This is an accurate assessment. I do feel that there is a routine bias on HN to underplay AI. I think it's people not wanting to lose control or relative status in the world.
AI is an existential threat to the unique utility of humans, which has been the last line of defense against absolute despotism (i.e. a tyrannical government will not kill all its citizens because it still needs them to perform jobs. If humans aren't needed to sustain productivity, humans have no leverage against things becoming significantly worse for them, gradually or all at once).
I think AI is still in the weird twilight zone that it was when it first came out in that it's great sometimes and also terrible. I still get hallucinations when I check a response I get with ChatGPT on Google.
On the one hand, what it says can't be trusted, on the other, I have debugged code I have written where I was unable to find the bug myself, and ChatGPT found it.
I also think a reason AI's are popular and the companies haven't gone under is that probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of people are getting responses that have hallucinations, but the user doesn't know it. I fell into this trap myself after ChatGPT first came out. I became addicted to asking anything and it seemed like it was right. It wasn't until later I started realizing that it was hallucinating information.
How prevalent this phenomena is is hard to say but I still think it's pernicious.
But as I said before, there are still use cases for AI and that's what makes judging it so difficult.
AI is an existential threat to the unique utility of humans, which has been the last line of defense against absolute despotism (i.e. a tyrannical government will not kill all its citizens because it still needs them to perform jobs. If humans aren't needed to sustain productivity, humans have no leverage against things becoming significantly worse for them, gradually or all at once).
On the one hand, what it says can't be trusted, on the other, I have debugged code I have written where I was unable to find the bug myself, and ChatGPT found it.
I also think a reason AI's are popular and the companies haven't gone under is that probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of people are getting responses that have hallucinations, but the user doesn't know it. I fell into this trap myself after ChatGPT first came out. I became addicted to asking anything and it seemed like it was right. It wasn't until later I started realizing that it was hallucinating information. How prevalent this phenomena is is hard to say but I still think it's pernicious.
But as I said before, there are still use cases for AI and that's what makes judging it so difficult.