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AI teaches itself to use an API

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Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#51

Post by antibasilisk »

afpx wrote: post #44
bko wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The marginal cost of technology is pretty close to zero (albeit slightly higher for large LLM model inference) so it would make sense that the technology gets distributed widely. Kind of like how everyone has essentially the best smart phone. And it's laughable when someone tries to create a luxury smartphone for $10k and its just a sub-par Android with leather accents. If you have a technology with practically zero…

The problem won't be the cost. It will be access. Someone's going to say it's too powerful and restrict it.

A similar thing also applies to all arguments in favor of transhumanism, which is worth pointing out

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#52

Post by sclarisse »

slg wrote: post #45
bko wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The marginal cost of technology is pretty close to zero (albeit slightly higher for large LLM model inference) so it would make sense that the technology gets distributed widely. Kind of like how everyone has essentially the best smart phone. And it's laughable when someone tries to create a luxury smartphone for $10k and its just a sub-par Android with leather accents. If you have a technology with practically zero…

>If you have a technology with practically zero marginal cost, pricing it very low and distributing it widely would maximize your profit. This is just fundamentally not true or else all software would be sold for next to nothing. If a company is choosing between selling a billion copies of its software for $1 each or two copies of its software for $1b dollars each, it will choose to set the price at $1b. The sky-high…

That price tag only works if the firm has pricing power. In a very competitive market, it may find its pricing power isn’t strong enough, as other firms undercut it.

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#53

Post by ChatGTP »

vasco wrote: post #14
bsaul wrote: post #5

I’ve recently thought about iron man movies, where tony stark actually designs stuffs by simply talking to jarvis. I’ve always thought « if only i could have those kind of tools available, i would too be able to design crazy stuffs ». We didn’t think « damn, tony stark didn’t have to write a line of code, he got rendered obsolete by this damn AI ». That’s how i choose to think about AI tools for developers from now o…

Let's hope in reality it isn't available only to the billionnaire owners of software companies. In those movies everyone else wasn't designing cool suites by talking to voice assistants.

I'm kind of hoping it is available only to some people, not going to be nice when everyone can have an AI design weapons, viruses etc?

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#54

Post by ForestCritter »

paxys wrote: post #36

So the AI can learn to use APIs that follow perfect RESTful semantics, are fully documented and intuitively behave exactly like one would expect. Our jobs are safe.

Yep, I worked in a factory assembly line 'Wrangling the robots' and I'm not an engineer. They require watching and they can't do parts of the job. They get hung up easily and require alot of resetting. There's good reason factories still hire plenty of manufacturing laborers.

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#55

Post by DrewADesign »

defrost wrote: post #50
DrewADesign wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so confident. Places that industrialized during the industrial revolution saw explosive growth as automation yielded unprecedented productivity. Factory jobs paid very well and were readily available because demand was generally high for like a century... but automation and labor passed a tipping point and now we have very few manufacturing jobs and the days of guaranteed high salaries and growth are gone. Ru…

> during the industrial revolution saw explosive growth as automation yielded unprecedented productivity. Factory jobs paid very well It's almost like you've never actually read any history at all. https://www.historycrunch.com/working-conditions-in-the-indu... https://firstindustrialrevolution.weebly.com/working-and-liv... https://industrialrevolutiontwo.weebly.com/common-workers.ht...

As is clear from the rest of my comment, I was talking about the manufacturing industry over time, not talking specifically about the working conditions during the industrial revolution. Feel free to address the central point of what I said rather than make an unrelated pedantic point.

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#56

Post by dimal »

thih9 wrote: post #16
bsaul wrote: post #5

I’ve recently thought about iron man movies, where tony stark actually designs stuffs by simply talking to jarvis. I’ve always thought « if only i could have those kind of tools available, i would too be able to design crazy stuffs ». We didn’t think « damn, tony stark didn’t have to write a line of code, he got rendered obsolete by this damn AI ». That’s how i choose to think about AI tools for developers from now o…

I don’t see it like that. To me it illustrates that if you have money and want to build something, you don’t need to hire coders or have any coding skills, AI will help. And if you’re a regular coder, you just got replaced by Jarvis.

Software development isn’t just “writing code”. It’s knowing what code to write. It’s knowing how to accomplish a goal using code. It’s knowing how to structure all of your code to work together. It’s knowing how to adapt code to meet new requirements. I don’t foresee rich “idea” guys figuring out how to do that any time soon.

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#57

Post by layer8 »

valine wrote: post #27
jrumbut wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works for Tony Stark because he gets the economic benefit of that AI's output. I hope that we get there, but it won't happen by default.

Can you think of any category of software that doesn't eventually have an open source alternative? There are many open source projects orders of magnitude more complicated than a LLM. The linux kernel, Blender, Firefox, etc. These LLMs aren't inherently complicated to implement, just expensive to train. And if the LLaMA release/leak is anything to go by we are extremely close to ChatGPT running on consumer hardware.

It could turn into a Microsoft Office situation where the integrations couple so strongly that it’s very difficult to compete.

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#58

Post by slg »

sclarisse wrote: post #52
slg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you have a technology with practically zero marginal cost, pricing it very low and distributing it widely would maximize your profit. This is just fundamentally not true or else all software would be sold for next to nothing. If a company is choosing between selling a billion copies of its software for $1 each or two copies of its software for $1b dollars each, it will choose to set the price at $1b. The sky-high…

That price tag only works if the firm has pricing power. In a very competitive market, it may find its pricing power isn’t strong enough, as other firms undercut it.

>In a very competitive market...

Yes, that was exactly the point that vasco was worrying about earlier in the thread since we don't yet know if it will be competitive market. I was refuting the point that price is dictated by marginal cost. It is dictated by the level of competition. If there is competition, we generally wouldn't have to worry about it only being available to billionaires.

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#59

Post by ForestCritter »

DrewADesign wrote: post #47
raldi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know; in the 1970's, writing assembly code was "the part that gets you paid", and then when programs took over that aspect of programming, I'm pretty sure salaries didn't go down.

I'm not so confident. Places that industrialized during the industrial revolution saw explosive growth as automation yielded unprecedented productivity. Factory jobs paid very well and were readily available because demand was generally high for like a century... but automation and labor passed a tipping point and now we have very few manufacturing jobs and the days of guaranteed high salaries and growth are gone. Ru…

The reason we have fewer manufacturing jobs isn't because of automation. It's due to moving manufacturing overseas to exploit cheap labor. Also there are still many parts of this country that have factory jobs (I live in one of them, 10 different factories within half an hour drive.) and the majority have minimal automation.

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#60

Post by layer8 »

NZ_Matt wrote: post #46
paxys wrote: post #36

So the AI can learn to use APIs that follow perfect RESTful semantics, are fully documented and intuitively behave exactly like one would expect. Our jobs are safe.

I wouldn't say so. The 'Learning by mistakes' step in the demo shows that the AI can work through these issues, presumably this can be done more efficiently than a human.

As long as their reasoning capabilities for the general case (system 2 thinking) remains limited, trial and error will only get them so far.
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