Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by refulgentis 560 days ago
HN is honestly pretty poor on AI commentary, and this post is a new low.

Here, at least, I think there must be a large contributing factor of confusion about what a "system card" shows.

The general factors I think contribute, after some months being surprised repeatedly:

- It's tech, so people commenting here generally assume they understand it, and in day-to-day conversation outside their job, they are considered an expert on it.

- It's a hot topic, so people commenting here have thought a lot about it, and thus aren't likely to question their premises when faced with a contradiction. (c.f. the odd negative responses have only gotten more histrionic with time)

- The vast majority of people either can't use it at work, or if they are, it's some IT-procured thing that's much more likely to be AWS/gCloud thrown together, 2nd class, APIs, than cutting edge.

- Tech line workers have strong antibodies to tech BS being sold by a company as gamechanging advancements, from the last few years of crypto

- Probably by far the most important: general tech stubborness. About 1/3 to 1/2 of us believe we know the exact requirements for Good Code, and observing AI doing anything other than that just confirms it's bad.

- Writing meta-commentary like this, or trying to find a way to politely communicate "you don't actually know what you're talking about just because you know what an API is and you tried ChatGPT.app for 5 minutes", are confrontational, declasse, and arguably deservedly downvoted. So you don't have any rhetorical devices that can disrupt any of the above factors.

1 comments

Personally I am cynical because in my experience @ FAANG, "AI safety" is mainly about mitigating PR risk for the company, rather than any actual harm.
I lived through that era at Google and I'd gently suggest there's something south of Timnit that's still AI safety, and also point out the controversy was her leaving.