Ask HN: Are people in tech inside an AI echo chamber?

[freelanddev]

I recently spoke with a friend who is not in the tech space and he hadn’t even heard of ChatGPT. He’s a millennial & a white collar worker and smart. I have had conversations with non-tech people about ChatGPT/AI, but not very frequently, which led me to think, are we just in an echo chamber? Not that this would be a bad thing, as we’re all quite aware that AI will play an increasing role in our lives (in & out of the office), but maybe AI mainstream adoption will take longer than we anticipate. What do you think?

[sensanaty]

Definitely. The tech is impressive but anyone I've spoken to thinks of it as Cleverbot 2.0, and among the more technically minded I've found that people mostly are indifferent. Hell, IRL most people I know don't think much of it, though on HN and elsewhere online I see a lot of people praising it as the next coming of Christ (this thread included) which puts it in a similar tier as crypto and other Web3 hypetrains as far as I'm concerned.

Every "AI" related business idea I've seen prop up recently is people just hooking up a textbox to ChatGPT's API and pretending they're doing something novel or impressive, presumably to cash in on VC money ASAP. The Notion AI is an absolute fucking joke of epic proportions in its uselessness yet they keep pushing it in every newsletter

And a funny personal anecdote, a colleague of mine tried to use ChatGPT4 when answering a customer question (they work support). The customer instantly knew it was AI-generated and was quite pissed about it, so the support team has an unofficial rule to not do that any more.

[DebtDeflation]

>puts it in a similar tier as crypto

Comparisons between AI and crypto are horribly misguided IMO.

Is AI overhyped? Sure. However -

AI/ML is creating utility everywhere in our lives - speech to text, language translation, recommendation engines, relevancy ranking in search, computer vision, etc. and seems to be getting embedded in more and more processes by the day.

Crypto never amounted to anything beyond a currency for black market transaction, a vehicle for speculation, and a platform for creating financial scams.

[kmarc]

FWIW I have the exact opposite experience: people around me, who are _NOT_ in tech, keep talking about AI and lately especially ChatGPT, whereas serious (not only senior) IT professionals don't really.

Besides the science behind it, currently it feels like the same hype as crypto a couple years before.

[laurent123456]

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.

[xyzelement]

// currently it feels like the same hype as crypto

I keep seeing this take and it doesn't make any sense to me. Some tech has obvious utility and some doesn't.

For example, I knew internet (web, email) were valuable when I discovered them because accessing information and communicating with people were already things I did - the internet unequivocally made them faster and easier and often cheaper.

chatGPT / bard gave me a similar vibe - I use them to brain storm/shape ideas, and as mentioned elsewhere, they do a great job of tasks like drafting a job ad. These are things people already do and this tech just makes it better. So people will use it.

In contrast, I "get" why people were excited by crypto but I don't personally know anyone whose payment/banking experience is improved by it. As an American for example there was nothing tangible Bitcoin made easier vs my bank account and visa. So it was always less "obvious" that it was going to be a valuable thing beyond hype.

[perrygeo]

Same. My friends in other white-collar-ish jobs, which require lots of writing, are smitten with ChatGPT and think it's amazing. Friends in tech are largely dismissive/critical of it's abilities while being skeptical/fearful of its impact.

My take is that, for most non-tech people, this is their first experience directing a computer to perform a precise task - ie programming. They're accustomed to using applications, not having a hand in making them. Maybe they've used Excel before and felt a bit of this power. But ChatGPT allows them to dream up a novel idea and get the computer to execute it - something that feels like magic to non-tech folks but is rather pedestrian for most of us in tech.

[nfw2]

I would say it's more akin to AR/VR as far as hype.

In other words, the tech is real and amazing, but it doesn't seem as immediately useful in the short term as some people expect.

[matwood]

> people around me, who are _NOT_ in tech, keep talking about AI and lately especially ChatGPT

Same, and they are using it. Tech tends to look at the exception cases or try to use it for exact answer types of things. But non-tech are happily using it as they would Google to come up with ideas for parties and events, write the mundane emails many people have to send, etc... I've been using it to bounce ideas off of and build things like marketing plans. Basically dynamic templates. The challenge right now is prompt engineering.

[29_29]

Friends I know who previously worked on crypto side projects are suddenly LLM experts.

[rsynnott]

Similar experience; a lot of laypeople seem to be viewing it as world changing magic, whereas that view is far more niche in tech.

This feels like a common pattern; a few years back many of my non-tech friends believed self-driving cars were coming imminently, whereas ~no-one working in tech believed that.

[barrysteve]

It's not even hype like we used to see in the build up to a big video game release.

It's just cargo culting and wishful thinking. People staring into the magic mirror, hoping it will clone their desires.

The phrase cargo culting or some meaningful equivalent should make a come back. Even after the 'great youtubening' of technical knowledge, it is easy to find people stuck in habituated imitation of tech skills and tech talk.

I love that people are interested, but cargo culting is no good water to drink from.

[lrem]

The hype is real. But this time it’s backed by something more real than free money out of thin air.

[danpalmer]

I've seen this but it's only the people outside tech who were into crypto, and who were invested in GameStop, who min-max credit card offers or air miles, etc. It's those who are into the latest hustle-culture fad.

My family who are mostly non-technical have heard of ChatGPT but couldn't tell you what it is or does.

In tech I see a wide spectrum of skepticism, with many people using it well and getting a lot of value out of it, and many remaining skeptical or having not found a good way to integrate it into their workflow yet.

[Footkerchief]

The difference between AI and crypto is that AI does (some) existing work more efficiently (and is poised to become more efficient), while crypto does existing work less efficiently (and its inefficiencies are inextricable).

[doctor_eval]

I was on a shuttle bus in the early hours of this morning in regional SE Queensland and they had some Triple-M talkback show talking about it. Someone was talking about how their kid had told them that they can just get GPT to write responses to emails for them.

To their credit, they said, "wtf would we want to do that?!"

[eterevsky]

> serious (not only senior) IT professionals don't really.

Which part of the industry are you working in?

I work for Google and hear a lot of talk about LLMs from my serious colleagues.

[rvense]

On October 17th, 1979, VisiCalc was released.

I'm sure pretty much every accountant in the world got up and went to work that day exactly like they'd been doing all of their career. It probably didn't feel different for that many of them. Most of them had probably never used a computer then, and a lot of them probably didn't feel any particular need to, at least until they tried it. There were probably more than a few who were near the end of the career managed to keep doing their job the old way for another half or whole decade or so, because even when the future moves fast it's never evenly distributed.

There were probably also more than a few who saw VisiCalc and bought an Apple II to start doing their own books and ended up regretting it. I don't know where we are and how things will pan out, but I think there's a parallel.

[JW_00000]

Agreed. On my Twitter timeline lots of people are saying "the world will be completely different in 6-12 months' time". On October 17th, 1980, most accountants' work day still looked the same as a year before. It took decades for spreadsheets to get widespread adoption. I think LLMs are revolutionary, but the (r)evolution will take decades to materialize. Our work days will look completely different... in 2043.

[swalsh]

A young man in his 20's starting his career will never know understand how things worked without the tech. A man in his 30's see's an opportunity to boost his career, and an older man in his 50's see's a long fought career's worth of expertise being thrown away.

[kspacewalk2]

You have to go back a whole lot further if you're making an analogy between chatGPT and spreadsheets. Back to Ada Lovelace, probably. VisiCalc did already useful and already transformative, the only things missing was better user experience and adoption. ChatGPT is a nice thought provoking toy, but not really useful other than as a novel search engine interface.

[samuellevy]

There's definitely a few echo chambers around AI, but it's definitely not something that "just techies" are onto.

ChatGPT made some waves at the end of last year. My in-laws were wanting to talk to (at) me about it at Christmas. There's plenty of awareness outside of the tech circles, but most of the discussion (both out and in of the tech world) seems to miss what LLMs actually _are_.

The reason why ChatGPT was impressive to me wasn't the "realism" of the responses... It was how quickly it could classify and chain inputs/outputs. It's super impressive tech, but like... It's not AI. As accurate as it may ever seem, it's simply not actually aware of what it's saying. "Hallucinations" is a fun term, but it's not hallucinating information, it's just guessing at the next token to write because that's all it ever does.

If it was "intelligent" it would be able to recognise a limitation in its knowledge and _not_ hallucinate information. But it can't. Because it doesn't know anything. Correct answers are just as hallucinatory as incorrect answers because it's the exact same mechanism that produces them - there's just better probabilities.

[NikolaNovak]

All you can get in a survey like this is anecdotes and opinions. This may be sufficient for your purposes - here's my story:-)

My sister is not technically minded. She has used chatgpt to create a request for permit for a backyard deck to city Hall, a letter to her boss requesting attendance to a conference, and her performance reviews.

Another non techie and I use chatgpt to help us learn French and music theory.

My mother in law uses it to create funny rhyming stories for kids.

Meanwhile the techie friends of mine are... Completely ignoring it. My two best friends are vmware senior architect and a Java developer / tech manager, and I've been urging them for months to try it.

So I personally live in a completely opposite situation to that which you describe :-). Techie are skeptical of the toy, and endlessly discuss it's limitations and impact. Non Techies are just using it as a tool.

[Qwertious]

I don't think it's people in tech specifically - I think that "fire your workers because they're going to be replaced by AI" is a great excuse for firing workers without looking bad. Thus, anyone who might use that excuse has a strong incentive to play up the potential of AI (and thus the plausibility of their excuse), regardless of the actual value of AI.

Also, we're all calling it "AI" for some dumbass reason. That infects our thoughts with unwarranted credit toward the technology.

[demarq]

Same experience, talked to a young, highly educated person about ChatGPT… they had no clue what I was going on about.

But the more surprising thing is that even after I explained what it could do, they weren’t even slightly impressed. “So it tells you wrong answers? Sounds utterly pointless”

I was flabbergasted. I think we do live in a bubble. I’m sure architects and surgeons have equally exciting advances in their fields that no one else cares about.

I also think the medias sensationalist phrases should be taken with a pinch of salt: “The tech everyone is talking about”, “here’s the news that got everyone buzzing. etc

I do think LLM are a significant event, but that will only be realised by building on top of it and “showing rather than telling”.

[azangru]

> “So it tells you wrong answers? Sounds utterly pointless”. I was flabbergasted.

Could you tell a bit more about why this objection surprised you so much? I am often seeing this in the same tech circles that rejected the web3 craze; and I have to confess, it does sound reasonable to me. There is a recent PR opened in the MDN docs repository after MDN added the "AI explain" button, pointing out how utterly useless a AI guide is if it gives you incorrect answers and you do not have enough knowledge to catch it [0].

[0] - https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9208

[rsynnott]

I mean, I’d be inclined to agree with your friend here, to an extent. A machine for confidently being wrong has rather limited practical applications.

[kieckerjan]

Same here. My girlfriend is not impressed by GPT and its ilk at all. But I guess that for a non-technical person most things digital are a form of magic, and it is probably hard to tell the difference between the common magic of (say) a game on her phone and the heavy voodoo of an LLM.

[nerdbert]

To many people, a computer program that can output in kind of natural-sounding sentences but can't be trusted to give you the right answers is not progress. I am sympathetic to that view.

It's an impressive technical feat to mimic human writing and drawing with its level of fidelity, but until it can make the leap to knowing what it's talking about - and there's no clear basis for assurance that the current vector will get us there - real-world use cases are mostly limited to replacing the some of the more boring email jobs.

[tester457]

> they weren’t even slightly impressed

Could be because they haven't actually tried it. There are a surprising amount of applications something that tells wrong answers part of the time can do.

[buro9]

I see more people outside of tech talking about it than within tech.

Within tech the biggest constraint I'm seeing is a failure of our imagination on how this tech could be used, so far we've limited our interactions to that which we've been shown... chat bots, and if that's all we can imagine then this is definitely a hype cycle.

But when I speak to those outside of tech, who are not constrained to imagine what they've seen, then I see and hear much different things. It's not the second coming, it's not going to make the whole world redundant, but it is a change and for the most part non-tech people seem more eager to get there. At least, I'm surrounded by positive people who seem to hope that the most mundane aspects of our lives will be replaced by AI and will lead to some qualitative improvement of life (ignoring the cost of living crunch presently hitting most of them).

[kjkjadksj]

The Halo games and lore had a pretty interesting storyline with military AI, some going rogue, others being built to counter the rogue ones.

https://www.halopedia.org/Offensive_Bias

[oldandboring]

Big mixed bag for me:

* All the techies I know have heard about and used it, and most have a healthy dose of skepticism paired with some optimism that it can be used to help solve some previously hard to solve problems. This alone, I think, makes it clear that LLM has staying power in a way that blockchain did not: obvious use cases.

* The normies in my life run the whole spectrum from "never heard of it" to "use it at least sometimes." One interesting subset are the folks who have heard a LOT about it but haven't used it. My lawyer said he had already attended panel discussions about the ethical implications of AI usage in law. I asked if he had USED ChatGPT and he said no; I had to direct him to the URL and walk him through signing up so he could see it for himself. And he's pretty tech-saavy as non-techies go.

Burying the lede, now. Here is my unpopular opinion: there is an outsized "wow factor" when you specifically use ChatGPT because of the fact that it outputs the text seemingly in real-time. It makes it look like it's thinking/talking and viscerally our minds are blown. Bing and Bard generate the response in the background and output it all at once like a search result, doesn't hit the same way.

[weevil]

I spoke to my 70-year-old step-aunt about this yesterday for exactly this reason. She's a self-employed piano teacher with zero technical interest or knowledge, but a generally astute and clued-up kind of person.

She said she's heard a lot about it, but it all sounds like marketing hype, tabloid sensationalism, or open alarmism from people who don't seem to know what they're talking about.

She said some of her students had used ChatGPT for creating revision materials for their exams, and that they'd found it useful for that, but she found the assertion that mass unemployment is 6-12 months away 'pure speculation'.

[Yizahi]

All professions who need to write a lot of bullshit text are adopting NNs. So basically any advertisements, corporate news and emails etc. And parsing and responses to such ads or corpoletters, if they are required. Another area to be taken over - translations and language learning. Half a year ago my teacher had been suggesting different resources for different issues, like this online translator for this task, that translator for a different one, and yet another site to check suffixes. Last week her recommendation to checking grammar etc. was simply - ChatGPT.

In my work I've yet to find a use for NNs, but maybe for the writing of a lot of templates in one go it could be useful.

[Ameo]

Young people all know about AI. There are 24/7 live AI generated SpongeBob shows on TikTok, character.ai is immensely popular, ChatGPT is used by students for homework and stuff, Snapchat AI was all posted all over (mostly memes about how bad and out of touch it is), I get ads for AI anime girl generators, etc.

I think there is certainly more talk about it inside tech circles, but I feel like it's more of a generational divide than anything else.

[monk_e_boy]

All my students us it a lot. We use it a lot in the office - we have a lot of digital paperwork to do, ChatGPT is fine at doing it all.

It can write lectures, generate worksheets, come up with interesting quizzes, D&D stuff.

It's just a tool, some people will find it useful, some won't. A bit like a chainsaw.

[throwawaaarrgh]

This isn't just a tech echo chamber, it's the YC/SV echo chamber. Nobody is seriously looking at AI for normal products, because it's not trustworthy. Never really will be. Why do you think subways still have human operators? The combined investment & risk of full automation aren't worth it. It'll be useful for customer support bots, and backend things like spam filtering and other statistical analysis. But otherwise it's a flash in the pan.

[koliber]

I've recently joined the tech org at a company that grows flowers, at a huge scale. The kinds of tech and product problems that they are dealing with are as far removed from the kinds of problems AI can help with as I can imagine. There may be places where generative AI might be able to optimize some things.

This is the real world. Manufacturing. Logistics. Managing people. Building tools for streamlining one tiny part of a workflow and getting people to use them effectively.

This latest client has opened up my eyes to the fact that I've been living in a bubble. I could not be more glad, as I was beginning to suspect that OpenAI is taking over the world.

[tkgally]

I live in Japan and have been surprised by how much coverage there has been of ChatGPT in the mass media here during the past few months. Popular awareness seems to be increasing quickly, too. Here are some results of a survey conducted by Line Research [1, in Japanese]:

Question: Do you know about ChatGPT? If yes, have you used it?

(n = 1056 in both March and June)

March 2023

Know about it and have used it: 4.8%

Know about it but haven’t used it: 25.5%

Don’t know about it: 69.7%

June 2023

Know about it and have used it: 15.2%

Know about it but haven’t used it: 55.8%

Don’t know about it: 29.1%

The survey also suggests that awareness is higher among younger people and that usage is higher among males.

Search results at Amazon Japan and Amazon USA show that many books are being published about ChatGPT in both Japanese and English [2, 3]. Quite a few Japanese magazines have had cover stories about it recent months [4].

[1] https://markezine.jp/article/detail/42509

[2] https://www.amazon.co.jp/s?k=ChatGPT

[3] https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ChatGPT&ref=nav_bb_sb

[4] https://www.amazon.co.jp/s?k=ChatGPT&rh=n%3A13384021&__mk_ja...

[5900]

There was a similar survey conducted by Pew in the US [1]. From the results in May, 58% of Americans have heard of ChatGPT.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/24/a-majorit...

[joshstrange]

I hear more about ChatGPT/AI from people outside my tech circle than within. Heck some of the people in my tech circle won't even play with it or try it out.

I don't think AI is the second coming of Christ like some pretend (it is over-hyped outside of tech and somewhat under-hyped inside of tech IMHO) but it's impressive and extremely useful. I've used it many times to help point me in the right direction. I never take what it says as fact, I always "check it's work" but it often saves me considerable amounts of time by getting me on the right track and then I can refine what it gave me. I don't use it for writing "real" code (aside from maybe a few small algorithms) but I do use it to help with certain debugging tasks if I think it will be useful. Also for things like "spit me out a shell script that takes a CSV and does X, Y, Z" it's incredibly useful. These are normally 1-off tasks that I can do by hand or code if needed but ChatGPT makes it way easier.

When it comes to writing, I'm often faced with "Blank Screen Syndrome" or a similar type of feeling and so getting something on the screen that I can then edit/revise/improve/fix is a huge boon to my productivity.

[rossdavidh]

In the late 90's I got a Master's degree, specializing in neural networks. This caused me to learn about the hype cycle in AI, and since then I have seen it continue. Remember Watson, IBM's AI technology that was going to drive its growth? IBM got lots of press by making computers that could play chess and Jeopardy, which seemed impressive to people at the time, but they never found a way to make money from it. "AI winter" is the term for the trough of the AI hype cycle.

Note that every "AI summer" prior to this one has produced something useful, just never all that world-changing compared to people's expectations. Most people think that if it can BS (excuse me, generate convincing text), then it can do lots of other jobs. Well, in previous AI summers, people thought that if it can play chess, or answer Jeopardy questions, it could do many other things that it turned out, it could not do (or could not do well enough).

For that matter, the ability to do math, at one time, was thought of as a sign of great intelligence. But, it turned out that computers could do math, long before they could do anything else. Our intuition about, "if it can do this, soon it will be able to do that", is not very good.

I have heard ChatGPT described as a better autosuggest, which sounds about right. It's not that autosuggest isn't useful, it can be very useful, but it's not a thing that is going to change the world, and the jobs which it will automate are neither numerous, nor very well paid even now.

If you're trying to pump that VC hype machine for $$, though, cryptocurrency is not going to work anymore, so they need something.

[formulatwo]

I think there have been so many hyped up stuff in the tech world that it's trained a lot of people to point at everything and call it part of the hype cycle.

But this causes people to literally fail to notice that there are many things in tech that Aren't just hype. I mean literally think about it, the internet wasn't just hype, the smart phone wasn't just hype. There's millions of things that weren't just hype.

>I have heard ChatGPT described as a better autosuggest, which sounds about right. It's not that autosuggest isn't useful, it can be very useful, but it's not a thing that is going to change the world, and the jobs which it will automate are neither numerous, nor very well paid even now.

This is a poor characterization. chatGPT has the capability of answering extremely complex questions with novel answers that are completely indistinguishable from human answers. And remember much of these answers are novel, meaning that it wasn't just a copy of the answer out of nowhere.

There are of course huge problems with our ability to control chatGPT to give us the correct answers consistently but the fact that it can even do the above 50% of the time is a feat that moves the needle far beyond a mere "auto suggest". All you need to do is increase that 50% rate and suddenly it can auto suggest you out of an entire career. Cross your fingers and hope token prediction is just a technological dead end and that we can't really raise the correctness rate past 50%. In many instances of project development getting to 50% is often the hard part and getting to 100% could be easier.

[olalonde]

It's funny you say that because ChatGPT knows how to play chess although it wasn't explicitly trained for that[0]. The "if it can do this, soon it will be able to do that" is actually becoming real.

[0] https://villekuosmanen.medium.com/i-played-chess-against-cha...

[jhugo]

> maybe AI mainstream adoption will take longer than we anticipate

I mean, I'm in "tech", and I don't anticipate it happening soon. People want something they can trust, and current solutions are nowhere near that.

[samhuk]

I whole-heartedly disagree, but on a more technical note: "echo chamber" is a pajorative that implies a bunch of people "sniffing their own farts and enjoying it" - more accurately, a group of people believing in a false because of groupthink.

To expand and to tell of a very recent story: For work I used ChatGPT to help me write a 500 line bash script to automate a bunch of stuff. It took me around 1 day versus the 5 it would have taken me if I would go the google/ddg/stack overflow route of slowly crawling through outdated content and SEO noise to find the signals.

It worked, completely!

Solely from that experience, I'm convinced that it's not just farts and kool-aid. To go one step further, even, i'de say that anybody who doesn't at least have a cursory awareness or AI is in fact the one in the "echo chamber", isolated from the possible.

It's not the do-all solution, of course, but in certain scenarios, it's quite obviously, trivially demonstrably, revolutionary.

[ern]

I know a lot of people who are using ChatGPT who aren't in tech.

My spouse works in early childhood education and they use ChatpGPT routinely for low-value boilerplate stuff (social media posts that no one reads, etc).

A relative is in commercial real-estate management, and they also use ChatGPT routinely (in fact they started using it before I did).

So I don't think it's an echo chamber.

[threeseed]

My partner runs an ecommerce business and her team uses ChatGPT dozens of time a day.

Everything from writing emails to suppliers, correcting grammar, responding to customers, brainstorming new product ideas, explaining contracts etc.

Where as for me I can't find a use for it. Even as a coding assistant I find that I spent more time trying to understand/correct what it did than if I just wrote it myself.

[mercer]

I've found that any non-techie I know who uses ChatGPT uses it in a similar way, and for quite a bit of stuff. The ones that don't usually haven't really used it much, if at all.

But I still feel most of them are in the 'google but nicer' stage.

[Animats]

Those are people talking to echo chambers.