Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ancalagon | Hacker News Reader

Really weird considering how much AI is actually available now

If you have an idea for a cool AI startup it's faster to build your first prototype without the actual AI, just faking that part. But if your Actual Indians had 95% accuracy and you can't get an AI to do more than 85% then you are kind of stuck if you raised money and got customers pretending that your Actual Indians are Artificial Intelligence.

This is the way. Funny how AI could also stand for Actual Intelligence. Or, Artisanal Intelligence? "Now 100% organic handcrafted thoughts, unique for your business problem."

Not true it’s super easy to fine tune and deploy one of the open models. I should teach a course.

The technical aspects of training and tuning are trivial. GP is pointing out that you might not be able to get the model to succeed at the task as often for any number of reasons that you won't know before you actually train one.

Although I guess your point is that it's also cheap to train them, probably cheaper than doing this. But startups are started by social people, not technical people. Stuff like this will always be expensive for social people since they have to pay one of us to do it. YC interviews their CEOs from time to time, it's really clear that's how that works.

Also it can't have been fast. Didn't customers and investors feel that it was weird that CoPilot spits out code as fast as you can type, but Builder.ai needs days or weeks to generate your app. Or where these Indian developers just really really fast?

Maybe they use GPT :)

There's this one super secret agentic framework that beats all the benchmarks...

Available sure, but cost effective? My guess is that they tried a lot of things to get ChatGPT to work and burnt out of money before it got cheap enough to fit with a reliable business model. Early but not wrong, I guess.

Almost like it doesn't work as well as they market it as working?

Not all companies are equal.

At the same time that Tesla was making actual electric cars, Nikola was rolling fake "electric trucks" downhill.

Grifters exist, but not everyone is a grifter.

Capitalism rewards dishonesty. Every company is a grifter to some degree. This is more widespread in technical service companies.

It's a wonderful thing that no other economic systems reward dishonesty.

>>> Grifters exist, but not everyone is a grifter.

>> Capitalism rewards dishonesty.

> It's a wonderful thing that no other economic systems reward dishonesty.

This is a whataboutism. To rephrase, "all economic systems reward dishonesty." - That's the point. Saying not every market participant is a grifter is a form of denial.

To an extent. Just not to the extent that dishonesty is rewarded in socialism and communism.

At least Capitalism in a free society is largely self correcting.

Capitalis does no such thing, the market available to the company does. Every problem people blame on "capitalism" is solvable with appropriate regulation. That's literally the point of regulation, too. Dozens of other countries show you can have a vibrant economy that isn't beholden to a few billionaires.

> Every problem people blame on "capitalism" is solvable with appropriate regulation.

Capitalism makes capitalism hard to appropriately regulate. Concentration of capital means concentration of power.

> Capitalism makes capitalism hard to appropriately regulate. Concentration of capital means concentration of power.

And yet many countries have a better handle on it than the USA. I just never, ever buy into the whole "it's to hard for America to do a thing that other countries do". I think the US is capable of anything we put our collective will towards, we just need leaders who want to lead the whole nation rather than personal profiteers.

The general trend has been towards deregulation, and capital concentration, almost everywhere for decades. US is just ahead.

The talk in EU is now that we have to ease regulation because we can't compete with countries with laxer regulation. The same race to the bottom has happened in e.g. taxes and labor protections ever since capital controls were lifted.

> I think the US is capable of anything we put our collective will towards, we just need leaders who want to lead the whole nation rather than personal profiteers.

I sure hope so but I can't really see it happening. The whole US political system seems to be FUBAR, largely because the concentrations of capital bought it.

Capturing the regulators is a great way to make yourself immune to market pressure.

> Capitalis does no such thing, the market available to the company does. Every problem people blame on "capitalism" is solvable with appropriate regulation

Too bad that capital owners deeply hate regulation and do everything they can to deregulate everything.

Hell, it doesn't even need to be capital owners. Plenty of bootlickers here on HN that always cry about any kind of government regulation.

> Capitalis does no such thing,

I think it's obvious that this is incorrect. Part of regulation is to try and curtail grifting. It is not possible to prevent it and is the tendency of the system.

Not being able to eliminate it doesn't mean controlling it is impossible or that we shouldn't try. In any system there will be cheaters, it's how you deal with it that counts. A well regulated economy makes wealth spread around.

In eastern europe (COMECON) during the cold war days, the factories were famous for cranking out products that claimed to do something but did not deliver on the promise. Did they do that because they were run by capitalists?

Google China melamine contaminated milk.

I find it hard to believe any claim that they weren't capitalists. Almost nothing in the USSR was operated or managed by worker collectives. Nor in China. A handful of people managed the capital of these businesses and profited off them, and the people who own, operate, and profit off of capital investments are capitalists, even if they slap a PR sign up claiming they aren't.

Technically you are wrong. The best kind of wrong.

That's why I specified the eastern european countries where many of the factories actually were controlled by the unions. They themselves acknowledged that they were fudging their numbers on a regular basis to get undeserved bonus money for workers.

Thank you for pointing out that this has nothing to do with capitalism.

Humans are dishonest, and implying that that doesn't manifest in other economic systems is willfully and maliciously false, a statement only used by propagandists.

We are talking about capitalism because we live in capitalism and are observing problems with capitalism. We are not currently living in the USSR.

Not sure Tesla is the poster child for non-grifters in the context of AI.

Or “auto pilot”

Auto pilot is pretty good at driving within the same lane. Just like a plane pilot needs to do the more complicated stuff like take off and landing, one can expect the same with autopilot (just changing lanes and stopping at lights or stop signs or turning).

Full self driving is the mislabeled one. Should be “90% self driving”.

Not when that lane is the HOV lane and traffic is going (speed limit + 15mph). You can always spot the white Tesla on 101 doing the speed limit in the HOV lane during rush hour with a mile of cars behind them and a mile of nothing in front.

The driver can set the auto pilot speed to whatever number they want. If they are going the speed limit, it’s because the driver chose to cruise at that max speed.

Full self driving, however, may be limited to the speed limit. I don’t know, since I don’t use it.

> plane pilot needs to do the more complicated stuff like take off and landing

Auto landing test 3 days ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eijEPsSdqg8

Interesting. For marketing purposes, however, I would think almost all people still associate auto pilot with just cruising in the air, similar to cruising on a highway.

Modern planes can land themselves - not sure about taking off. They can land in zero visibility like this. In this case the pilot is expected to double, triple, quadruple check the automated systems constantly, not just sit back and relax. The plane and airport both need special equipment. And the whole thing is a controlled closed system unlike the roads.

How are they grifters? Tesla gave us FSD to try for free for a month, twice now. If you don't like its performance, don't pay.

Elon Musk Predicts Level 4 Or 5 Full Self-Driving ‘Later This Year’ For the Tenth Year In A Row

(2023) https://www.theautopian.com/elon-musk-predicts-level-4-or-5-...

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/grift

    ways of getting money dishonestly that involve tricking someone

So, they got money dishonestly by tricking someone into buying their cars based on the belief that they'd offer real full self driving now or very soon, then they didn't actually deliver that.

Who cares what Elon says? You can literally try the product and decide. Or you can watch any of hundreds of videos on YouTube or people trying it.

You the customer are only a minor part of the grift. In fact, you're an unwitting prop for the grift. The entire point of the grift is the stock price, not your $8,000 or monthly subscription.

What they want from you are comments like this. What they want to do with those comments is to preserve the consensus amongst Tesla bulls that they are on their way to selling robots and renting robot taxis by the ride.

Coast-to-coast self-driving Teslas were promised by 2017. And have been promised next year almost every year since.

Tesla can make electric vehicles but the company valuagion is based on grift.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com