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Re:AI Is Smoke and Mirrors by hermitcrab on Monday April 22, 2024 @12:49PM (#40116154)
I'm 58. It is hard not to be cynical when you've seen as many hype cycles as I have. Especially when you suspect the person hyping LLMs is the same person that was hyping blockchain and NFTs.
Re:AI Is Smoke and Mirrors by whimsicalism on Monday April 22, 2024 @12:53PM (#40116195)
In my personal experience, cynicism seems more like a fixed personality trait people have than one that is rationally borne out of experience.

If you had been holding a representative basket of tech stocks right before the dot-com bust (a classic "hype cycle"), you would be beating the S&P 500 today if you just held on to them, even after most of those companies went bankrupt. Even on crypto, it is too early to call.

The fact that you bridge so easily from crypto to LLM suggests to me you're not really considering these things on the merits and are over-focused on the who and cultural alignment of the people behind various inventions, rather than the creations themselves. /2c

Re:AI Is Smoke and Mirrors by hermitcrab on Monday April 22, 2024 @02:45PM (#40117447)
I've definitely got more cynical as I've got older. I'm sure I'm not alone in that.

>you bridge so easily from crypto to LLM

They are both things that have been massively hyped. I'm not saying they are the same in other ways.

Re:AI Is Smoke and Mirrors by bcrosby95 on Monday April 22, 2024 @01:02PM (#40116309)
Yeah, I have a few "lottery tickets". I put a smallish amount of money into a wide variety of things that I don't actively manage. It includes crypto, tech stocks, hell, even magic the gathering cards from my childhood.

The plan is when the kids are college aged to see how it nets out and pay as much as I can from that.

Re:AI Is Smoke and Mirrors by hibikir on Monday April 22, 2024 @12:59PM (#40116279)
I am in my 40s myself, but it's difficult for me to not separate the very little utility we actually were seeing from NFTs with the utility I get from AI today. It's things people have in production, with millions of users, which are getting actual value out of it.

If a very unreliable person told me it was raining I'd check myself, instead of just assuming it was sunny because they are prone to lying.

Given what we have working today, it's a matter of how transformative it all is, not whether it will be useful at all: More like the dot com boom than blockchains

Re:AI Is Smoke and Mirrors by mattnewton on Monday April 22, 2024 @12:55PM (#40116225)
I really blame crypto, especially NFTs for this.
Re:AI Is Smoke and Mirrors by hn_throwaway_99 on Monday April 22, 2024 @07:33PM (#40126288)
I'm not exactly a spring chicken either, and I 100% agree on the insane, unwarranted hype of blockchain and crypto (plenty of examples in my comment history).

But the huge difference with, for example, blockchain, is that despite all the attempts by the hypesters to explain what revolutionary tech it was, I was always left thinking one of "Umm, OK, but what do I actually do with it" or "How is this better than just a normal database?" or "Actually, that's not possible." Blockchain was nearly always a cool tech looking for a use case beyond cryptocurrencies.

But with LLMs, I never felt that way. I was immediately blown away by how cool ChatGPT was, and how much real value I got out of it. Sure, I think there is plenty of overhyping (and I think it's a little funny how companies are trying to add that little star icon everywhere, even when it's just annoying), but even if I ignore what everyone says about it and just use the tech personally, by myself, I'm still left thinking "Damn this is just magic" many times a day.