Hype, maybe, but it's obviously not a passing fad like crypto was. Back then many people were trying to figure out what to do with it and we still don't really know.
A week after ChatGPT was out and plenty of people were already using it for writing code, emails, and plenty of other tasks. It would be weird to argue that AI is not going to have a massive impact at many levels.
Why obviously? It might as well be a passing fad, and all those uses oof ChatGPT might turn out to be a temporary amusement rather than real and lasting improvement of people's workflows. It's interesting how something comes out, and then all of a sudden so many people are immediately absolutely certain that it will have a massive impact at many levels, even before we've seen any meaningful ROI. To me it is a bit absurd and somewhat annoying. Of course, the tech is cool, it does have some amazing uses, but to forecast growth to trillions of dollars over the next few years and massive job losses seems premature and fuelled by relentless promotion, not only by the likes of OpenAI, but also by all the investment-hungry tech businesses - large and small.
For many people it is already a lasting improvement. It simply saves us so much work that we can improve in many other areas. And that is improving too; we have a slew of internal tools build with several LLMs, including the openai ones, that effectively replaced full time employees. The entire process of transforming arbitrary json or xml to another json with a required knowledge of the field semantics is now done quite perfectly using LLMs. And that is a lot of the work we do. Creating json schema’s based on a pdf, text, arcane line feed format etc is also now seconds vs hours. Debugging previous (and we have 10000s of these) transforms is also automated and simply, measurable, more accurate and faster than humans. And it was boring work so we can focus on other things.
Well it's already here if you care to look. So much stuff is already generated by AI, I use it, many non-technical people I know use it. They didn't have to be taught how it works, it's very accessible, it just works and it can save time and money.
Now there are plenty of challenges to overcome of course, but I have no doubts that something that useful on day one is going to have a big impact once we really understand how to integrate it to various products.
Honestly? It's the tech people who have this weird blinkered view on it. There's a zoomer clique that's mad about it, but beyond that, just watch the NYT OpEd page to see how normies are engaging
I don't think it's a passing fad, but the legitimate and lasting use cases are lost among the hype and bullshit.
There WILL be job losses but it's not going to be the kind of people who hang out on HN. I can't think of any reason why you wouldn't have an AI taking orders at the drive through, handling customer service calls / tech support, etc. Any job that consists mostly of having the same simple, repetitive conversations is going to eventually be cheaper to have a computer do.
> Back then many people were trying to figure out what to do with it and we still don't really know
Same thing is happening with “AI”. I think it’s not a fad but at the same time it is.
In the company I work for, in the media sector, there’s clear and direct use of LLMs (it’s already being done, and yes it will mean quite a few people will lose their jobs, despite many HNers saying that it won’t happen), but with all the hype they want to get some sort of “AI” everywhere and the most ridiculous ideas are being POC’ed.
Question answering and summary generation is miles better with modern AI. What came before does not compare in any way, it is just garbage. If the practical use-case is limited to just this it will be a massive win.
Btc is a genuine intranational and international currency in the developing world. It is more trustworthy than many sovereign currencies. The fx applications of btc alone are enough to grant it legitimacy and fx is a the biggest of all the markets. In a de-dollarizing world btc is a genuine factor.
The stable coins are an issue but stable coins aren't a necessity for btc transactions, they're a utility for traders. Btc's biggest danger is its price volatility. As it increases in value and market cap it will become more valuable to large players who will in turn be motivated to protect its integrity.
If your nation's currency is so mismanaged that Btc looks like an appealing alternative that says more about your nation's monetary policy than it says about Btc.
There are plenty of developing countries where people don't trust the government currency and use alternatives. It's quite common in Africa where many transactions were done in USD.
It doesn't need to handle much to be a large market because international trade and foreign exchange are so huge.
If btc replaces 1% of fx it's doing $50B/day of transactions. Market cap of btc is only about $600M, so 100x btc is not crazy.
Is a p2p transaction system with an auditable record attractive to 1% of fx transaction parties? Seems reasonable, especially when corrupt states are a counterparty.
>make agreement with company in developing world
>how do we get the payment?
> a) accept their local currency? where? what then? what will it be worth by the time we exchange it?
> b) take btc. transaction registers publicly on the blockchain. smart contracts can execute if desired, e.g. when payment x is received to address y initiate a sequence that starts delivery. currency risk is now in btc and that can be instantly mitigated by converting to your chosen currency, as the btc market is liquid.
> c) require counterparty to pay in your currency, which means they pay exchange fees, increasing their costs.
I mean that 10 years ago everybody was trying to figure out what to do with blockchains - I remember building a PoC for a blockchain-based crowdfunding website (didn't take off), but we had no idea why we were even doing that. It's like there had to be a blockchain-based killer app somewhere. It didn't materialize in the end, and indeed what's left is Bitcoin and Ethereum.
It would be, but crypto sits outside the real economy, and can only be traded by passing around stablecoins, which can be printed out of thin air. It won't reach zero if there are always enough stablecoin-denominated purchases to prop it up.
"Outside the real economy" reminds me of that Australian comedy sketch about the oil tanker ("the front fell off"), where the company representative said there would be no environmental impact because the ship was towed "outside the environment".
> A week after ChatGPT was out and plenty of people were already using it for writing code, emails, and plenty of other tasks.
But soon after they realized it wasn't as useful for these tasks as initially thought. Interestingly, a lot people started to believe that the tool had been limited on purpose, where in fact they were just becoming a bit more objective.
That being said, it's better than crypto and there are applications (although maybe not life changing). The bar is low though.
Most of the actual techies in my circles, as in: practicing software engineer for 20 years kind of people, looked at it, maybe tried it out of curiosity, and went back to work.
The people who are really into it are the same people who were really into SEO, and then leadgen marketing, briefly online poker, and then blockchain/crypto, and then NFTs: the eternal hustlers who just look for the next hype train and ride it until the next train enters the station...
The interesting difference with AI / LLMs is that for whatever reason, the big companies have fallen under the spell, and they're all trying to cram generative AI into all their products now. I work at one of these companies and it's bizarre how they've turned the huge ship on a dime and are now trying to AI All The Things.
I like ChatGPT, but it is literally the autocomplete function from your favorite email interface. Give it a standalone prompt and a new name and everyone will embrace it? No, it's not that helpful and after some initial exploration they will disable it.
My moment was when I realized if you ask ChatGPT a question about itself, like how ChatGPT works, you are not receiving an authoritative or 1st person kind of answer, the way everyone assumes. You are getting a rehash of press releases from a text autocomplete engine. Everyone when they interact with it intuitively feels they are receiving an authentic, slightly flawed, interaction with intelligence, but it's just PT Barnum with a text completion feature. Bravo.
> you are not receiving an authoritative or 1st person kind of answer
That’s how most human beings work as well. Ask someone about what India or Thailand is like, and even if they’ve never been there, they’ll be happy to give you a rehash of stories, pictures, and videos they saw about India or Thailand. They might make up totally wrong facts as well, just like ChatGPT.
What are you trying to convince people of with this rhetoric? I don't understand the point of this tangent unless you are trying to say that the two are equivalent.
I put it in the same bucket as deep CNNs - very good for specific tasks, but ultimately their lasting impact will be something trivial and faily non-world-changing like being able to search your photo collection in a slightly more clever way.
Classic NLP tasks (eg classification, summarization, translation, etc) just work with GPT-4 mostly. It is probably still possible to beat GPT-4 with a fine-tuned model, but it isn't easy. The open source LLMs are pretty good too at the classical NLP tasks, but still need to be fine-tuned in many cases. However I bet eventually open source LLMs will get close to GPT-4. What this means is that at a minimum, LLMs will be used to replace "legacy" algorithms for classical NLP tasks to boost accuracy. Also more people who have a problem that can be solved/improved with ML, but currently is cost/time/expertise prohibitive will use LLMs.
A week after ChatGPT was out and plenty of people were already using it for writing code, emails, and plenty of other tasks. It would be weird to argue that AI is not going to have a massive impact at many levels.