3 years ago, if you told me you could facetime with a robot, and they could describe the environment and have a "normal" conversation with me, i would be in disbelief, and assume that tech was a decade or two in the future. Even the stuff that was happening a 2 years ago felt unrealistic.
astrology is giving vague predictions like "you will be happy today". GPT-4o is describing to you actual events in real time.
People said pretty much exactly the same thing about 3d printing.
"Rather than ship a product, companies can ship blueprints and everyone can just print stuff at their own home! Everything will be 3d printed! It's so magical!"
Just because a tech is magical today, doesn't mean that it will be meaningful tomorrow. Sure, 3d printing has its place (mostly in making plastic parts for things) but it's hardly the revolutionary change in consumer products that it was touted to be. Instead, it's just a hobbiest toy.
GPT-4o being able to describe actual events in real time is interesting, it's yet to be seen if that's useful.
That's mostly the thinking here. A lot of the "killer" AI tech has really boiled down to "Look, this can replace your customer support chat bot!". Everyone is rushing to try and figure out what we can use LLMs (Just like they did when ML was supposed to take over the world) and so far it's been niche locations to make shareholders happy.
> Sure, 3d printing has its place (mostly in making plastic parts for things) but it's hardly the revolutionary change in consumer products that it was touted to be. Instead, it's just a hobbiest toy.
how positive are you that some benefits in your life are not attributable to 3d-printing used behind the scenes for industrial processes?
> Just like they did when ML was supposed to take over the world
how sure are you that ML is not used behind the scenes to benefit your life? do you consider features like fraud detection programs, protein-folding prediction programs to create, and spam filters valuable in and of themself?
I'm sure 10 years from now, assuming LLMs don't prove me wrong, I'll make a similar comment about LLMs and a new hype that I just made about 3d printing, and I'll get EXACTLY this reply. "Oh yeah, well here's a niche application of LLMs that you didn't account for!".
> how positive are you that some benefits in your life are not attributable to 3d-printing used behind the scenes for industrial processes?
See where I said "in consumer products". I'm certainly not claiming that 3d printing is never used and is not useful. However, what I am saying is that it was hyped WAY beyond industrial applications.
In fact, here I am, 11 years ago, saying basically exactly what I'm saying about LLMs that I said about 3d printing. [1]. Along with people basically responding to me the exact same way you just did.
> how sure are you that ML is not used behind the scenes to benefit your life? do you consider features like fraud detection programs, protein-folding prediction programs to create, and spam filters valuable in and of themself?
Did I say it wasn't behind the scenes? ML absolutely has an applicable location, it's not nearly as vast as the hype train would say. I know, I spent a LONG time trying to integrate ML into our company and found it simply wasn't as good as hard and fast programmed rules in almost all situations.
sorry, maybe i'm not completely understanding what you mean by "in consumer products".
reading your argument on reddit, it seems to me that you don't consider 3d printing a success because there's not one in every home...which is true.
but it feels uncreative? like, sure, just because it hasn't been mass adopted by consumers, doesn't mean there wasn't value generation done on an industrial level.
you're probably using consumer products right now that have benefitted from 3d printing in some way.
> ML absolutely has an applicable location, it's not nearly as vast as the hype train would say
what hype train are you referring to? i know a lot of different predictions in machine learning, so i'm curious about what you mean specifically.
> but it feels uncreative? like, sure, just because it hasn't been mass adopted by consumers, doesn't mean there wasn't value generation done on an industrial level. you're probably using consumer products right now that have benefitted from 3d printing in some way.
I'd suggest reading both the article and the surrounding reddit comments if you want context for my argument there. The explicit argument there was that everyone would own a 3d printer. Not that they would be used in commercial applications or to produce consumer goods. No, instead that everyone would have a 3d printer on hand to make most of their goods (rather than having their goods shipped to them). That's the hype.
I did not say there weren't other areas where 3d printing could be successful nor that it wouldn't have applications. Rather, that the hype around it was unfounded and overblown.
This is much the same way I see LLMs. The current hype around them is that every job will end up being replaced. Doctors, nurses, lawyers, programmers, engineers, architects, everything. All replaced by LLMs and AI. However, that seems really unrealistic when the current state of LLMs is you always need a human doublechecking what it produces, and it's known to give out incorrect responses. Further, LLMs have limited capabilities to interact with applications let alone the physical world. Perhaps they will but also perhaps they won't. The imagination of what they could do is just wildly out of step with what they currently do.
> what hype train are you referring to? i know a lot of different predictions in machine learning, so i'm curious about what you mean specifically.
I didn't really see a lot of predictions around ML. Instead, it was more just a bunch of articles talking about the importance of it and seemingly ever CEO deciding they need more ML in their products. Lots of stuff ended up being marketed specifically because it had ML capabilities (much like this last CES had almost every product with "AI" capabilities).
Funnily, the ML didn't (as far as I could see) have a whole lot of predictions other than more of an ephemeral notion that it would save manpower.
I bring it up in this case because like LLMs, there's just a bunch of buzz around 2 letters with not a whole lot of actual examples of those 2 letters being put to practical use.
hm, maybe we're misinterpreting each other's main point.
My reply was to some person who said that AI was akin to astrology, i.e. absolutely fake bullshit, which is bonkers to me.
Your reply was that AI, like 3d printing, is likely not going to be mass adopted by the average consumer, despite the hype, which i think is a reasonable prediction, and doesn't necessarily mean it won't have some valuable applications.
Yeah, if you see it that way then I think we agree.
croes's point, I believe, about the astrology was that we know today that LLMs will produce bad results and that they can't be trusted. Yet the hype is sort of at a "Well, if we just give it more time maybe that problem goes away". Similar to how in astrology "if you just think about it right, the prediction was actually accurate".
That's where I see the parallels with 3d printing. There was a sort of "We can print anything with enough time!" even though by and large the only printable things were plastic toys.
> GPT-4o being able to describe actual events in real time is interesting, it's yet to be seen if that's useful.
sure, but my experience is that if you are able to optimize better on some previous limitation, it legitimately does open up a whole different world of usefulness.
for example, real-time processing makes me feel like universal translators are now all the more viable
The huge difference between this and your analogy is that 3d printing failed to take off because it never reached mass adoption, and stayed in the "fiddly and expensive" stage. GPT models have already seen adoption in nearly every product your average consumer uses, in some cases heedless of whether it even makes sense in that context. Windows has it built in. Nearly everyone I know (under the age of 40) has used at least one product downstream of OpenAI, and more often than not a handful of them.
That said, yeah it's mostly niche locations like customer support chatbots, because the killer app is "app-to-user interface that's undisguisable from normal human interaction". But you're underestimating just how much of the labor force are effectively just an interface between a customer and some app (like a POS). "Magical" is exactly the requirement to replace people like that.
> But you're underestimating just how much of the labor force are effectively just an interface between a customer and some app
That's the sleight of hand LLM advocates are playing right now.
"Imagine how many people are just putting data into computers! We could replace them all!"
Yet LLMs aren't "just putting data into a computer" They aren't even really user/app interfaces. They are a magic box you can give directives to and get (generally correct, but not always) answers from.
Go ahead, ask your LLM "Create an excel document with the last 30 days of the high temperatures for blank". What happens? Did it create that excel document? Why not?
LLMs don't bridge the user/app gap. They bridge the user/knowledge gap, sometimes sort of.
"Adoption" of tech companies pushing it on you is very different from "adoption" in terms of the average person using it in a meaningful way and liking it.
Remember when Chegg's stock price tanked? That's because GPT is extremely valuable as a homework helper. It can make mistakes, but that's very infrequent on well-understood topics like English, math and science through the high school level (and certainly if you hire a tutor, you'd pay a whole lot more for something that can also make mistakes).
Is that not a very meaningful thing to be able to do?
If you follow much of the education world, it's inundated with teachers frantically trying to deal with the volume and slop their students produce with AI tools. I'm sure it can be useful in an educational context, but "replacing a poor-quality cheating tool with a more efficient poor-quality cheating tool" isn't exactly what I'd call "meaningful."
The most interesting uses of AI tools in a classroom I've seen is teachers showing students AI-generated work and asking students to critique it and fact check it, at which point the students see it for what it is.
> Is that not a very meaningful thing to be able to do?
No? Solving homework was never meaningful. Being meaningful was never the point of homework. The point was for you to solve it yourself. To Learn with your human brain, such that your human brain could use those teaching to make new meaningful knowledge.
John having 5 apples after Judy stole 3 is not interesting.
Ok, but what will the net effects be? Technology can be extremely impressive on a technical level, but harmful in practical terms.
So far the biggest usecase for LLMs is mass propaganda and scams. The fact that we might also get AI girlfriends out of the tech understandly doesn't seem that appealing to a lot of folks.
this is a different thesis than "AI is basically bullshit astrology", so i'm not disagreeing with you.
Understanding atomic energy gave us both emission-free energy and the atomic, and you are correct that we can't necessarily where the path of AI will take us.
There are 8 billion humans you could potentially facetime with. I agree, a large percentage are highly annoying, but there are still plenty of gems out there, and the quest to find one is likely to be among the most satisfying journeys of your life.
But technology has secondary effects that you can't just dismiss. Sure, it is fascinating that a computer embedded into a mechanical robot can uphold one end of an engaging conversation. But you can't ignore the fact that simply opens the door towards eventual isolation, where people withdraw from society more and more and human-to-human contact gets more and more rare. We're already well on the way, with phone apps and online commerce and streaming entertainment all reducing human interactions, perhaps it doesn't bother you, but it scares the hell out of me.
I'm increasing exhausted by the people who will immediately jumps to gnostic assertions that <LLM> isn't <intelligent|reasoning|really thinking|> because <thing that applies to human cognition>
>GPT-4o is also describing things that never happened.
>People started to ask [entity] questions and take the answers as facts because the believe it's intelligent.
Replace that with any political influencer (Ben Shapiro, AOC, etc) and you will see the exact same argument.
People remember things that didn't happen and confidently present things they just made up as facts on a daily basis. This is because they've learned that confidently stating incorrect information is more effective than staying silent when you don't know the answer. LLMs have just learned how to act like a human.
At this point the real stochastic parrots are the people who bring up the Chinese room because it appears the most in their training data of how to respond to this situation.
Maybe you just haven't been around enough to seen the meta-analysis? I've been through four major tech hype cycles in 30+ years. This looks and smells like all the others.
I'm 40ish, I'm in the tech industry, I'm online, I'm often an early adopter.
What hype cycle does this smell like? Because it feels different to me, but maybe I'm not thinking broadly enough. If your answer is "the blockchain" or Metaverse then I know we're experiencing these things quite differently.
Where platforms and applications are rewritten to take advantage of it and it improves the baseline of capabilities that they offer. But the end user benefits are far more limited than predicted.
And where the power and control is concentrated in the hands of a few mega corporations.
This is such a strange take - do you not remember 2020 when everyone started working from home? And today, when huge numbers of people continue to work from home? Most of that would be literally impossible without the cloud - it has been a necessary component in reshaping work and all the downstream effects related to values of office real estate, etc.
No way. Small to medium sized businesses don't need physical servers anymore. Which is most businesses. It's been a huge boon to most people. No more running your exchange servers on site. Most things that used to be on-prem software have moved to the cloud and integrate with mobile devices. You don't need some nerd sitting around all day in case you need to fix your on-prem industry specific app.
I have no idea how you can possibly shrug off the cloud as not that beneficial.
> the end user benefits are far more limited than predicted
How have you judged the end user benefits of the cloud? I don't agree personally - the cloud has enabled most modern tech startups and all of those have been super beneficial to me.
i feel like a common consumer fallacy is that, because you don't interact with a technology in your day-to-day life, it leads you to conclude that the technology is useless.
I guarantee you that the cloud has benefitted you in some way, even though you aren't aware of the benefits of the cloud.
which hype cycles are you referring to? and, after the dust settled, do you conclusively believe nothing of value was generated from these hype cycles?
Yeah, I remember all that dot com hysteria like it was yesterday.
Page after page of Wired breathlessly predicting the future. We'd shop online, date online, the world's information at our fingertips. It was going to change everything!
Silly now, of course, but people truly believed it.
3 years ago, if you told me you could facetime with a robot, and they could describe the environment and have a "normal" conversation with me, i would be in disbelief, and assume that tech was a decade or two in the future. Even the stuff that was happening a 2 years ago felt unrealistic.
astrology is giving vague predictions like "you will be happy today". GPT-4o is describing to you actual events in real time.