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Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
121–130 of 183 posts
Re: Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. As you said, in the last 6 months you use ChatGPT instead of outsourcing. What are the roles/positions that you don’t need anymore? In other words, what is the job that ChatGPT does for you now?
One very common task we have is writing and maintaining ETL scripts. This was never a particularly difficult task, just time consuming and normalized enough that I could outsource it. It's not that chatgpt can do the whole task, it's just that I can do it myself much faster now. Paying somebody to set up a new source that is consistent with our protocol is just too expensive relative to the 1-2 hours it takes me to d…
I don’t know much about the ETL industry. Are these ETL jobs for all sort of data? Accounting data? Log data? Getting the data from point A to point B? You mentioned UI. Is the UI so the customer can now move the data around or to visualize the data.?
Re: Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people who have the most to gain from an increase in productivity are those who already have lots of experience and are willing to embrace new technologies.
... or people who don't need that experience to now compete against you.
why are people in such a denial on this point, makes me mad...
the same field who has the most imposter syndrome rants, also has most people who think they can't be replaced by someone with less experience equipped with AI.
Everyone is talking about the junior, mid-tier programmer who will replaced, but not themselves. It just sounds like willful ignorance.
Re: Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The more I use GPT, the less I'm worried I'm curious, as I see quite a few people saying this. You might not be worried about GPT4, but aren't you at least a little concerned about GPT8 or whatever? Just having a post like this a mere 5 years ago would've been unthinkable yet here we are.
Ten years ago they were warning anyone who drove for a living that they'd soon be out of a job. I'm sure the day will come, but I can't help but feel that LLMs are in that same area where we can watch them do impressive things, but they are still a long way away from real autonomy.
I understand your point but anyone who just finished high school I wouldnt recommend to choose to be driver as professional path - unless as a temporary 1-10 years gig. It's just unlikely someone would be still a driver for the next 40 years. People who are already professional drivers for less than 10 years I would say also unlikely gonna do it for the next 30 years as a job - at least majority won't.
And I think situation with self driving cars and LLM is different. For self driving car you need it to be at least 99.99% good to be useful and initial investment is high.
For LLM is enough to be just 90% good and it already scales to millions of inferences at the same time. Investment for user is either free or 20$ per month.
Re: Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
>is this post just BS? I think it is, because the entire thing reads as someone with very little life experience. If they've truly been in the industry 20 years they would have experienced plenty of similar career anxieties - the .com boom/bust, outsourcing, and global financial crises.
I've been through all those (started working in '99 at a company that failed in Jan '01). Seriously, it was 80% y2k bug work during the first year of my career. This has me far more concerned, as I went into detail in another comment in this thread. Much of what I see in this thread feels like platitude-driven myopia, which brings to mind the famous Upton Sinclair quote "It is difficult to get a man to understand som…
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it"
So, it is "Your salary depends on your ability to convince others that you can not be replaced." basically.
Everyone is talking about "that other developer who has less experience, they will be the one to be replaced". The more I hear, the more suspicious it gets to me. Like everyone is so sure of themselves.
Re: Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is a tool, and a good one Not even a good one imo, I ask it to cite its sources and it makes up the URLs 95% of the time.
That makes sense - it is an LLM, not a reference library. Part of using a tool well is understanding what it is good for and what it is not. If you are .looking for citable references... or even full factual accuracy, it is the wrong tool.
It's the wrong tool at the moment. But full factual accuracy and citable references is something the users will likely demand from these chatbots as a minimum requirement. I'd be surprised if it won't be attempted incorporated at some point, not too distant.
Re: Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The more I use GPT, the less I'm worried I'm curious, as I see quite a few people saying this. You might not be worried about GPT4, but aren't you at least a little concerned about GPT8 or whatever? Just having a post like this a mere 5 years ago would've been unthinkable yet here we are.
I had a similar moment of existential career crisis as OP. I'm at the 20 year mark as well, in terms of developing software professionally. I've always felt like with new technology, I could grok at a high level how things worked. But LLMs like GPT seem like magic and I went through stages of initial astonishment -> despair realizing the potential impact it would have on the industry -> acceptance. While I still feel…
>> I've always felt like with new technology, I could grok at a high level how things worked. But LLMs like GPT seem like magic
This is exactly how I feel. I felt so out of my depth looking at the ML architectures and I could not make any sense of it. I thought perhaps, they get inspired by neuroscience for the layers etc.
But a friend who works on LLMs mentioned, the architecture of large ML models, are mostly experimentally discovered, not designed. If that's the case, that's even worse... it means an entire field which perhaps could replace me in future, doesn't even have a knowledge foundation for its breakthroughs, but just goes by experiment... I thought it was only the weights inside the model that evolves, not the architecture itself.
Which body of knowledge do I study then, and is it even engineering anymore? That's something else, which I am not sure if my programming experience applies.
The amount of GPU/Capital it takes to evolve such architectures, run such experiments has to be prohibitively expensive.
Re: Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
#128The more I use GPT, the less I'm worried. It is a tool, and a good one, but not a replacement for the thought required to design an app that will function, scale, and have good UX to result in a marketable product. So use it and enjoy its benefits while letting it help you perform even better. As far as everything else you've said... oof, you need a break. You seem focused on money and ego. Maybe it is time to simpli…
This is correct to a degree, but consider what doors GTP is opening. Its slow erosion of our responsibilities. If AI can do some of your work with minimal supervision then sooner or later managers will figure it out and reduce you job scope. Get an intern to do it. We are certainly not at level where you can talk to chatGTP and give it requirements to generate code, but who knows where we will be in 5,10 years. As a…
Was assembly a "slow erosion of our responsibilities" compared to coding in octal?
Was a compiled language a "slow erosion of our responsibilities" compared to writing assembler?
Was writing in a garbage-collected language a "slow erosion of our responsibilities" compared to manual memory management?
The better tools let us do more, faster. They let us waste less time on the trivial, and spend more time on figuring out how to actually build what we were trying to build. They didn't reduce the need for programmers - far from it.
GPT will probably be the same. It's a force multiplier. You can write more in less time. That will make people want software that they couldn't dream of before, because it was too expensive to build. Net programmer employment will probably go up, not down.
Re: Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
#129Whenever you feel this kind of panic you should ask yourself how F’d you are relative to the general population. AI will shake things up for sure, but has it ever been the case that smart, educated, experienced people collectively got hurt because of innovation or disruption? No, never. Your total comp might go down or it might go up. Every time you make a career move that’s the risk you take. But if you’re healthy a…
Yeah, but how do we protect and grow expertise when it can be easily copied in GPT-(n+1)
I think it’s more like truck drivers panicking in 1995 they will soon be obsolete after having seen the first self-driving demo.
Truck drivers will get automated away eventually, but not today and not next year. Self-driving systems get better every year. It’s been 30 years. We’re getting close but we’re still not there yet.
I expect the LLM revolution to be somewhat similar. The models will get better but they won’t have the kind of superintelligence that makes meat humans obsolete. Someday, perhaps. But GPT 5 will be an incremental improvement, and GPT 6 moreso.
Re: Ask HN: GPT4 Broke Me
#130Have you used any of these AI tools? If you have, you should feel more confident not anxious. It will make bad programmers worse and good programmers better.
Well, yeah, like I said I have been using it to build several projects. My productivity definitely went up at least by a factor of 5 by a safe estimate. This is amazing, all good, yeah. But doesnt that mean companies need 5x fewer people?
I don't think you should even been playing those mind games with yourself. Focus on what you can control which is leveraging the tools available to you and have some grounded perspective. There's a lot of noise. There's also a bunch of coincidental events happening simultaneously (economy, post-covid recovery, company right sizing, etc) that are obscuring things.