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Comment by imiric | Hacker News Reader

> Performance improvements have flatlined.

Multimodality, MoE, RAG, open source models, and robotics, have all been/seen massive improvements in the past year alone. OpenAI's Sora is a multi-generational leap over anything we've seen before (not released yet, granted, but it's a real product). This is hardly flatlining.

I'm not even in the AI field, but I'm sure someone can provide more examples.

> Current AI predictions reminds me of self-driving car hype from the mid 2010s

Ironically, Waymo's self-driving taxis were launched in several cities in 2023. Does this count?

I can see AI skepticism is as strong as ever, even amidst clear breakthroughs.

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You make claims of massive improvements but as an end user I have not experienced such. With the amount of fake and cherrypicked demos in the AI space I dont believe anything until I experience it myself.

>Ironically, Waymo's self-driving taxis were launched in several cities in 2023. Does this count?

No because usage is limited to a tiny fraction of drive-able space. More cherrypicking.

Just because you haven't used text generation with practically unlimited context windows, insight extraction from personal data, massively improved text-to-image, image-to-image and video generation tools, and ridden in an autonomous vehicle, doesn't mean that the field has stagnated.

You're purposefully ignoring progress, and gating it behind some arbitrary ideals. That doesn't make your claims true.

No. The progress is not being ignored. Normal people just have a hard time getting excited for something that is not useful yet. What you are doing here is the equivalent of popular science articles about exciting new battery tech - as long as it doesn’t improve my battery life, I don’t care. I will care once it hits the shelves and is useful to me, I do not care about your list of acronyms.

I was arguing against the claim that progress has flatlined, and when I gave concrete examples of recent developments that millions of people are using today, you've now shifted the goalpost to "normal" people being excited about it.

But sure, please tell me more about how AI is a fad.

You are seeing enemies where there are none. I am merely commenting on AI evangelists insisting I have to be psyched about every paper and poc long before it ever turns into a useable product that impacts my life. I don’t care about the internals of your field, nobody does. Achieve results and I will gladly use them.

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