Foundation models are basically compressed databases of a big chunk (75%?) of human knowledge and the query language is English (...and many others) and you're saying it's a bubble to be ignored.
Meanwhile, model providers are serving millions if not billions of tokens daily.
Don't want to say this is a dropbox comment class blog post, but certainly it... ignores something.
> Foundation models are basically compressed databases of a big chunk (75%?) of human knowledge and the query language is English (...and many others) and you're saying it's a bubble to be ignored.
Wake me up when I can access this database without having to rely on the whims of an evil megacorporation.
Using them productively & ethically and without getting sucked into a modern-day religious cult: virtually impossible.
Yes, I suppose humanity can pat itself on the back that it has managed to invent something which seems so whiz-bang cool and also is so utterly, utterly ghastly…all at the same time.
> Some companies, like Meta, went even further. They didn’t just use web content—they also used pirated books to train their models. (The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem) If a regular person did this, they’d probably get into serious trouble. But when billion-dollar companies do it, they usually get away with it.
Someone should tell Anna’s Archive.
The US’s criminal enforcement is very much biased into the “rules for thee, but not for me” category, but invoking it here is a trope. Anyone can get away with piracy on the scale of Books3 or The Pile. The reason random people don’t make models is because the hardware and power costs are fucking astronomical, not because they can’t get away with downloading the training data.
These sort of hot takes are just as wrong as the breathless “AGI is right around the corner” ones.
AI is hugely transformative, and anyone who thinks it’s overhyped doesn’t know the SOTA. It will likely be the single biggest technological advancement of our lifetime.
On a more conceptual angle, Landrebe and Smith's "Why Machine's Will Never Rule
the World" clarifies the limits of computation w/r/t complex dynamic systems.
Here is the core argument:
"an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human
intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical
reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim:
1. Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain
and central nervous system.
2. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to
operate inside a computer.
Google has been crawling the web. I think it's about limiting to 1Hz per IP. This means a site with 100 000 pages will take 24 hours to crawl. The crawler could send requests as fast as possible, just distributed across IPs.
If I put a website up, everything goes as long as people don't DDoS me. A human crawls at ~1Hz, if a bot tries 1000Hz, this is a denial of service attack. It's hard to block since you can't rate limit IPs due to many people sharing the same IP. So you need heuristics, cookies, etc.
Putting paywalled content in the AI is not cool though (such as books), nobody was anticipating this, people got effed unexpectedly. This is piracy on hyperscale. Not fair.
> Ever since ChatGPT came out, the tech world has jumped on a new hype train—just like it did before with crypto, NFTs, and the metaverse.
Personally, I eschewed all of those — except for LLMs. I'm convinced this one's for real. People though can use "hype" to mean a number of things.
AGI by the end of the year? Hype.
Decimation of white-collar jobs? Hype.
Fundamentally new paradigm and tech the world will have to adapt to? Not hype at all.
> Eventually, these companies tried something new: agents.
Yeah, that one's still on the hype shelf for me.
> This floods social media and websites with low-quality, copy-paste content.
No! Welp, there goes social media. ;-)
> ChatGPT has around 500 million weekly active users, but only around 20 million of them actually pay for a subscription. That means the vast majority of people think it’s not worth $20 a month.
You could say the same for YouTube (and likely wildly surpass that scenario).
When you offer a free version, don't be surprised if most users (meekly raises hand) save their pocket money for something else. These are early days and people are sussing out what the thing can do for them.
> To me, Apple stands out. They aren’t trying to build a chatbot that knows everything. Instead, they’re focused on using AI as a tool to help people interact with their apps and data in smarter ways.
That feels like Apple in gap-filling mode: trying to show the world they're doing something while smart people are trying to figure out what Apple really ought to be doing.
They have their own chip dies — could perhaps do a dedicated LLM client architecture that allows it to run on-device? It makes you wonder what Jony Ives (and investors) could possibly be thinking when Apple could easily pivot and own the aiPhone market.
Waiting for my own aiPhone someday — with encrypted history saved to my cloud account. Wondering what it will be like for future generations who will have had a personal confidant for decades — since they were teenagers…
The “we don’t need as many workers because AI” line from CEOs isn’t sticking. It might work for a quarter or two but sooner or later these companies must answer hard questions on why they’re not getting measurable returns from massive investments in AI. That day is coming and it’s going to be really ugly.
Same for many of these “AI companies” that are burning through cash in a race to the bottom towards a commodity with no real prospects for a sustainable business model. The tech is cool, and can be useful, but the business aspects of all this is a forrest full of dry timber waiting for one strike of lightning to burn the whole thing to the ground.
This is a terrible article, apparently one of those that starts with a title and then goes in search of every possible argument to support the conclusion.
The whole thing is bad and disingenuous (somehow the very real impact of excessive crawling by AI companies in an indictment of the value of the output).
And it just gets worse. For instance:
> If you’re looking something up [on a search engine], you usually type a few keywords and get a list of links. But with a chatbot, you have to write full sentences, and how fast you can type limits how fast you can interact. Then, instead of getting quick, scannable links, you get a big block of text. You read it—but you’re always aware it might be wrong. On a regular search engine, you can judge a source just by looking at the domain of the website, the design of the page or even reading the “About” page.
Got that? Chatbots make you type whole sentences, and instead of a short list of links the reader can easily scan, click through, analyze quality of graphic designs, and read the obviously-totally-trustworthy About pages to determine accuracy… you get answers in one place that could be wrong.
The fact that all chatbots include citations that you can click to do the same rigorous design-based fact checking is omitted, presumably because it would weaken the argument.
There are legit reasons to dislike the ethics of AI companies, and there are legit reasons believe this is a dot bomb style bubble, and there are legit reasons to be skeptical that the tech has enough headroom to reach AGI.
But this article just puts little bits of each in a blender and hopes for the best. It’s funny because while decrying “hype”, it uses all the same cheap and lazy rhetorical techniques as the worst AI hypesters. Further illustrating the “you become what you hate” principle, I suppose.
I don't have anything particular against using AI tools in my workday in the future. I just don't want to spend my time experimenting with it now, and have no need to be on the bleeding edge. If in a year things are stable and useful, I can just learn whatever is vogue then. You won't miss out by not jumping on the train now. Most tools I use were made long before I started my career as a software engineer, and still I got up to speed. There is no big moat that experienced developers won't be able to quickly get over.
Someday, somebody might use “AI” to simulate the viewing of ads, and since AI might perfectly simulate viewing an ad, but will not spend money as a result, the whole ad economy will collapse.
And honestly this is where I stopped reading. I’m the biggest AI hater but none of these are good arguments against AI (I would argue that #3 is actually an argument for AI). If this is what you’re leading with then I’m not particularly interested in reading the rest.
Author's conclusion here is pretty much where I'm at too:
> In the end, I see AI for what it is: a powerful but limited tool—not a revolution, not a replacement for human thinking, and definitely not something worth worshipping.
How much of a "revolution" it is depends on your field though. I think computer programming is still the field that is most impacted by potential productivity improvements from these tools.
To me it's just a new way of representing information that makes information on the web easily accessible to people. So in a way it's a breakthrough just like Google was a breakthrough. Google's pagerank represented the web as a graph and you could easily go to related pages. Gpts embed concepts in a high dimensional space and there are links between them that makes it easy to query this knowledge représentation. So I don't think it will replace humans so much as disrupt the knowledge industry just like Google
The hype is on OpenAI not AI. AI is nothing new. It’s been around for a very long time and it will continue to get better as a function of data and compute. Remember the dotcom days? People got hyped on Netscape, AOL, Cisco, etc. There will be plenty of those this time around too.
This seems to be a common disconnect. If you're using the free version of ChatGPT, you don't get to see what everybody else is seeing, not even close.
> None of the past “big things” were pushed like this. They didn’t get flooded with billions in investment before proving themselves
Oh, sweet summer child ^^ I assume Mert was not around to witness the internet boom and bust. Exactly this happened.
There is a lot of conflation in this article. It cites a lot of ethical concerns around the sourcing and training of data, expected job losses and the issues around that, but those are not reasons to doubt the _efficacy_ of AI. There are surprisingly few and weak arguments as to why the hype is not justified, presumably because the author hasn't used powerful models (see above).
It's possible to believe the hype is real and still to find AI unethical. But this article just mixes it all into a big pot of "AI bad" without addressing the cognitive dissonance required to believe both "AI is not very useful" and "AI will eliminate problematic numbers of jobs".
To be honest, this is getting tiring, every day we have multiple articles on HN how AI is all hype, 'stochastic parrots' and so on. I think it is becoming fashionable among some people to be a AI/LLM sceptic.
Certainly there are people who overhype AI/LLMs. Also any discussion of AGI is a mere speculation at this point, but you can't deny that LLMs are revolutionary tools, and we are still learning their limits. I find it bizarre when people deny that.
as someone who is running claude code as admin (with sudo pwd in claude.md) on my laptop and on a server - and it completely changed how I interact with computers - I honestly can not fathom the ongoing dismissal of AI as the one thing that will changes everbodies future.
the jobs killed by AI is for me mostly zero sum thinking in action, also all AI companies seem to be just one AI company instead of a (currently) healthy competition. and apparently all users are duped cause they suddenly are up to a 100x more productive.
and yes, the energy needed is horrible (is AI now over bitcoin or still below).
the anecdotes ad hallucinations are true, but what about the success stories? ie faster vacation research? the fact that now everybody with chatgpt has now access to a world class team of doctors (where perviously often there was none).
yes, criticism of AI and AI companies is good and necessary. said that: even if all technological progress would stop right now it is the most meaningful technological change I experienced in the last 25 years I am working it/web stuff.
Lost me un the first section. It's like when anti-vaxers say vaccines are bad because they were developed unethically. It's just a bad argument.
Also, I learned about Bitcoin when it was worth 8 USD and got obsessed with the tech but always thought it was over hyped. I never owned one Satoshi. I still think crypto ended up being hype and not adding real value to the world. But I could be very very wealthy if I had jumped to that hype train XD.
I think with all the hype, AI does provide some real value to the world. That's the train I'm jumping in.
Author is a software dev and still 90% of what he understands from it is “there is a box you ask smart machine silly questions and it answers like human does or can generate a funny cat”.
There is more to it but it requires more effort to learn and see for yourself instead of repeating laundry list of “why is it bad” things posted by all the other AI doomers.
33 comments
[ 516 ms ] story [ 1046 ms ] threadMeanwhile, model providers are serving millions if not billions of tokens daily.
Don't want to say this is a dropbox comment class blog post, but certainly it... ignores something.
Wake me up when I can access this database without having to rely on the whims of an evil megacorporation.
Using them productively & ethically and without getting sucked into a modern-day religious cult: virtually impossible.
Yes, I suppose humanity can pat itself on the back that it has managed to invent something which seems so whiz-bang cool and also is so utterly, utterly ghastly…all at the same time.
Someone should tell Anna’s Archive.
The US’s criminal enforcement is very much biased into the “rules for thee, but not for me” category, but invoking it here is a trope. Anyone can get away with piracy on the scale of Books3 or The Pile. The reason random people don’t make models is because the hardware and power costs are fucking astronomical, not because they can’t get away with downloading the training data.
These sort of hot takes are just as wrong as the breathless “AGI is right around the corner” ones.
AI is hugely transformative, and anyone who thinks it’s overhyped doesn’t know the SOTA. It will likely be the single biggest technological advancement of our lifetime.
Here is the core argument: "an artificial intelligence that could equal or exceed human intelligence—sometimes called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—is for mathematical reasons impossible. It offers two specific reasons for this claim: 1. Human intelligence is a capability of a complex dynamic system—the human brain and central nervous system. 2. Systems of this sort cannot be modelled mathematically in a way that allows them to operate inside a computer.
If I put a website up, everything goes as long as people don't DDoS me. A human crawls at ~1Hz, if a bot tries 1000Hz, this is a denial of service attack. It's hard to block since you can't rate limit IPs due to many people sharing the same IP. So you need heuristics, cookies, etc.
Putting paywalled content in the AI is not cool though (such as books), nobody was anticipating this, people got effed unexpectedly. This is piracy on hyperscale. Not fair.
Personally, I eschewed all of those — except for LLMs. I'm convinced this one's for real. People though can use "hype" to mean a number of things.
AGI by the end of the year? Hype.
Decimation of white-collar jobs? Hype.
Fundamentally new paradigm and tech the world will have to adapt to? Not hype at all.
> Eventually, these companies tried something new: agents.
Yeah, that one's still on the hype shelf for me.
> This floods social media and websites with low-quality, copy-paste content.
No! Welp, there goes social media. ;-)
> ChatGPT has around 500 million weekly active users, but only around 20 million of them actually pay for a subscription. That means the vast majority of people think it’s not worth $20 a month.
You could say the same for YouTube (and likely wildly surpass that scenario).
When you offer a free version, don't be surprised if most users (meekly raises hand) save their pocket money for something else. These are early days and people are sussing out what the thing can do for them.
> To me, Apple stands out. They aren’t trying to build a chatbot that knows everything. Instead, they’re focused on using AI as a tool to help people interact with their apps and data in smarter ways.
That feels like Apple in gap-filling mode: trying to show the world they're doing something while smart people are trying to figure out what Apple really ought to be doing.
They have their own chip dies — could perhaps do a dedicated LLM client architecture that allows it to run on-device? It makes you wonder what Jony Ives (and investors) could possibly be thinking when Apple could easily pivot and own the aiPhone market.
Waiting for my own aiPhone someday — with encrypted history saved to my cloud account. Wondering what it will be like for future generations who will have had a personal confidant for decades — since they were teenagers…
Same for many of these “AI companies” that are burning through cash in a race to the bottom towards a commodity with no real prospects for a sustainable business model. The tech is cool, and can be useful, but the business aspects of all this is a forrest full of dry timber waiting for one strike of lightning to burn the whole thing to the ground.
The whole thing is bad and disingenuous (somehow the very real impact of excessive crawling by AI companies in an indictment of the value of the output).
And it just gets worse. For instance:
> If you’re looking something up [on a search engine], you usually type a few keywords and get a list of links. But with a chatbot, you have to write full sentences, and how fast you can type limits how fast you can interact. Then, instead of getting quick, scannable links, you get a big block of text. You read it—but you’re always aware it might be wrong. On a regular search engine, you can judge a source just by looking at the domain of the website, the design of the page or even reading the “About” page.
Got that? Chatbots make you type whole sentences, and instead of a short list of links the reader can easily scan, click through, analyze quality of graphic designs, and read the obviously-totally-trustworthy About pages to determine accuracy… you get answers in one place that could be wrong.
The fact that all chatbots include citations that you can click to do the same rigorous design-based fact checking is omitted, presumably because it would weaken the argument.
There are legit reasons to dislike the ethics of AI companies, and there are legit reasons believe this is a dot bomb style bubble, and there are legit reasons to be skeptical that the tech has enough headroom to reach AGI.
But this article just puts little bits of each in a blender and hopes for the best. It’s funny because while decrying “hype”, it uses all the same cheap and lazy rhetorical techniques as the worst AI hypesters. Further illustrating the “you become what you hate” principle, I suppose.
Meanwhile unintentionally ultrarlhfrelevant title photo.
1. They train on website data without permission
2. They require a lot of electricity
3. Kids use them to cheat on homework
And honestly this is where I stopped reading. I’m the biggest AI hater but none of these are good arguments against AI (I would argue that #3 is actually an argument for AI). If this is what you’re leading with then I’m not particularly interested in reading the rest.
> They’re just tools. If they disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn’t affect how I work or live.
This sounds like prepper mentality? Or is it more objectively sound like quitting Facebook?
> In the end, I see AI for what it is: a powerful but limited tool—not a revolution, not a replacement for human thinking, and definitely not something worth worshipping.
How much of a "revolution" it is depends on your field though. I think computer programming is still the field that is most impacted by potential productivity improvements from these tools.
This seems to be a common disconnect. If you're using the free version of ChatGPT, you don't get to see what everybody else is seeing, not even close.
> None of the past “big things” were pushed like this. They didn’t get flooded with billions in investment before proving themselves
Oh, sweet summer child ^^ I assume Mert was not around to witness the internet boom and bust. Exactly this happened.
There is a lot of conflation in this article. It cites a lot of ethical concerns around the sourcing and training of data, expected job losses and the issues around that, but those are not reasons to doubt the _efficacy_ of AI. There are surprisingly few and weak arguments as to why the hype is not justified, presumably because the author hasn't used powerful models (see above).
It's possible to believe the hype is real and still to find AI unethical. But this article just mixes it all into a big pot of "AI bad" without addressing the cognitive dissonance required to believe both "AI is not very useful" and "AI will eliminate problematic numbers of jobs".
Certainly there are people who overhype AI/LLMs. Also any discussion of AGI is a mere speculation at this point, but you can't deny that LLMs are revolutionary tools, and we are still learning their limits. I find it bizarre when people deny that.
the jobs killed by AI is for me mostly zero sum thinking in action, also all AI companies seem to be just one AI company instead of a (currently) healthy competition. and apparently all users are duped cause they suddenly are up to a 100x more productive.
and yes, the energy needed is horrible (is AI now over bitcoin or still below).
the anecdotes ad hallucinations are true, but what about the success stories? ie faster vacation research? the fact that now everybody with chatgpt has now access to a world class team of doctors (where perviously often there was none).
yes, criticism of AI and AI companies is good and necessary. said that: even if all technological progress would stop right now it is the most meaningful technological change I experienced in the last 25 years I am working it/web stuff.
Also, I learned about Bitcoin when it was worth 8 USD and got obsessed with the tech but always thought it was over hyped. I never owned one Satoshi. I still think crypto ended up being hype and not adding real value to the world. But I could be very very wealthy if I had jumped to that hype train XD.
I think with all the hype, AI does provide some real value to the world. That's the train I'm jumping in.
There is more to it but it requires more effort to learn and see for yourself instead of repeating laundry list of “why is it bad” things posted by all the other AI doomers.