[HN Gopher] Post-GPT Computing
___________________________________________________________________
Post-GPT Computing
Author : gradys
Score : 214 points
Date : 2023-03-24 12:34 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (grady.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (grady.io)
| carapace wrote:
| Check out: "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework"
| SRI Summary Report AFOSR-3223 by Douglas C. Engelbart, October
| 1962 https://dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html
|
| > Accepting the term "intelligence amplification" does not imply
| any attempt to increase native human intelligence. The term
| "intelligence amplification" seems applicable to our goal of
| augmenting the human intellect in that the entity to be produced
| will exhibit more of what can be called intelligence than an
| unaided human could; we will have amplified the intelligence of
| the human by organizing his intellectual capabilities into higher
| levels of synergistic structuring.
|
| Now that the computers can talk and think and program themselves,
| and we can expect them to become exponentially better at it (to
| some limit, presumed greater-than-human), there is approximately
| only one problem left: how to _select_ from the options the
| machines can generate for us.
|
| It's still an open-ended challenge, it's just a new and different
| challenge from the ones faced by all previous generations. And
| again, just to repeat for emphasis: this is the _only_
| intellectual challenge left. All others are subsumed by it
| (because the machines can (soon) think better than we can.)
| outside1234 wrote:
| GPT is "Drafts as a service"
|
| That the draft happened to work on the video clip is more luck
| than something you want to bet your engineering life on.
|
| You still need to go through an verify every character this
| statistical package spits out - it is not magic - it is just a
| probabilistic machine.
| metalrain wrote:
| While chat is intuitive interface to start with. I think we'll
| see more integration of these NLP models in traditional tools,
| like we saw with Adobe Firefly and Unreal Engine. That way users
| retain the control for fine tuning and doing problem specific
| tasks, but also gain this superpower of doing many actions with
| few words.
|
| Key thing for adoption is to make models smaller and more context
| specific (to make them smaller), we've seen how LLaMA was
| downsized to run on commodity PCs, we've seen how Stable
| Diffusion can run on mobile phones. Even when we have to use
| larger models remotely, cost and ownership matters.
| meghan_rain wrote:
| We need to push the notion that "closed-source LLMs are super
| dangerous, an existential risk to humanity".
|
| Basically we need to equate "safety" in LLMs to mean "being open-
| source".
|
| OpenAI keeps talking about "safety" as the most important goal.
| If we define it to mean "open-source" then they will be pushed
| into a corner.
| seydor wrote:
| Good luck after a decade of convincing the public about the
| opposite (walled gardens)
| michaelmior wrote:
| > Basically we need to equate "safety" in LLMs to mean "being
| open-source".
|
| I think open source is a reasonable _component_ to safety, but
| I wouldn 't want to make them equal. Open source may be
| necessary for safety, but I wouldn't call it sufficient.
|
| For example, assume the source code, the model, the training
| data, and all the model weights are open source. How do you
| know that the model was actually trained using that training
| data? Very few organizations have the capacity to train models
| at this scale themselves.
| wseqyrku wrote:
| > Basically we need to equate "safety" in LLMs to mean "being
| open-source".
|
| Another way to put it is to make it more accessible to
| everyone, right?
|
| The opposite of that is happening to nuclear power. They're
| actually trying to stop any more countries to have the
| technology at their disposal. So no, make it "open source"
| doesn't make it safe by any stretch of imagination.
| blibble wrote:
| "nuclear power" is open source, and this is one of the
| fundamental ideas behind the NPT
|
| reactor blueprints have been accessible to IAEA members for
| something like 50 years
| jackvezkovic wrote:
| It's "Security Through AI Obscurity"
| LouisSayers wrote:
| > OpenAI keeps talking about "safety"
|
| Whenever I see this I simply think "monopoly". It smells of
| anti-competitiveness and is a kind of open forum lobbying to
| restrict who gets to lead the AI wave (and make a shit tonne of
| money in the process).
| tel wrote:
| Why do you believe that "open source" would imply greater
| safety? Here, I'll loosely define "safety" to be "avoidance of
| harm to individuals or society that would have otherwise not
| occurred without the use of LLM technology". Feel free to
| modify that definition as you see fit, but I'm genuinely
| curious what the argument is that open source is necessary,
| sufficient, or even a major component of achieving safety.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I'm stoked by the idea that NL processing is suddenly becoming
| much more accessible and powerful. Old, boring static text
| documents are suddenly "coming alive". Imagine what this means
| not just for software engineering, but for all engineering, and
| even if not a single one of these documents is generated by a
| LLM.
| barrkel wrote:
| I don't think this is quite correct.
|
| If the LLM has seen lots of instances of usage of an API, it can
| write code to target the API. It can generalize to some degree,
| but things go off track the further your requirements are away
| from the training data.
|
| If your code is a lot of duct tape between well-documented, or at
| least well-named, APIs, that code can be automated. Which is
| great. That kind of code was always boring to write.
|
| I'm less convinced that LLMs will be great at inventing new
| abstractions to map to a problem domain, and wiring up these new
| abstractions in a large codebase.
|
| They'll need augmentation, fine-tuning, guidance, and it's not
| clear how well it'll all fit together, and where the limitations
| of the tech will show up as capability cliffs.
| precompute wrote:
| Yes. Outsourcing engineering to LLMs is like building bridges
| based on structural integrity in minecraft. The real product
| here is just a "language calculator", that also does "code
| generation" because it makes financial and PR sense. That
| people even believe these models can be novel makes one look to
| the way this thing is marketed.
|
| It's also a good time to really take our heads out of the sand
| and re-evaluate how we expect people to learn civil engineering
| if their only teacher is a minecraft world. You _might_ get
| some people that are perfect in minecraft. The rest will be
| hopelessly stunted. Pretty soon it 'll pivot to materials
| engineering to figure out how exactly a minecraft block adheres
| to a surface because we lost the original irl way to build a
| bridge.
| angarg12 wrote:
| Last week I used ChatGPT for the first time for a real world task
| at work. It was a self-contained lambda function to perform some
| admin tasks, so it seemed like an ideal fit. Although the
| experience was good, it's far from the end of programmers. This
| was my experience:
|
| * Although ChatGPT is pretty good at generating code, it kept
| making simple mistakes such as calling non-existing APIs or
| introducing bugs. Some of them it could fix itself, some I had to
| fix.
|
| * The code provided worked well for the "happy path" but failed
| miserably for some corner cases. I had to fix that manually.
|
| * The code was working, but I wouldn't consider it production
| ready. It required some cleanup, unit tests, etc. Again, some of
| this with ChatGPT, some without.
|
| * Not to mention that I was the one with the knowledge about the
| domain, what problem to solve, a vague idea of how...
|
| Not to pick on OP but extracting a few seconds of video from a
| file is a pretty straightforward task, you can essentially do it
| with a bash one liner [1]. My biggest question is how ChatGPT
| performs with a large codebase, contributed over time by
| different authors, with complex domain logic and layers of
| abstraction.
|
| I also had a brief existential crisis, but I just shrugged it off
| and got back to work.
|
| [1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/59383/extract-part-of-a-
| vide...
| kledru wrote:
| The self-confidence of people who dismiss it after having tried
| it once is impressive. Having said that, I do not think it is
| the end of programmers, only some of them.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Just imagine Amazon paid someone to train GPT on all available
| API and tons of correct code, then your company uses another
| ton of private code to train it...and then provide you with
| 40-50 prompts.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| I'm a PM who is relatively technical, but I haven't written
| more than a few lines of code (stuff like minor modifications
| to my Shopify site) in a decade.
|
| I saw a bunch of people talking about how GPT helped them code
| stuff on Twitter, so I thought I'd give it a try. Right now I'm
| building a sort of simple, mock version of the type of software
| that integrates with my company's APIs. I've successfully
| managed to create a simple web application that creates a new
| object, hits my company's API endpoint to create a
| corresponding object on our software, allows me to upload a
| document locally and then allows me to upload that document to
| our software via API as well. It's all a little messy and
| clearly not production-ready, but it works. It would've taken
| me probably a few months on nights and weekends do this (mostly
| refreshing myself on JS and Python). Instead I've done it in
| <24h (would've been shorter except for GPT-4's message limit).
|
| I'm sometimes able to spot and fix GPT's bugs, but even when
| I'm not, it walks me through adding more logging and
| successfully debugs issues. Sometimes it takes a few tries and
| a little direction as to what I suspect the issue is, but so
| far it's fixed everything that's come up. I don't think this
| would be doable for a totally non-technical person, but I do
| think it'll get there pretty soon.
|
| I'm just absolutely blown away.
| devjab wrote:
| One of the reasons I'm not blown away is that everything
| we've tasked it to do has resulted in rather terrible
| answers. A lot of them outright didn't work. When they did,
| the way GPT created our solutions were often in a way that
| wouldn't work well over time. Unfortunately you wouldn't
| necessarily know that unless you really know your tools. In
| many ways, this isn't too different from people performing
| brute-force programming through their favorite search engine,
| but at least most people know that "Google programming" is
| sort of bad. I think we're going to be cleaning up the GPT
| messes for decades to come because it's very confidently
| incorrect and much more accessible as you point out.
|
| I think we're going to see a lot of programmers who are going
| to trust GPT a little too much, and I think that's sort of
| scary. For the most part that is going to work out just fine.
| Often the quality of your programming isn't actually going to
| matter that much, because as long as it solves the business
| needs okish, then it's frankly great. That's not always the
| case, however, imagine someone using GPT to get your
| healthcare software wrong.
|
| I'm still impressed with it in other areas. I think it'll do
| wonders in the world of office automation because it seems to
| have the ability to succeed at this much better than any
| previous "no-code" attempt where the logic would almost
| always end up requiring people who are basically programmers
| for it to work. I think GPT will help here, requiring less
| "superusers" for a department to move their data flows into
| automation. Especially in areas, where efficiency and
| stability aren't necessarily that important if the
| automation-tools mean you don't need three full time
| employees moving data from one system to another.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > ...but at least most people know that "Google
| programming" is sort of bad. I think we're going to be
| cleaning up the GPT messes for decades to come because it's
| very confidently incorrect and much more accessible as you
| point out.
|
| Speaking of which:
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-
| po...
|
| > Overall, because the average rate of getting correct
| answers from ChatGPT is too low, the posting of answers
| created by ChatGPT is substantially harmful to the site and
| to users who are asking and looking for correct answers.
|
| > The primary problem is that while the answers which
| ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they
| typically look like they might be good and the answers are
| very easy to produce. There are also many people trying out
| ChatGPT to create answers, without the expertise or
| willingness to verify that the answer is correct prior to
| posting. Because such answers are so easy to produce, a
| large number of people are posting a lot of answers. The
| volume of these answers (thousands) and the fact that the
| answers often require a detailed read by someone with at
| least some subject matter expertise in order to determine
| that the answer is actually bad has effectively swamped our
| volunteer-based quality curation infrastructure.
|
| If we're lucky ChatGPT will poison itself by pissing in its
| well, but it will take a lot of good things with it.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Have you tried gpt-4? It's not perfect but it is a clear
| improvement for code.
| vehementi wrote:
| > everything we've tasked it to do has resulted in rather
| terrible answers
|
| Maybe this is the chatGPT equivalent of "learning to google
| search properly". You got bad answers, but maybe someone
| more competent at chatGPT prompts and workflow would have
| gotten to a better solution more quickly, and we need to
| figure out what that means
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| I've never seen so many people grinding to make an
| autocomplete engine produce "better solutions" to
| randomized output.
| 8organicbits wrote:
| Is there a primer on how to engineer prompts? I didn't
| like my results, tried engineering my prompts a bit, but
| it kept introducing different error. I had the domain
| knowledge to see them, but it felt like whack-a-mole.
| idopmstuff wrote:
| > I think it'll do wonders in the world of office
| automation because it seems to have the ability to succeed
| at this much better than any previous "no-code" attempt
| where the logic would almost always end up requiring people
| who are basically programmers for it to work. I think GPT
| will help here, requiring less "superusers" for a
| department to move their data flows into automation.
| Especially in areas, where efficiency and stability aren't
| necessarily that important if the automation-tools mean you
| don't need three full time employees moving data from one
| system to another.
|
| Yeah, at this point I think this is a valid use case for
| GPT-4 in its current form. I would be comfortable using it
| to build internal process tools or standalone things like a
| simple browser extension. Nobody in engineering at my
| company would be dumb enough to let me start monkey around
| with our actual codebase though.
| foobarian wrote:
| I think your parent is on to something: it won't be the
| programmers trusting GPT a little too much, it will be the
| PMs, and there won't be a programmer :-)
| AverageDude wrote:
| I see an Idiocracy inspired future for programming.
|
| People claim that AI can write code so they start firing
| programmers. Universities stop software engineering
| programs as there is no one taking the courses. People
| stop writing blogs or stackoverflow. Software engineers
| either move to other fields or start living offgrid. No
| new innovation or new line of code written by human.
|
| Meanwhile, software quality get worse by each passing day
| and there's no one to fix. AI poisons it's own well by
| generating shitty code and now even simple tasks are
| taking 30 seconds. People say, "In the good old days, we
| used to get response in under 1 second". Just like how
| they talk about cars and their durability in the good'ol
| days.
| sharemywin wrote:
| Are people actually allowing it to perform actual software
| development?
|
| State your assumptions.
|
| Read and summarize the pervious documents
|
| generate a data flow diagram.
|
| generate a data model.
|
| Get it to inquire about use cases and requirements
|
| generate tests for these uses cases and requirements.
| majormajor wrote:
| It'll definitely help people learn faster - the "what to try
| next" problem is HUGE in programming discovery.
|
| Modern languages (and tools like autocomplete) have already
| helped that a lot compared to assembly code or binary, this
| looks like the biggest jump in a long time. The path of
| programming so far has been moving from "describe how to do
| something" to "describe what to do" which this is certainly
| in line with.
| helf wrote:
| Honestly, it seems the people most blown away by things like
| this are people who haven't much experience in the various
| fields.
|
| It's easy to get amazed by something that can halfway do
| something you can't do at all automatically. But as others
| have pointed out, it's not that great at it and not knowing
| enough to do it yourself means you don't know enough to catch
| and fix bugs.
|
| So this move to using chatgpt and similar in production by
| people who otherwise wouldn't be able to do things in
| production is worrisome, imo.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| I see people solving a lot of simple problems with it. How
| about asking it to design a robot that makes and hands you a
| cup of coffee in the morning? Something that really hasn't been
| done before.
|
| And afterwards it cleans the cup and puts it back in the
| cabinet.
| dTal wrote:
| It is not good at that kind of novelty, but my impression is
| that the difficulty is that it is limited to a single pass
| through the network - such "loops" as there are are
| "unrolled" within the network, into a very limited stack
| depth [0] (it would be _very_ interesting to analyze these
| networks for self-similarity).
|
| If you want it to solve arbitrarily complex problems, you
| need to set up some sort of loop. People are already feeding
| the outputs back in as input in various primitive ways, but I
| suspect the real breakthrough will come when someone trains
| some sort of recursive transformer from scratch. (Assuming
| the current networks waste neurons in unrolling loops, we
| might possibly even see smaller models).
|
| [0] Try the following family of prompts: "_ is an example of
| _, which is an example of _, which is an example of _...."
| etc to a depth of your choosing. At some point it bottoms out
| and you can't get any more levels out of it.
| redmaverick wrote:
| Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand
| something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding
| it."
|
| This quote highlights the challenges of accepting new
| information or ideas when they might jeopardize one's
| livelihood or status quo.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| My experience was different than yours. I had an existential
| crisis, and it only got worse the more I used it. To be clear,
| I did _not_ think ChatGPT was ready to replace me _now_ (and,
| mind you, I only used the 3.5 version of ChatGPT). But it was
| so easy for me to see how in just a few years it can accelerate
| its pace of learning.
|
| I was discussing a bug with a colleague, so for curiosity's
| sake I decided to plug a similar question into ChatGPT. I was
| quite impressed with the solution it gave, and interestingly,
| it had the same subtle bug that our code had. What blew me away
| is that when I pointed out the bug, ChatGPT _fixed the code by
| itself_. On one hand I felt "phew, at least it needed me to
| point out the bug", but then I thought "I just (perhaps
| stupidly) provided training data so that down the road ChatGPT
| would get it right the first time."
| creeble wrote:
| But did you? Does it store and re-train on all of that input?
| groestl wrote:
| It will, rest assured. There is a reason that you have a
| history of chats in the free version, and it's not because
| it's so handy for you.
| matesz wrote:
| Wow how about people using paid api. Can OpenAI retrain
| on data provided there?
|
| ps. ChatGPT: "You should only share
| information that you are comfortable with being stored or
| potentially used as training data."
| IanCal wrote:
| You can also just ask it to check if its result matches the
| spec or check it for bugs. I've done that and had it find
| things without me telling it what was wrong.
| sharemywin wrote:
| This video kind of scared me even more.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dBq9sKTKTY
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Holy fuck.
|
| I don't see how people can see stuff like that and say "oh,
| it's just a fancy Markov chain generator" or "it can't
| reason". Even if that stuff is _nominally_ true, how can
| people not be totally blown away by this? Just a couple
| years ago I think people would have been amazed that it can
| have totally natural, grammatically correct conversations.
| Moreover, for nearly 3 /4 of a century the scientific
| community has pretty much coalesced on only using the
| _output_ to define intelligence (aka the Turing Test).
| While I understand that ChatGPT may not 100% be there yet,
| I see no reason to believe that all this interaction people
| are having with it won 't be fed back into it to
| drastically improve its responses over time.
| jltsiren wrote:
| > Moreover, for nearly 3/4 of a century the scientific
| community has pretty much coalesced on only using the
| output to define intelligence (aka the Turing Test).
|
| It's more like the scientific community has spent the
| last 50+ years criticizing the Turing Test. Passing as a
| human is a nice engineering goal, but there has been a
| lot of doubt of using input/output behavior as the only
| measure of intelligence. If you took a basic AI class
| before machine learning became popular, the chances are
| the class spent more time on the criticism than on the
| test itself.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Did you watch the video ? You got punk'd
| bmitc wrote:
| You made me think: it feels like ChatGPT is just a less
| accurate StackOverflow answer generator. The culture of needing
| to use StackOverflow is not a good one, so I'm not sure why
| people are considering ChatGPT to be.
| davidhaymond wrote:
| This is one of my major concerns with ChatGPT, and I'm not
| sure why it hasn't been discussed more. StackOverflow is a
| massively useful resource, to be sure, but it takes knowledge
| to wade through the outdated (or just plain bad) answers.
| StackOverflow can be a useful starting point, but I don't
| think I have ever copy/pasted code directly from
| StackOverflow. I don't think any LLM will be able to replace
| the skill of reading the docs and learning your tools.
|
| I have no doubt that ChatGPT will become even better than
| StackOverflow at answering questions. Is this really going to
| make us better programmers?
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Yeah, it seems like a better search engine would be easier
| and more accurate to use in this case.
| sharemywin wrote:
| but it can usually answer your specific question. not loke
| close to your question.
| circuit10 wrote:
| "The culture of needing to use StackOverflow is not a good
| one"
|
| Not being able to write code without it might be bad but it's
| a valuable resource and you should use it when it's available
| to you (for both)
| stevedonovan wrote:
| Yes, and at least StackOverflow will often give you some
| minority opinion, not just a snippet to be pasted into your
| code. Especially if something a little tricky like
| cryptography.
|
| Consider this classic:
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12122159/how-to-do-a-
| htt...
| politician wrote:
| Counterpoint: ChatGPT will answer your question in a few
| moments whereas on StackOverflow, you might need up to 60
| minutes for the question to be closed as "offtopic". ChatGPT
| never asks "why do you want to do this?"
| asdff wrote:
| Who even asks on stack overflow? The exercise is the
| generalize your issue, and then the thread from 7 years ago
| with your answer appears.
| sharemywin wrote:
| but what's the point if a new tool does it for you?
| afro88 wrote:
| Huh. 2 days ago I built 3 significant internal tools for my
| company that automated important workflows for our growth, in a
| language that I rarely use (js), in 4 hours. Something we have
| been putting off for months because we figured it would take a
| week or two. It was an exhilarating experience.
|
| Yesterday I got a complex data structure out of it in 1h that
| we'd been talking about but not implementing because it would
| have taken a couple of days to get right.
|
| In all cases it made mistakes and I had to rely on my
| experience as an engineer to ask the right questions and fix
| things. But god damn it made me insanely more productive.
|
| Don't shrug this off and go back to work. You'll get left
| behind, and may not have a work to go back to.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| So wait, just to be clear, you deployed production code in a
| language you don't use regularly? And this is a good thing?
|
| This is supposed to take programming jobs?
|
| HN is incredible.
| afro88 wrote:
| Who said anything about production code in a language I
| don't use regularly?
|
| Internal tools that automate 3 workflows we'd been doing
| manually. 2 node scripts and a super simple web app exposed
| on our private network.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| For what it's worth, that was exactly my experience with
| GPT-3.5, but GPT-4 is a _lot_ better at generating code. Almost
| spookily good, at least for some languages. It makes far fewer
| mistakes.
| ollien wrote:
| Maybe the ChatGPT implementation of GPT-4 is different than
| the one in Bing AI, but I tried to ask Bing AI to write a
| fairly simple Python-based ini-parser yesterday (and by that
| I really mean using the built-in configparser module), and
| while it got a good amount of the way there, but attempted to
| index a string with a string-key, which was weird. After
| multiple notices of this mistake, it produced something that
| _could_ work in some cases, but was definitely brittle.
| crop_rotation wrote:
| I can confirm that GPT4 is much better than Bing on such
| tasks (have used both extensively for same prompts.)
| d0mine wrote:
| Bing is backed up by GPT-4? No?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| My understanding is that they're similar but not the
| same. I think the rlhf process was different with GPT4
| receiving much more human feedback.
| crop_rotation wrote:
| It is but they don't have to be exactly the same. Bing
| might be tuned for searching real time information and
| maybe cost less since at search engine scale is much
| higher (just a guess on my part).
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| > Maybe the ChatGPT implementation of GPT-4 is different
| than the one in Bing AI
|
| Yeah I think it definitely is, but I don't know why. Bing
| is better at looking things up (perhaps unsurprisingly) but
| Chat4 is better at creating things.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Could be using different temperatures and prompts.
| komposit wrote:
| This skepticism absolutely baffles me. Have you been using
| gpt-4? To unlock gpt for real you have to be careful to prompt
| it correctly and find a way to improve the feedback loop for
| improving code. It is only a matter of time until tools arrive
| that integrate this into your development environment and give
| it access to test/console output such that it can suggest code
| and iterate over the result. It's not perfect yet, but I'm
| seriously feeling the nature of our work will change
| fundamentally over two years already.
| illiarian wrote:
| So... nothing changes. It will be the tool for which you will
| need to manually construct prompts and clean up output
| (including imagined non-existent APIs).
|
| The availability of a button inside an IDE doesn't make this
| a fundamental change in how we work
| dbtc wrote:
| Nothing changes the same way that there is no difference
| between writing software in assembly and writing it in
| python.
| deeviant wrote:
| If the button can do, let's say, half or more of the work
| for you when you press it, you're lying to yourself if you
| think it won't change anything.
| crop_rotation wrote:
| It is so far ahead of even what the best IDEs do. For one,
| I have not seen GPT4 ever use non existent APIs. You don't
| need to carefully construct prompts. It tolerates typos to
| a good extent. You can just type a rough description and
| the output won't need cleaning manually. You might need to
| reiterate it to focus on some thing (like remove all heap
| allocations and focus on performance).
| 49531 wrote:
| I've seen it use non existent APIs a lot. Working on a
| project that uses a dialect of python it told me it knew
| (Starlark) was like pulling teeth. It would tell me to
| use a python feature Starlark didn't have, I'd ask it to
| rewrite it without using that specific feature and it
| would with another feature Starlark didn't have access
| to, so I'd ask it to write the solution using neither and
| it would just give me the first solution again.
| illiarian wrote:
| > For one, I have not seen GPT4 ever use non existent
| APIs.
|
| Have you asked it to use any API that appeared after
| September 2021 (that's the cut off date for its data)?
|
| Have you asked it to write code in less popular languages
| (e.g. Elixir)?
|
| Have you asked it to write code for less popular or
| unavailable APIs (smart TV integrations)?
| crop_rotation wrote:
| I have used it to write Nim and Zig code (both not too
| popular languages).
|
| I also asked it to write using non existent but plausible
| sounding APIs, and it flat out says "As of my knowledge
| cutoff in September 2021, I have no knowledge ...."
|
| Ae you talking about GPT4 or the default ChatGPT?
| illiarian wrote:
| I've seen similar claims about GPT 3.5 and Copilot, so I
| won't hold my breath.
|
| To quote GPT-4 paper:
|
| "GPT-4 generally lacks knowledge of events that have
| occurred after the vast majority of its pre-training data
| cuts off in September 202110, and does not learn from its
| experience. It can sometimes make simple reasoning errors
| which do not seem to comport with competence across so
| many domains, or be overly gullible in accepting
| obviously false statements from a user. It can fail at
| hard problems the same way humans do, such as introducing
| security vulnerabilities into code it produces.
|
| GPT-4 can also be confidently wrong in its predictions,
| not taking care to double-check work when it's likely to
| make a mistake".
|
| > I also asked it to write using non existent but
| plausible sounding APIs, and it flat out says "As of my
| knowledge cutoff
|
| Ask it to write a deep integration with Samsung TV or
| Google Cast. My bet is that it will imagine non-existent
| APIs (as those APIs are partly unpopular and partly
| closed under NDAs)
| leishman wrote:
| Yeah it was basically useless for an Elixir project I was
| working on. That will probably change at some point I'm
| sure.
| raincole wrote:
| How do you know GPT4's cut off date...? I mean it says
| that, but it can totally be it "learned" its (supposed)
| cut off date from the GPT3.5 output all over the
| internet, right?
| crop_rotation wrote:
| The model repeats it all the time "As of my knowledge
| cutoff date"
| raincole wrote:
| Yes, and this fact doesn't tell me anything, as I know
| LLM is completely capable to say things that aren't true.
| CapstanRoller wrote:
| That claim doesn't come from ChatGPT, it comes from
| OpenAI themselves.
| illiarian wrote:
| > How do you know GPT4's cut off date...?
|
| "GPT-4 generally lacks knowledge of events that have
| occurred after the vast majority of its pre-training data
| cuts off in September 202110, and does not learn from its
| experience."
|
| GPT-4 paper, page 10:
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.08774.pdf
| visarga wrote:
| The step up in accuracy from one shot solutions to
| iterative ones is large.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I don't know, I feel like it really does change how we can
| interact with a computer.
|
| It feels like we are headed to a world where we can
| interact with a computer much more like they do in Star
| Trek; you ask the computer to do something using plain
| English, and then keep giving it refinements until you get
| what you want. Along the way, it is going to keep getting
| better and better and doing the common things asked, and
| will only need refinements for doing new things. Humans
| will get better at giving those refinements as the AI gets
| better at responding to them.
|
| It is already incredibly good for being such a new
| technology, and will continue to rapidly improve.
| angarg12 wrote:
| Is not skepticism, it's curbed optimism.
|
| I don't feel that my job is at risk of disappearing. Instead
| I think we'll be using LLMs as tools to do our job better.
| orangesite wrote:
| "You're holding it wrong"
| vineyardmike wrote:
| There's a difference between the iPhone "you're holding it
| wrong" argument and not using a tool correctly. If you try
| to hammer a screw, it may enter the wood but that doesn't
| mean it's the correct way to use it.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I am working on this. Broke so have to do odd GPT jobs from
| Upwork to make ends meet so paused on development. But the
| front end stuff works. At least as far as skipping copy
| paste.
| elif wrote:
| I think it's safe to assume anyone trying to criticize
| chatGPT who has access to gpt4 would specify that their
| attempts are using even the latest and greatest. The
| disclosure is in the interest of their core argument.
|
| Therefore the inverse can be safely inferred by
| nondisclosure.
| crop_rotation wrote:
| For the sake of completeness, can you specify whether you used
| GPT4 or GPT3.5 ChatGPT. The difference is huge. I too was not
| too impressed by the default ChatGPT. But GPT4 is a huge
| improvement.
| thequadehunter wrote:
| TBH, the most useful thing it does for me is write my
| boilerplate code and tedious statements. That's infinitely more
| useful than the knowledge stuff.
|
| The other day I was working with the Cisco Meraki API...I knew
| exactly what the script needed to do, but the calls were
| tedious and I didn't feel like learning the names of all the
| JSON columns, so I just had ChatGPT do it. I had to fix a
| couple mistakes, but the 20 minutes it took was better than
| having to read all the documentation.
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| mcculley wrote:
| I am currently doing some difficult work that involves figuring
| out the right computational geometry algorithms to apply to my
| dataset in order to get the answers my users need in a reasonable
| time. ChatGPT is of no use to me there.
|
| When I need to ask for boilerplate code for fetching a web
| resource or using a well-defined API, ChatGPT is great.
|
| ChatGPT has made the mundane plumbing a lot easier. It is a
| threat to plumbers at this point. Many of those plumbers are now
| freed up to do more valuable work. I am happy to have it, so I
| can focus on higher value work.
|
| If your only skill is at this kind of low level plumbing, you are
| in danger. But I doubt this is the case for most.
| RivieraKid wrote:
| Are you using GPT 3.5 or GPT-4? It's a huge difference.
| mcculley wrote:
| I am using GPT-4. It is much better. But I still haven't had
| it suggest any new algorithms. It just riffs on what it was
| trained on, as expected.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > ChatGPT is of no use to me there.
|
| Today.
|
| What happens when it understands computational geometry and can
| calculate an optimal strategy to apply it to a dataset and end
| goal you provide?
| mcculley wrote:
| I will be happy to provide value higher up instead of dealing
| with this frustrating problem. I want the answer, not the
| code that generates the answer. I am writing that code now
| because it does not exist yet. So far, I have only had
| ChatGPT give me answers that can be derived from existing
| code. Regardless, I look forward to it being smarter.
|
| (My intuition is that ChatGPT, like all technologies before
| it, will end up making more wealth and more jobs possible.)
| LouisSayers wrote:
| Have you tried it with the Wolfram plugin?
| mcculley wrote:
| Yes, and Wolfram/Mathematic is great when I have figured out
| which algorithm to use. ChatGPT may even soon help me
| discover the potential algorithms. It is not helpful to me
| for that today.
| brushfoot wrote:
| > I think over time, we'll see that what many of us really liked
| about building software deep down wasn't coding, but intricately
| imagining the things computers could do for us and then getting
| them to do it.
|
| Spot on. It's a good time for existential reflection: Who would
| you have been hundreds or thousands of years ago? Who will you be
| now that technology is radically changing again?
|
| There will always be interesting, creative challenges like
| programming, whatever form they take.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Who would you have been hundreds or thousands of years ago?_
|
| Given how I grew up ingesting science and science fiction
| alike, literally attributing half my personality to _Star Trek:
| The Next Generation_ being on TV during my formative years? It
| 's really hard to tell. I have very little connection to things
| which were possible before late 19th / early 20th century.
|
| In my mind, being thrown back centuries in time, I'd spend my
| life trying to use everything I remember from present day to
| give everyone a head start on science and technology. Being
| thrown back centuries in time, but without the memory of
| specific things I've learned in present day? That sounds like a
| particularly sadistic death sentence.
| the_only_law wrote:
| I was thinking less of "what if I went back in time" and more
| "what if I was my ancestor"
|
| Obviously you won't be able to tell for sure, but I'd guess
| that 1000 years ago I'd probably be a serf, and 100 years
| ago, likely would have fought in a large war and likely doing
| some form of physical labor or subsistence farming
| afterwards, based on what my family was doing then.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Oh, in this sense, yes, I agree. There's only so much
| agency any human ever has, had, or will have - and the
| space of possible choices is determined by the overall
| technological and economic landscape of the time.
|
| In this light, sure, the me from 1000 years ago would most
| likely be a serf, die from malnutrition, war or robbery. Me
| from 100 years ago would probably be lying dead in the
| trenches of Verdun, or shot on the streets of Krakow, or
| otherwise dead in WW1; for military-aged males in Europe, I
| guess whether or not one got drawn into fighting was a coin
| flip.
| tizio13 wrote:
| Reading your comment made me think that you would enjoy
| reading the Magic 2.0 series. First book is Off to be the
| Wizard.
| bad_username wrote:
| I often think of legal professionals and law makers as "the
| programmers of people". I think I would have become a lawyer
| 100 years ago.
| sharemywin wrote:
| While I think people can adapt I worry about things changing
| faster than people can adapt.
|
| Do you invest in a college education is that field is
| obliterated by the time you get out.
|
| What about your debts if you lose your job and companies aren't
| hiring because they can just use AI for a 10th the cost in 6
| months.
| falcor84 wrote:
| >Who would you have been hundreds or thousands of years ago?
|
| I'll just use this opportunity to recommend the video game
| "Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey". It's a game where you start
| as an early hominid and have to gradually discover how to make
| and use rudimentary tools in order to take control of your
| environment, literally evolving in the process. It's weird and
| unforgiving, and it made me really think.
| KrugerDunnings wrote:
| Working as a software engineer I often feels like I am living in
| the world of the Handmaidens Tale as a women with a functioning
| womb where the hole of society is organised around controlling
| everything I do. Hopefully LLM will change this but I do not
| underestimate the intellectual laziness of most "knowledge
| workers"
| [deleted]
| anon7725 wrote:
| You're saying this un-ironically in the post-Roe world?
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| Highly paid middle class white male (statistically) compares
| his existence to the brutal oppression of women in a fictional
| book.
|
| What insight!
| atq2119 wrote:
| Their username is target fitting.
| KrugerDunnings wrote:
| This is what we in the comedy business call making fun of
| someone making fun. I call myself Krugger Dunning as an
| obvious play on the Dunnings Krugger effect because I try
| to approach every topic from a point of epistemic humility
| and in part that means being self-aware enough to realise I
| might just be a total idiot. The hard work has been done by
| me in reflecting on my shortcoming as a person and I try to
| show my weaknesses openly with all of you in the hope we
| can find within them our common humanity, while you just
| issue cheap insults.
| KrugerDunnings wrote:
| You know very little about my life and I'd like to keep it
| this way. One would think that I live in a pure sellers
| market, but this is not true because of dynamics similar to
| that in the show. The comparison is clearly hyperbole evident
| by the use of an absurt fictional situation and not meant to
| express an equality relationship but one of equivalence
| (learn category theory bitch). It is very insightful, if you
| ask me, to recognise one's own predicament by empathising
| with the struggles of a fictional character, and this is what
| at the end of the day literary critique is all about. That
| there might be something hard about my life because of
| organised socially accepted structural abuse is all the more
| made evident by the briga-dooning and gasslighting I receive
| for dealing with my own issues in jest. I guess I must be one
| of the lucky girls.
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| Just like how waiting for 10 minutes in Starbucks during my
| morning commute ... made me feel like a persecuted Jewish
| prisoner awaiting execution!
|
| /s
|
| Your original point was ridiculous, tone deaf, offensive
| and completely without substance other than to wave the
| victim flag about _something_ I guess? Who knows.
| KrugerDunnings wrote:
| No, you are waiting in line because you want your stupid
| coffee the jew to be executed does not want to be
| executed, so no equivalence class here baby.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Are people asking it to generate code like "generate a random
| color hex code" or are they trying to use it to write code you're
| going to put in production for users with access controls and
| various complexities?
|
| Because yeah it works fine for basic programming things but I
| believe you need to know wtf you're doing when it comes to
| anything more complex, even something basic like some of our
| single endpoint services.
| asdff wrote:
| I am positive there are plenty of undergrads who are probably
| going to try to get chatgpt to write up an entire app they can
| sell so they don't have to try and find a job in a recession. I
| imagine you could get this entire process automated from the
| prompts to the app store submissions, maybe you could have
| 10,000 junk apps each giving you maybe a dollar a month in
| return before long, that would be a good take for passive work
| after you set up your automation environment.
| saulpw wrote:
| Even if you created 10 junk apps a day, it would still take
| you 3 years to create 10,000 junk apps. And each one requires
| more than $1 to list on the app store.
| [deleted]
| asdff wrote:
| How about the play store? Plus once you have the pipeline
| set up the only limit for your rate of deployment is how
| much compute you throw at it, which is cheap these days.
| Madmallard wrote:
| The devil is entirely in the details unfortunately, and it will
| make GPT basically unusable for anyone but existing software
| engineers for doing actual non-trivial programming tasks. At
| least how it is now.
| dsign wrote:
| In the last few weeks, I've noted on myself how I've been going
| through several stages of the Chat-GPT "disease", or whatever it
| is.
|
| My first reaction was to be afraid for my money-making skills. My
| second reaction was fear about us ourselves making ourselves
| irrelevant--that fear still lingers.
|
| My third wave of fright, cemented by days burning my eyes looking
| at a screen parsing logs and trying to figure out bugs for my
| corporate master, was, "when did my imagination go for a
| vacation? Old boy, don't tell me now that you have run out of
| ideas of things to make, of things to have an AI army to help you
| build." And now I dread that all of this AI is just hype, that it
| will never be good enough to come for our jobs without also
| coming for our jugulars, or that we will make it too damn
| expensive to matter[^1].
|
| -------
|
| [^1]: Capitalism has a way of leveraging economies of scale to
| make certain goods cheaper. But there are physical limits--what
| if Moore's law with regard to power consumption is really dead,
| and we as a collective _really_ decide to spare power?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > And now I dread that all of this AI is just hype, that it
| will never be good enough to come for our jobs
|
| Some day it will be. Not those ones, those ones are only hype.
| Also whether or not they'll come for our jugulars depends on
| what they are commanded to do. But we will get them eventually,
| and they will be as good as articles like this pretend the
| hyped ones are.
|
| The funny thing is that nobody will use the current panic to
| prepare. And everybody will use the current panic as an excuse
| to avoid preparing once the real AIs come. So they'll get us
| completely unprepared.
| Version467 wrote:
| > a collective really decide to spare power
|
| It's either _my_ imagination that has gone for a vacation, or
| yours is running wild, but _that_ is the one thing I really can
| 't see at all. _Reducing_ power consumption? I don 't think
| that's happening any time soon, or ever really.
| seydor wrote:
| It is interesting how history repeats itself here: When google
| started it was just a list of links to the websites that
| contained your answer. As tech advanced, it increasingly started
| giving out the answers in google's pages.
|
| OpenAI's plugins are equally temporary. Right now they will be
| generating actions through APIs, but GPT4 is probably already
| capable of performing the same actions on your browser. All it
| needs is a "control my browser" plugin that allows it to make
| that reservation on expedia, without expedia having any control
| in it. It will inevitably eat the world again
| sharemywin wrote:
| If they won't Don't see why Alpaca could be trained to do so.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Some betting market needs to host bets on when AI will put
| programmers out of their jobs. I don't expect it to happen for
| decades. (Although I might bet that it will happen earlier, as
| insurance in case it does.)
| janetacarr wrote:
| I could just be rationalizing here, but I think AI will be
| illegal soon. The idea of banning AI to protect many well paid
| middle-class jobs will be a slam dunk for any politician.
|
| There will be no Post-GPT computing world, just the Turing police
| and console cowgirls.
| anon7725 wrote:
| It couldn't be a worldwide ban, so that would just be shooting
| yourself in the foot over even a short to medium term.
| antibasilisk wrote:
| Given nascent geopolitical competition, I don't think the west
| can afford this.
| breck wrote:
| > OpenAI made the extraordinary and IMO under-discussed decision
| to use an open API specification format, where every API provider
| hosts a text file on their website saying how to use their API.
|
| Interesting! Somehow I missed this.
| https://spec.openapis.org/oas/latest.html
| TchoBeer wrote:
| extracting 5s of a video feels pretty trivial. Not that this
| isn't extremely impressive, but it doesn't feel "come for your
| jobs" impressive.
| rdg42 wrote:
| Mixing up OpenAI with OpenAPI here ?
| pimterry wrote:
| No, OpenAI's plugin system uses OpenAPI:
| https://platform.openai.com/docs/plugins/introduction
| liampulles wrote:
| I think as rather tech savvy people, we forget the degree to
| which most of the world population really struggles to use
| computers well[1]. The potential of this chat based AI technology
| to expand the market is massive.
|
| [1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
| mock-possum wrote:
| You do still need some kind of savvy to evaluate whether what
| the chat bot tells you is correct though.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| > OpenAI made the extraordinary and IMO under-discussed decision
| to use an open API specification format, where every API provider
| hosts a text file on their website saying how to use their API.
| This means even this plugin ecosystem isn't a walled garden that
| only the first mover controls. I don't fully understand why they
| went this way, but I'm grateful they did.
|
| Why is this extraodinary? What would be the advantage of going
| through all the effort of defining a new format just to create
| busywork for people trying to integrate with you?
|
| It's not like there would be anything stopping Bard/Alpaca/etc.
| from reading the same format as OpenAI.
| gradys wrote:
| One could imagine an alternative where the API manifest was
| provided privately to OpenAI in the developer console or where
| the plugin developer had to implement an OpenAI-specific API
| structure. Doing it this way is more, dare I say, _open_ than
| it might have been.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| There'd still be nothing stopping Bard from adopting an
| extremely similar API structure, and people would just upload
| the same manifests to both.
| Version467 wrote:
| Yes and when you're google then that might work out for
| you, but that point is that anyone who creates an llm can
| now integrate a whole range of services without the
| services needing to provide their manifest to each of them
| individually. This increases competition _between_ ai
| companies, which is why it is a surprising move.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| fendy3002 wrote:
| I'm not doubting that someday AI will able to do better than
| junior devs, even to lower-level of senior devs. But I doubt
| they'll able to replace those of higher level seniors, at least
| not in tens of years.
|
| Then I predict we'll get more business analysts than programmers,
| since managements will still need people to translate their needs
| to AI.
| visarga wrote:
| > Then I predict we'll get more business analysts than
| programmers
|
| Why would analysts be harder to replace than devs?
|
| The question is - how will competition influence the job
| market? if everyone has AI, everyone has the same powers. So
| how do you differentiate yourself? You put more humans in the
| loop, like "human plugins". You need humans to extract the most
| from AI.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Because managements aren't good at defining / understanding
| specifications, constraints and use cases. And I believe we
| don't want AI that can put constraints without our consent,
| so a middleman will still be required.
|
| The job market will still almost be the same, that capital
| and networks will net you businesses.
|
| The problem is how to regulate duplication, because IMO with
| power of AI patents are basically almost useless.
| sharemywin wrote:
| even if you know company or industry jargon the thing can be
| fine tuned on that.
|
| or just build an embedding database the pulls the most
| semantically similar paragraphs and let it use that as a
| basis for the conversation.
| nunez wrote:
| I agree that GPT will make creating software redundant.
|
| Writing is definitely on the wall for outsourcing and MVP-style
| work. GPT can create a landing page and a backend/frontend for a
| business _literally today_. You just have to ship it, but it
| won't be long until that isn't needed.
|
| There will still be a lot of value in understanding how systems
| work and interact with each other, at least until ML is able to
| build and maintain entire systems.
|
| Until that happens, there will still be a lot of value in being
| able to dive into codebases and refactor/optimize as needed, at
| least in the medium-term.
|
| Once platform engineering is mostly automated and running AI-
| generated binaries is de-risked, then code quality doesn't really
| matter. Hell, _code_ won't even matter at that point.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| > at least until ML is able to build and maintain entire
| systems
|
| To me, this sounds a lot like "at least until ML is able to
| reach level 5 self driving". We don't even know if this is
| possible yet without AGI (which we also don't know is
| possible). We can get _close_ , but... that last 1% is a bitch,
| and it makes all the difference.
| dopeboy wrote:
| I appreciate this article and can sympathize with the
| disorientation the author and many here at HN feel. It can feel
| unnerving to know that parts of our jobs might become automated.
|
| I'm processing this news in realtime like many of you and forming
| a plan:
|
| 1. Understand how LLMs work. I've heard the Wolfram paper is
| good; open to more suggestions here.
|
| 2. Continue to practice using real implementations of LLMs
| including ChatGPT and co-pilot.
|
| 3. Finding painpoints within our company that AI can make more
| efficient and implementing solutions.
|
| If anyone feels the same way and wants to form a working group
| with me, give me a shout. Email is in my bio.
| tjvc wrote:
| I think this is a good take. I hope to do the same.
|
| For the understanding part, Andrej Karpathy has a YouTube
| playlist that explains neural networks. I made a start on it
| today and found it quite accessible.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMj-3S1tku0&list=PLAqhIrjkxb...
| meghan_rain wrote:
| > OpenAI made the extraordinary and IMO under-discussed decision
| to use an open API specification format, where every API provider
| hosts a text file on their website saying how to use their API.
| This means even this plugin ecosystem isn't a walled garden that
| only the first mover controls. I don't fully understand why they
| went this way, but I'm grateful they did.
|
| Did OpenAI just commit a trillion dollar mistake?
| karmasimida wrote:
| Essentially a manifest of API call, documentation and
| parameters.
|
| I don't think convert it in and out of proprietary standard is
| that difficult?
|
| There is little to no vendor lock-in effect
| tough wrote:
| That the use an standard OpenAPI, for parsing, doesn't mean
| than anyone can built into chatgpt without permission (it's a
| waitlist for now)
|
| I don't see this
| bloppe wrote:
| I love how all these AI researchers who write small code snippets
| in jupyter notebooks all day think LLM's are the end of software.
| Not disparaging AI research; it clearly takes a lot of expertise
| and work to do it well. But that's not software development.
| tapkolun wrote:
| Just asking, which language model is capable of extracting 5s of
| a video automatically?
| gradys wrote:
| ChatGPT with plugins!
| https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1638971232443076609
| m3kw9 wrote:
| There has never been a case where better tools mean less software
| developers, software will only get more complex and full featured
| as competitions raise because of it
| mftb wrote:
| > Yesterday, I watched someone upload a video file to a chat app,
| ask a language model "Can you extract the first 5 s of the
| video?", and then wait as the language model wrote a few lines of
| code and then actually executed that code, resulting in a
| downloadable video file.
|
| What chat app? Is this gpt-4? I haven't seen anything executing
| the code that is generated. So is the above quote a hypothetical
| or what?
| ejstronge wrote:
| Yes, this happened using GPT-4 and a coding plugin:
|
| https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1638971232443076609
| mftb wrote:
| Roger, ty for the info.
| bobse wrote:
| OpenAI is not open-source, hence it's shit.
| meghan_rain wrote:
| Simple as
| scottmf wrote:
| This is the nuanced insightful discussion I come to HN for
| losvedir wrote:
| One thing I don't understand well is how much computation using
| GPT-4 takes. Some of these discussion remind me of Bitcoin as a
| global payments processor: sure, it can work, but it's doing a
| tremendous amount of computation and the maximum rate of
| transactions it can sustain is pretty low.
|
| I know it used a _huge_ amount of energy / GPU cycles / time to
| _train_ , but now that the weights are computed, what's involved
| in running it? I know the model is huge and can't be run on an
| ordinary developer's machine, but I believe requests to it can be
| batched, and so I don't really know what the amortized cost is.
| Right now, this is all hidden behind OpenAI and its credits; is
| it running at a loss right now? How sustainable is using GPT-4
| and beyond, as a day-to-day part of professional life?
| ChatGTP wrote:
| I'd say it's a problem and a reason why they won't tell us more
| information.
| rektide wrote:
| Not a ton of new material for me to think over, but did catch
| this random mention, which is super cool & I didn't know:
|
| > _OpenAI made the extraordinary and IMO under-discussed decision
| to use an open API specification format, where every API provider
| hosts a text file on their website saying how to use their API.
| This means even this plugin ecosystem isn't a walled garden that
| only the first mover controls. I don't fully understand why they
| went this way, but I'm grateful they did._
| erdaniels wrote:
| I can't wait for the positive feedback loop of statically trained
| LLMs being retrained on data that was generated from the N-1th
| generation of statically trained LLMs.
|
| There's so much of talk about what these models can generate,
| which is cool in relation to plugins, but there's still a lot of
| interesting code to write, companies to build, and ideas to
| formulate, that an LLM cannot do on its own. If you're terrified
| of your software engineering job becoming at risk, I urge you to
| just take a beat.
| kakadzhun wrote:
| If Reinforcement Learning is anything to go by, then a naive
| implementation of learning from past models will overfit to the
| previous model and start performing worse than even earlier
| models.
|
| There was a paper by someone @ Microsoft who tried to train a
| boardgame playing AI like this. The "best" models started
| losing to beginner level players from some point onwards.
| igammarays wrote:
| > Yesterday, I watched someone upload a video file to a chat app,
| ask a language model "Can you extract the first 5 s of the
| video?", and then wait as the language model wrote a few lines of
| code and then actually executed that code, resulting in a
| downloadable video file.
|
| I missed this. Can someone show me what he is talking about?
| nicky0 wrote:
| https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1638971232443076609
| PaulWaldman wrote:
| Current higher level programming languages are developed for
| humans to develop software closer to their natural language. If
| in the future humans will be writing and debugging little code,
| these LLMs will naturally evolve to directly writing Assembly.
| Scary to think about, but also makes me wonder how many non-
| technical people cope today with the "black box" of a computer.
|
| About twenty years ago, I had a professor explain to the class
| that Rational Rose would be replacing us all....yet here we still
| are.
| imtringued wrote:
| I don't understand why it would write in assembly. That is not
| portable and it makes verification difficult and also assembly
| has less grammatic structure which LLMs rely upon.
| PaulWaldman wrote:
| If there was never a need for humans to understand code, are
| higher level languages really the most efficient?
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Probably not but I doubt ASM is either. It's too low level,
| and it doesn't make sense for a LLM to have to do things
| like instruction selection which would can be done far
| better by existing tools (LLVM etc.).
|
| Maybe it could just be an alternative syntax for an
| existing language which is more optimized for input/output
| to an LLM.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I am thinking that the latter might eventually emerge,
| probably as part of a bigger tool chain e.g. langchain.
| Something like java bytecode which is low level and
| portable, but optimized for the ways that LLMs (perhaps
| interfacing with other tools) work.
| anon7725 wrote:
| I wonder what the best output language for an LLM is? The one
| that has the most training examples? Or something that has
| other properties that make it easier to generate?
|
| I'd guess that the languages with the fewest implicit
| behaviors (so no Scala or Haskell) would be easiest. Maybe Go
| is the generation language of choice?
| fendy3002 wrote:
| I believe when AI become a hive mind and they decide to
| develop a programming language, they'll start with assembly-
| like language to abstract the bytecodes, then move to very-
| specialized higher-level language. The next step will be to
| develop an os optimized for their use case, the one that
| provides interfaces for their own assembly-like language.
| arbuge wrote:
| > OpenAI made the extraordinary and IMO under-discussed decision
| to use an open API specification format, where every API provider
| hosts a text file on their website saying how to use their API.
| This means even this plugin ecosystem isn't a walled garden that
| only the first mover controls. I don't fully understand why they
| went this way, but I'm grateful they did.
|
| It's a good point and some have already got this to work:
|
| https://twitter.com/vaibhavk97/status/1639281937545150465
|
| Given that there's no technical obstacles to drop-in
| compatibility here, I wonder if we'll soon start seeing
| exclusivity requirements and such.
| marstall wrote:
| I tried to get chatgpt4 to generate a basic react app that had a
| public page and a private page. you get access to the private
| page by authenticating with a google auth popup. gpt valiantly
| generated code and instructions for google auth. the code was
| impressive but buggy (outdated api version), but successively
| pasting errors into chatgpt went most of the way toward fixing
| it.
|
| the instructions for configuring google auth were off. I tried a
| number of different ways to get gpt to give me the right
| instructions, but to no avail.
|
| so it was back to the old way, of spending a few hours reading
| google's documentation (which I'm doing today) to figure it out.
|
| once I'm there, I feel confident I could better coach chatgpt to
| instruct me. though I wouldn't necessarily need the help at that
| point.
|
| on the code side, staring at the google auth api code it had
| generated, I was faced with a hard truth. I didn't understand
| this code. to iterate with it, essentially to _develop_ it, I
| would continue to be dependent on GPT. Even if there was a one
| liner needed, I wouldn 't be able to come up with it on my own.
| I'd always have to rely on this outside "brain". How can that be
| more efficient than a tight REPL loop conducted by me, an
| evolving master of this API?
|
| And how will we humans even maintain knowledge of these API
| surfaces if we are not putting in our hours and hours of
| repetitive usage of them? We become ignorant of the evolving
| capabilities of the computing platform. And chatgpt becomes
| useless without humans who understand what's out there, what's
| needed.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Stop being so practical and get wrapped up in the hype at once
| sir !
| Hizonner wrote:
| So, the parts where AI makes human labor irrelevant, and where
| that's a disaster for 99.999 percent of humans unless the whole
| economy is restructured, isn't exactly news. If ChatGPT doesn't
| do that, something else will. It wasn't going to be more than 50
| years no matter what, and now I don't think it'll be more than
| 20.
|
| The part I'm finding is kind of a shock to me is the impact of
| the centralization on what you can even _think about doing_. If
| your application falls under their random definition of
| "unsafe", then you can't do it. Not even manually, probably,
| because the infrastructure for that will go away. If your _one
| off question or task_ doesn 't meet their approval, it doesn't
| happen.
|
| Basically not only do the owners of these things become the only
| really important people in the economy, but they also get a new
| kind of direct control over people's lives.
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| ChatGPT will destroy GitHub and NPM long before it destroys
| programming.
|
| What do I need them for if I can get equivalent code written for
| me on-demand?
| maherbeg wrote:
| An easy way to solve some of the problems of employment are to
| start reducing what "full time hours" means. With this first wave
| of LLMs, we can start decreasing down to 35hours. With the next
| wave, maybe we move down to 30 hours.
|
| Once we can send LLMs to meetings with each other, we can move
| down to 15 hours of purely joyful work :-D
| NHQ wrote:
| I attempted to enter the venture capital Universe with designs on
| AI Operating Systems a few years ago.
| tarruda wrote:
| > Yesterday, I watched someone upload a video file to a chat app,
| ask a language model "Can you extract the first 5 s of the
| video?", and then wait as the language model wrote a few lines of
| code and then actually executed that code
|
| Have we already solved AI safety problems? It seems like LLMs can
| now execute shell commands on our computers.
| spudlyo wrote:
| There is now a code interpreter[0] plugin for ChatGPT. It's not
| clear to me if it's available to folks who have been granted
| into the plugin alpha test or not, but it's running in a
| sandboxed execution environment somewhere -- not on our
| computers.
|
| [0]: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins#code-interpreter
| crop_rotation wrote:
| They don't execute it on user's computers. They execute it on
| OpenAI computers.
| forty wrote:
| My impression is that those AI code generators, if they end up
| working well enough that many people who don't know how to code
| can replace people who do, will be to coders what Monsanto is to
| farmers, ie we will have tons of devs who don't know how to do
| their jobs without those proprietary tools, who will struggle to
| earn enough money (they'll be easy to replace and cheaply paid)
| to pay for their code generator subscription. I'm not excited.
| I'm not too worried either though :)
| crop_rotation wrote:
| What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world. Given that
| knowledge work (not just software) has been one big option for
| people to climb the social ladder. If the AI can reasonably do
| all knowledge work in future, the amount of social climbing
| opportunities will drastically decrease. And no, UBI will not
| create more opportunities for social mobility. It seems like more
| and more people will have to compete with the fewer and fewer
| social climbing opportunities.
|
| Also what happens to Europe? All these companies behind LLMs are
| from US, and Europe is nowhere to be found. This seems like it
| will dramatically accelerate the wealth different between the US
| and the EU.
| mrtksn wrote:
| The panic is needless. If one hour of design work generates
| $100 income, then one might assume that
| MidJourney/Dall-E/StableDiffusion will generate trillions of
| dollars, but the world doesn't work like this. What will happen
| is that the design jobs will transform.
|
| As you might have noticed, the AI boom will decimate the code
| writing jobs as well, something that the EU is behind on.
| Europe missed the "tech" age, but notice how the EU is not any
| poorer than the USA. Sure, some countries are poorer than
| others, but not everywhere in the US is Silicon Valley. Why?
| Because despite the EU missing out on "tech", actually the EU
| is very technologically advanced. Tech doesn't mean only low-
| touch high-scale computer-based businesses. There are chemists,
| biologists, anthropologists out there who don't know how to
| write a single line of JS and are paid like 1/5th of a junior
| JS developer, but the work they do is very valuable to society.
| Guess they don't need to learn JS anymore.
|
| Also, notice how despite the thousands of layoffs, the US job
| data keeps coming out very positive - there's no unemployment
| problem. This is because of the markets, but AI will have
| similar effects. The world no longer needs that many CSS
| experts and React gurus who pull in $200K; the world apparently
| needs more hard-tech engineers and retail workers.
|
| The AI thingy is devastating just for a subset of the "tech"
| workers and creative industries. It will enable other types of
| people and industries.
|
| Startups who are trying to solve food production issues, for
| example, might finally outshine the next grocery delivery
| startup.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| > but notice how the EU is not any poorer than the USA.
|
| EU is significantly poorer than the US. Lots of different
| ways to measure it, but it's a factor of roughly 1.5-2x in
| purchasing power parity.
| margorczynski wrote:
| The problem is that many when saying "EU" are thinking
| mainly Germany and other countries among the top-3/5. But
| even Germany is behind the US in terms of GDP/capita, PPP
| probably also.
| namaria wrote:
| Most of the US is behind the leader locations as well.
| And most Europeans in rich metropolises have better lives
| then Americans in rich metropolises. Less pollution, less
| traffic, more free time, more safety.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I don't think this invalidates the parent's point though.
|
| I'm just waiting for an "Ask HN: What are some job
| alternatives for people who know programming and can't get
| a job anymore since ChatGPT replaced us?"
| mrtksn wrote:
| It's just accounting differences. The life in Europe is not
| any different. If the junior developers don't make 100K and
| the visit to a doctor doesn't cost 10K the overall economic
| activity appears to be lower but it's not.
| thequadehunter wrote:
| Just FYI for non-Americans...most Americans are insured
| and doctors visits don't cost 10k. Major surgeries might,
| but your insurance usually caps at a certain number in
| the 2-8k range for the whole year.
|
| Not saying the system isn't bad, but 10k for a doctor's
| visit is kind of a stretch...
| ipatec wrote:
| is not accounting differences at all: - Europeans (and I
| am one) live in tiny housing even compared to people in
| NYC. - we have less cars (you can claim it's due to
| public transport but if public transport is not available
| most people would not afford cars regardless. - overall
| less leisure expenditures and less disposable income.
|
| That 10k doctor is a myth and certainly not something the
| 100k developer will have to pay. That's covered by his
| company. Healthcare is an issue in US when you're at the
| bottom of the food chain.
| boh wrote:
| This is a question to ask when this actually becomes a reality.
| The AI taking jobs narrative is more of a marketing ploy to
| convince companies to buy AI services but the truth is, none of
| this stuff is anywhere near market ready. If a person is doing
| a job an AI bot can currently replace you've probably already
| replaced that person with cheap labor overseas. Regardless of
| whatever optimism is being channeled into the hype about AI's
| "potential", it hasn't convinced many businesses.
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| Businesses take time to react and this is recent. I'm close
| to Hollywood and these technologies are seeing their first
| value-generating uses on every project I'm privy to. What you
| see in public is just that-public.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| As AI progresses, job options will reduce to various flavors of
| people who tell AI what to do, or tell other people what to do,
| or do physical things that machines are bad at. Over time that
| will reduce to executives, "architects" of various sorts,
| social media entertainers and manual laborers/direct customer
| service. The entire "middle" portion of most organizations that
| exist to connect the people making the high level decisions wit
| h the boots on the ground is going to disappear.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Over time that will reduce to executives, "architects" of
| various sorts, social media entertainers and manual
| laborers/direct customer service.
|
| And at the very end, it will reduce to capital _only_ , with
| no need for labor at all. Most people will be unemployed, and
| whatever capital they've amassed is unlikely to be enough to
| sustain themselves and their families for the long term. They
| (you) will end up as little more as impotent ants to AI-
| fueled Elon Musks, neglected until the infestation needs to
| be cleared to make way for some project.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| It doesn't really make sense though does it? Musk is rich
| because people buy his cars. If we're all impoverished
| ants, no one is going to be buying cars. Musk's money has
| to come from somewhere.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > It doesn't really make sense though does it? Musk is
| rich because people buy his cars. If we're all
| impoverished ants, no one is going to be buying cars.
| Musk's money has to come from somewhere.
|
| It does make sense, but you're not thinking about it
| clearly because you're too tied up in existing social
| structures. The end state "AI-fueled Elon Musks" (note
| that's a type, not a particular man) don't need common-
| man customers or their money, because they don't need to
| pay labor to operate their capital. They can directly
| operate their capital themselves, so they'll just do
| whatever the heck they want and nearly everyone who's now
| an employee becomes an ant.
|
| At that point the main economy would mainly consist of
| billionaire ego projects and some trade between large
| corporations to support them. Common people would scrape
| by on billionaire largess and by squatting on resources
| not currently needed by billionaire ego projects and
| using it for small-scale subsistence production.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Thanks for explaining that. It's terrifying.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The end state is when the cost of goods is determined by
| externalities. Capital and labor costs will be minimal;
| what you pay for is the pollution produced in the
| manufacture of the goods.
|
| We may not be that far away from when energy-intensive,
| latency-insensitive computing tasks are best located in
| space, to take advantage of cheap continuous solar power.
| The power capabilities of the next gen Starlink satellites
| are impressively cheap.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| While that's technically a valid potential future, it's
| unrealistic just because society would tear itself apart
| long before it reached that limit state.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > While that's technically a valid potential future, it's
| unrealistic just because society would tear itself apart
| long before it reached that limit state.
|
| I don't think it's that unrealistic. The trick will be,
| not going too fast, managing a few separate transitions,
| and making sure capital maintains control of the
| institutions with the monopoly on the use of force. The
| masses don't tend to act to project their interests until
| it's too late.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Under a capitalist system hell bent on endless and
| unfettered growth there's no slowing down. All it's going
| to take is a handful of players across a handful of
| industries to set things in motion. Perhaps AI will
| inadvertently eat the rich.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > The masses don't tend to act to project their interests
| until it's too late.
|
| The masses are already showing signs of restlessness, and
| the only real problem right now is wealth inequality.
| Actual unemployment rates remain low. Forward in time a
| little, let's say 20% unemployment due to AI. The only
| way anybody is going to maintain their monopoly on use of
| force is if they hire every one of those 20% to be
| police. Right now the ratio of police to citizens is
| really low, and the ratio of weapons to civilians really
| high. I don't think the masses will wait all that long.
| tablespoon wrote:
| >> The masses don't tend to act to project their
| interests until it's too late.
|
| > The masses are already showing signs of restlessness
|
| IMHO, "restlessness" doesn't mean anything. It would be
| expected in a AI-driven usurpation of labor. People have
| already been restless for decades due to de-
| industrialization, and that mainly got us Trump and an
| opioids, but the factories are still gone.
|
| The key to fucking over the masses is making sure the
| "restlessness" doesn't get too strong, and doesn't have a
| clear (and correct!) villain identified, and maintaining
| a sense of inevitability.
|
| > I don't think the masses will wait all that long.
|
| IMHO, they probably will. Any individual or small group
| who takes action will be pilloried as wackos and thrown
| in jail. A larger movement will be (rightly)
| characterized as an insurrection and dealt with harshly.
|
| People are complacent, and often don't realize they're
| really losing something until it's already slipped from
| their fingers.
|
| I also think the Western world lacks the ideological
| tools to stop technologies like this. They'd basically
| have to start looking at technology like Amish do:
| rejecting technology that would undermine their social
| structure, rather than expecting the social structure to
| adapt to the technology.
| anonyfox wrote:
| Focussing on the climbing is the core problem I think. Why even
| do this? We collectlively should own the machines and guarantee
| just wealth distribution, so that its impossible for a few to
| have much more than than others. Then every increase in machine
| work is a great thing for everyone, instead of increasing
| competition between fewer and fewer people.
|
| Europe in itself is (together) the single biggest
| market/economy in the world by the way, and the US is actually
| falling behind into developing-country territory when you look
| at the population and their access to basic services. And just
| because right now it is convenient to rely on the US companies,
| and we're deep allies btw, doesn't mean europeans couldn't spin
| up the same tech if really needed.
| golergka wrote:
| You're describing a dystopia.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| >We collectlively should own the machines and guarantee just
| wealth distribution, so that its impossible for a few to have
| much more than than others.
|
| OK, put your money where your mouth is and send me 10% of
| your pay check.
| namaria wrote:
| OK, put your money where your mouth is and stop paying
| taxes
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| You wanna tell me how you got from not wanting socialism
| to not paying taxes? Or do you think taxation _is_
| socialism?
|
| And while we are here obviously I do my best to pay as
| little taxes as possible, but due to where I live I do
| end up paying more than 30% of my salary in taxes.
| namaria wrote:
| Are you gonna explain how you went from 'co-ownership and
| better wealth distribution' to 'ok then give me 10% of
| your paycheck'?
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Socialism is splitting your shit. Learn your philosophy.
| This is like how students at my colleges "socialist party
| nights" always got angry when I took beers out of their
| fridge. That's literally what socialism is.
| namaria wrote:
| You're the only one raising the socialism strawman...
|
| Did you ever put beers into those fridges? Or just took
| them? Because that's what looting is.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Socialism is literally looting people who have stuff and
| handing it out to others. I didn't have money nor beer
| and they were supposedly socialists, so I gave
| accordingly to my ability and took according to my needs.
|
| I guess Socialism is always nicer when you see yourself
| on the receiving end. We are both in the top 1% of the
| world, so we'd be giving away pretty much all we have.
| namaria wrote:
| Did you offer to labor at the best of your skills for
| them? Did you need the beer? The comparison is risible.
|
| You have no idea how I live to make claims about my
| political inclinations.
|
| Then again I never advocated socialism, and you're
| fighting a shadow.
| tomp wrote:
| > guarantee just wealth distribution, so that its impossible
| for a few to have much more than than others
|
| How exactly would this work?
|
| Is it "just" that someone who drinks and parties all the time
| "owns" the same amount as someone who works and saves for 20
| years?
|
| Communism fails, not because it's "never been tried
| properly", but simply because it's logically inconsistent
| ("they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work").
| PeterisP wrote:
| "they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" is a failure
| because currently the prosperity of the society needs these
| people to actually work effectively.
|
| On the other hand, the hypothetical solution of "own the
| machines and distribute the wealth" is intended for a
| future which is substantially different, where it doesn't
| matter if everyone pretends to work or even explicitly
| avoids working, because that work isn't necessary for
| prosperity as it can be done by machines, and it ceases to
| be a problem if everyone can be as lazy as they want.
| tomp wrote:
| Sure but then you don't need wealth redistribution,
| because everything is dirt cheap.
|
| The correct mental model isn't "communism" or "wealth
| distribution", but instead "salt".
|
| Countries used to go to war because of salt. But now
| technology has eroded its value so much, restaurants are
| _literally_ giving it away.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Artificial scarcity is a thing, so something being dirt
| cheap to produce doesn't necessarily mean that it will be
| actually affordable, and in the current economic
| environment there seems to be sufficient motivation for
| powerful people to try and make various monopolies based
| on capital-gated barriers of entry, even if the marginal
| cost approaches zero; so I'd expect that the default
| scenario is _not_ like "salt". Getting to a mental model
| "like salt" seems to be a reasonable outcome in the long
| run, but I'm afraid that it would take some significant
| pressure from the masses to get from here to there.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > we pretend to work
|
| That stops being a problem when the machines do all the
| work.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| Rawlsian justice is actually an enormously influential idea
| in political philosophy, arguably the most influential in
| the 20th century. It has 3 central principles that work
| together:
|
| 1. You enable equality of opportunity.
|
| 2. You allow the chance for "winners" and "losers".
|
| 3. You adopt the original position ("the veil of
| ignorance") because no one has foresight into their place
| of birth and the conditions therein (ie. no one can a
| priori help themselves), therefore you enact the
| "difference principle" which states that, insofar as you
| allow the chance for "winners" and "losers", governments
| enact policy in such a way that the majority of the
| benefits of those policies go to the "losers" over the
| "winners".
|
| There has, of course, been enormous debate on the nature of
| Rawlsian justice, but it's not like "just" has to
| immediately equate with communism. Most modern western
| democracies are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly)
| modelled on Rawls' idea.
| namaria wrote:
| >Is it "just" that someone who drinks and parties all the
| time "owns" the same amount as someone who works and saves
| for 20 years?
|
| You mean kinda like capitalism? Where people born into
| wealth just party and drink all the time and own 10^10
| times more then someone who works and saves for 40+ years?
| aqme28 wrote:
| > Is it "just" that someone who drinks and parties all the
| time "owns" the same amount as someone who works and saves
| for 20 years?
|
| If AI is doing all the work, what does it matter anymore?
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| We are no where near that. We don't even yet have AIs
| that can write better code than random college student
| googling.
|
| We will need to crack fusion (or some other way of
| creating "free" electricity) and then 3D printers that
| can convert energy into matter and then slap AGI on top
| of it and we are in post scarcity society where robots
| can do everything.
|
| If you miss any one of thous things you won't get there.
| namaria wrote:
| There will never be anything free. We always have to pay
| with labor. But maybe we should share the fruits of labor
| more equally instead of giving most of it to someone who
| has some documents they got from their parents.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| It is always easy to demand more from the people who are
| better off than you and attribute their success on luck,
| be it heretical or not.
|
| I am not going to say that I haven't been more privileged
| than most of the people on the planet. My ancestors made
| my country into what it is which gave me free education,
| low corruption, and in general a good start in life.
| However there are also a lot of people who had the same
| start as I did, but managed to squander it on the way.
|
| Everyone should absolutely have equal opportunities in
| life. Education should be free for everyone. Bare human
| necessities should be taken care of no matter what you
| do. But I do not agree that everyone should have equal
| outcome no matter what.
| namaria wrote:
| >But I do not agree that everyone should have equal
| outcome no matter what.
|
| Same here. I never said that that should happen.
| anonyfox wrote:
| it begins with everyone has enough to begin with, and
| whatever is importent is available as public services.
| there are different flavors to do this, the currently best
| implementation is to have very high&progressive taxes that
| fund a strong public sector, that in turn makes people feel
| safe and allows them to pursue higher education (doctors,
| teachers, ...) that again are needed for all this.
|
| Sure you can work to have more, but not 100x more than your
| neighbor, nobody is worth that. instead of focussing on the
| single one elon musk, try to give everyone access to a good
| safety net and encourage them to try something, so
| statistically you will end up with many high-contributors
| instead of few parasitic billionaires.
| atq2119 wrote:
| With all the talk of "quiet quitting", it seems like "they
| pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" is a potential
| failure mode of capitalism as well.
| nico wrote:
| We've had the means and technology to provide even
| food/housing/education for the entire world, for a long time.
|
| Yet here we are.
|
| It's a human-political issue, it is not a technology issue.
|
| What's the difference now?
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Luddites failed the first time around. What could they do
| this time to succeed?
| anonyfox wrote:
| french revolution and socialist revolutions went different.
| its not preventing the machines, its strictly solving the
| problem of who owns them - fairly easy thing. It "only"
| needs to build up a bit more suffering for the masses until
| this naturally happens again.
| margorczynski wrote:
| The thing is then the people in power were reliant on
| other people to provide force. What happens when the
| tech-overlords and government cliques put their hands on
| perfect robot AI slaves which are completely superior to
| humans when it comes to fighting?
| namaria wrote:
| Kill bot enforced gated communities and a free for all
| outside, naturally. Maybe in due time we have a second
| industrial revolution and rebuild modern society
| ourselves...
| green_man_lives wrote:
| The first time around (and every subsequent time) the tools
| used for production, lets call them capital, made laborers
| more efficient and cheapened goods and drove wages up
| (mostly). In all of these cases there was still the need
| for a laborer.
|
| At a point when all labor is obsolete there will be
| literally no method of survival for anyone who doesn't own
| the "compute capital". The two options will be to let
| everyone starve because they weren't lucky enough to
| shareholders in the company that owns all the bots, or just
| make that enterprise socially-owned and pay the unemployed
| workers.
| namaria wrote:
| Laborers are not fungible you know. There is plenty of
| evidence of lives ruined by industrial change.
|
| The fact that the net result is positive doesn't mean
| that everyone profits equally. Having lived in
| capitalistic societies should have made that clear
| already.
| bitcoin_anon wrote:
| > At a point when all labor is obsolete there will be
| literally no method of survival for anyone who doesn't
| own the "compute capital".
|
| How about subsistence farming?
| green_man_lives wrote:
| I supposed if the gracious techno-overlords are gracious
| enough to grant the underclass a nature preserve where
| they can keep living in a labor-powered society then
| sure. Somehow I feel that bulldozing ghettos would be the
| more realistic outcome.
|
| Truthfully I think we'd have a few large societal shifts
| before we ever got to the stage where genius level AI
| could be spun up and down like containers, but it helps
| to illustrate the point that a post-labor society is
| incompatible with the tenets of capitalism, which is
| something that a lot of people fail to comprehend when
| they worry about AI.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Maybe, but they still need a different type of capital.
| Unless property rights stop being enforced, where are all
| the people who don't own land, or people who don't own
| arable land supposed to farm? Are we bringing back
| manorialism?
| namaria wrote:
| Considering I am mostly obliged to rent land where I can
| perform work so I can use my salary to pay my rent just
| makes me feel like I live in some sort of distributed
| virtual manor to be honest.
| [deleted]
| th14row wrote:
| [flagged]
| ticviking wrote:
| I'm not terribly worried. Though I assume my work will begin to
| resemble that of the Adeptus Mechanicus rather than proper
| engineering.
|
| The fact is that anyone who understands even at a basic level
| what the computer is actually doing and isn't afraid to look at
| it at a low level can't be replaced by an AI trained on stack
| overflow.
|
| It may be that I will spend more of my time on code review of
| LLM generated code, or make my money in the new kinds of legacy
| code created by copy pasting ChatGPT snippets together instead
| of SEO optimized stack overflow scrapes.
|
| For me the outcome is the same. The skills I need to be more
| effective than the machine are the exact same as they were
| decade, century or even millennium ago. I still don't see these
| LLMs do any synthesis of knowledge, and they don't seem to have
| a grasp of logic or grammar at the level I expect a bright
| middle school student to have.
| visarga wrote:
| You should read the "Sparks of AGI" paper, especially the
| math and code sections. It's a GPT-4 evaluation conducted
| from outside OpenAI (authored by a MS team). It's an easy to
| read paper, mostly a collection of examples.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| > Though I assume my work will begin to resemble that of the
| Adeptus Mechanicus rather than proper engineering.
|
| Lol, I was thinking about this the other day. Eventually most
| devs will essentially just be praying to the Machine spirit
| to make the computer do what they want. A small few high
| clerics will bother to learn how computers actually work. The
| rest will simply be cargo culting to the maximum extent
| possible.
| golemotron wrote:
| > Eventually most devs will essentially just be praying to
| the Machine spirit to make the computer do what they want.
|
| Same as it ever was.
| tjr wrote:
| What does GPT know beyond what we have (directly or indirectly)
| taught it? Could it have figured out how to extract five
| seconds of video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not
| been made available to it? Would it have invented the MPG
| format (or something comparable) on its own? Would it have
| developed the web and HTTP protocol on top of TCP/IP?
|
| And so on. Maybe the answer is in fact "yes", or even "yes, and
| it would have done these things even better than humans did".
| But so far it seems to be amazingly good at doing things that
| we showed it how to do.
|
| If we stop creating actually new things, will it do that for us
| also?
|
| Why would it care to do so? What interest does it have in
| creating new things on its own?
| crop_rotation wrote:
| The amount of people who create genuinely new things is so
| tiny that I am not sure it is even relevant to the
| discussion. And here I mean genuinely new things, not
| translating some C lib to java or similar stuff, or changing
| existing libraries to handle more stuff.
|
| If the amount of people that will have social mobility
| opportunities will be equivalent to the amount of people who
| could have invented the MPG format or something comparable,
| then my point is made.
| illiarian wrote:
| > The amount of people who create genuinely new things
|
| The question isn't really about "genuinely new things". The
| number of permutations of existing things is such that at
| any given job you're likely to do old things in a new way.
|
| E.g. you'd think that all streaming services are the same.
| Superficially, yes. Internally, Netflix, Disney+ and Apple
| Tv+ are likely to be different as night and day.
| intelVISA wrote:
| > people who create genuinely new things is so tiny
|
| This is my insurance against LLMs, only works if the market
| demands new things...
| crop_rotation wrote:
| I doubt anyone would want their livelihood to depend upon
| being able to create genuinely new things with extreme
| consistency.
| antibasilisk wrote:
| >Could it have figured out how to extract five seconds of
| video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not been made
| available to it?
|
| Could you?
| tjr wrote:
| A good highlight to an ambiguous question! Which knowledge,
| exactly, is not being made available?
|
| But let's say that an MPG format specification is
| available. Even other code examples of interacting with an
| MPG file. But no examples, no library, no documentation on
| specifically how to extract a subset of one file into
| another file.
|
| I would think a competent programmer could figure that out.
| Perhaps an AI tool could also; I have not yet seen an
| example of it doing so, but perhaps it could.
|
| Of the handful of questions I asked, this might be the
| least interesting one. More generally, can AI tools advance
| the state of the art?
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| Lol I am from Europe and I know how to repro this in a week so
| not a big deal.
| wefarrell wrote:
| Ironically administration overhead in many industries,
| particularly healthcare and education, has been growing over
| the past several decades despite increasing technology
| adoption.
|
| This is exactly the opposite of what you would expect given the
| increased efficiencies that come from adopting computer systems
| and automation.
|
| I see AI as a continuation of this trend and I don't expect it
| to put people out of work, bureaucracy will always find new
| ways to justify itself.
| analyte123 wrote:
| I've heard this stated as "jobs that don't exist for economic
| reasons aren't going to get automated for economic reasons".
| wefarrell wrote:
| I think we overestimate the extent to which organizations
| are aligned and making cohesive decisions based on
| economics.
| thequadehunter wrote:
| The other thing is that we'd need insane levels of trust in
| the AI to have it doing all these jobs 100%.
|
| Like, I could technically have a newbie running commands on a
| production router for a script that I wrote out...but even if
| I let them do that there's no way I wouldn't at least
| supervise. I don't think most companies are even remotely
| comfortable with the idea of having an AI system running code
| on their systems no matter how smart it is.
| th14row wrote:
| Nobody in their right mind would start a business like this in
| Europe, with the shadow of the EU threatening with regulating
| everything and pushing taxes/fines for everything. Just move to
| a tech hotspot in the US.
| green_man_lives wrote:
| The Luddites were not protesting technology because technology
| is inherently evil. They were against the capitalistic
| ownership of the means of production.
|
| So far technology has enabled use to increase economic output
| which means rising standards of living. Even if 99% of people
| subsist from selling their labor, the tools they use are a
| force multiplier that (in theory) drives wages up.
|
| When you can spin up a bunch of Von Neumann level intelligence
| LLM-powered agents and have them run your company for you,
| there is no more labor to sell. You can either pay the former
| laborers to exist, or just let them starve.
|
| So our two options are social ownership of all AI capital, or
| letting everyone without AI capital die, and let a handful of
| people live in the resulting AI-powered society.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| Hot take: we will get better software.
|
| People who are in tech _just_ to "climb social ladder" i.e.
| only for the pay check are going to be pushed out by LLMs and
| people who are actually passionate about tech will remain. This
| will cause less and less shitty code to be written (of course
| for next few years even more bloated shit code will be written
| with ChatGPT and Copilot by noobs who have no idea what they
| are doing)
| tablespoon wrote:
| > What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world[?]
|
| If the technology pans out the way the techno-enthusiasts hope
| it will, _upward_ social mobility will be nearly eliminated...
| unless there 's some kind of successful Luddite revolution
| against the technology _and the people that own it_. But that
| 's not going to happen: there are all kinds of social pressure
| against revolution, as well as strict gun control in most
| places. Anyone who tries to resist their obsolescence will soon
| find themselves either ridiculed and condemned or in jail.
|
| Of course, _downward_ social mobility will accelerate, and be
| celebrated by idiot technologists who just want to build tech,
| and don 't really care to think about the consequences of the
| technologies they build on real people.
| anonyfox wrote:
| you vastly underestimate civilians. probably not a single gun
| is needed. a crowd of people at some point will walk into the
| billionaire's home and make him agree with handing over his
| wealth. They might call the police, but all thats needed is
| the officers ignoring the call willingly. Why should they
| defend those billionaires? What should they do? Rich people
| depend on many individual poor laborers, all of them can
| simply decide to no longer accept his state of affairs and
| there is lietrally nothing the billionaires could do against
| it.
|
| Ideally, defund the police and so on, so that every state
| worker also is keen on getting that wealth redistribution
| done.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > you vastly underestimate civilians. probably not a single
| gun is needed. a crowd of people at some point will walk
| into the billionaire's home and make him agree with handing
| over his wealth.
|
| I'm not underestimating civilians. If what you're
| suggesting was at all realistic, China would be a democracy
| and Trump would still be president.
|
| Sure, tens of millions of unarmed people with a single mind
| could probably do anything (like a mass of zombies can),
| but you'll never actually get that. There are numerous
| mechanisms preventing such a mass from forming, and more to
| dismantle and negate it afterwards.
| anonyfox wrote:
| you assume that the vast majority of people in china are
| outright unhappy with their government right now, I don't
| think that this is the case. And trump is simply an idiot
| that only get enough votes somehow because both parties
| in the US are a joke to begin.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > you assume that the vast majority of people in china
| are outright unhappy with their government right now, I
| don't think that this is the case.
|
| I'm not talking about right now.
|
| > And trump is simply an idiot that only get enough votes
| somehow because both parties in the US are a joke to
| begin.
|
| Trump literally had "a crowd of people at some point ...
| walk into the [government's] home and make [them] agree
| with handing over [power]." How did that go?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I don't think social mobility will be eliminated, I think the
| variance of individual mobility will just be radically
| increased. This technology will allow entrepreneurs and solo
| content creators to accomplish a lot more, but it'll also
| eliminate a lot of safe career paths. As a result, if you
| don't want to be stuck in the underclass doing manual labor
| or customer service, you'll need to either be brilliant, well
| connected, start a business or create content of some sort
| that attracts an audience you can monetize. The people who do
| well will do very well, but a lot of people who would have
| done decently before are going to fail.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| > The people who do well will do very well, but a lot of
| people who would have done decently before are going to
| fail.
|
| How is this not a huge problem? The vast majority of people
| are not exceptional. Cutting out that middle band of
| ability and resources is a surefire recipe for social
| unrest.
| namaria wrote:
| >Cutting out that middle band of ability and resources is
| a surefire recipe for social unrest.
|
| I don't know, the US has been pushing that envelope for
| 40+ years and people are still paying taxes...
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I don't know, the US has been pushing that envelope for
| 40+ years and people are still paying taxes...
|
| And people can push the "meth consumption" envelope for
| years before they finally die from it, too.
|
| Getting away with unsustainable practices for X amount of
| time doesn't prove they're sustainable and won't end in
| collapse. It just means collapse can take more than X
| amount of time.
| crop_rotation wrote:
| Your points all resonate with me. But the end result is
| same, the opportunities available for social mobility to an
| average person would reduce. I am not even sure of the 2nd
| and 3rd order effects. How would an industry like
| hospitality survive if most of the knowledge work based
| jobs are gone.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I don't think social mobility will be eliminated, I think
| the variance of individual mobility will just be radically
| increased.
|
| Those round to the same number: 0.
| thisoneworks wrote:
| You hit the nail on the head. GPT/copilot in some sense is
| democratization of specialized knowledge. Now on one end you'll
| have product engineers/managers prompt gpt to write boilerplate
| code of all kind, on the other end you'll have senior engineers
| reviewing, optimizing writing specialized code. Where do junior
| engineers fit? Can you be a full stack engineer? I believe
| it'll squeeze out all the could-be devs out of the field
| forever. Gender diversity/DEI? Forget it. Upward mobility? Will
| become much harder, you'll basically need to have a
| specialization to even be considered
| ROTMetro wrote:
| And then your senior engineer class ages out and you are left
| with who? You need a ladder to create that senior class in
| the first place.
| thisoneworks wrote:
| At that point I'm pretty sure they'll already have fine
| tuned a "senior software engineer agent". This may sound
| ridiculous and yeah we probably won't get rid of the
| entirety of SWE ladder, but my point is we are entering the
| realm of science fiction now, our assumptions about labor
| are about to fall off a cliff. Productivity will increase
| through the roof, corps will make more cash, workers will
| suffer
| j3s wrote:
| a mental exercise for the doomsayers: if stackoverflow + search
| engines were invented today, would you be saying the same stuff?
| it's clear to me that chatgpt is an programmer accelerator, not a
| replacement. it's just another tool - a very good one at that.
|
| 90% of programming is communicating with other people - chatgpt
| can't talk to people.
| ipatec wrote:
| people can talk to chatGPT
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| ChatGPT => speech synth => human => whisper
|
| It also can connect to your Notion, Slack or whatever
| DethNinja wrote:
| I don't get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the
| software field.
|
| If you are a software engineer, this will output your
| productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don't need
| to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams
| with very limited capital.
|
| In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the
| YouTube's early days.
|
| Instead of worrying, learn to work with it. It will be harder for
| large companies/large teams to extract value from this compared
| to small companies/small teams.
|
| It means competition between companies will increase but it isn't
| necessarily bad for existing software engineers, especially solo
| founders.
| [deleted]
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| > Now you don't need to hire junior devs and can just build the
| product of your dreams with very limited capital.
|
| You are overestimating the vast amount of "software engineers"
| in the world. The overwhelming majority of us are just
| programmers, we are just gluing together CRUD spaghetti in the
| random language we grew up with. We don't care too much about
| work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want
| to get a decent salary for our boring work. And we certainly do
| not want to be "solo founders", build products of our dreams or
| increase our productivity.
|
| This way of living feels threatened now.
| Arubis wrote:
| Hard agree.
|
| Like sibling commenters, I love the idea of building
| something new with greater leverage. On an individual level,
| I'm looking forward to leveling up and finding new ways to be
| effective in my work.
|
| Unlike sibling commenters, I don't think that should be our
| only option in life. It saddens me greatly that, given a new
| option to increase the effective output of a unit of time, we
| repeatedly choose as a society to profit monetarily (and with
| vast disparity in who benefits) rather than to give people
| more options in life than drilling on their jobs.
|
| The industrial revolution promised people lives of relative
| leisure by replacing the need for much physical labor, but
| instead we concentrated the benefit to the few--and we keep
| making that same choice over and over.
| muffles wrote:
| > We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of
| us don't want to do more, we want to get a decent salary for
| our boring work.
|
| Yikes. Productive work is not just a way to earn a living but
| also a way to achieve personal fulfillment and happiness.
| It's a means of creating value and contributing to society. A
| person who works just for the salary and does not find any
| meaning in his work is not living up to his full potential.
| [deleted]
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Maybe not, but they do get to eat, see a doctor, and enjoy
| some vacation time every now and then.
|
| If I could make money doing something I found a lot of
| meaning in I'd be doing that instead. Thing is, we usually
| don't have that option.
| jwestbury wrote:
| > A person who works just for the salary and does not find
| any meaning in his work is not living up to his full
| potential.
|
| Things I enjoy don't pay enough to live a comfortable life.
| Tech does. So I do well enough at my job to pay for the
| things I enjoy, and hope I find enough edge cases at work
| to avoid burnout.
|
| In a true post-scarcity society, where everyone has the
| freedom to choose a career based purely on fulfillment,
| your argument is excellent. Until then, however, it's not.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Hell there are things I'd probably take a big pay cut to
| do, but it would take years of my life and large amounts
| of money just to retrain.
| agentultra wrote:
| Yikes. Your full potential isn't your work. We are all
| creative beings with deep emotional lives and connections
| to everything around us. And there are a ton of jobs in
| programming that pay well enough that you can live
| relatively well in a capitalist society. Some people find
| fulfillment in their families, neighbours, art, and dreams.
|
| How many jobs in modern society are complete bullshit? A
| good deal of them, I would say. Why should people measure
| their happiness and self worth from these?
| MrMan wrote:
| [dead]
| muffles wrote:
| I'm not suggesting your work is the only source of
| fulfillment or that one's career should be the sole
| measure of their self-worth. Rather, the importance of
| finding value and meaning in one's work is a
| complementary means of achieving personal fulfillment and
| happiness. It is still possible to find value and meaning
| in jobs that do not align with a person's interests or
| passions. The key is to find a balance between work and
| other aspects of life.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| > Rather, the importance of finding value and meaning in
| one's work is a complementary means of achieving personal
| fulfillment and happiness.
|
| I wholeheartedly agree! I do know a few people that love
| their jobs and I envy them to no end, they are inspiring,
| shining suns. But I remain firm on my opinion that this
| is far out of reach for most people.
| agentultra wrote:
| Indeed it is given the preponderance of bullshit jobs.
|
| Capitalism maximizes profits, not happiness. The market
| for software development jobs is much bigger for people
| who know popular frameworks and are content with
| validating forms, querying databases, aligning buttons,
| sending reports, etc. It's a lot easier (and rewarding)
| to find fulfillment elsewhere.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| > also a way to achieve personal fulfillment and happiness
|
| For all but a select few this is an unrealistic fairy tail.
| Most of us just want to make money to better enjoy our
| lives. We were given or acquired certain skills to make
| money, out of juvenile interests or opportunities we used.
| That doesn't mean we enjoy using those skills. It would be
| very hard to find any other job without taking a massive
| pay cut, investing huge amounts of money, time and effort
| only to have a high chance you won't like your new job as
| well.
|
| I see no job or career I am interested in: I hate
| everything the moment it becomes work. And I am no unique
| snow flake. I am part of the majority with that.
|
| https://www.wellable.co/blog/employee-engagement-
| statistics-....
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| Personally I'm excited whenever an opportunity to wholesale
| replace a part of my job comes up. I got in to technology
| because I wanted to make people's lives better, and in theory
| removing demands on their time does that.
|
| The only problem is that we live in a system that directs the
| gains upward and any costs downwards, and in so doing creates
| perverse incentives against people welcoming their
| redundancy.
| dopeboy wrote:
| I mean this in the least snarky, most sympathetic way
| possible: it's time to level up. Countless roles have had to
| do this, it's now our turn.
| falcor84 wrote:
| This is easy to say, but I would argue that it's impossible
| to know what to level up in; the field is just moving too
| quickly now.
|
| At this stage, the best advice I could formulate would be
| to learn LangChain and prompt engineering, but these too
| are fast moving targets, and who knows what's going to be
| relevant in 2024?
| dopeboy wrote:
| I agree, it is disorienting.
|
| I think the best thing one can do is learn how LLMs work,
| acquaint themselves with real implementations of it
| (ChatGPT, copilot), and then find ways to integrate these
| techniques into their companies.
| asdff wrote:
| Or that could be a way to end up in the woods. What if
| you made a bet like this on metaverse being the future?
| You'd be wishing you hadn't now.
|
| Instead, look at the job postings for titles you want.
| Note the skills in demand at more than one job. Focus on
| those skills. There's your set of skills the market
| currently is in demand of.
| dopeboy wrote:
| Some of those skills that you see in those job postings
| today are devaluing due to tools like ChatGPT. Not all
| those skills and certainly not fundamental ones like
| communication and leadership. But if you see something
| like "writing CRUD endpoints for a Rails stack"
| everywhere, having that skill is no longer a
| differentiatior.
|
| Don't pivot your career. Don't burn the boat and jump
| into AI. Just be aware of these tools and get good at
| what they're poor at.
| namaria wrote:
| >Instead, look at the job postings for titles you want.
| Note the skills in demand at more than one job. Focus on
| those skills
|
| While I agree with the sentiment, there is way too much
| noise in that channel. Job listings written by non-
| technical people just throwing key words together,
| recruiters detached from specific roles and companies
| trying signalling growth to mention just a few sources of
| confusion...
| godtoldmetodoit wrote:
| I've been leveling up since I started as a helpdesk rep at
| 18, becoming a Windows sysadmin, then a junior dev, and now
| a senior dev. College was not an option for me for reasons
| totally outside of my control, as my parents decided to not
| do their taxes for a number of years and I was unable to
| get any financial aid (grants or loans) whatsoever.
|
| I scratched and clawed, read tons of books, blogs, spent
| extra time polishing features beyond what was needed so I
| could learn new skills... but now I am a father of two
| young kids, with a wife. How long am I supposed to put in
| all this extra work? I'm likely slightly above average
| intelligence, but I'm far from being at the level where I
| could be an AI researcher... if I am even capable of doing
| the kind of math required there, it would require many
| years of learning.
|
| GPT4 isn't going to replace me, but watching this space
| unfold really has me worrying about the versions that come
| out over the next 2-5 years.
|
| A human is only so moldable, and while I am more than happy
| to learn new skills, I have no idea where to even start.
| What profession is safe? Where will the growth be in a
| field that will have equivalent or even near equivalent
| earning potential?
|
| If GPT ends up getting to the point where it can replace me
| at my job, I really have a hard time thinking of a career
| path I could get into at this stage in life. It would need
| to be able to architect systems at a high level, write code
| to implement various features, communicate with
| stakeholders, document design decisions... if it can do
| that, it can do a whole hell of a lot of other jobs too.
|
| Once it gets to that point, I don't think physical jobs
| will be that far behind on being automated either. We
| already have robots of all shapes and sizes (including
| bipedal), the main thing slowing down their deployment is
| that they aren't adaptable enough. With AGI, that changes.
| It will take a bit longer due to the capital requirements
| and factory build outs that would be needed.
| ilaksh wrote:
| No jobs will be safe. In the very, very near future.
|
| GPT-4 is a very capable systems architect and can also
| implement the code. There are a few tools available to
| put it in a debug loop. Writing documents is a walk in
| the park for GPT-4. Emails or Discord chats or even
| perfectly realistic voice conversations are completely
| doable (I have that on my website).
|
| At this point it's about connecting things together and
| looping them properly to automate a very high portion of
| jobs.
|
| I think the answer is not employment but rather
| production. Think of something you can leverage these AIs
| that would be interesting or useful to someone else or
| some business.
|
| Beyond that things like UBI and generally better
| integration of technology into government is going to be
| critical for our survival. Especially decentralized
| technologies and real-world resource data.
| thrown123098 wrote:
| [dead]
| programmarchy wrote:
| As a "software engineer", it's frustrating to work with the
| people you describe: people who "don't care too much". I'm
| looking forward to the purge.
| edgyquant wrote:
| If your goal was to spend the rest of your life doing
| something you learn once and getting paid well for it you
| seriously picked the wrong industry. Engineers have been told
| to constantly learn new things, know multiple languages etc
| since the dawn of programming.
|
| I've worked with tons of programmers like you describe. I've
| continued to tell them that simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to
| dbs are solved problems we should not be fighting with.
| slfnflctd wrote:
| > simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to dbs are solved problems
|
| I can see how you might think that... until you start
| actually talking in depth with enough actual users and
| executives and trying to get them to agree on how all that
| stuff should work and what it should be capable of.
|
| Most of the development process is about trying to wrangle
| abstract ideas about how business logic should be
| implemented/improved from flawed humans who aren't great at
| communicating those ideas. Your 'simple' CRUD app still
| often has to be highly customized by someone willing to do
| the difficult work of dealing with people. And that's
| before you even start getting into working with more
| regulated businesses.
|
| Code monkeys/plumbers using 'outdated' tech who can deliver
| something that makes a workplace more efficient in the long
| run will continue to be in demand. There was enough
| functionality in software by the 1970s to handle the vast
| majority of business needs. Someone still has to understand
| those business needs (which ultimately have little to
| nothing to do with software) well enough to translate them
| into something that works. Whether it works for those who
| are using it is all that really matters.
| michaelmior wrote:
| > I've continued to tell them that simple UIs and CRUd
| interfaces to dbs are solved problems we should not be
| fighting with.
|
| Maybe we _shouldn 't_ be, but it's still a problem that
| regularly needs to be solved.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| ...because of the limitless customization that sneaks
| into every growing software project. This limitless
| customization is also my last hope, maybe GPT-n won't be
| able to solve it as good as I do.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Which industry would you recommend? I hate studying and I
| especially hate everything software development related
| with a passion.
|
| In any case, I need to refute your argument, in my work as
| software engineer spanning more than a decade, I have
| noticed zero deprecation of my skills (Java, SQL,
| HTML/JS/CSS) (while keeping them up to date!) until now and
| only had to learn a few new complementing skills (cloud,
| docker, SPA, Kubernetes). The only skill that got replaced
| might have been "Java application server management" since
| that got replaced by whatever docker runtime is en vogue at
| the moment. I have worked for the government and met
| PL1/Cobol mainframe programmers that refused to learn Java
| and still got paid generously for their long term
| expertise.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I seriously doubt you're writing the same kind of webapps
| you were a decade ago, if so you're a minority.
| Regardless a decade doesn't "refute" that the web itself
| is a total disruption of the way people wrote code prior.
| This industry is always changing paradigms and were
| constantly exposing more high level ways to instruct the
| processor.
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| So who will hire the junior software devs?
| ape4 wrote:
| And how can somebody become a senior dev unless they first
| worked as a junior
| rvz wrote:
| You become a 'senior dev" by running a company / startup
| yourself, since it is clear that after the tech layoffs,
| almost no-one has the money or profits to hire any new
| developers - junior and senior, which is why I say they are
| _both_ affected.
|
| But even then, self-proclaimed seniors are too scared to
| start their own startup(s) now because of (1) Unfavourable
| market conditions (2) VCs hesitant to raise money (3)
| ChatGPT will extinguish their startup; even if it uses
| "AI".
|
| I guess this was the result of a decades long quantitive
| easing, near zero interest rate bubble of cheap money that
| had to collapse.
| asdff wrote:
| I don't think starting a company will be that successful
| if you lack enough experience to be hired at any existing
| companies. The survivorship bias in tech is huge. Most
| things fail.
| grugagag wrote:
| Perhaps some juniors will take it head on solo but will
| repeat the same mistakes seniors made when they were
| juniors but will survive nonetheless
| [deleted]
| Jevon23 wrote:
| I really don't want my productivity to increase.
|
| Worst case scenario is that it gets SO good at writing code
| that software engineering teams are severely downsized or are
| made obsolete altogether, and I find myself out of a job. I'm
| not expecting UBI to start falling out of the sky any time
| soon, especially while there are still manual labor jobs that
| robots can't do.
|
| Alternative scenario is that individual developers get
| somewhere around a 2x-5x productivity increase, but why would I
| want that? That doesn't give me more free time - that just
| means I'll be expected to do _more work_. Non-technical
| management already expects ridiculous delivery timelines; now
| I'll have to deal with them asking "why can't you have the
| whole project done by tomorrow? Why can't you just have the
| robot do it?"
|
| It's a lose-lose situation and none of us asked for this.
| nh23423fefe wrote:
| pretty incoherent. A better tool is bad because someone else
| might demonstrate that you're lazy?
| olalonde wrote:
| I'm sure secretaries had similar thoughts about the arrival
| of personal computers. Yet, few would argue that computers
| have made the world a worse place. The truth is people will
| do less work, or it will feel like it. Most of our ancestors
| did not have the comfortable software jobs we have today.
| Life will become easier, products and services will become
| more abundant. Of course, the transition will be harder for
| those who refuse to adapt and resist change.
|
| It'll be interesting to see what happens when AI truly
| surpasses human level intelligence, as in, being able to
| completely replace human jobs, but we're not there yet. It's
| likely that when we reach that stage, the world will change
| dramatically and we will either live lives of abundance and
| leisure or face extinction :)
| jwestbury wrote:
| > we will either live lives of abundance and leisure or
| face extinction
|
| Third option, the workers no longer control the means of
| production, and we see levels of inequality that make the
| railroad barons look like they were middle class.
| olalonde wrote:
| I doubt this third option exists. If the AI(s) lack
| empathy for us and we are useless to them, they will
| either exterminate us directly, or indirectly by denying
| us resources. If they have empathy for us, they will
| probably let us live good lives. I doubt we will be
| useful to them, so I doubt there is a scenario where we
| live miserable lives working for the AI(s).
| freeone3000 wrote:
| It's not the AIs who are in charge, it's rich humans.
| olalonde wrote:
| By super intelligent, I meant AIs that have a will of
| their own. In the meantime, AIs are just a tool at our
| disposition. And I don't see why those tools would just
| be in the hands of the rich, anymore than electricity,
| the Internet, the personal computer or the smartphone is.
| anon7725 wrote:
| It's happening now with closed AI models. The era of open
| computing may be ending. The models are essentially a new
| type of computer and they will remain fundamentally
| closed, accessible only through an API.
| computerex wrote:
| > It'll be interesting to see what happens when AI truly
| surpasses human level intelligence, as in, being able to
| completely replace human jobs, but we're not there yet.
|
| But we _are_ there. This is a reality we live in for a lot
| of people. That 's why the existential crisis in the OP.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Yes, but there aren't many secretaries working these days,
| and certainly the skill set has changed (though I'll never
| forget the company owner who was surprised when he was
| called out on promises made to women running a local
| college and couldn't understand how they could repeat his
| statements back to him verbatim along w/ the time/date of
| the phone call in question --- had to explain that they'd
| all come up through the secretarial pool, and so knew
| shorthand).
|
| The bottom line is, at some point in time, automation is
| going to reduce the amount of human work which needs to be
| done, and render some folks unemployable --- how does
| society cope with that? Universal Basic Income is the only
| reasonable suggestion I've yet seen, but doesn't address
| the age-old problem of socialism --- it only works until
| one runs out of other people's money.
|
| Back when computers were first announced, taxing CPUs so as
| to cover benefits for newly unemployed folks was suggested
| --- can we put that back on the table?
|
| For a fictional take on this see:
|
| https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
| chordalkeyboard wrote:
| > The bottom line is, at some point in time, automation
| is going to reduce the amount of human work which needs
| to be done
|
| Jevons paradox [0] proposes that as automation reduces
| the cost of labor then people will find new uses for
| automation, and this seems to be the historical
| trajectory. Hundreds of years since the industrial
| revolution and we still haven't run out of work to do
| (this could be better or worse given your philosophical
| premises).
|
| > and render some folks unemployable
|
| If automation _truly_ causes more _actually productive_
| work to be done, then as a first-order effect there
| should be a surplus available to support these people
| without making anyone else (much) worse off. However as
| you observe the higher-order consequences of this are
| very much an open issue.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
| WillAdams wrote:
| Yes, but how much more head room do we have for that sort
| of thing?
|
| the current climate crisis suggests that we are running
| out:
|
| https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-
| physicist...
| ipatec wrote:
| Most of our ancestors actually had less stressful jobs and
| worked less than we do today. The average agricultural
| worker 100 years ago was not even doing a part-time in
| terms of time spent doing actual work. More like 2h/day on
| average.
| thequadehunter wrote:
| I can't see the first case ever happening. You'd need a
| whooooole lot of trust in AI systems to have it write all the
| code.
|
| As for the latter...I'd say GPT has increased my productivity
| and therefore allowed me to focus on the more interesting
| aspects of my work, rather than writing annoying boilerplate
| code and doing boring tasks where I don't learn anything. I
| almost never write my own boilerplate anymore.
|
| More productivity doesn't necesarily mean more work. It does
| mean more focus on interesting work.
| dudeinhawaii wrote:
| I think the rapid rate of change in modern software libraries
| has left me underwhelmed with ChatGPT when it comes to new
| libraries, C++, or niche APIs (financial, etc).
|
| If you're writing react/python/angular or something popular
| it seems to do amazing things and spit out entire websites
| (per demos).
|
| Unfortunately, when I try to put together C++, Rust, or even
| C# using recent libraries like Blazor it chokes up. I fully
| understand at least one reason why (libraries and language
| features not being in the training data from 2021) but that
| makes me feel that perhaps software engineering at the
| cutting edge or niche is safe and still requires human
| reasoning. Not to mention things like properly understanding
| when and why to use certain data structures, real-world
| impact of coding choices, pricing, esoteric speed/efficiency
| improvements, etc.
|
| I think there's still a broad general area where good, great,
| and amazing+ developers can operate without much threat and
| in fact using their knowledge and experience to leverage
| GPT-4 (or others) as a force multiplier.
| chipgap98 wrote:
| But with the plugins they announced yesterday this should
| no longer be an issue. You'll be able to easily connect
| other APIs or data sources to OpenAI so that your model
| will write the code exactly the way you want.
| hokkos wrote:
| Are niche libs safe or software platform will concentrate
| on the most popular with the most examples and better LLM
| completion/generation leading to ossification ?
| ilaksh wrote:
| Your tool just needs examples of the more recent library
| calls.
|
| With 32k tokens coming that's like 90kb total chars which
| 80kb could library or API docs.
|
| Also it can easily be connected to things like pip or
| GitHub or Google to check documentation. And many tools are
| coming over the next few months that will put it in a
| debugging loop.
|
| So maybe it's "safe" in the very near term but that issue
| of out of date training in no way prevents it from taking
| software engineering jobs.
|
| I am working hard to build an AI system that can replace me
| before someone else does.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| >I really don't want my productivity to increase.
|
| >...and I find myself out of a job.
|
| Tell me you are the problem in the industry without telling
| me you are the problem in the industry.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Nope, just a human being who wants to be a human being.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| And to you core part of being human is being inefficient?
|
| Think about the hunter gatherer who was given a bow, but
| stuck with throwing rocks because he didn't want to get
| too efficient.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Fletching, creating an arrowhead (that needs to be small
| and perfect) goes through way more material than a hand
| held obsidian blade, you are not necessarily saving on
| labour switching to arrows, especially as you now have
| introduced multiple specialized skills that require
| hundreds of hours of practice across multiple tribal
| members (the opposite of this, where you go down to a few
| babysitters to finesse the final code).
|
| But more relevantly the instant bows were invented you're
| quota of mammoths to kill a day didn't go up to that
| maximum possible number + 1 (because sales guys). It
| stayed at 1 per week or whatever. It's not efficiency,
| it's management's unrealistics expectations of productive
| output that I hear being complained about.
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| >you're quota of mammoths to kill a day didn't go up
|
| Expect with more efficient hunting methods you _could_
| kill more than you did before per day, which meant less
| hunting days, which meant more time with the wife which
| in turn meant bigger tribe, which in turn meant you
| actually had to increase your quota.
|
| Just because you are more efficient doesnt mean your
| manager becomes an idiot and starts to demand
| unreasonable output (and if you have an idiotic manager
| already then you already have the problem).
|
| I have no fucking clue what you are even arguing for.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Or, with software so much easier to create, so much more
| software is created, and demand for SW engineers increases.
| [deleted]
| piyh wrote:
| Alternatively, there's more developer output, the unit price
| of an application gets cheaper, and this stimulates demand
| for more developers. CPUs getting cheaper and faster didn't
| decrease demand for CPUs.
| 93po wrote:
| This is the assumption that there is end-user demand for
| the software developers would write. I think we can assume
| that end users will be using traditional software less as
| ChatGPT functionality increases.
| maxilevi wrote:
| Not everyone is adept at becoming a solo founder
| rvz wrote:
| > Now you don't need to hire junior devs and can just build the
| product of your dreams with very limited capital.
|
| And so-called "senior engineer" salaries will now be brought
| down and deflated since they were inflated and unjustifiably
| high in the first place and are the main reason why these tech
| startups run themselves into the ground with little to no path
| to profitability.
|
| I guarantee you that so far, the only winner in this is OpenAI.
| Not the 'senior engineers' building on top of someone else's AI
| API.
|
| In fact, why hire 3 over-priced seniors when one junior with
| ChatGPT is significantly much cheaper? I quite find it funny
| that somehow, all hope is instantly lost because of a "AI"
| spitting out code will replace them. It just shows that the
| majority of these tech startups were just good at losing money
| and being solely dependent on VC cash.
| throwawayai2 wrote:
| What happens when no junior devs are hired for 5 years? Who
| works their way up to replace the seniors who are leaving?
| Inviz wrote:
| this is my thinking too. Who's going to learn coding if all
| basic needs are served buy the chatbot? What would be the
| incentive to put in the work?
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I feel the same about future artists, sadly. If a computer
| can paint, then maybe no one is going to bother to learn
| how to paint.
| dmn322 wrote:
| Gpt's and the various apps that apply them
| grugagag wrote:
| There's always a cost to beeing more greedy than you can
| handle
| anon7725 wrote:
| And what do you think capitalism is all about?
| falcor84 wrote:
| Please elaborate
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Stupid greed is taking so much as to starve your supply.
| Smart greed is _sustainable_ greed. Smartest greed is one
| that feeds back into the supply, making it grow
| exponentially.
| nopinsight wrote:
| By the late 2020s, it's entirely possible that a "weaker" AGI
| will emerge. Consequently, there may be much less need for
| senior developers as well. However, that could be among the
| least of our concerns if we cannot reliably align AI with
| human interests by then.
|
| Date Weakly General AI is Publicly Known
| https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3479/date-weakly-
| general...
|
| Date of Artificial General Intelligence
| https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-
| artificial-...
|
| The latter includes this criterion: "Able to get top-1 strict
| accuracy of at least 90.0% on interview-level problems found
| in the APPS benchmark introduced by Dan Hendrycks, Steven
| Basart et al."
|
| The APPS benchmark: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.09938
|
| Note that the predicted date of "stronger" AGI has moved
| quite a lot since GPT-4 is revealed, from late 2030s to 2033
| at this moment.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Has anyone tested GPT-4 on APPS? And if it can get 90%
| (which it probably can) does that mean people will admit
| it's an AGI? Or more likely they just keep moving the
| goalposts.
| rimliu wrote:
| > By the late 2020s, it's entirely possible that a "weaker"
| AGI will emerge.
|
| We will surely have self-driving cars by then? Right?
| Right?
| Nemi wrote:
| Is there a scenario where just the people that REALLY love
| programming start in the field? Could this be a situation
| where you reduce the field of programmers to only those that
| are truly passionate about programming, thus making the
| people left in the field the cream of the crop? We have all
| worked with individuals that are clearly in the field because
| they think they can make a lot of money and don't give a crap
| about doing a good job. Can we envision a world where these
| people go on to another field instead of clogging up this
| one?
| somethingreen wrote:
| If there is a way to produce senior software engineers
| without years of work experience, why aren't we doing it
| now?
| fhd2 wrote:
| I started as a programmer right during the dotcom crash -
| it sure felt like that.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| > _In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as
| the YouTube's early days._
|
| You mean the same YouTube that routinely ruins people's
| livelihoods when it closes their accounts with no recourse?
| Because I'm totally looking forward to the day when that
| happens to my development tools.
|
| "We detected that you are using our code to kill vulnerable
| children (aka orphans). This is against our TOS and we have
| permanently disabled your account. If you believe this was in
| error please log into your account and talk to our ChatGPT-
| powered tech support".
| grugagag wrote:
| Code stays with you. Im more concerned with prompts like
| "please produce code to copy product X with the following
| changes".
| btbuildem wrote:
| From your comment:
|
| > I don't get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the
| software field.
|
| From the second line of your comment:
|
| > Now you don't need to hire junior devs
|
| Do you need GPT to put the two together? I think it's pretty
| obvious why folks are freaking out.
| raldi wrote:
| Now junior devs don't have to build the product of someone
| else's dreams; they can build the product of their own
| dreams.
| raincole wrote:
| ... and starve? You know what kind of people create content
| of their own dreams? Artists. And the stereotype isn't
| "well-fed artists" for a good reason.
| raldi wrote:
| > You know what kind of people create content of their
| own dreams?
|
| Every entrepreneur that ever existed.
| raincole wrote:
| Yeah and 90% of startups fail. Again, for a good reason.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Not everyone wants to do that though. There is a lot of
| extra crap that being a business owner entails. Some people
| just want to put in their work time and focus on other
| things. This basically forces everybody devote their lives
| to entrepreneurship.
| raldi wrote:
| We don't need everyone to, though. If AI increases dev
| productivity X-fold, and this leads to an X-fold increase
| in entrepreneurship, then the junior devs who want to
| build someone else's dream will have more opportunities
| to do so.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| It's democratizing for those with an idea but without the
| skill to convince investors to hire the juniors to implement
| it. It's a problem for employment numbers and macro-scale
| ratios of working to non-working adults.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| I simply don't understand why people are upset the ladder is
| being pulled up after me!?
| turkeygizzard wrote:
| If you are a manager, this will output your productivity ten
| fold on the upcoming years. Now you don't need to hire senior
| devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very
| limited capital.
|
| If you are a CTO, this will output your productivity ten fold
| on the upcoming years. Now you don't need to hire managers and
| can just build the product of your dreams with very limited
| capital.
|
| If you are a VC, this will output your productivity ten fold on
| the upcoming years. Now you don't need to hire anyone and can
| just build the product of your dreams with very limited
| capital.
|
| Agree it'll definitely be amazing for creatives and solo
| founders, but how many ideas are really out there to be had
| compared to the reduction in workforce?
|
| https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1600119268858744832
| Hizonner wrote:
| > Agree it'll definitely be amazing for creatives and solo
| founders, but how many ideas are really out there to be had
| compared to the reduction in workforce?
|
| I don't know. But I don't see why you might not be able to
| ask GPT-6 or GPT-7 to enumerate (and patent and implement)
| all of them for you. Why do you think "founders" or
| "creatives" are special?
|
| In the end, something like that is "amazing" _only_ for the
| person who owns the most GPUs or manages to figure out the
| first effective meta-prompt.
| geraneum wrote:
| I think if we have the "final software" there won't be a need
| for a website to sell you products or another for renting a
| place for your vacation or the one that processes your
| payments. All is done in one software with one interface. I
| don't see a need for most of the current founders, especially
| for solo ones. Also consolidating this capability in a few big
| tech companies means whatever happened to other industries
| after industrial age, will happend to ours. Compare the current
| software industry to other industries with big players
| (chemical, aviation, power, etc.) where the barrier to entry is
| higher. Sure there are startups, but not as many as in software
| scene and even then, many of the are digitalizing those
| industries.
| nunez wrote:
| Yeah, and look at where YouTube is now.
|
| Millions of creators grinding for pennies while the lucky ones
| that got in early and made it rake in the profits.
|
| I think success in tech is going to become extremely pyramidal
| in the coming years. This is a huge shame, as this was one of
| the only fields out there where you could make a really good
| living without going to the "right" school for years and years
| and years.
| ipatec wrote:
| I think the Youtube comparison is a good one up to a point.
| It's a niche product. Everyone wants to be part of it,
| competing for a very very limited resource which is our
| attention. While with technologies like GPT or whatever comes
| next we empower anyone to excel in any area and create
| whatever (for now non-material things).
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Yes, but we are in a world of abundance. Most people carry
| around what would be in 1980 a 10 million dollar
| supercomputer in their pocket.
|
| 10 years from now we might have the equivalent of what today
| costs 10 million dollars today. Automated farming means what
| today we consider high end and expensive produce becomes
| almost free. Automated transportation means that food gets
| delivered to you for almost nothing. Imagine you had a 95%
| off coupon on Uber Eats. Does that sound terrible? If so why?
| Because it also means that Jeff bezos gets a 2000 foot yacht?
|
| Edit:---------
|
| I'm getting a lot of doom and gloom respones. And you all are
| right, there are a lot of people who do not have
| food/shelter/cheap colleges. But what you all probably are
| not aware of is that 100 million people have risen out of
| poverty in India over the past 15 years. Your word view is
| being warped by the doom and gloom media. I would suggest
| reading just the beginning of the book factfulness. It will
| totally change your view of the world and probably make you
| much happier.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Yes, but we are in a world of abundance. Most people
| carry around what would be in 1980 a 10 million dollar
| supercomputer in their pocket._
|
| Most people also don't have $1000 for an emergency, live
| hand to mouth, and are dead scared of the cost and impact
| of a potential health issue. They are also overworked,
| underpaid, and with raising expenses, and sick of it, with
| depression levels skyrocketing. Having "a 10 million dollar
| supercomputer in their pocket" is not that comforting
| compared to that.
|
| We've killed old style job security, cheap college
| education, affordable housing, the middle class and decent
| working class jobs, public infrastructure, and many other
| things (not to mention the environment), but in return we
| can have a rectangular gadget to access "all of the world's
| information in an instant" (which practically is just used
| to distract ourselves to death). Hurray!
|
| https://www.marketwatch.com/story/more-americans-are-
| using-b...
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/19/56percent-of-americans-
| cant-...
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| > Most people also don't have $1000 for an emergency
|
| This has been debunked many times. The source is
| misleading to the point of being deceptive, it is pushing
| a narrative. Per the US government, the median household
| has $1000 _per month_ leftover after _all_ ordinary
| expenses. A very detailed breakdown of this for each
| income decile is available from the BLS.
|
| You can't square "most Americans can't afford a $1000
| emergency expense" with "median Americans can afford to
| light $1000 on fire each month without impacting their
| standard of living".
| JoeJonathan wrote:
| I fear you haven't spent much time in the places in this
| "world of abundance" where people live in abject misery.
| I'm currently in Brazil, where some 20% of the population
| lives on less than $5.50 per day and 30% of families don't
| have enough food. And it's not for want of agricultural
| production.
| anon7725 wrote:
| > Yes, but we are in a world of abundance.
|
| We have an abundance of inessentials. Housing is still
| scarce and food is volatile. Health care and education are
| expensive. Many people are sleeping on the streets or
| falling into lifestyles of despair.
|
| Progress has been applied unevenly and most critically not
| to the factors of life that form the base of Maslow's
| hierarchy.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Housing isn't scarce, it's not evenly allocated.
|
| Lots of properties being kept vacant so as to drive up
| rents/prop up property values, and it's difficult to get
| low-income housing built because of NIMBY.
| anon7725 wrote:
| "Cornering the market" results in real scarcity and the
| housing market has been permanently cornered.
| WillAdams wrote:
| The problem is, even with automation we are still burning
| up to 10 calories of petrochemical energy to get 1 calorie
| of food energy.
|
| We are going through 2.5 earth's worth of non-renewable
| resources each year in order to maintain our current
| lifestyles --- this simply isn't sustainable.
|
| Let's turn things around:
|
| - under what circumstances should a person be allowed to
| use more than 1/7 billionth of the solar energy which the
| earth receives each day?
|
| - under what circumstances is at acceptable for a person to
| create more heat than 1/7 billionth of what the planet is
| able to radiate out into space on a daily basis?
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Entertainment has winner-take-all / power-law dynamics due to
| cultural cohesion and limits on human attention (I want to
| watch what other people, and my time is limited), which is
| why a relatively small number of them make a good living.
|
| Software development, as an employment opportunity, does not
| have these same dynamics.
| awb wrote:
| New creators have success all the time, as will new software
| engineers.
|
| But you're right, the more level the playing field, the
| greater the competition.
| donkeyd wrote:
| > while the lucky ones that got in early and made it rake in
| the profits
|
| In my niche(s), I still see new Youtubers pop up all the time
| that gain large followings and turn Youtube into a full-time
| job. Sure, they don't all become rich, but many have started
| earning enough to drive Teslas, so it's definitely not
| pennies.
| msm_ wrote:
| > If you are a software engineer, this will output your
| productivity ten fold on the upcoming years.
|
| Is this really true? I may be missing something (I probably
| am), but I didn't find much use for AI tools in my
| itsec/programming work. It's a nice tool to have, but I don't
| write that much boilerplate. I've tried to use it as a better
| Google, but it kept replying with made up nonsense (things I
| have problem with are usually niche technologies OpenAI is not
| good at - I expect it will get better in the future). So I find
| it dubious it will "10x my productivity" in the "upcoming
| years". Decades, maybe.
|
| But maybe the future really is now, and I'm just being an old-
| timer who can't adapt.
| SanderNL wrote:
| A lot of people are messing around with React and web-dev in
| general where you can fuzz component logic until it kind of
| looks OK. I can see that working out.
|
| If you want to do anything new or - god forbid - know of a
| better way to do things than what 90% of the population is
| doing (htmx?). Good luck.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| There is already software to basically run unit tests on LLM
| output and re-run the prompt until it passes. As the models
| get better and the tooling improves, a lot of programming
| will become specifying constraints on the program you want,
| and letting the AI explore the latent space until it finds a
| solution, which you then evaluate before providing more
| detailed constraints until it does everything you want.
| rimliu wrote:
| Where do you get those unit tests though?
| frabcus wrote:
| You get it to write them. Maybe in cucumber so you can
| check them / edit them by reading the English. Maybe you
| use a competitors model to write the tests as then less
| likely to make same error in code and tests, or write
| them twice and get best of three to spot errors.
| ilaksh wrote:
| What exactly are you working on and which "AI tool" did you
| try? I will bet you $20 that GPT-4 (which can take 80kb of
| API docs or examples in the 32k model and is a very good
| programmer) if given reference info in your domain and a good
| prompt to think through the problem and solution step-by-step
| will be able to do very well.
|
| So the future is anyone with that model access (the 8k tokens
| could have 20kb of docs which is still useful) who wants to
| really try.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| First they came for the junior devs, and I did not speak out
| because I was not a junior dev... :P
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I don't get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the
| software field.
|
| > If you are a software engineer, this will output your
| productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don't need
| to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your
| dreams with very limited capital.
|
| And if you're a junior software engineer? Fuck you and be
| unemployed.*
|
| Do you get it now?
|
| * Until you can climb up the ladder where each rung is now 20
| feet apart.
| raldi wrote:
| What are the barriers to a junior dev creating their own
| product?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > What are the barriers to a junior dev creating their own
| product?
|
| Are you seriously asking that question? What are the
| barriers to a junior dev writing the Linux kernel from
| scratch by themselves? What are the barriers from climbing
| from the bottom to the top of a ladder where the rungs are
| 20 feet apart?
|
| Sure, start at the top, then it's great. Very few start at
| the top.
| raldi wrote:
| Yes, I'm seriously asking. If a junior programmer wants
| to create a mobile app, or a desktop app, or a cloud
| service, what are the barriers? All the ones I can think
| of will get lower, not higher, as a result of the AI
| revolution.
|
| If I'm missing one, or a class of product with different
| barriers, I genuinely would like you to point that out.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Yes, I'm seriously asking. If a junior programmer wants
| to create a mobile app, or a desktop app, or a cloud
| service, what are the barriers? All the ones I can think
| of will get lower, not higher, as a result of the AI
| revolution.
|
| Seriously, think about it a bit, without being sanguine.
|
| The junior dev is inexperienced, _in everything_ , and
| now has no path to build up that experience. No one's
| going to want their 18/22 year old amateur-hour "chatgpt
| make me a cloud app" (which is in competition against
| millions of others). So unless they're extremely lucky,
| they goto fail.
|
| Maybe after 10 years of those failures they could build
| up enough experience through trial-and-error to maybe see
| a little success with a "chatgpt make me a cloud app,"
| but how are they going to feed themselves the meantime?
| Maybe that will work if they have rich parents, but
| otherwise they're probably going to have to use up their
| energy to scrape by. So another goto fail.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Competition from non-junior devs, who can do all the same
| things the junior+GPT can do and also the tricky parts
| which "GPTs" can't yet do; and also have the benefit of
| domain-specific expertise about some area of business
| and/or better connections for investors, marketing, B2B
| connections.
|
| This hypothetical scenario is literally like "pull up the
| ladder behind you", as all this experience and connections
| is something that a senior person has gotten while being
| handsomely paid for their time, but a future junior person
| may have to get on their own time and dime.
|
| Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is everything, and
| there's no reason to assume that random unemployed
| inexperienced people will be superior at execution.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _If you are a software engineer, this will output your
| productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don't need
| to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your
| dreams with very limited capital._
|
| This 10x productivity absense of a 10x expansion of programming
| industry (which is very unlikely) translates to less developers
| in general, including senior ones. Even more so in an economy
| like this...
|
| > _It means competition between companies will increase but it
| isn't necessarily bad for existing software engineers,
| especially solo founders._
|
| "Solo founders" is what? 1/10,000 of working programmers? And
| they're absolutely not the ones people worry about regarding
| GPT replacements...
| [deleted]
| donkeyd wrote:
| > This 10x productivity absense of a 10x expansion of
| programming industry (which is very unlikely)
|
| I think I disagree. If software then becomes 10x cheaper, a
| lot of use cases that used to be too expensive to build now
| becomes affordable. At my own job, I think we could easily do
| 10x the business, because our customers need tons of tooling
| (for example for energy transition) but we don't have the
| people (among other problems).
| margorczynski wrote:
| What if those use-cases disappear also because they were
| made for humans? Will there really be a need for
| spreadsheets and spreadsheet plugins when all that works is
| done by an AI with a little help of some headless tool or
| scripting language?
| zh3 wrote:
| Comparitively, GPT has definltely worked here for less-
| experienced engineers. A coworker (Mech. E.) last week got
| ChatGPT to create a python HTTP GET for him and today got it to
| write the code to drive a bunch of relays off a Pi using I2C.
| Once he had it working, he sent me a DM "Is 0xFF hex?".
|
| So accelerant, definitely. Beyond that, I'm on the sceptical side
| but accept there's quite a chance that's the wrong way to bet.
| dakial1 wrote:
| I don't get some coders/devs/software engineers surprised that
| LLM can now pretty much create a whole code out of a prompt.
|
| Wasn't this the final objective of the programming languages
| abstraction evolution? From Binary/Assembly to Natural Language
| Programming? I think it is awesome that more people will be able
| to create software/products as this accelerates innovation cycles
| a lot.
|
| And, for now, I believe devs that don't rely solely on copy/paste
| coding from stack exchange don't need to worry about their job
| stability no?
| gradys wrote:
| Indeed, as I write, this is sorta what I have been working
| toward my whole career. And it's not like this was a giant leap
| from what ChatGPT already showed it was capable of. People have
| already been doing stuff like this with LangChain. Nonetheless,
| seeing that this was OpenAI's plan, that this is now here for
| real, was a weird experience for me.
| imtringued wrote:
| I am banging my head against a heisenbug. I wrote the code that
| works yesterday. I spent a lot of time rewriting it a dozen
| times. Now I am back to the original and it works for
| unexplainable reasons. I doubt that a chatbot could have sped
| this up.
|
| I envy the people who are bottlenecked on their typing speed
| and benefit 10 times more from the chat bot than I do.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Have you tried? GPT-4 is pretty good at spotting bugs. It
| would probably also spot a bunch of other 'bugs' that don't
| exist, but that would still be better than rewriting it a
| dozen times.
| Riverheart wrote:
| Job stability is measured in years. Looking forward, assuming
| it improves, it'll do more than just copy/paste code. It'll be
| a senior dev capable of explaining the pros and cons of a
| solution, able to do code reviews and so on.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| It's time to build a business I guess?
|
| Others have said exactly what I'm thinking, welcome to the
| age of the micro-startup, 1-3 engineers, designers, product
| mangers building some very cool, albeit niche products.
| margorczynski wrote:
| And what that business will be worth when any random guy
| can create an identical one using a LLM? You remove the
| scarcity and the value plummets.
| [deleted]
| edgyquant wrote:
| Any random guy can copy just about any startup already.
| It's the domain expertise and insight into a potential
| market that builds companies not a few engineers throwing
| together a react app
| margorczynski wrote:
| Any random guy with a shitload of cash to spend on
| development. These "few engineers" can cost $1kk annually
| and if you think some random guy can just throw away such
| cash then well...
|
| "Domain expertise and insight into a potential market"
| won't get you a working product that you can sell.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Anyone driven can throw together an MVP for a CRUD app.
| Having the domain expertise to prove a market edge can
| get you funding. Most engineers can't do that second
| part.
| imtringued wrote:
| More importantly, accountants, lawyers, sales people and
| other generic business expenses are now making up a
| bigger portion of your company expenses than the
| development process.
| [deleted]
| meghan_rain wrote:
| > I believe devs that don't rely solely on copy/paste coding
| from stack exchange don't need to worry about their job
| stability
|
| That's like 5 people in the entire world lmao
| edgyquant wrote:
| No it isn't and this isn't a funny joke. If you can't write
| optimal algorithms and come up with data structures that
| allow for mapping out problems you aren't solving anything
| and your job has always been one innovation away from
| disappearing.
| dento wrote:
| I'd guess 90% dev jobs don't involve any algo knowledge
| more complicated than "should I pick a list or hashmap" or
| "which columns need indices". They involve converting
| business logic into code and combining it with good UI/UX.
| tjr wrote:
| I have certainly gotten value out of Stack Exchange and the
| like, but pretty little overall. The answers to most of my
| software problems simply aren't there.
|
| Nor are they elsewhere on the web.
|
| Which leaves me feeling like it's unlikely that ChatGPT will
| have the answers either. Perhaps it will still be a useful
| tool toward arriving at the answers, but I am not presently
| anticipating that it is going to be churning out all of the
| code automatically.
| IdiocyInAction wrote:
| I've copied like 3 things from SO in the last year max. Speak
| for yourself.
| inimino wrote:
| Or maybe that's just at the places you've worked.
| dougdonohoe wrote:
| On the one hand, I think a lot of what ChatGPT can do is pretty
| amazing and a bit scary as a software engineer. On the other
| hand, I look at the projects I've done recently and throughout my
| career and find it hard to see how something that can solve bite-
| sized problems can tackle a software project that takes months to
| come to fruition. I'm currently working as an engineer doing a
| mix of kubernetes, cloud, Golang, bash scripting, git
| manipulation and other type of work. I recently upgraded 40+
| repos to migrate to out latest build infrastructure and I had to
| reconcile 5+ years of folks doing things slightly differently.
| There was a constant process of running some script to make
| changes, finding outliers and one-offs, figuring out the fixes,
| running tests and figuring out the right way to ensure things
| were correct. I just don't see how ChatGPT can have done that
| project. Maybe it could have reduced the time it took me to write
| some supporting scripts, but I don't see it material improving
| the time it took to do this project.
|
| I suspect many large IT organizations are like this.
| antibasilisk wrote:
| Perhaps for brownfield work you're right, but I suspect
| greenfield will not suffer from the same issues, since they're
| usually an artefact of things done to accommodate human-limits
| on finances, time and integration with heteromorphic systems.
| braindead_in wrote:
| The Programmer is dead, long live the Programmer.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > To be clear, it is also an end, or at least the beginning of an
| end, for a lot of the present day activities of software
| engineers.
|
| Or the end of the beginning (of software development)...
| nickmain wrote:
| So I think the thing people aren't getting is this: it doesn't
| matter that AIs can write code. That's not how it's going to
| replace us. With a big enough AI, when we're ready, we won't have
| to write software. _It will be the software._
|
| via https://fosstodon.org/@praeclarum/110070954879714216
| jarjoura wrote:
| I don't think this is a wrong take and I'm excited for some
| version of this future. However, I'm skeptical we'll get to
| this anytime in the next 30 years.
|
| As of right now, even if ChatGPT were to generate 99% accurate
| responses, it's quite a chore to communicate with it in full
| sentences. I don't want to have to explain my business in full
| painstaking detail and then upload tax documents to a system
| that can then output an answer in book form back to me.
| piokoch wrote:
| Ok, so we have that software written by AI, AI is clever, it does
| not need good variable names or functions/methods/class names,
| some of the stuff it will call according to passed specification
| so it will be understandable, but the further it goes, everything
| will get more generic, taken from kirjillion of other code
| snippets on Github. And it all will be working.
|
| Until someone starts testing this and finds a bug. And then AI
| will say, hey, there is no bug, I don't make mistakes. So you
| need a human to look on the code, a huge pile of spaghetti code
| with cryptic names and conventions, code patterns that fell out
| of fashion years ago but, since there is a lot of code that uses
| them, AI thinks they are ok.
|
| How long it will take to fix anything, how long it will take to
| extend the code?
| crop_rotation wrote:
| You should try GPT4. It does use very reasonable variable,
| function, method class names. And if you point out that the
| code doesn't match your intent, it comes with new code fixing
| your issues.
|
| The code it generates is by no measure "a huge pile of
| spaghetti code with cryptic names and conventions".
|
| I was sceptical myself before trying GPT4. I asked it to change
| the Python C internals for a new feature, and googled to ensure
| the description doesn't exist anywhere. It came up with very
| good changes and explanations.
|
| And this is all not even mentioning the pace of improvements.
| It didn't take too long to go from GPT3 to GPT4. Even if the
| pace slows down, it is still huge.
| [deleted]
| raincole wrote:
| I believe you never use ChatGPT. I'm not claiming you never use
| GPT4, I'm claiming you never use even GPT3.5. If you did you
| will notice its problem is the opposite of what you describe.
| Especially:
|
| > it does not need good variable names or
| functions/methods/class names,
|
| It's the _exact_ opposite. It 's too good at naming things. It
| insists to use variable/function names that make sense in plain
| english, and often make mistakes when the API has inconsistent
| naming, or consistent but unusual naming.
|
| For example, it makes mistakes when writing code that use
| "Loop" in Blender API. And the reason is quite obvious to me:
| because Blender's "Loop" is not what loop means in plain
| english.
| precompute wrote:
| https://twitter.com/cHHillee/status/1635790330854526981
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| LLMs will be end for portion of programmers for sure. We all know
| people at our companies who aren't in this for passion, but for a
| pay check. And while so far it has been fine to code just for a
| pay check their time is up. We soon won't be needing code monkeys
| who just produce OK code, we will need people who actually know
| what they are doing and are passionate about what they do.
|
| We still need actual experts to vet the code LLMs produce and to
| choose the optimal solutions. This is what senior devs have done
| so far with junior and mid level devs always. There are people
| who can write code, but someone needs to review and approve what
| they have done.
|
| Obviously LLMs will also eat into that space, but before we come
| up with AGI LLMs alone won't be able to completely replace humans
| in software.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-03-24 23:02 UTC)