from Hacker News

The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

by TomWhitwell on 3/10/23, 6:50 AM with 150 comments

• by stuckinhell on 3/10/23, 2:31 PM

  No, it really isn't the same as crypto.

  Crypto really didn't solve so many problems in such an immediately visible way.

  AI has some immediate and fully practical uses, it's completely different. Stable Diffusion with Control Net/Art AI's are game changers for art creation. AI artwork is already winning awards.

  Generative AI's are evolving so rapidly. ElevenLabs Voice AI is absolutely amazing, we are planning to use them over hiring any voice actors for internal presentations going forward.

  AI generated Seinfeld was watched by millions,and I thought it was pretty damn good.

  The flexibilities and immediate usefulness of neural net AI's is just astounding, and to think we are still in the beginning of the paradigm shift.

• by textninja on 3/10/23, 8:36 AM

  This criticism, like many others, attacks the mechanics of how LLMs think, apparently dismissing the models for not doing so using the same process, faculties, and background life experience as a human. It does not contain any compelling arguments to refute the notion that LLMs think. We may not have consumer level AGI just yet, but suggesting a LLM is just a dumb anything (stochastic parrot or otherwise) is a rather extraordinary claim to make about something that basically patterns the whole internet.

  We’ve been here before. Our sense of place in the universe was first upset by the heliocentric model (we’re not as special as we thought), then the theory of general relativity (not as correct as we thought), then quantum mechanics (not even living in a deterministic universe, really). With all these fantastic discoveries behind us, now seems like the right time to learn that we’re not as smart as we thought either.

• by akhosravian on 3/10/23, 8:48 AM

  “It’s just auto complete” is probably one of the worst takes out there on AI.

  It’s also clear the author doesn’t actually know how LLMs work and is parroting information, e.g. “…it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average.” is just not correct, and, frankly, suggests the author hasn’t even observed what autocomplete does.

  I completely respect the view that there’s more to being human than pattern matching text, but I also am open to the possibility consciousness may not actually be that much more than stochastic parrots.

• by dmurko on 3/10/23, 8:06 AM

  With all the arguments how ChatGPT is "just autocomplete", I wonder if these people ever used it. I know it is technically autocomplete, but the end results are so much more than that.

• by janalsncm on 3/10/23, 3:40 PM

  It’s kind of amazing how wrong the author is here. Any comparison to crypto bubbles fails when one digs anywhere below the surface level. Crypto was a solution in search of a problem. Machine learning is a collection of techniques specifically designed to solve problems. That’s why it was used long before your grandma knew what ChatGPT was, and ML will continue to be used even if OpenAI shuts down ChatGPT tomorrow.

  I will say that crypto is a big reason why AI is blowing up, though. It primed people to believing in tech-backed get rich quick schemes. That’s why I avoid all ex-crypto “entrepreneurs” turned AI aficionados who couldn’t backpropagate their way through a paper bag.

• by fwlr on 3/10/23, 9:36 AM

  LLMs may be stochastic parrots, but the critics of LLMs are starting to look like deterministic parrots. Do they know any other phrases besides “autocomplete on steroids” and “stochastic parrot”?

  (The LLMs do: I asked ChatGPT for some sarcastic and dismissive phrases for language models and it gave me back “mindless mimics”, “algorithmic babblers”, “robotic regurgitators”, “synthetic chatterboxes”, and my personal favorite: “soulless scribble-bots”.)

• by maxdoop on 3/10/23, 1:32 PM

  The problem I have with claims like “LLMS aren’t thinking— they are just parrots”, is we don’t even know what human thinking really is! So many people want to assume that human complexity makes us special, yet there is not any proof of that right now.

  This article claims “AI is not intelligent”— and I’ll counter with, “what is intelligence?” And further, say that we somehow prove LLMs aren’t “thinking” as humans do, but they still give (eventually) a near perfect illusion that they do — what does it matter that it’s not “really thinking?” I feel like crazy AI cultist at times when discussing this, but my main (admittedly petty) point is that such strong confidence about similarity or dissimilarity of human thinking to LLMs is unfounded.

  It’s like we are comparing the insides of two black boxes and trying to make absolute claims on them.

• by zamnos on 3/10/23, 8:06 AM

  Ah I mean if you're hell bent on not being impressed by ChatGPT you don't have to be. Everyone's entitled to their own opinions too. It's already useful for those in certain roles, the only question is what's the medium term situation with ChatGPT gonna be? It's free, with a paid option for now. Is it going to get shut down? is it going to go pay-only? or go away and only be available as BingGPT? If you're already using this for work (eg gptforwork.com) or play (https://gamesplayedbadly.com/2023/02/14/create-your-own-dd-a...), those are your real questions. Pundits and critics have a vested interest in predicting the future the way their readers want, but your time machine is as good as mine - it only goes 1 second per second and we'll get to the future at the same time.

  If your role doesn't involve things ChatGPT would be useful for (eg you're a blue collar carpenter), it doesn't seem very useful, but neither do computers or the Internet, really. They still revolutionized the world though, so do you want to be a buggy whip manufacturer, or a computer (the job, mostly employing women, prior to the advent of the digital computer and auto calculating spreadsheets, who performed the math for spreadsheets at accounting firms)? Or do you want to at least be aware of incoming trends.

  Crypto and web3 still has yet to have a clearly defined use case by anyone outside that industry. Meanwhile, anybody with a phone number can make an openAI account and try out ChatGPT. Some, like our carpenter, will walk away thinking it's neat but ultimately useless. Others simply won't be impressed, for whatever reason. Some will see immediate uses for it in their life and can't live without it again. Don't expect them to speak up about it either, they're too busy using it to write emails and make plans to be bothered to convince the haters.

• by valine on 3/10/23, 7:46 AM

  Computers and the internet looked like bubbles until they didn’t.

  Not every craze is the next big thing, but for LLMs it’s still too soon to say anything with certainty. The people comparing LLMs to autocomplete have no more legitimacy than people who think LLMs are the first coming of AGI.

  I found it humorous that the author couldn’t help but anthropomortise ChatGPT by calling it ”fully automated supremely confident liar”. Calling it a liar implies intent to deceive. Strange to ascribe intent to an autocomplete.

• by fatjokes on 3/10/23, 5:08 PM

  No. I've already used ChatGPT for a few practical tasks. I've never been able to do that with crypto. The most I got out of crypto was buying some, watching it go up/down in value and then selling.

• by dalbasal on 3/10/23, 8:45 AM

  The anti-hype around GPT is quite a thing. It got out of a gate at a sprint, determined to get ahead of the hype.

  So sure... if you want to point to hype statements that are silly, you'll find them. If you want to find monopolies investing I gpt to preserve their monopolies, you'll find them. If you want analogies to stuff that has empty hype in the past, you'll find those analogies.

  I'm old enough to remember the hype, and anti-hype around the early web... The information superhighway. Anti-hype had all the same arguments there.

  It really doesn't matter what we think about chatgpt's answers to philosophical questions, or it's ability to write poetry. Those are just novelties and parlour games.

  What matters is that autocomplete is useful, and that means it's going to be used. Well use it for writing emails. Well use it to code. Well use it to summarize, tabulate... It'll bring video game characters to life. Some of these will be significant. Others will be profitable. Others will be harmful.

  What autocomplete isn't, is a dud. The thing works.

• by currymj on 3/10/23, 8:16 AM

  there's been steady progress on language models for the past 6-7 years, getting somewhat faster in the last 2 years, in part due to fundamental advances, in part due to (mainly) OpenAI being a little more product focused.

  it's true that certain types of scammers and influencers have started jumping on LLMs en masse now that shilling cryptocurrencies isn't so lucrative.

  i think that if it appears from your perspective like there is a brand-new LLM hype bubble that just appeared this year to substitute for the previous cryptocurrency hype bubble, you're in a bad part of the information ecosystem.

• by Animats on 3/10/23, 8:42 AM

  We're still at the beginning of large language models. This is very new technology. Right now, they can act as question-answering and interaction systems that can do a decent job most of the time and are totally wrong some of the time. Improvement is needed, and does not seem to be impossible. Making up bogus facts has to stop if these things front-end search engines.

  The concern right now is widespread deployment of really crappy systems. ChatGPT can probably outperform the average call center staffer now. That's going to be a problem.

• by anuraaga on 3/10/23, 8:53 AM

  While big companies getting even bigger may not sit well, equating business development with the actual ponzi schemes of crypto, which will result in convictions (FTX members are already admitting guilt) seems like a stretch. There doesn't seem to be any reason to believe users are not in a position to pick experiences that work for them and abandon ones that don't for AI products - a far cry from financial products that require significant literacy and profit the most when ensuring the users never achieve it.

• by aogaili on 3/10/23, 2:05 PM

  There is a genuine improvement in the ability of algorithms to understand, retrieve and generate knowledge.

  The tooling around an area that impacts the daily life of knowledge workers (probably everyone on this site) just got much better.

  Crypto was overhyped; this does not seem to be the case.

• by aaroninsf on 3/10/23, 6:56 PM

  I love Cory, and read much of what he writes,

  but he is without being fully self-aware about it starting to go down the same road that doomed Chomsky,

  being so compelled by a compelling frame of critique, that it necessarily becomes the first and insidiously becomes the only real lens he views things through.

  One of his tenets is that Technology is Hype. This may be true, but not all technology is hype; and the fact that hype is regularly an outgrowth of other equally intelligence observers finding reason to be excited, is something he is far too breezily dismissive of.

  I welcome a critical and sardonic voice, and the regular deflation of the over-inflated,

  but he is starting to predictably be derisive too quickly and too broadly, and to assume bad faith (or naiviety) too widely.

  He's a smart monkey, but there are other smart monkeys, and AI in specific is one area where he's beginning to genuinely miss the scale of the disequilibrium coming.

  This is a shame because many of his most passionately-held convictions and campaigns are going to be significantly impacted by AI.

  He has a window and a pulpit to shine a bright light on the intersections where real change is accelerating or otherwise changing the landscape of some of the things he is most concerned about.

  He's missing it.

• by ieee2 on 3/10/23, 12:13 PM

  I agree with Sam Altman. It is not the main point that we are close to creating the human robot. Rather we start to understand that we are biological robots ourselves, just so sophisticated that it doesn't look like that from the top view. That we are called humans will not save us from this realisation. Each atom in our body just follows laws of physics.

• by BorisTheBrave on 3/10/23, 9:15 AM

  Ah yes, AI doesn't have any significant use cases and is only good for party tricks, but also it's going to be used by paymasters to erode wages.

  If it's useless, it can hardly replace jobs, can it?

• by TrackerFF on 3/10/23, 3:46 PM

  Crypto was pure unadulterated speculation.

  I mean, SURE, you could (still can) actually use crypto for things like purchases, contracts, data tracking, and what have you - but in the crypto bubble people were solely buying and holding to sell at a profit. Zero actual use, all speculation.

  At least with the current ML, we daily see new tools and other cool stuff.

• by Vanit on 3/10/23, 8:01 AM

  So I guess just ignore all the people getting real value out of ChatGPT/etc? How can you compare that to crypto at all with a straight face. Yes, you need to be an expert to validate the output. Welcome to being an expert using any tool.

• by mschuster91 on 3/10/23, 8:25 AM

  > AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn't "artificial" and it's not "intelligent." "Machine learning" doesn't learn. On this week's Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete – not our new robot overlord.

  For what it's worth: a lot of "office work" is repetitive bullshit that could be done just as well with decent automation or assisting "artificial intelligence" (=lawyers writing letters, ...).

• by jsdeveloper on 3/10/23, 3:14 PM

  Just before LLM and stable diffusion I would have agreed with you but this two tools are real game changer, I do use the daily and they are not part of my day to day business.

• by spaceman_2020 on 3/10/23, 1:46 PM

  I've been deep in both these bubbles.

  If I'm honest, I'm more terrified of crypto going mainstream than AI going rogue. The crypto utopia is a world where everything can be fractionalized and financialized and monetized.

  We already live in a world that's extremely hyper-financialized. Crypto can add a layer ontop and financialize it to a degree that it could completely perverse human motivations.

  So yeah, I'll take the AI bubble.

• by afro88 on 3/10/23, 11:58 PM

  I don't totally agree with the article, but it was an interesting read. It's funny reading quotes like "I gave it a paper to peer review and it didn't help at all". It not doing exactly what you want it to do + you not wanting to believe it is revolutionary = it's all hype.

  Personally, I use ChatGPT everyday. I use it in ways that weren't possible through mere google searches. It does some of the thinking and synthesis of different ideas and patterns for me. I work faster as a result. I work in languages and frameworks I didn't know before in a matter of minutes instead of days.

  Is there AI hype? Yes. Am I starting to see patterns in the responses, and lots of errors, which makes me realise this is a bit more limited than I thought? Yes. Are there lots of gimmicky use cases? Absolutely.

  Is it still crazy useful, and game changing for lots of industries in fundamental ways? Yes!

• by entropyneur on 3/10/23, 7:54 AM

  The author seems to be unaware of how many people's jobs are nothing but a sophisticated form of autocomplete. How many people's lives are nothing but a sophisticated form of autocomplete. Also, what terrible writing, full of rage about nothing.

• by pmoriarty on 3/10/23, 8:00 AM

  I've long been a fan of Cory Doctorow. He's a witty, eloquent writer with lots of interesting, insightful things to say about technology, and I agree with him on his critiques of capitalism and corporate hype.

  However, he's dead wrong if he thinks AI is all hype and no substance.

  Yes, AI is being exploited and hyped up by corporations. Yes, most workers are going to get screwed, as usual.

  But there is so much potential in AI... even if it's not "truly intelligent" (yet). At the very least it's a tool that can boost creativity. Playing around with Midjourney made a believer out of me. I've been a life long artist, and midjourney just blew me away. It's nothing short of amazing, and just about as close to magic as anything I've ever seen a computer do.

  AI is a completely transformative technology. People like Doctorow can dig their heels in and scream against the hurricane, but it's utterly futile. The world will adopt this technology anyway, and it will transform the world (for the better or for the worse). It already has, and the transformation will only accelerate.

• by Imnimo on 3/10/23, 7:02 PM

  For a bubble that has no future, the author seems quite worried about its future impacts in the final paragraphs.

• by ElijahLynn on 3/10/23, 11:43 PM

  I so want to upvote this article just because the discussion is so good. But I just can't upvote it because the title is so 1,000% wrong.

• by pfoof on 3/10/23, 7:01 PM

  Not the new crypto hype, rather .com hype, and only if investors start throwing money at "AI Metaverse Pet Generator Deluxe"

• by keithalewis on 3/10/23, 1:12 PM

  One day there will be a https://smbx.org/ for ChatGPT.

• by leashless on 3/10/23, 4:46 PM

  Yes.

  Source: project managed the Ethereum launch in 2015.

• by drdeca on 3/10/23, 8:38 AM

  In the limit of quality of sequence continuation, there are many wonders.

• by ElijahLynn on 3/10/23, 11:30 PM

  Nope.

• by rambojohnson on 3/10/23, 4:37 PM

  tired of this boomer cynical bullshit usually coming from people without a clue as to what crypto and AI is or works.

• by walrus01 on 3/10/23, 7:48 AM

  I don't know what the duck you are talking about with autocomplete modifying things