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Comment by gherkinnn | Hacker News Reader

All of this is truly bizarre, I hope that we can make sense of this craze in the future.

Maybe it will be seen similarly to the dancing crazes of the Middle Ages.

I think it will be seen similar to the crypto craze to be honest. People on this very site, with an actual reputation, were telling us non stop how we were losers who were going to be left behind and stay poor. They never had to apologize for being obnoxious when that didn’t happen

Comparing AI to crypto makes zero sense. We get tremendous use from AI right now, while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases. I repeat - the utility of AI is not some hypothetical but something that happens right now at very large scale (so please don't reply with something in line "well, crypto was supposed to have lots of uses also").

That’s irrelevant… I’m talking about the craze, not the technology

But that doesn't make sense. How can you evaluate if craze is warranted without evaluating underlying technology?

I’m very familiar with both technologies, but it’s not what my comment was about. The crypto craze would have been the same if we would have ended with some actual use cases for cryptocurrencies. The level of frenzy was completely out of proportion, very aggressive, with that same attitude of „we will impose something on you, change the world, you will be left behind and stay poor forever for having not been a believer“

The thing is - with AI the position that everything will change is reasonable, with crypto not.

Everything is changing all the time. The position that everything will change in favor of the AI overlords is an imposed narrative that has a bigger chance of materializing if they get all people to believe it is inevitable. It is not.

The boy who cried wolf is a parable we read to children to teach them the lesson that wolves are imaginary creatures you shouldn't believe in.

> while 2 decades after invention of crypto there are still basically zero legitimate use cases.

The first card on the homepage of the DTCC (https://www.dtcc.com/) is "Tokenization". This is a legitimate use case and is being adopted at the largest institutional level. Stablecoins are yet another legitimate use case.

Edit: for what it's worth, I do agree that the crypto craze was insane. I also think the AI craze is insane, even though I agree that its current proliferation is larger than crypto.

Ok, there are niche use cases but still - nothing world changing and real world adoption remains very low.

where? All i see is getting bugged with slop and for learning i returned to textbooks. Even code i get from it is stuff i would earlier copy paste from SO.

After 2 years i feel mostly distracted by it. There are usecases ofc but encountering a chatbot or AI written posts, software, etc. is still a negative.

Literally everywhere. I'm running a scientific project where I've got to inspect large amount of whole-body MRI segmentations. The software available on market is very clunky for doing that, so I've asked Claude to write one perfectly tailored for my use case. With all the helper functions I've asked it to implement, the software sped up reviews >4x. And I couldn't write it myself.

I agree there are usecases, but image classification is not the hype. Still - that's great, can we get a link? Or let me guess it's internal, you don't want to doxx yourself?

Knowing medical software requirements, which might be there for a reason, i highly doubt this will see production.

> I agree there are usecases, but image classification is not the hype. Still - that's great, can we get a link? Or let me guess it's internal, you don't want to doxx yourself?

Why would I distribute software that's tailor made for me? I don't want to deal with headaches associated with distributing it.

> Knowing medical software requirements, which might be there for a reason, i highly doubt this will see production.

It won't, the software is not a point of my work, it's just a tool for my actual project which has nothing to do with programming (very useful tool but still - not a goal on it's own).

Excel sped up reviews >100x without Bill Gates preaching daily that devs were cooked.

Excel has limited uses. AI threatens replacement of all cognitive work. Don’t you see the difference?

> AI threatens replacement of all cognitive work

AI does nothing. CEOs want to use it to replace all cognitive work, it doesn't mean it is inevitable. That is why smart people are fighting against the narrative push.

It’s not inevitable but based on current trajectory it’s very likely. Not preparing for it is the opposite of being smart.

I spent about $200 on openai tokens today to solve a seriously hard distributed systems problem that would have taken me probably three weeks to understand, let alone fix.

Crypto only ever allowed me to buy drugs over the internet. I'm not really buying this argument.

Or maybe it's not just a craze and we'll soon look back and think "I wonder what we might've done differently if we'd been clear-eyed about what was happening."

Show me a person who truly revised their priors to put forward a novel solution to AI that isn't just "do the thing that I like and that benefits me in some way". The discourse around all this is a mix of quasi-religious beliefs (pro and con) and blatant opportunism. For Dario and Sam, the solution is "give us a monopoly on this tech". For Gates, it's "create an supranational organization with unprecedented taxation and regulatory powers" - world AI police, presumably staffed by technocrats like him.

What's your take? Do the ideas put forward by Gates strike you as worth pursuing? What are the trade-offs - how can they go wrong?

https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/ https://ai-2040.com

Can you describe a method of slowing frontier AI development that you yourself would not classify as monopoly-seeking by US AI companies or power-seeking by governments and technocrats?

Limiting the development of powerful AI requires restricting free enterprise in some way, backed by the threat of force; hence, there will always be a cynical framing available.

In the case of the US AI industry, how about some stricter banking laws to forbid its current circular financing?

Many people would be fine with restricting free enterprise. It hasn't exactly given us great quality of life, at least in America.

> Do the ideas put forward by Gates strike you as worth pursuing? What are the trade-offs - how can they go wrong?

I agree. However, why aren’t we applying the same standard to AI technologies themselves? That doesn’t strike me as worth pursuing, the article discusses all the ways that is and will go wrong

Unless there's another significant breakthrough, LLMs will only get incremental improvements.

Do they need more than incremental breakthroughs to transform society?

They don’t even need breakthroughs, it’s already damaging to societies

You really think that legitimate concern about AI is equivalent to mass hysteria? Do you think AI will just stop getting better?

I could google this, but what are these dancing crazes?

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