I definitely need LLMs for one critical thing: search that works.

Google has become clogged with outright spam and endless layers of indirection (useless sites that point to things that point to things that point to things, never getting me to the information that actually fucking matters), but I can ask the best LLMs queries like "what's the abc that does xyz in the context of ijk" and get meaningful answers. It only works well when the subject has a lot of "coverage" (a lot of well-trodden ground, nothing cutting-edge) but that's 80% of what I need.

I still have to check that the LLM found a real needle in the haystack rather than making up a bullshit one. (Ironically, Google works great for that once you know what the candidate needle actually is—it just sucks at finding any needle, even a hallucinated one, in the first place.) For shortest path from question to answer, LLMs are state of the art right now. They're not only kicking Google's ass, they're the first major improvement in search since Google showed up 20+ years ago.

Therefore I think this author is high on his own fumes. It reminds me of the dotcom period: yeah there was endless stupid hype and cringey grifters and yeah there were excellent rants about how stupid and craven it all was—but the internet really did change everything in the end. The ranters were right about most of the battles but ended up wrong about the war, and in retrospect don't look smart at all.

Always42• 2 years ago

This it's incredible if you keep in mind it's just gonna find the most "common" words that come alongside your query in some jobbled together answer

tavavex6• 2 years ago

Machine learning isn't just a word frequency machine. If that's all it was, we'd have this technology decades ago.

trustno2• 2 years ago

I think you missed the point of the article.

It's not meant as a criticism of ChatGPT and some LLMs, more like a criticism of corporate drones and "thought leaders" that latch on latest hype instead of fixing their core problems.

blast8• 2 years ago

Oh I probably did because none of that is interesting to me. Every 5 years another crop of omg corporate drones are so awful consciousness appears, but once you've been through 3 or 4 cycles, everything new is old again. The rants aren't more interesting than the suits are. (well, - the rants at least have their fun side)

What interests me is that there is new technology here that does something relatively magic - that just doesn't happen often. Corporate crap and MBAs and suits and founder hucksters are forever with us. I'm sure it was equally true decades before me and you showed up.

I'm rather annoyed that this is so, because now I have to slightly get off my ass and learn something, so as to reach a better state of lethargy later.

I'm a ranter by character, but you know who I'd pick between the ranters and the drones? The drones. The drones are the 100 million sperm racing to fertilize the egg. They're all losers (save one infinitesimal winner) and it's easy to point that out. The ranters stand on the side saying "those fucking idiots. those morons. what losers they are. as opposed to me, who sees this." But the ranters are the dead end, smart as they may be. The sperm are at least in the race.

kjkjadksj8• 2 years ago

The issue with google is true. That being said ai isn’t the answer in my experience. Wikipedia is a better source of casual information I find. And if I want to dig further I look for the real sources if I can, not the slop written by journalists but the actual material people in the field are engaging with. The primary sources. The documentation. If I can’t find that or understand that material, then thats that and I move on, considering anything ‘accessible’ is going to be an example of gell mann amnesia and not worth my time.

rixrax• 2 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree (that first ask from ChatGPT, then double check with whatever, and that Google results have become junk - mostly). Alas, I can totally see how AI companies will monetize this by allowing advertisers to influence the answers. And not in a add-in-a-sidebar fashion, but baking the advertisers product etc. into the answers. Personally, I find this somewhat disturbing.

Indeed, I think this is a key area where regulation is needed. If answer from AI is influenced by 'something unexpected' - what ever that might be, then it has to be clearly highlighted in the answer.

boxed3• 2 years ago

I definitely need LLMs for one critical thing: search that works.

Hmm, that seems weird.

Google has become clogged with outright spam and endless layers of indirection

So.. the problem isn't search, it's that Googles ad business has destroyed googles search and created spam to try to get ad clicks.

I switched to Kagi a few months ago and I'm much happier. Most of the blog spam is just gone, and the things that slip through I can nuke.

blast8• 2 years ago

yeah I should try it, I'm just a laggard.

Still though, the way that LLMs can give customized answers to complex specific questions, questions that probably don't have any specific page on the web, feels like a leveling up beyond traditional search engines.

here's a recent example: I asked how to call a particular function in some library from a little-used language, and it not only told me exactly how to do it but wrote the FFI wrapper. I could definitely have dug that information up but it would have taken a lot longer and then I'd still have had to pore over documentation to write that tedious code.

AIorNot2• 2 years ago

So what about: 1. vector search 2. RAG pipelines with your data 3. Semantic, image, video, object, detection 4. Robotics 5. Code generation /Review 6. AI language translation 7. AI research agents 8. ChatGPT

Clickbaity article aside there’s tons of legitimate uses of LLMs for corporations of all sizes

Now blockchain on the other hand…

zer00eyz12• 2 years ago

> RAG pipelines with your data

FTA

"Everyone is talking about Retrieval Augmented Generation, but most companies don't actually have any internal documentation worth retrieving. Fix. Your. Shit."

5. Code generation /Review

FTA

"If another stupid motherfucker asks me to try and implement LLM-based code review to "raise standards" instead of actually teaching people a shred of discipline, I am going to study enough judo to throw them into the goddamn sun.

I cannot emphasize this enough. You either need to be on the absolute cutting-edge and producing novel research, or you should be doing exactly what you were doing five years ago with minor concessions to incorporating LLMs. Anything in the middle ground does not make any sense unless you actually work in the rare field where your industry is being totally disrupted right now."

The man trots out his bonified's at the start and in the article. He's inside and backing up that rage.

xarope• 2 years ago

"Everyone is talking about Retrieval Augmented Generation, but most companies don't actually have any internal documentation worth retrieving. Fix. Your. Shit."

I read up about Copilot as part of some internal research, and absolutely the first things to do for Copilot (I'll copy-paste just the line-item headings from the section entitled "Prepare your data for Copilot for M365 searches") is:

  - Clean out redundant, outdated, and trivial (ROT) content.   
  - Organize content into logical folders and sites.
  - Tag files with keywords.
  - Standardize file names.
  - Consolidate multiple versions.
  - Promote data hygiene habits.

Sigh. If I could do all this at an organizational level, I wouldn't need copilot at all.

AIorNot2• 2 years ago

What the hell does that mean fix your docs?? -

companies have tons of document libraries and documentation that need sifting through and are generating more content regularly and => RAG and vector search is game changer with real value there

Eg we implemented RAG + vector search at a manufacturing company and it changed their workflows entirely

And to coding with LLMs, Say what you will about AI coding but code review/linting and LLM created unit tests are as itself game changing as IDE intellisense this value is worth at least one junior developer on the team - that’s 70k yearly salary alone benefit

senectus1• 2 years ago

While i agree with what he's said, its really a very violent read, I wish it wasnt so.

Also, I attend an online Microsoft meeting every week where they inform the attending community about all the new changes and technology coming from MS.

I'm utterly sick and tired of hearing about "AI" and Co-Pilot from them. every. signle. meeting. is 90% AI/Co-pilot.

I'm over it. I'm burnt out on it as a product.

terminatornet• 2 years ago

i agree with all of the points just wish it wasn't couched in a "maddox / best page in the universe" writing style, circa 2007. can't be writing like that in 2024

ChicagoMan• 2 years ago

Done right, the rant is mostly a style of expression easily adapted to making clear contrasts. If you can make it work, I say go for it.

23david• 2 years ago

Awesome. Best rant I’ve read since Zed Shaw’s “Rails is a Ghetto” back in 2008.

what-the-grump• 2 years ago

Would be perfect if the article was written by gpt.

RickyS• 2 years ago

What a shit blog in general.

vundercind2• 2 years ago

How stupid do you have to be to believe that only 8% of companies have seen failed AI projects?

That’s because most of them are still in progress. Enterprise moves slow and only started on this recently. They still think it’s going great because they’re riding the high of imagination.

Barrin92• 2 years ago

No, it's because the numbers are made the f** up. That same chart, as the author notes also points out that allegedly a third of companies have outsourced "strategic decision making" to AI. That is so offensive to any person who has a brain that the authors much criticized tone is completely warranted if you have any love for truth at all.

I mean, contempt is literally the only sane and appropriate emotional reaction to the amount of lies, and it is intentional lies, that are being marketed to people.

arbfay2• 2 years ago

That is not true unfortunately.

ML has been around for decades, DL for more than a decade.

In 2019, I had to explain to executives that 95% of AI projects fail (based on some other survey), top 1 reason is bad or missing data and top 2 is misaligned internal processes. I probably still have the slides somewhere.

One project I worked on was impossible because the data was so bad that after cleaning, we went from 4M rows to 10k usable rows in 4 languages. We could have salvaged a lot more if we restricted the use case but then the benefits of the projects would be not so interesting anymore. The internal sponsor gave up and understood the problem. Instead, they decided to train everyone on how to improve data entry and quality! In just 6 months I could see the data was getting better indeed. But I had to leave this company, the IT dep was too toxic.

So I think the author is right. According to Scale, we'd have gone from 95% failures to 95% successes in just 4-5 years just thanks to LLMs? This is of course ridiculous, knowing the problem was never poor models.

whoknowsidont6• 2 years ago

That’s because most of them are still in progress.

What? You know AI has been around since before ChatGPT.

vundercind2• 2 years ago

The number of projects increased a lot since that started getting big press, though. It kicked off a much bigger craze than before.

kmnc• 2 years ago

I think the author disproves his point by ridiculing the stupidity of human actors. AI doesn’t need to become much more powerful to displace the idiots in management, product design and marketing. Just wait until the keys are actually handed over. Dismissing things such as Copilot seems crazy to me, give it time. Chatgpt made stackoverflow obsolete overnight. AI isn’t going away anytime soon.

rkagerer• 2 years ago

Have not read the article.

But the title (as phrased here on HN) is exactly how I felt at Google IO this year.

moose_man4• 2 years ago

The AI hype happened in close proximity to the decline of the crypto mania and so many mediocre grifters from crypto latched onto AI as a fraud life raft.

itkovian_2• 2 years ago

Sometimes things really are as significant as they seem.

itkovian_2• 2 years ago

This person has significantly less ml exp. than I do. I guess it's fine for me to totally dismiss their argument in the same way they dismiss anyone who has less than them.

cleandreams• 2 years ago

I worked for an AI startup that got bought by a big tech company and I've seen the hype up close. In the inner tech circles it's not exactly a big lie. The tech is good enough to make incredible demos but not good enough to generalize into reliable tools. The gulf between demo and useful tool is much wider than we thought.

xwolfi4• 2 years ago

So a large cluster of nvidia cards cannot predict the future, generate correct http links, rotate around objects with only a picture at source with the right lighting or program a million lines of code from 3 lines of prompt ?

Color me surprised. Maybe we should ask Mira Murati to step aside from her inspiring essays about the future of poetry and help us figure out why the world spent trillions on nvidia equity and how to unwind this pending disaster...

waciki• 2 years ago

it also can't reliably add two numbers to each other.

help us figure out why the world spent trillions on nvidia equity and how to unwind this pending disaster..

There are many documented examples of the market being irrational.

beoberha2• 2 years ago

I work at Microsoft, though not in AI. This describes Copilot to a T. The demos are spectacular and get you so excited to go use it, but the reality is so underwhelming.

moose_man4• 2 years ago

It's a lot like AR before Vision Pro. The situation for the demo and reality didn't meet. I'm not trying to claim Vision Pro is perfect but it seems to do AR in the real world without the circumstances needing to be absolutely ideal.

throwaway20372• 2 years ago

I never considered this angle. (Yeah, I am a sucker -- I know.) Are you saying that they cherry pick the best samples for the demo? Damn. I _still_ have high hopes for something like Copilot. I work on CRUD apps. There are so many cases where I want Copilot to provide some sample code to do X.

TeMPOraL10• 2 years ago

Copilot isn't underwhelming, it's shit. What's impressive is how Microsoft managed to gut GPT-4 to the point of near-uselessness. It refuses to do work even more than OpenAI models refuse to advise on criminal behavior. In my experience, the only thing it does well is scan documents on corporate SharePoint. For anything else, it's better to copy-paste to a proper GPT-4 yourself.

(Ask Office Copilot in PowerPoint to create you a slide. I dare you! I double dare you!!)

The problem with demos is that they're staged, they showcase integrations that are never delivered, and probably never existed. But you know what's not hype and fluff? The models themselves. You could hack a more useful Copilot with AutoHotkey, today.

I have GPT-4o hooked up as a voice assistant via Home Assistant, and what a breeze that is. Sure, every interaction costs me some $0.03 due to inefficient use of context (HA generates too much noise by default in its map of available devices and their state), but I can walk around the house and turn devices on and off by casually chatting with my watch, and it work, works well, and works faster than it takes to turn on Google Assistant.

So no, I honestly don't think AI advances are oversold. It's just that companies large and small race to deploy "AI-enabled" features, no matter how badly made they are.

surfingdino7• 2 years ago

The tech is good enough to make incredible demos but not good enough to generalize into reliable tools. The gulf between demo and useful tool is much wider than we thought.

One thing it is good at is scaring people into paying to feed it all the data they have for a promise of an unquantifiable improvement.

yawnxyz• 2 years ago

I just used Groq / llama-7b to classify 20,000 rows of Google sheets data (Sidebar archive links) that would have taken me way longer... Every one I've spot checked right now has been correct, and I might write another checker to scan the results just in case.

Even w/ a 20% failure it's better than not having the classifications

lifeisstillgood2• 2 years ago

Sorry this actually sounds like a real use case. What was the classification? (I tried google “sidebar archive”). I assume somehow you visited 20,000 web pages and it classified the text on the page? How was that achieved ? You ran a local llama?

smusamashah• 2 years ago

I classified ~1000 GBA game roms files by using their file names to put each in a category folder. It worked like 90% correctly. Used GPT 3.5 and therefore it didn't adhere to my provided list of categories but they were mostly not wrong otherwise.

https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/20f24e80cfe962d26af5315e...

runeks2• 2 years ago

Every one I've spot checked right now has been correct, and I might write another checker to scan the results just in case.

If you already have the answers to verify the LLM output against why not just use those to begin with?

physicsguy6• 2 years ago

The problem isn't that it's not useful for self driven tasks like that, it's that you can't really integrate that into a product that does task X because when someone buys a system to do task X, they want it to be more reliable than 80%.

rob74• 2 years ago

Looks like this is another application of the ninety-ninety rule: getting to the stage where you can make incredible demos has required 90% of the effort, and the last 10% to make it actually reliable will require the other 90% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule).

veqq• 2 years ago

80/20, 90/10 etc. are all just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

viking123• 2 years ago

Isn't it a bit similar situation with the self driving cars?

rsynnott3• 2 years ago

The gulf between demo and useful tool is much wider than we thought.

This is _always_ the problem with these things. Voice transcription was a great tech demo in the 1990s (remember DragonDictate?), and there was much hype for a couple of years that, by the early noughties, speech would be the main way that people use computes. In the real world, 30 years on, it has finally reached the point where you might be able to use it for things provided that accuracy doesn't matter at all.

jraph• 2 years ago

Assuming it works perfectly, speech still couldn't possibly be the main way to use a computer:

- hearing people next to you speaking to the computer would be tiring and annoying. Though remote work might be a partial solution to this

- hello voice extinction after days of using a computer :-)

nektro• 2 years ago

this is so refreshing to see

musebox35• 2 years ago

Fun to read. The style of the article reminded me of https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatc...

DidYaWipe2• 2 years ago

At first I was thinking that "AI" is the "HD" or "digital quality" of this decade. But it's a broader fraud than that. It reminds me of this IBM commercial, which made me laugh out loud at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvDCk3pY4qo

firefoxd• 2 years ago

I remember the hype around BigData. I was in those meetings where vendors pitched their product. Our director would asked "Do you do Big Data?" Any vendor who said no was immediately dismissed.

I still don't know what the answer to that question was supposed to be. We scraped coupons from our competitors then displayed them on our websites.

moorow• 2 years ago

Probably the most entertaining thing about the article (aside from the article itself) is seeing a comment section full of Americans who have precisely zero understanding of Australian humour or writing style.

As a former-PhD-Data-Scientist-who-quit-the-industry-because-it-was-full-of-fraud-and-went-back-into-software-engineering-and-is-now-an-Australian-consulting-to-Americans, this is even more hurty. Someone sent this to me and I thought I'd dreamposted it.

Great article, the anecdotes physically pain me in the same way that watching Utopia does.

WickyNilliams• 2 years ago

Similarly, as a Brit, the tone and humour is not unusual at all. Feels like someone blowing off steam down the pub with their mates.

It is totally lost on many here, some of whom equivocate the rant with serious threats of violence.

Personally I found it very funny and an accurate portayal of industry trends

whoknowsidont6• 2 years ago

It's mainly midwest Americans that like to tone police. People from the east coast, especially northern east coast, read this as comfort literature.

jusonchan81• 2 years ago

From what I have been seeing there are a few real use cases:

1. Customer service - seems like natural language processing by AI could be a better offering than someone manually trying to resolve problems. I have been in front of many CS agents who couldn't do what I wanted them to do. Untrained CS agents, non native speakers, or people who just don't care enough to help.

2. Internet search - I don't have to search through arbitrary articles and text to get the answer I want. Now its not always accurate or the latest, but still better than scrolling through Google search (feel bad for the publishers and writers though - they aren't getting the same ad views as before and clearly not ideal)

3. Summarizing - AI does a fabulous job here - TLDR and more.

4. Rewriting things to a better tone - AI is going an amazing job here, every time I get stuck on how to write something OpenAI has helped me. Now I don't use the output as it is, but it gives me an idea of how to write my own message.

5. NLP interface to devices / tools = I think this is a really valuable use case.

Almost everything I suggested here is pointing to a $20 or a fixed monthly subscription for individual user. I don't know if its an "enterprise" need. Except for the customer service use case.

Timber-6539• 2 years ago

This writeup is pure comedy (both in content and subject matter). Should be recommended reading for all those curious about the AI buzzword.

zombiwoof• 2 years ago

What if we mean “Apple” Intelligence LOL

DeathArrow• 2 years ago

I assume that anyone who has ever typed in import tensorflow is a scumbag

That's true, decent people write import torch.

d--b• 2 years ago

ChatGPT, can you remove the unnecessary violence expressed in this article please?

Fucking internet.

Kiro2• 2 years ago

I didn't find this article refreshing. If anything, it's just the same dismissive attitude that's dominating this forum, where AI is perceived as the new blockchain. An actually refreshing perspective would be one that's optimistic.

andrei_says_4• 2 years ago

Is it possible that this forum may be dismissive of the AI bubble because the people on HN tend to have better understanding of the technology, its limitations, and the deceptive narrative around it?

Kiro2• 2 years ago

We like to think we're above everyone else but in reality our technical expertise is mostly irrelevant when evaluating the utility. I've been programming for 20 years and I can't think of a single thing I know that puts me in a better position to predict the future of AI.

Kuinox2• 2 years ago

Did you heard about the opinion of HN about Dropbox ?

TeMPOraL10• 2 years ago

That still requires to have tight blinders on your eyes, the same kind that were needed to not be dismissive of the blockchain.

Or maybe we're confusing two things. AI and blockchain are complete opposites in real terms; the former represents an unexpected and qualitative jump in technological capabilities of humanity, and already delivers spectacular results, while the latter is just a purposefully inefficient database, neat on mathematical grounds, but useless in the real world. However, in business terms, both are in fact the same - a way for grifters to get rich on peddling bullshit.

To this I can only say: please remember that the nature of a thing is not affected by how much the fraudsters can lie to you about it. Hustlers gonna hustle. So sure, it's a business-level hype - but that doesn't affect the merit of the underlying tech.

__rito__3• 2 years ago

That's far from what the article actually tries to say. Did you read the full thing?

HN is disproportionately dismissive, where one comment in late 2023 was this:

    Ruby is so much better than Python, and Python is only pumped up by AI hype, and the AI hype will die down soon. Ruby will regain the throne again.

Imagine that!

This article is not that. This article just tells you to get your basics correct as a company, and don't think about using AI before you are absolutely sure where and how you will use it. And non-technical people are the main drivers of AI hype (which is besides the true thing).

oidar2• 2 years ago

Can you give a link to that quote? A google search and hn search doesn't surface it.

cainxinth• 2 years ago

It reads a bit like someone at the turn of the 20th century describing the shortcomings of newfangled automobiles.

arbfay2• 2 years ago

Started a career in ML/AI years before ChatGPT changed everything.

At the time, we only used the term AI if we referred more than just machine/deep learning techniques to create models or research something (thinks operations research, Monte Carlo simulations, etc). But it started to change already.

I think startups and others will realise to make a product successful, you will need clean data and data engineers, the rest will fill follow. Fundamentals first.

All the startups trying to sell "AI" to traditional industries: good luck!

I've worked as an AI engineer for a big insurance, contractor with a bank, and oh gosh!

alecco3• 2 years ago

I bet the old guard will refuse to change course and new companies using the new tools will displace the old ones. Like what is happening with online banks and similar. Like what happened with low-cost airlines.

varjag• 2 years ago

I think new hot upstarts will find that a combination intricate regulation, physical reality and institutional inertia would only allow them to make a tiny dent over years.

physicsguy6• 2 years ago

I actually think the example of banks is a good one, because what's happened in places with a competitive banking landscape is just that the big players have upped their game and the benefit of the challenger banks has diminished, with them struggling to become profitable.

Monzo is the biggest new player in the UK and it's not making much of a profit. Revolut doesn't have a banking license because it can't comply with the regulatory requirements. Starling has taken much more of a conservative path and is being led by an ex-Barclays person, but even it is being investigated by the FCA for having poor controls around financial crime. All of those giving loans have unnaceptably high % of defaults from an investor perspective.

mellosouls2• 2 years ago

The editorialising of the title is amusing. The writer comes across as like a teenager still developing his style.

boxed3• 2 years ago

The writer? Or the person editorializing the headline? :P

mellosouls2• 2 years ago

Yes, the writer :)

timlod3• 2 years ago

I'm a Data Scientist currently consulting for a project in the Real Estate space (utilizing LLMs). I understand the article is hyperbole for perhaps comedic purposes, and actually do perhaps 80% align with a lot of the authors views, but it's a bit much.

There is industry-changing tech which has become available, and many orgs are starting to grasp it. I won't deny that there's probably a large percentage of projects which fall under what the author describes, but these claims are doing a bit of a disservice to the legitimately amazing projects being worked on (and the competent people performing that work).

runeks2• 2 years ago

I'm a Data Scientist currently consulting for a project in the Real Estate space (utilizing LLMs).

Consultants are obviously making huge amounts of money implementing LLMs for companies. The question is whether the company profits from it afterwards.

timlod3• 2 years ago

Time will tell, but I would cautiously say say yes.

Note that I don't usually work in that particular space (I prefer simple solutions and don't follow the hype), didn't sell myself using 'AI' (I was referred), and also would always tell a client if I believe there isn't much sense in a particular ask.

This particular project really uniquely benefits from this technology and would be much harder, if possible at all, otherwise.

lagrange773• 2 years ago

Would you recommend to still get into freelance consulting (with a ML background) at this point in time? Or will the very technology you're consulting about, replace you very soon? AutoML, LLMs etc..

timlod3• 2 years ago

I'd say it depends on what your other options are. I don't think the technology will replace me soon, even at the rate I see it improving. At this point it's still a tool we can use to deliver faster, if we use it wisely.

Especially about ChatGPT et al. - I use it daily, but having the proper foundation to discern and verify its output shows me that it's still very far from being a competent programmer for any but the 'easy' tasks which have been solved hundreds of times over.

Like I hinted, I also view all of this hype sceptically. I dislike the 'we need AI in our org now!' types and am not planning on taking on projects if I don't see their viability. But there's obviously still a lot of demand and people offering services like those in TFA who're just looking to cash in, and that seems to work.

If you can find projects you believe you can make a difference in with your background, why not give it a shot?

arisAlexis3• 2 years ago

"With God as my witness, you grotesque simpleton, if you don't personally write machine learning systems and you open your mouth about AI one more time, I am going to mail you a brick .."

I really dislike articles that have rage against (x) and try to appear smart and with authority to tell you that everyone else is stupid and they know better but deep down they are just anti-everthing because contrarianism is the target here and not AI or anything that any article like this talks about. The idea is to just say "no, it's not like that".

brap• 2 years ago

To me it sounds like a typical neckbeard internet power-trip.

whoknowsidont6• 2 years ago

Strangely, the most boring people are the ones that seem to hate the article.

arisAlexis3• 2 years ago

You mean you prefer haters and jihadists so as not to be bored? Ok for game of thrones

casebash• 2 years ago

I'm just going to say it.

The author is an idiot who is using insults as a crutch to make his case.

CaptainFever• 2 years ago

This article makes me want to increase my AI usage hundred-fold.

noisy_boy• 2 years ago

GPT-4 can't even write coherent Elixir, presumably because the dataset was too small to get it to the level that it's at for Python

Yes but it does save me a whole bunch of time writing boilerplate command line entries in argparse. I can give it a table definition and ask it to write a bunch of crud methods instantly. I can do all of this myself but why?

Of course the stuff it produces doesn't work all the time but then I'm not asking it to write my entire app. I'm asking it to spare me the tedium of iterating over the building blocks so that I can get to the main part - building things.

physicsguy6• 2 years ago

Zero interest rates are gone, so dying companies are throwing themselves onto the AI bandwagon as a last ditch attempt to bring in cash and keep going.

Yizahi4• 2 years ago

I'm working at a hardware shop, we are making what is essentially is a special kind of network routers/switches for analog network (DOCSIS). And we also got hit by NN craze, half of automation team is developing an "analyzer" based on some neural network model for our lab tests which classify fails by type. A completely useless activity, because even if that code guesses correctly, we still need to go see logs manually and make a decision manually, one by one. Exactly as if NN didn't exist. But after trying to tell that in team chat I was confronted with doubt and rejection. And so this development continues.

lemonwaterlime• 2 years ago

This article is great use of rhetorical delivery to drive home these messages.

vfclists• 2 years ago

When I asked the innocuous question -

https://www.reveddit.com/v/singularity/comments/1bdjf7u/is_t... - The mods deleted the content of the question and the whole question itself.

Go figure!!

This is the original question

=====

Is the power of AI companies basically their ability to outbid for AI accelerator chips?

It seems to me that all the hype AI companies are getting is primarily due to the ability to outbid competitors for scarce AI chips, or even design and/or build their own. This also includes their ability to build their own infrastructure around them.

IMHO this scarcity is the main source of their high valuations, and it seems that in the long term when chipmaking capacity builds up this advantage will eventually wane.

Having the ability to train on information provided by users and customers is also a factor, but that doesn't look like it will last either

=====

iainctduncan• 2 years ago

A lot of this is on point. I work in tech diligence, talking to companies raising money. The amount of pointless AI hand waving is unreal, and the majority have not ever tested their disaster recovery plan.

javier123454321• 2 years ago

This is how I feel. GPT and similar LLMs demoes extremely well, but collapses as soon as its put through any kind of real world problem. However, we absolutely are living through press release driven business administration, so it's likely that the realistic approach will be discarded for things that are sexier for the media. Companies will pay for this.

scottmcdot• 2 years ago

Nikhil is the Hambini of the AI industry.

JSDevOps2• 2 years ago

https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/sc-dv-cleared-head-of-kno...

Don't know what to do with AI, Ah fuck it let's just shove it with FOI and GDPR

johnea• 2 years ago

Wow! This article sure has had a roller coaster ride 8-/

While the title seems to express a widespread annoyance at the overwhelming prevalence of this subject in the tech news, the body of the article then goes on dedicate itself to the exact topic the title claims it doesn't want to hear about.

I for one really do wish someone/something would piledrive this topic, but this article was just more of the same tripe...

mikewarot2• 2 years ago

That is to say, it turns out that the core competency of smiling and promising people things that you can't actually deliver is highly transferable.

There's a lot of value in this statement, regardless of how you feel about AI, etc.

We really should fully fund the FTC and anyone else who can help fill the cells in "Thought Leader Jail".

Bendy• 2 years ago

The author’s Australian so I couldn’t help but read it in the voice of Robert Hughes, to narrate this new shock of the new.

“‘This is the real thing, this deserves respect!’. It isn’t and it doesn’t, and no one cares.”

rldjbpin• 2 years ago

um, excuse you, it is all about ANI/AGI/ASI now!

on a serious note, to me this field was already in quagmire of bs marketing the moment they named it "AI" almost a decade ago. in retrospect, seems like naming it "data science" was the move that started it all. but then political sciences get away with it, but i should not be picking multiple battles at the same time.

lowkey grifting has been part of the r&d space in the corporate world from as long as i can see. but lately i am afraid that the bubble will ruin it for all of us.

mattkenefick• 2 years ago

Woof. Lots of strong opinions and misinformation in this thread.

backs away slowly

mrjin• 2 years ago

What is AI? Artificial? Yes. Intelligence? Hell NO!!

Please don't mention AI again

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