Hacker News Reader

Comment by TechnicolorByte | Hacker News Reader

Really surprised to see such low effort commentary akin to Reddit/twitter on here.

In what way has Nvidia abandoned the consumer market? They have something like 80%+ market share on discrete gaming GPUs and still rake in billions a year from GeForce, which at their revenue is a sizable fraction.

And what makes you say that current AI hype is a grift? Do you truly think that the work with transformers is just a fad? I swear people on this site were saying the same thing about AI in general 3+ years ago before transformers blew up the scene.

View on HN

> I swear people on this site were saying the same thing about AI in general 3+ years ago before transformers blew up the scene.

They kind of weren’t super wrong. What people usually mean by this is that the product doesn’t match the hype. It very much didn’t.

Even now we’re only starting to catch up to the breathless promises from back then. Barely.

The main difference now is that the barrier to entry is lower so it’s starting to get some interesting uses cases come out

It's kinda strange seeing some people link advancements in transformer models with stuff like cryptos and NFTs. You've gotta ask, where are these thoughts coming from? Plus, the ongoing use of the 'stochastic parrot' argument is starting to feel a bit repetitive in these discussions.

The irony is that 99% of them haven't actually read the paper the term originated from.

One of it's only recurring warnings was the danger of underestimating what a "stochastic parrot" can do in practical terms.

Their consumer stuff barely competes with itself. They can only get away with that because nobody is interested in that market. I’d also say current AI hype is hard to tell from a grift now - my team is doing some useless crap because CEO basically has tech FOMO. It’s so uncalled for and I’m only guessing not uncommon.

Companies doing useless crap with AI has been a thing long before the current AI popularity spike. I've heard a specialist complain about that trend 5 years ago, where clients couldn't say what they wanted to do with an AI but they "knew" they needed one. That doesn't make it a grift, though.

Nvida literally doubled the prices of their entire product line overnight and then spent their entire GDC keynote talking about how AI was going to eliminate the need for game developers.

Like crypto, fraud is the only use case that will pan out for transformers in the end.

We’ve been here before. ChatGPT isn’t functionally all that different from ELIZA from the 1960s. It’s tricking people just the same, into thinking it’s more than it really is.

I’m also eagerly awaiting the discovery process that will show that all of this generative AI was built on mass copyright infringement. OpenAI certainly ingested the entire z-library. They’d have to be stupid not to, right? If they didn’t use it, less ethical competitors would have beaten them to market.

Oh, I’m sure they used some sketchy subcontractor to do it. We’ve all seen a variation of this in our careers, where a dataset was acquired under questionable circumstances, and you don’t ask and don’t tell if you want to keep your job, right?

And that’s just speculation. There’s hard evidence for the Getty Images lawsuit.

Comparing ELIZA to GPT because it's not quite there yet is like comparing horse carriages to autonomous cars because they still have accidents. People have already found actual real-world uses for GPT, meanwhile ELIZA's most popular use-case is an obscure feature in Emacs.

Regarding the questionable training data I agree, but the likely outcome is that those AI models will be used regardless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com