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GitHub Copilot

copilot.github.com

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Re: GitHub Copilot

#411
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pack it all up, boys, programming's over. Hello, AI. Anyone want to hire me to teach your grandma how to use the internet?

Automation has always produced an increase in jobs so far, although sometimes in a disruptive way. I consider this like the switch from instruction-level programming to compiled languages, a level of abstraction added that buys a large increase in productivity and makes projects affordable that weren’t affordable before. If anything this will probably lead to a boom in development work. But there’s a bunch of low ski…

Yes, but AI isn't the same as automation.

Automation is a force multiplier. AI is a cheaper way of doing what humans do.

And the AI doesn't even need to be "true" AI. It simply needs to be able to do stuff better than what humans do.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few days back, Sam Altman tweeted this "Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the price of work that happens in the physical world. This is the opposite of what most people (including me) expected, and will have strange effects" And I was like yeah I gotta start preparing for next decade.

> Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the price of work that happens in the physical world. I'm skeptical. The envelope of "programming" will continue to shift as things get more and more complex. Your mother-in-law is not going to install Copilot and start knocking out web apps. Tools like this allow programmers to become more productive, wh…

I strongly agree with you.

Reminds me of something I read that claimed when drum machines came out, the music industry thought it was the end of drummers. Until people realized that drummers tended to be the best people at programming cool beats on the drum machine.

Every single technological advancement meant to make technology more accessible and eliminate expertise has instead only redefined what expertise means. And the overall trend has been a lot more work opportunities created, not less.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#414
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might this end up putting GPL code into projects with an incompatible license?

It shouldn't do that, and we are taking steps to avoid reciting training data in the output: https://copilot.github.com/#faq-does-github-copilot-recite-c... https://docs.github.com/en/early-access/github/copilot/resea... In terms of the permissibility of training on public code, the jurisprudence here – broadly relied upon by the machine learning community – is that training ML models is fair use. We are certain this…

> It shouldn't do that, and we are taking steps to avoid reciting training data in the output

This just gives me a flashback to copying homework in school, “make sure you change some of the words around so it’s not obvious”

I’m sure you’re right Re: jurisprudence, but it never sat right with me that AI engineers get to produce these big, impressive models but the people who created the training data will never be compensated, let alone asked. So I posted my face on Flickr, how should I know I’m consenting to benefit someone’s killer robot facial recognition?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pack it all up, boys, programming's over. Hello, AI. Anyone want to hire me to teach your grandma how to use the internet?

Few days back, Sam Altman tweeted this "Prediction: AI will cause the price of work that can happen in front of a computer to decrease much faster than the price of work that happens in the physical world. This is the opposite of what most people (including me) expected, and will have strange effects" And I was like yeah I gotta start preparing for next decade.

I think this will result in classic Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox . As the price of writing any individual function/feature goes down, the demand for software will go up exponentially. Think of how many smallish projects are just never started these days because "software engineers are too expensive".

I don't think software engineers will get much cheaper, they'll just do a lot more.

Re: GitHub Copilot

#419
post #390
post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's just because humans are not as creative as they think. Whatever you do, thousands of others have done the same already. So no need to pay a high level programmer, just a mediocre one and the right AI assistant gives the same results.

> So no need to pay a high level programmer, just a mediocre one and the right AI assistant gives the same results. I think of it as not needing juniors for boring work, all you need as a company is seniors and AI.

without juniors, how do you get more seniors?

Re: GitHub Copilot

#420
> OpenAI Codex was trained on publicly available source code (...)

It would be nice if github made this tool publicly available in a good spirit of open-source instead of straight up monetizing it.

I get that github is not a non-profit but still.

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