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Comment by FrustratedMonky | Hacker News Reader

There has been a lot of push back lately that the current hype cycle is completely un-warranted, in the process of fading away, and generally that LLM's aren't that good really.

I thought that was what this post was about.

Really, this is just trying to 'cut through the hype'.

When we get beyond the hype, here is a list of articles to explain current state?

Am I correct here?

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Seems that way. "Hype free" would probably be a better way to put it.

Seems more just non-commercial, which is fine. Hype is more subjective. For example the gzip thing appeared to me to be hype, but it's there. And the mere existence of yet another AI list is a kind of hype.

Much better than "10 things you need to know [thread]" stuff.

where is the pushback ? can you share any links.

all i see is the hype cycle.

also, the title is click-bait. I was expecting a list of pushback articles. and whats the deal with developers curating such lists and posting on hn ?

Among the more amusing ones is Slate’s recent “See? It’s eight months later and there’s no mass unemployment yet”:

https://slate.com/technology/2023/08/chat-gpt-artificial-int...

The push back was in another post on HN couple days ago. Basically saying the current LLM's aren't that good, this is all hype, charlatan hype. Really ignoring the real results, and taking they hype as all their is.

Then this list of articles is kind of the anti-hype-hype. 'here are some real results'.

The anti-ai threads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37256577#37260717

Might have link wrong, here is another https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37256577

and another https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37263231

Tech people are little bi-polar when it comes to hype. Everyone, seems to love the hype on the way up.

Then little while later, the 'hipsters' are like 'that sucks, this hype is all a lie you lemmings'.

Then a few year later, the silent majority of engineers are quietly plugging along and have adopted whatever settled out of they hype-hype-backlash cycle.

That recent pushback has been a bit exhausting, even more so than a hype preceding it. At least the hype was full of hope and excitement, the recent pushback is full of snide (and often unwarranted) I-told-you-so and a taste of luddite.

I guess that's how the pendulum goes.

> I guess that's how the pendulum goes

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/

Pendulum is probably way sharper this time around because we're dealing with the aftermath of the crypto fallout. Sure in practice this time there are actual applications and lots of people paying actual money for real products, but tech has lost a lot of it's sheen and there's going to be a lot more very understandable dismissal of the next shiny. Even though for this one we should probably actually take it seriously since the societal disruption potential is very high and humans dealt poorly with the previous few transitions when tons of people lost jobs. The AI doesn't even have to be that good. Tons of jobs involve trying to turn humans into robots, like call centers and offshore software consultancies, and I think llms passed the "good enough" point a long time ago

I'm sure there are egregious examples, but I think "I told you so" is fine. You get these waves of bro-kids storming into established disciplines and acting like hot shit, it's not surprising to see people happy when their bubble burst. Importantly, I don't see pushback against ML researchers or practitioners, it's against the charlatans who are using the hype to sell snake oil. That's completely warranted.

Those are some key aspects of Gary Marcus but not the worst. The worst is that so many people listen to him. It's actually problematic because it confuses lawmakers.

Conflating luddism with anti technology sentiment just illustrates how shallow your analysis is. And isn't complaining about complaints just more noise?

The thing about luddism is, it correlated strongly with suppression of legitimate industrial action. It wasn't an act of ignorance or seeking regression. It was a violent manifestation of labor push back against rampant exploitation in the face of systematic suppression of legitimate channels.

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