Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

scottaaronson.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 263 posts

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#111

Post by rakejake »

omnicognate wrote: post #18

As someone who is skeptical, but open minded, about the impact these technologies will have on practical programming I think I'm one of the "people" in "people are complaining..." The article makes some assumptions about what such people think that certainly aren't true for me: 1. That we are unimpressed. I'm gobsmacked. 2. That we don't think these are significant advances. They're obviously huge advances. 3. That w…

I agree that reviewing code is much much harder than writing something that works. Hasn't anyone here written what they thought was a smart, compact solution or feature, only to have it ripped to shreds during a code review?

I have worked in large decade-old codebases and sometimes the code is truly puzzling. Usually, an old-timer helps out when you run into a block and explains design decisions taken by people who moved on. This is the crucial factor that determines how long a task takes. A task could be resolved in a few hours with the help of a senior engineer, which otherwise could take days to weeks.

All said, I think simply generating the code will not be enough to replace programmers. Now, if an AI can generate code AND explain queries about logic, syntax, etc, the game is over.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#112

Post by runarberg »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #5
evrydayhustling wrote: post #3

I love this take. Most AI results provoke a torrent of articles listing pratfalls that prove it's not AGI. Of course it's not AGI! But it is as unexpected as a talking dog. Take a second to be amazed, at least amused. Then read how they did it and think about how to do better.

It's rarely productive to take internet criticism into account, but it feels like AI is an especially strong instance of this. It seems like a lot of folks just want to pooh pooh any possible outcome. I'm not sure why this is. Possibly because of animosity toward big tech, given big tech is driving a lot of the research and practical implementation in this area?

> but it feels like AI is an especially strong instance of this. It seems like a lot of folks just want to pooh pooh any possible outcome. I'm not sure why this is.

I presume the amount of hype AI research has been getting for the past 4 decades might be at least part of the reason. I also think AI is terribly named. We are assigning “intelligence” to basically a statistical inference model before philosophers and psychologists have even figured out what “intelligence” is (at least in a non-racist way).

I know that both the quality and (especially) the quantity of inference done with machine learning algorithms is really impressive indeed. But when people are advocating AI research as a step towards some “artificial general intelligence” people (rightly) will raise questions and start poohing you down.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#113

Post by indicisive »

Frankly asking a computer to write code is like asking a dog to speak facts in straight zfc. What else can I say, ai research has conspired to take over all other areas of computer science. I wonder who exactly started this hype. Also what else will come after this the stupid ai craze.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#114

Post by mark_l_watson »

vain_cain wrote: post #106
mark_l_watson wrote: post #38

Right on, I couldn’t agree more. We are living during a period of exponential progress. I like AlphaCode’s approach of using language models with search. In the last year I have experimented with mixing language models for NLP with semantic web/linked data tasks, so much simpler than what AlphaCode does, but I have been having fun. I have added examples for this in new additions to two of my books, but if you want a…

I mostly work with data mining on my personal projects(which is a couple of hours every day), and I'm pretty sure I didn't have to write a single regex since I've started using Copilot. It's hard for me to even imagine how I used to do it before, and how much time I've wasted on stupid mistakes and typos. Now I just write a comment of what I want and an example string. It does the job without me having to modify anyt…

Thanks for the good example. The first time I tried OpenAI's assistant (before I had access to GitHub CoPilot) I wrote a comment in Javascript code that read something like "perform SPARQL query to find out where Bill Gates works" and code was generated using an appropriate library, the SPARQL (like SQL) query was correct, and the code worked. Blew my mind.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#116

Post by keewee7 »

axg11 wrote: post #109
keewee7 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that AI is being aggressively applied to areas where AI practitioners are domain experts. Think programming, data analysis etc. We programmers and data scientists might find ourselves among the first half of knowledge workers to be replaced and not among the last as we previously thought.

Compilers didn't replace any jobs, they created more. Similarly, this type of AI-assisted programming will allow more people to program and make existing programmers more productive.

I was thinking over a really long time period. There is at least 20-30 more years of general purpose programming being a highly sought after skill. But with time most programming is going to be done by AI that is directed by domain experts.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#117

Post by mark_l_watson »

axg11 wrote: post #107
stephc_int13 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not seeing exponential rates of progress, in my opinion. We've been on the steep part of an S-curve.

When you're on that curve, it's indistinguishable until you hit the plateau. We're in an era where AI is continuing to improve and has already surpassed a level that many people doubted was achievable. Nobody knows when that progress will plateau. It's entirely possible that we plateau _after_ surpassing human-level intelligence.

Exactly correct. We really don't know if the progress is exponential or like a Sigmoid squashing function. You just changed my opinion, a bit, on this.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#118

Post by jeffbee »

axg11 wrote: post #109
keewee7 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that AI is being aggressively applied to areas where AI practitioners are domain experts. Think programming, data analysis etc. We programmers and data scientists might find ourselves among the first half of knowledge workers to be replaced and not among the last as we previously thought.

Compilers didn't replace any jobs, they created more. Similarly, this type of AI-assisted programming will allow more people to program and make existing programmers more productive.

In my view this type of system will only be usable by Real Computer Scientists and will completely kill off the workaday hacker. Think of all the people who bitterly complain that a C++ compiler does something unexpected under the banner of UB. That crowd cannot cope with a world in which you have to exactly describe your requirements to an AI. It is also analogous to TDD, so all the TDD haters, which is the overwhelming majority of hackers, are toast.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#120

Post by arnaudsm »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #3

I love this take. Most AI results provoke a torrent of articles listing pratfalls that prove it's not AGI. Of course it's not AGI! But it is as unexpected as a talking dog. Take a second to be amazed, at least amused. Then read how they did it and think about how to do better.

Marketing people love to make false claims, setting crazy expectations. Increased competition encourages these small lies, and sometimes even academic fraud.

This hurt and will continue to hurt the ML field.

Post reply on HN