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Between the Booms: AI in Winter – Communications of the ACM

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68 points rbanffy | 3 comments | 20 Nov 24 17:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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DyslexicAtheist ◴[20 Nov 24 19:35 UTC] No.42197320[source]▶
every other article these days on this site is about AI. And it's incredibly tedious and annoying.

Isn't it enough that clueless marketers who get their Tech knowledge from businessinsider and bloomberg are constantly harping on about AI.

Seems we as a community have resigned or given up in this battle against common sense. Maybe long ago. Still there should be some form of moderation penalizing these shill posts that only glorify AI as being the future, ... the same way that not everything about crypto or the blockchain ended up on the FP. Seems with AI we're looking the other way and are OK with it?

Or maybe it's me.

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swatcoder ◴[20 Nov 24 20:08 UTC] No.42197618[source]▶
It's you.

The AI discussions can indeed be repetitive and tiresome here, especially for regulars, but they already seem to be downweighted and clear off the front page quite fast.

But it's a major focus of the industry right now, involving a genuinely novel and promising new class of tools, so the posts belong here and the high engagement that props them up seems expected.

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gorjusborg ◴[20 Nov 24 20:40 UTC] No.42197887[source]▶
> It's you.

Not just him.

> But it's a major focus of the industry right now, involving a genuinely novel and promising new class of tools, so the posts belong here and the high engagement that props them up seems expected.

In your opinion (and admittedly others), but that doesn't make the overhype any less tiresome. Yes it is novel technology, but there's alway novel technology, and it isn't all in one area, but you wouldn't know it by what hits the front page these days.

Anyway, it's useless to shake fists at the clouds. This hype will pass, just like all the others before it, and the discussion can again be proportional to the relevance of the topic.

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SubiculumCode ◴[20 Nov 24 21:15 UTC] No.42198191[source]▶
I don't know about the professional professionals, but as a science professor, I have to wear a lot of hats, which has required me to gain skills in a multitude of areas outside my area of deep expertise.

I use Claude and Chatgpt EVERY DAY.

Those services help me run out scripts for data munging, etc etc very quickly. I don't use it for high expertise writing, as I find it takes more than I get back, but I do use it to put words on a page for more general things. If your deep expertise is programming, you may not use it much either for that. But man oh man has it magnified my output on the constellation of things I need to get done.

What other innovation in the last decade has been this disruptive? Two years ago, I didn't use this. Now I do as part of my regular routine, and I am more valuable for it. So yes, there is hype, but man oh man, is the hype deserved. Even if AI winter started right now, the productivity boom from Claude level LLMs is nothing short of huge.

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1. goatlover ◴[20 Nov 24 22:02 UTC] No.42198563[source]▶
Personal anecdotes on the benefits of using LLMs don't address complaints about tedious articles over-marketing AI tech. That LLMs provide benefits is well known at this point, it doesn't mean we can't recognize the latest hype cycle for what it is. There's a long list of previous technologies that were going to "change everything".
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2. exe34 ◴[20 Nov 24 22:28 UTC] No.42198784[source]▶
surely it's not hype if it works?
3. SubiculumCode ◴[20 Nov 24 22:38 UTC] No.42198870[source]▶
Yes, of course, but they almost always did too. Internet. Mobile Phones.

I think the issue is whether you think that HN posts on AI are basically marketing, or about sharing new advances with a community that needs to be kept on top of new advances. Some posts are from a small startup trying something, or from a person sharing a tool. I think these are generally valuable. I might benefit from a RAG, but won't build one from scratch. In terms of this crowd, I can't think of advances that in other areas that are as impactful as machine learning lately. Its not like crypto. Crypto was an interesting innovation, but one in which mostly sought a market instead of the a market seeking an innovation. There is no solid "just use a database" analogical response here like was the well used refrain to attempt at practical uses of cryptocurrency tech. Sure, AI companies built on selling something silly like "the perfect algorithm to find you a perfect date!" is pure hackery, but even at the current level of llm, I don't think we are any where near understanding its full potential/application. So even if we are on the brink of an AI winter, its in the Bahamas.

Also, looking at the most popular stories with AI in the title over the last month show quite a varied array of topics. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...

If HN readers feel that AI-related articles are showing up too much, then I'd say it would be on them to find articles on topics that interest them and post them to HN.