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AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

scottaaronson.blog

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Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#161

Post by nradov »

whatshisface wrote: post #152
37ef_ced3 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know the regular expressions are correct, without understanding them?

Who cares if they're correct? If they fail a test, you can fix them. If they turn out to be wrong in production you can isolate the example and add it as a test. Producing regexes that pass all current tests but contain a subtle bug satisfy 100% of what programmers are incentivized to do. Producing them very quickly will get you promoted.

You're not wrong, but hopefully someone is at least doing a code review.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#162

Post by meken »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #63
ogogmad wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think using these tools might become a science or an art form in its own right. You'll have to give these tools the input they need to produce the most useful answers to you. In the short term at least, this is not going to take away your need to think. But it might change how you think, and it might make you more productive when your problem aligns well with these tools.

I think that you are correct, we will see AI used as a copilot for artists and content creators. I have had access to the OpenAI APIs for GPT-3 since last summer, and in addition to using this for NLP tasks, I have also experimented with using GPT-3 to help me work on a sci-fi short book that I have been occasionally writing for years. It has been useful for expanding sections that I have been stuck on. I feel that I…

This gives me an idea.

You know how you can break writing down into 2 phases: creative and edit?

What if you did the creative part, braindumping all your ideas and vision into a word document. Then had an AI edit your incoherent story into engaging prose.

I find the creative part easy, but the editing part tedious.

Like, a doctor I know asked me to write a review for him. I did the braindump part, but have been procrastinating on the edit part.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#163

Post by notfed »

37ef_ced3 wrote: post #128
notamy wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does CoPilot generate, given this prompt: Here's what it generated for me: // A Go function to set the middle six bits of an unsigned 64-bit integer to 1. func set6(x uint64) uint64 { return x | 0x3f }

Incorrect. Thank you. CoPilot is helpless if it needs to do more than just regurgitate someone else's code. The training of these models on GitHub, so they regurgitate licensed code without attribution, is the greatest theft of intellectual property in the history of Man. Perhaps not according to the letter of the law, but surely according to the spirit.

I like CoPilot's answer better than yours, and I think it's closer to what most people would do; clearly 0x3F is the wrong constant but the approach is good.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#164

Post by nlitened »

whatshisface wrote: post #152
37ef_ced3 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know the regular expressions are correct, without understanding them?

Who cares if they're correct? If they fail a test, you can fix them. If they turn out to be wrong in production you can isolate the example and add it as a test. Producing regexes that pass all current tests but contain a subtle bug satisfy 100% of what programmers are incentivized to do. Producing them very quickly will get you promoted.

I think we will very soon start seeing a clear separation between programmers ("co-pilot operators") and software engineers (those who do the thinking and understanding when there's someone "who cares").

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#165

Post by microtherion »

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…

> have the machine generate code and have the human review it

The best characterization of such massive language models I've seen is "world class bullshitters": they are very good at producing output that superficially looks plausible, but neither know nor care whether what they're saying has any relationship to the truth.

This is virtually guaranteed to make such code reviews very frustrating, and of course AlphaCode & co have no capability of explaining why they wrote a certain line. I can't see this having much of a role in a high quality code base, but I suspect the sort of management which currently would offshore coding to the lowest bidder would be quite enamored of it.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#166

Post by arpa »

Hey it sure feels nice to know that now a "dog" is much more clever than me.

but then again, its approach is so vastly different that it makes it really incomparable with our typical modus operandi. It's throwing millions of monkeys into millions of typewriters and actually producing "to be or not to be" reliably.

I don't see AI writing Shakespeare in my lifetime though (I hope to die rather soon).

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#167

Post by incrudible »

incrudible wrote: post #133
37ef_ced3 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know the regular expressions are correct, without understanding them?

All regular expressions are incorrect, but some are useful.

(It's a reference)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#168

Post by 62951413 »

CTmystery wrote: post #87

Amazing stuff for sure. Looking at the example on page 59, though, I certainly see a description that contains sufficient information to implement against. I read this, and then I jump back into the tech spec that I'm writing to find: (1) The product specification and use cases are so poorly defined that I need to anticipate the use cases, design a system that is general enough to accommodate them, and implement it i…

I'm mostly with you for the immediate future. So even if cars driving themselves to our offices to write code for 8 hours is in the cards I'd be curious to hear more tactical informed guesses. What would an intermediate stage look like?

Would the demand for junior developers evaporate if more experiences people can 10x daily LoC productivity? Or the other way around? Would languages with higher level abstractions (e.g. comparable to Scala if not Haskell) win or something like JS dominate?

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#169

Post by mirceal »

this is cool and all but it’s not even close to AGI. it’s a sophisticated gimmick.

to go meta, I don’t believe that our way of approaching AI in general is going to get us to AGI.

Why? Assume for a second that we could build something that could solve ANY problem. What would happen next? What does an intelligent human with zero emotions do? Nothing.

Fear of dying and the hardwired desire to pass on our genes (or to contribute something to society - which is just another way of shooting for immortality) is what drives us.

I predict that true AGI cannot come before a machine that has feelings, that is sentient.

We already have machines that do that. They’re called humans. It’s very arrogant of us thinking we can recreate in silicon what nature has evolved over eons. Not saying it’s not gonna happen - but not with the current approaches.

Also, a dog that speaks mediocre english? please. this is insulting to dogs and shows out tendency to anthropomorphize everything.

Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English

#170

Post by mirceal »

arpa wrote: post #166

Hey it sure feels nice to know that now a "dog" is much more clever than me. but then again, its approach is so vastly different that it makes it really incomparable with our typical modus operandi. It's throwing millions of monkeys into millions of typewriters and actually producing "to be or not to be" reliably. I don't see AI writing Shakespeare in my lifetime though (I hope to die rather soon).

on the internet everyone is a dog that speaks mediocre english. especially AI bots!
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