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Generative AI and The Future of Work

maestroai.substack.com

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Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#11

Post by toss1 »

zabzonk wrote: post #3

> The results are often wildly creative and spookily accurate, giving these models a human-like feel. or wildly inaccurate, particularly in fields such as programming

Yup. What seems to be largely missed is that these models have zero understanding, and are actually destroyers of information, not creators. In classic Information Theory, information is basically surprise value — how much unexpected info is in the message? — yet these "AI" systems put out the most expected subset in each instance. This highly averaged output is very recognizable and so very striking, but it is not actually very informative (perhaps except in cases where it is specifically used as a verbose search engine, where the query takes advantage of the breadth of the AI's training).

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#12

Post by aero142 »

zabzonk wrote: post #3

> The results are often wildly creative and spookily accurate, giving these models a human-like feel. or wildly inaccurate, particularly in fields such as programming

I've been asking friends in non-programming engineering fields how ChatGPT does in their area of expertise, and I believe programming is the area that ChatGPT is the most accurate. Finding solution to general engineering problems seems blatantly wrong in almost all cases, whereas in programming, it seems to be able to generate mostly correct code for simple, boiler-plate like tasks.

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#13

Post by blablablerg »

zabzonk wrote: post #3

> The results are often wildly creative and spookily accurate, giving these models a human-like feel. or wildly inaccurate, particularly in fields such as programming

Or worse, subtly inaccurate. The problem I have with generative AI right now, its product looks like it makes sense and sometimes it does, but there is always the risk of total nonsense hidden somewhere in the middle. So you still need someone capable to check and correct for most professional work, and sometimes that is harder or more time consuming than making the product itself.

The same sort of problem with self driving cars, they are often correct but not often enough, and staying alert to correct the AI is worse than driving yourself which is more work, paradoxically enough.

AI might manage to push through these barriers, but I remain skeptical with the technology in the current state: statistical machines that are good in the common cases but sketchy at the edges.

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#14

Post by thih9 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #7
smoldesu wrote: post #4

> Widespread adoption of generative AI will act as a lubricant between systems, I largely agree with this article, but I feel like you have to be careful with these general predictions. Many technologies have purported themselves to be this "business lubricant" tech (ever since the spreadsheet), but the actual number of novel spreadsheet applications remains small. It feels like the same can be said for generative AI…

Weren't we all supposed to be lollygagging about, as our robots did everything for us, by now? I can't wait for Wall-E! https://www.thelist.com/img/gallery/things-only-adults-notic...

Wall-E was about as much about post-scarcity as it was about escaping reality. To me it looks like we've focused on the second part and we got pretty good at it.

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#15

Post by jbcranshaw »

d_burfoot wrote: post #9

I don't have a problem with the main point of the article, but there is a huge terminology confusion that is rapidly gathering force to confuse people. The key breakthroughs of GPT3 et al are not primarily about generative AI. People had been building generative models long before GPT3, and it was generally found that discriminative models had better performance. They key to the power of GPT3 is that it has billions…

Good point on the terminology. What do you think the right terminology should be? LLMs is too much of a mouthful and is not as informative for the general public, imo. People are also using Foundation Models, which I rather like.

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#16

Post by zabzonk »

aero142 wrote: post #12
zabzonk wrote: post #3

> The results are often wildly creative and spookily accurate, giving these models a human-like feel. or wildly inaccurate, particularly in fields such as programming

I've been asking friends in non-programming engineering fields how ChatGPT does in their area of expertise, and I believe programming is the area that ChatGPT is the most accurate. Finding solution to general engineering problems seems blatantly wrong in almost all cases, whereas in programming, it seems to be able to generate mostly correct code for simple, boiler-plate like tasks.

why is "mostly correct" ok for programming? also, i don't believe that good programmers want to have boiler-plate in their code.

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#18

Post by ccozan »

aero142 wrote: post #12
zabzonk wrote: post #3

> The results are often wildly creative and spookily accurate, giving these models a human-like feel. or wildly inaccurate, particularly in fields such as programming

I've been asking friends in non-programming engineering fields how ChatGPT does in their area of expertise, and I believe programming is the area that ChatGPT is the most accurate. Finding solution to general engineering problems seems blatantly wrong in almost all cases, whereas in programming, it seems to be able to generate mostly correct code for simple, boiler-plate like tasks.

yes, but why? Why is GPT so much better at programming than other tasks?

can it be that programming itself can be so easily predicted in a generative way, while others require more ingenuity and real world model to be solved?

In this case I would totally offload programming to a GPT /LLM AI, while my job is simply to specify largely the business case.

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#19

Post by oogali »

teknopaul wrote: post #6
smoldesu wrote: post #4

> Widespread adoption of generative AI will act as a lubricant between systems, I largely agree with this article, but I feel like you have to be careful with these general predictions. Many technologies have purported themselves to be this "business lubricant" tech (ever since the spreadsheet), but the actual number of novel spreadsheet applications remains small. It feels like the same can be said for generative AI…

"but the actual number of novel spreadsheet applications remains small." That's not my experience, I am continuously amazed by the amount of tasks worker bees manage to do in excel. I kind of wish MS access was more of a thing, because when eventually it doesn't scale and you need a "proper" system, it takes a rewrite.

It's not just that a system built in MS Access facing scale concerns needs a rewrite from an engineer's perspective.

It's that the business will also accept that it needs a rewrite. As opposed to the current status quo where they'll ask what's wrong with continuing to use $Slick_and_Fancy_Tool (then act surprised when it stops scaling with regards to whatever business, performance, or compliance barriers you've then reached).

Re: Generative AI and The Future of Work

#20

Post by impalallama »

ChatGPT help me solve a refactoring bug today. I had spent hours messing around trying to figure out what the issue was until I realized, via asking ChatGPT, that I had misunderstood a piece of the code and the docs. It was able to answer and provide examples (until it had error and crashed) in a way a senior engineer might have been able to.

The funny thing is I had tried just pasting in code and saying "find the bug" and it wasn't helpful at all, but when I posted in a portion and asked it to explain what the code was doing I was able to work backwards and solve the issue.

Its nice anecdote where the AI felt additive instead of existentially destructive which has been a overbearing anxiety for me this last month.

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