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AI teaches itself to use an API

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Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#101
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…

As someone who has been in the game a long time let me tell you that as our tools have gotten better user expectations have gotten way higher. I would argue that it's actually harder than ever before to deliver a true first class product for mobile or web.

That's what the hivemind says - AI will automate all our jobs. Well, yes it will automate a lot, but we won't be having the same expectations in a few years. The bar will rise so high we'll still have jobs with AI on top.

There's also a small little thing called competition. When your competitors use AI, your job just got harder.

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#102

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…

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.

A) That is the reason? Do you think automation played no part in large manufacturers ability to drop their highly skilled artisan workforce needed to perform key tasks? Does that really matter in the context of the conversation, which is that it's pretty naive to assume everything will just work out when workers are rendered obsolete because it's logistically easy and cheaper to get it elsewhere?

B) You could live in the midst of 100 factories and that wouldn't change the decades of well-documented decline in US manufacturing jobs.

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#103
post #45
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…

There's no moat in AI. AI feeds on data, and the kind of data it feeds on is necessarily massive publicly scraped data.

Deployment has to be done on a large scale to recuperate the training costs. You can't hide it. By having API access the model discloses its abilities and can even be used to improve the training set of your competition.

And models are compact, you can put SD on a DVD, but the original training set was 100,000 times larger. You can train a 13B language model from 1T tokens. You can download, save and share a GPT4 but you can't "download a Google" (remember what happened to the LLaMA model and 4chan). AI models are self contained pieces of data and code.

So my conclusion is that AI will spread wide and reverse the centralisation trend we have had in the last 20 years.

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#104
post #78
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.

Our jobs are safe for now. That's not my takeaway. Our jobs will eventually be "unsafe."

Our jobs could eventually become unnecessary

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#105

It seems to know how to improve through trial and error, so I wonder if, once being given the right tools and information, it could be used for software and hardware reverse engineering.

Forgive me if I am wrong but I was under the impression that what you described is how machine learning basically operates: reporting and trial and error to achieve better and more efficient results.

At least when analyzing actions. Is that not the case?

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#106
post #9
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…

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.

It works for tony stark because he’s a fictional comic book character and there probably wasn’t that much thought put into it.

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#107
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.

It works for tony stark because he’s a fictional comic book character and there probably wasn’t that much thought put into it.

Well that too, but I think there is something to it as an image of what is possible.

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#108

I wonder if farriers and ice deliverypeople mumbled amongst themselves about job security as much as I see devs do it these days. A lot of us are in the business of deprecating people’s careers. Hopefully the irony isn’t lost. I feel like for the actual job lots of us do day to day, we’re ridiculously overpaid. I’m not even on a rooftop with tar and a mop! I’m enjoying it but I’m expecting the gravy train to stop eve…

It's a sad pill to swallow to realize that AI is coming for high end knowledge work first. A great irony to be sure.

I hope my mortgage is paid off before AI makes me redundant

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#109
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…

Tony Stark inherited tens of billions of dollars. YOU DIDN'T.

And, so, if we get Jarvis level AI, and you will get rendered obsolete.

When these tools come, inheriting billionaires will hire 10 people with Tony Stark intelligence as opposed to 10,000 devs with your level of intelligence.

So, don't be in denial that you will be made obsolete.

(And probably so will I.)

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#110
post #27
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.

fwiw I've been experimenting with 75% Pygmalion 25% ppo_hh mixed GPT-J models and it seems to be 80% as useful as chatGPT... With the exception of coding. Hope we can get there.
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