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Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

I’m always amazed at the dismissive comments recent AI advancement generates: it’s not really creation, a human would do much better, it’s getting old, etc

Think about it for a second: a machine understood your request in plain English and executed it adequately, instantly and free.

If you can’t think how that will affect every aspect of UX and creative job I don’t know what to tell you.

And that’s not even touching on the philosophical questions like a LLM suddenly displaying personality, like Sydney, and mostly passing the Turing test.

The floor is shifting beneath our feet. This is for real.

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> Think about it for a second: a machine understood your request in plain English and executed it adequately, instantly and free.

And the same general purpose publicly available free AI can perform at that level for a very, very wide range of tasks.

Even if the general purpose bot is just 'adequate', how long until fine-tuned versions for specific tasks come out, performing at superhuman levels?

Today's software programs are written by humans for humans.

We'll rewrite those to be by AI for AI.

Craziness is incoming technologically and societally.

I was thinking recently when reading that OpenAI is piping some of the textual prompts into iPython based on some rules, for example when someone asks for an answer that requires math. I could see ChatGPT piping to "itself" in the background and potentially having specialized AIs that would figure out better prompts from your prompt for example, among other obvious specialised ones like piping to image generation models and so on. You'd obviously also use an AI to choose what to pipe too. I agree with you eventually it'll be AI all the way down.

Will AGI be one system, or the final boss that controls all the AI subsystems?

I think when AGI arrives, there will be so many AI tools out there we won't notice another one.

AGI seems like a moving goalpost target that always changes to whatever AI can't do today.

It’s going to be an ecosystem of intelligence, just like it already is today. The notion of “an intelligence” is going to go away.

The singularity is real and AGI is here —but it isn’t like some runaway single agent that self improves and takes over the world. Just wait till it all starts talking to each other, training each other, using each other, all in convergence with humans. It’s very real. And very weird.

Is there anything to stop them from using other against others? Will they start using humans as a tool too?

Yeah, once AI gets bank accounts (easy, via people), it can directly hire people.

Of course, arguably artificial intelligence is much older than this— and the bylaws of corporations constitute the algorithmic utilization of people.

Although I wouldn't have employees, I would have a variety of people on fiverr that I would interact with and pay for a month or two and probably spend $1000 total. Most of the tasks being $50-$100 while one or two being the lions share of the costs

But even at those low prices the biggest thing for me is time

going back and forth on a 8 day delivery, the logo designer bottlenecking the website designer and explainer video creator

that alone makes the AI tools worth it to me, to not consider doing a contract with 5 people at all and having so many iterations across a few minutes or few hours

it is very likely that different specialists will just be on fiverr, delivering complex things for $20 in a matter of hours, instead of a craft for $350 one week later

Pearl clutchers complaining about the bot that can do pretty much anything with only mediocre quality (so far)

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33846104)

Their sleeping on this is your opportunity.

Build something, scale it, raise capital.

The losers will wish they'd done the same.

I honestly think this is the biggest evolution of our field in our lifetimes (I was here for early web). I'm so excited and have already been building incredible stuff, and I'm saying that as someone who has had a decent career at top employers.

Build something, pump it, raise capital, buy a house in Bahamas, declare bankruptcy, hire lawyers and hope for the best. :-)

Does nobody believe in anything anymore?

Grumpy and cynical takes everywhere you look.

It reminds me of the quote "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win"

I'm guessing we are at the second phase for AI.

This will be for real, when I can run this stuff at home.

Stable Diffusion is there. But GPT-3 still has to be run on my behalf by a company that could pull the rug at any moment, or add more stuff that they don't approve of to their TOS. (You already can't use it for "sexy" content. Want help writing a love letter? Oh no, you're banned.)

The "lighter" versions these text models that can be run at home aren't good enough yet.

Software is only for real when you can run it on your home computer?

Google isn't for real yet?

There's a huge difference between utility software, especially utilities that are inherently network-based like "a search engine", and application software used for content creation.

Oh like Google Docs.

If Google Docs suddenly disappeared, everyone would just continue as usual, except that they now use MS Word or LibreOffice instead. If GPT-3 disappeared, what's the alternative?

Seems like you're changing the subject.

No he's not. That's exactly the point my original comment made. You have missed the point.

I feel like everyone is just playing devil's advocate. Almost every developer I know wants a native API or have the option of taking something out of the cloud. It's why paas died and docker as a service took over.

There are open models, eg. Bloom. Same with Stable Diffusion (open) and Dall-E. Creating these isn’t impossibly hard. Some ML ops company showed how you could train a GPT-like model for like $250k or something.

You've alluded to my main concern regarding ML models, especially large GPT-3-alikes. Less that they could pull the rug, but rather the more general concern of companies "renting-out" access to these valuable tools that we will likely become dependent upon.

Based on Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI, it wouldn't be surprising to me if they also wish to offer access to these AI models via Azure for example as a SaaS offering. Then you can imagine some small start-ups with Billy and Jimmy making some other SaaS product that is based on this very API. It would be a clever way to extract revenue from supposedly novel products whilst controlling and shaping the game.

People said very similar things about RoR…

Me with not much background experience in programming not knowing what RoR stood for.

Me asking ChatGPT:

In this context, RoR most likely refers to Ruby on Rails, which is a web application framework written in the Ruby programming language. The second comment is suggesting that people had similar dismissive comments about Ruby on Rails (RoR) when it was first introduced, but it has since become a widely used and respected framework in web development. The comment implies that similar trends may apply to AI tools used for web design.

You could have written an incredibly similar comment but for the blockchain 6 years ago. Down to the tone and verbiage.

I could never have done that. Never bought into the crypto hype, even though I still find the blockchain very interesting. Never had a cent in crypto currency or NFT.

In fact, I’m extremely averse to hype, perhaps almost to a pathological degree.

And yet, I can’t remember when I was more scared and excited about some tech. Take that as you wish.

I agree, I'm very hype-averse, and have moaned on here before about crypto-nonsense (and previous AI/AGI BS), but this is genuinely different.

It's a shame that people who are rightfully sceptical - precisely because of the hype-merchants and snake-oil salesman of the past decade or so on various tech "advances" have misjudged the quantum leap we are witnessing, and will duly fall behind or paint themselves into a luddite corner because of it.

> fall behind or paint themselves into a luddite corner because of it

I am not too concerned about that. It was easy to dismiss the blockchain/nft/web3 hype because there really is nothing there. No matter how hard the snake-oil salesmen tried, they were unable to create a killer app over the course of more than a decade.

I am likewise on the skeptical end of the AI hype, but I am using ChatGPT daily to do tedious stuff for me. The utility is so obvious and AI will become so ubiquitous that it will be impossible to ignore.

This seems to be a really common sentiment, and I find it very strange. Why do people think that the level of enthusiasm and hype for a technology is predictive of its likelihood to fizzle? Both real, world-changing tech and overhyped tech will create enthusiasm. You have to look deeper than the tone of voice people are using to talk about a technology to understand its potential.

This seems to be a really common sentiment, and I find it very strange.

The pattern: new thing -> decide if good or bad -> hype or attack.

Waiting to see how it evolves and gathering pros or cons is boring. Using it? Boring. Thinking? Better see if there's some expert you trust that has some opinion already. Readiness is all.

I find it so funny there are actually people here that seriously cannot see the gulf of utility that separates LLMs and blockchains.

What a crazy world we're in.

For some people, access to decentralized financial products can be a matter of life or death - they live in jurisdictions with limited property rights, and loss of property can translate to lack of food, medicine, and housing.

LLMs mostly provide a way for companies to increase their efficiency. Currently anything an LLM can do a staff creative worker in the correct field can do.

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