Hacker News Reader

Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

Simple minds want to believe one simple thing and then rationalize everything else to force consistency with that one simple idea.

If you want to believe the simple idea that AI is mostly hype, then you'll get stuck in a multi-year loop talking about stochastic parrots, ridiculous valuations, and doomer scaredycats.

But the real world isn't so simple. Multiple seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time.

Some AI is useless. Some is incredibly powerful and useful even though it makes mistakes. Some companies are wildly overvalued. Some extremely large and expensive companies will quadruple from here. Some frightening scenarios will look silly in hindsight. Other frightening things will happen that none of the doomers foresee.

It would be great to explore those new ideas and possibilities.

It's so boring rehashing the same old tired and worn out ideas like "they're just hyping the danger to pump their shares up."

View on HN

Some AI is useless

The question is not whether AI is useful. It is useful, full stop.

The question is whether AI is useful enough to justify valuations that dwarf the GDP of all but the top 20 countries in the world. As it stands right now, it's not even close! The leaked OpenAI financials put these AI companies in the same profitability territory as utilities, with zero justification for these crazy valuations.

Technically, it's the time discounted rate of future profits that determine valuations. If you take it as a given that they will provide exactly as much value as they do today, then, yes, your question has the obvious answer of no. If you think AI will provide greater value in the future, the answer depends on the value you think it will have.

Technically, it's the time discounted rate of future profits that determine valuations

Close, it's the time-discounted expectation of future returns. This seems related to future profits but it need not be. Historically, stocks tend to perform poorly after IPOs. There's no guarantee that (say) Anthropic's stock price would ever recover after a post-IPO drop.

The recent attempts by Anthropic et al. to circumvent the usual rules for inclusion in indices have raised red flags all over the place, with many calling it a naked attempt to raid everyone's pension funds for hundreds of billions in ill-gotten capital.

> The question is not whether AI is useful. It is useful, full stop.

And nukes are useful by some metric too.

AI (llms) is not useful in any way that we as humanity should be pushing for. It’s more harmful than good in every way possible. It’s honestly astounding to me that everyone’s ethics are so weak as to believe that somehow these incredible destructive companies are somehow good for humanity.

What you have written does not seem to be in close contact with the OP. He talks positively about the GLM news and whatnot. He is highly skeptical only of the "doom" scenarios, including upending most or a massive amount of jobs, and how that is deployed to keep the investment machine working at such breakneck pace.

> Some AI is useless. Some is incredibly powerful... It would be great to explore those new ideas and possibilities.

I agree, but it's not so mysterious what will win out. Even if the criticism is repeated so often, that's because much of it is still valid.

LLMs are not AGI. A statistical model of language helps fill in gaps. This is super useful for new and much improved UI/UX ideas that converge with better accessibility. Similar is true for generating images, video, audio, etc. There are situations where it's the right tool for expressing an idea.

What we need is a sense of maturity. The limitations are very clear to everyone now, and we're already past the disillusionment. If we can rein in the abuse, there should be a good path forward. The technology is already boring and that's a very good sign.

I love this website because people will write stuff like “I believe the hype because my brain is big, ‘believing the hype’ is actually very complex and cannot be embraced by lesser intellects”

"I cannot be contradicted because I can hold conflicting viewpoints" was Chomsky's bit, HN can only take credit for imitating it.

“Dario Amodei doesn’t seem like he can tell the future” - Simple. Pedestrian. The roughshod cogitation of a country oaf.

“Maybe he can” - Complex. Divine, possibly? A breathtaking filigree of nuance, like an Alex Grey painting of conceptual allemande.

There are reasonable anti- and pro-AI views. There are also unreasonable ones on both sides, and it's best if they are ignored.

However, on a site like HN or Reddit, you're far more likely to hear squawking about "stochastic parrots" or a rant about AI water usage than the mirror on the pro-AI side, making them harder to ignore.

It’s funny that a lot of what gets framed as pro- vs anti- AI arguments would be better described as past/present vs future arguments. If one guy is saying “that’s a stochastic parrot” and the second guy says “it’s going to achieve apotheosis and bring about global communism or feudalism or whatever while maximizing shareholder value” they’re not arguing about technology, they’re arguing about the second guy’s status as a clairvoyant.

You could post “fortune tellers used to be considered fraudsters and charlatans” and reasonably expect a “Get a load of the Luddite over here. Go raise a barn, Josiah!” response on the internet these days despite not mentioning AI or technology at all

Reply on news.ycombinator.com