I am so terrified right now about the implications of this to a regular software engineer like myself. In 10 years we would be totally dispensable
AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English
211–220 of 263 posts
Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 overwhel…
I hope you don't mean to imply that TDD haters are not real computer scientists. http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-s...
Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English
#213A lot of people who are skeptical about AI progress call it "statistical modeling" and point to large data sets involved and large amounts of hardware thrown at it. Sort of implying it's some sort of a brute-force trick.
I'm afraid they do not understand the size of problem/solution set. Suppose problem and solution are 1000 characters long and there's a set of 32 characters. Then a model is function F: X -> X where X is a set of 2^5000 elements. There are 2^10000 such functions, and the goal of a training process is to find the best one.
Training set for a language model would be well under 1 PB. So a task here is to use a training set of size 2^50 to find a function from 2^10000 space.
It's obvious that no amount of brute-forcing can possibly find this. An no classic mathematical statistical modeling can possibly help. A problem like this can be only approached via ANNs trained through backpropagation, and only because this training process is known to generalize.
Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
I meant actually coming up with examples consisting of specific problems and their correct solutions (and maybe some counterexamples.) Ironically, I had just replaced 'test cases' with 'tests', because I thought that the former might seem too generic, and arguably satisfiable merely by rephrasing the problem statement as a test case to be satisfied.
That would imply the AI already solved the problem, as it needs the solution inorder to generate tests, e.g. An AI can't test addition without being able to add, and so on
The problem here is to write a program, not solve the problem that this program is intended to solve. Clearly people can write tests for programs without necessarily being able to write a program to meet the specification, and in some cases without being able to solve the problem that the program is required to solve (e.g. plausibly, a person could write a tests for a program for solving Sudoku puzzles without being able to do that themselves, and it is possible to test programs that will be employed to find currently-unknown prime numbers.)
Having said that, your point is kind-of what I was getting at here, though in a way that was probably way too tongue-in-cheek for its own good: When we consider all the activities that go into writing a program, the parts that AlphaCode does not have to do are not trivial. Being given solved test cases is what allows it to succeed (sometimes) with an approach that involves producing a very large number of mostly-wrong candidates, and searching through them for the few that seem to work.
Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English
#215this 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 c…
I agree with your underlying premise - without stimuli such as pain and pleasure to give motivation it is difficult to foresee an AI which will think enough like humans to be useful or that we feel we can trust. But perhaps that is just chauvinism.
Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
The steep part of a sigmoid curve DOES grow almost exponentially though. What's the point of saying this? It's like saying, "sure we are making great progress, but eventually the universe will come to an end and we'll all be dead." Who cares? Why not worry about that when we're there?
The point is that it is a completely different framework to think about the future. The exponential model is something close than what is behind Ray Kurzweil reasoning about the Great Singularity and how the future will be completely different and we're all going to be gods or immortals or doomed or something dramatic in that vein. The S-Curve is more boring, it means that the future of computing technology might not…
>A bit like airplanes, or space tech you know, have you seen those improving by a 10x factor recently?
Is space tech included ironically here? There's been 10x (or more) improvements across dozens of space tech problems in the last couple decades.
Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Programmers often feel invested in the success of their product but that's not what they're incentivized to do. They're incentivized to produce fast results that are bad in ways that you have to be a programmer to understand. If you have to be a programmer to understand why something's bad, who's going to prevent it? This is a major unsolved problem in the structure and organization of working.
The CTO who used to be a dev. More generally anyone in management with a technical background. They may not exist in some companies, but that's not because it's "a major unsolved problem in the structure and organization of working", it's because the company sucks in that regard.
Except testers and users aren’t programmers. Code reviews are what’s supposed to catch this stuff, but it’s rare for a team lead or other programmer to investigate every single commit.
Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is overhyped because in the end it has failed to deliver the breakthrough promised years ago. Car drinking cars are a great example. The AI that has taken over google search has made a great product kinda of awful now. What breakthroughs are you referring to?
I mean, Zoom can change your background of video in real time, and people all over the world do so every day. This was an unimaginable breakthrough 10 years ago.
>This was an unimaginable breakthrough 10 years ago.
We had real time green screens 10 years ago. I don't think it's that unimaginable.
Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
100% this. Exponential progress is only a thing if potential progress is infinite. If the potential progress is finite (hint: it is), eventually the rate of progress hit progressively diminishing returns.
What is the limit you foresee on computation, especially when such computations can optimise themselves without human intervention?
There are physical limits to computation.
The number of orders of magnitude remaining, is not that large.
Re: AlphaCode as a dog speaking mediocre English
#220Amazing 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…
Dog speaking mediocre English won't take my job (yet).
I debated where in the whole thread, if anywhere, to comment that it is unfair to call it a dog. It is unfair to dogs, and misleading to any human trying to form useful abstractions about it. It lacks any of the dog's general intelligence and social skill which are integral to how we humans think about the sophistication of a dog and understand its adaptability and utility. To me, it is about as accurate as characterizing a mannequin as a monkey with mediocre fashion skills.
But, your post makes me realize that a job could be threatened by an AI just superficially emulating a worker, because its existence might exploit the social vulnerabilities of the workplace, in spite of having no general intelligence nor exploitative social skills of its own.