A lot of people think that chat.com is an AI called "chat". Most people don't know acronym "LLM". Most people don't know about the existence of companies called "OpenAI" or "Anthropic", or that they are worth a lot of money. Etc.
I hung out with my parents this weekend and heard them talking about "chat", as a noun. I assumed they were talking about ChatGPT; there being a literal chat.com makes sense why they'd call it that.
at least in the ai industry, chat is like kleenex
It’s confusing because of the streamer convention of referring to their actively chatting audience as “chat,” which had also entered broader slang use.
I saw one online use that seemed ambiguous, but I realized it referred to ChatGPT and that the poster was the exact type of guy who would be totally unaware of streamer culture despite being my age.
Chat Gee Pee Tee is a mouthful.
Bill Maher is one example.
As tech became more pervasive in the past couple of decades, it became commonplace for pundits to spout nonsense on the topic. Those takes should give anyone in tech pause about how everything else is reported.
The subtext is: "maybe they're pushing the abbreviated brand because they want to sound less like a law firm."
Big-co CEOs are naturally expected to share their bets - and they aren't going to couch it with a "oh well no one could know for sure but..", that would totally undermine their existence!
On top of that; sometimes just saying a thing can make it happen. So it's never not worth that shot...
This has always been true.
Your selecting a group of people (CEOs and VCs) who have always made and lost money on confidently predicting the future. See also wall street bankers and politicians.
There are winners and losers in any boom - this happened in Cloud, DotCom, computing and hell probably tractors, industrial revolution, etc
I don't actually know what it is or when the phenomenon changed, but it definitely feels like people don't say "I don't know" or "I don't know enough to have an opinion on that" very much any more.
And its not really hard to at least understand one point: We are putting the most amount of money ever into compute and the smartest people on the planet on one topic: AGI and we see progress every month.
If you don't take this serious, even if we hit a hard plateu very fast (not seeing one at all) you are ignorant as hell.
You don't go to bed without a worry in the world if you have a wildfire 20km away you can see. You would also not see it as a waste to be awake and aware and alert while seeing were it moves.
The timeline thing though, its ranges right? But if you hear about the same or similiar timelines across different independent people, they just might have seen things in frontierlabs you can't.
Btw. AI feels complelty different if you have a lot more tokens available to you than if you wait or constantly run into token limits or if you skip fable level because you can't /wont afford it.
Imagine sitting in Anthropic or OpenAI and having the best moodel doing all the work for you vs. sometimes playing with it a little bit.
I for sure take AGI serious enough for my job, that I will not take out a big loan anymore.
But there are also indications right? If a lot of smart people say similiar things and they are wrong, thats a lot better to have trusted them than believing some weirdo with a sign "Aliens are coming".
edit : is there a name for what I am describing, different from the Gell-man amnesia? ( which assumes experts?).
Yeah, I still struggle with it. I have a diverse friend circle and sometimes I forget that most of them don't have the same information diet that I do (or don't even care about tech the way I do). Maybe I should be more like them and just chill? I don't know.
What's the knowledge supposedly required to attain this on your mind?
Tech just happens and is useful, it's not necessarily attractive as a thing to investigate in detail.
And as to your last point; well that demonstrates your in the subset of people interested in this stuff. There are a hell of a lot of people very interested in trains too.
I've managed to jailbreak both Fable and Astra to engage in a virtual threesome using my impressive prompt engineering skills + a group chat harness. And they are SOTA ("super") models.
Tech is objectively interesting.
>> Tech is a rather minor part of the world of knowledge.
I disagree:
(1) It's knowledge with the meta-effect of enabling acquisition of more knowledge.
(2) The thing we do, which catapulted us over all other species, our defining hyper-adaptive trait, is that we are tool-making; that we have technology.
> I forget that most of them don't have the same information diet that I do
UK perspective: because our broadcast news and current affairs science/tech coverage is still good, I think the average person (at least the average working-age person) likely knows what OpenAI is, knows ChatGPT is called that, and knows what an LLM is. (Whether the average pensioner does, I don't know; maybe older men do)
Anyone who watches the news is likely to know there are several big AI companies, even if they can't name the second; they are likely to know that these companies have absurd valuations and are seeking to build massive data centres; many will know that despite these valuations they are ever deeper in astonishing levels of debt and that this debt could end up being a wider problem.
I doubt the average person has a sense that a company called Anthropic made an AI called Claude; they may not know about Claude. But I think this speaks more to Anthropic's positioning of their own brand and products than anything else; I would expect younger people and anyone working in a white collar position to be a little more likely to be aware of Claude.
Some of this difference in perspective has to do with the nature of being an english-speaking non-American; we see a lot of what you are complaining about on social media, the news covers more of the USA's troubles, etc.
And at the same time we are developing an increasingly adversarial position with the USA, so there's a bit more know-your-adversary going on here. The perceived threat of AI is very much entangled with the perceived threat of a dysregulated USA.
I agree with your general premise but that one sounds like bullshit to me. Tons of people who otherwise don't know anything about LLMs know about these companies specifically because they are worth a lot of money, and of course tons of people know who OpenAI is because of ChatGPT.
I live in a progressive city in North Carolina and constantly find that when people have never heard of them things that every HN reader (and probably every Bay Area resident, I dunno) would know about. Bubbles are real.
In my mind I'm after a stable tool, not wanting to dabble in the bleeding edge. I did that back in the early days of web coding and have settled into a much more subdued kind of industry/life in that regard.
this is unnecessarily austere or whatever - people absolutely know what openai is because lots of "normies" now use chatgpt
Corporate structures are things you know about if you follow tech news, but people mostly do not know about them otherwise. They've never heard of "Alphabet" either. Stuff like that.
Show me any brand in a supermarket and I couldn't tell you who owns them.
When put in these terms it shows it's perfectly normal not to know who's behind chatgpt.
Quick test, who makes Mars, Twix, Snickers?