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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In practice, dedollarisarion has been about shifting to other major national currencies, like the yuan. Bitcoin doesn’t really feature.
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.
Currently, nobody is talking about ChatGPT more than the crypto/NFT hustlers who now need a new angle.
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.
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.
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.
Citation needed.
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.
