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Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

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Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#751
post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m leaning in this direction too. I saw someone on Twitter phrase it quite well: “You can believe that most jobs are bullshit [jobs]. And you can believe that GPT-4 will completely disrupt the job market. But you can’t believe both.”

Bullshit jobs exist because upper management can't know exactly what everybody in the company is doing, which leaves opportunities for middle management to advance their own interests at the expense of the company as a whole. Upper management might suspect jobs are bullshit, but it's risky for them to fire people because the job might actually be important. But upper management can know exactly what LLMs are capable…

Hate to break it to you but upper management is usually the main driver of bullshit jobs. They know what’s going on

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until managers realize that their jobs are a lot easier to automate away with AI than the jobs of software developers.

The economy is so good at generating value that it is somehow possible for large portions of participants to create zero or negative value.

In Bullshit Jobs Graeber terms our current system as "managerial feudalism". It's not capitalism in the same way Adam Smith or Marx envisioned, we don't have firms brutally competing to generate the most value at the lowest cost. Instead we have a system of rent extraction largely done by a small number of powerful players. You don't need to be efficient to extract rent, so you end up with a court, or org chart in modern terms, of useless hangers on that mostly serve to demonstrate your wealth and power.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure the reason human physical labour hasn't been replaced yet in many areas isn't because AI tech hasn't advanced sufficiently - there are real engineering challenges in automating physical interactions with the real world that it's hard to see how ever more advanced LLMs will help much with (though they could certainly assist in the design process). That humans are still needed to cook/assemble burgers o…

They’re held back by robotics and energy storage more than anything. How would chatgpt paint my wall or fix my sink or install electrical wiring in my house?

It's worth wondering though how long it will before ChatGPT could give you complete instructions for building a machine/robot capable of doing any of those things...or better still, building a factory that can churn out millions of such machines...

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the AI's, at least right now, can't generate/change code so that it correctly does what's expected with the confidence intervals we expect. I've tried to get it to happen, and it just doesn't. As long as that's true, we'll need to somehow get the correctness to where it needs to be, and that's going to require a person.

A lot of people have already figured out at some tricks to improving code generation. You can fairly easily update the “next token” choice with a syntax check filter. LLMs like ChatGPT provide a selection of “likely” options, not a single perfect choice. Simply filter the top-n recommendations mechanically for validity. This will improve output a lot. Similarly, backtracking can be used to fix larger semantic errors.…

Currently ChatGPT isn't, at least via public access, hooked up to a compiler or interpreter that it can use to feed the code it generates into and determine whether it executes as expected. That wouldn't even seem particularly difficult to do, and once it is, ChatGPT would literally be able to train itself how to get the desired result.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#755
post #29

Looking back we had one CS professor who in 2007 predicted we'd all be jobless in ten years, i.e. 2017. His prediction was based on the trends he was seeing at the time. But it wasn't even AI. Instead he made this prediction because he saw the rise of no-code tools replacing software developers because managers could finally cut out the pesky "translators", i.e. software developers. I said it then and I will say it n…

> So exact in fact that they will need to specify a program in a click and drag interface, or in human language. This. I started programming in Machine Code, where the "editor" was a pad of graph paper. I've watched management- and business-focused people sneer at us geeks for my entire career, and watched them drool over the thought of finally getting rid of us. Hasn't happened yet. > I'd be surprised if the next st…

> I get that, from "idea people," on a regular basis. They have nothing but contempt for us "Make It Happen" folks.

I met a pair of such idea guys once, they ran their own idea company. Their specialty was brand consulting and online marketing, but if that involved something as menial as web development they'd help with that too. The thing that made me bristle was whenever they talked about the feasibility of software solutions for their ideas, they said "Oh, we'll run that through the machine." You know, as if their software team was just a big machine that ingested ideas and spit out code.

Their idea company is no longer around. One of them decided that he'd rather design hiking boots than anything computer related; the other is a head of UI design at Apple.

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#756

Real Artificial Intelligence? Yeah, that would definitely factor out a lot of the wasted work we call "engineering". Language Learning Models like GPT? Not even close. We should absolutely stop calling those "AI". They are not intelligent. They model intelligent behavior: human writing. We should probably even stop calling them "Language Learning". They don't know or care what language is: they learn whatever pattern…

> They are not intelligent. Citation needed. Numerous actual citations have demonstrated hallmarks of intelligence for years. Tool use. Comprehension and generalization of grammars. World modeling with spatial reasoning through language. Many of these are readily testable in GPT. Many people have… and I dare say that LLMs reading comprehension, problem solving and reasoning skills do surpass that of many actual human…

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Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if GPT or copilot make developer 5-50x more productive then you need just 2 good programmers instead of team of 10-100 person, so out of window goes all formalized agile processes, safes etc so you don't need anymore those managers who are doing communicating, process planning and other big business stuff. Of course this will also affect for developers but I bet less because there is huge need for software developers…

I don't disagree we just don't know yet. I do think these 2 guys will be overworked as f** and constantly context switching to the point they barely know what they're doing anymore...hope we don't get there.

Funny enough, last week I was talking about Copilot with a colleague. Out loud, I wondered if there was a diminishing return from Copilot. That is, Copilot is great at filling in boilerplate / the obvious, and I get to focus on the more intricate parts of the solution. But can my brain operate at the higher level day after day? Week after week? TBH I have my doubts.

Maybe it's going to be AI enables quality more than quantity?

Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If programmers are truly displaced then we’ll have something like a StartupGPT where anyone can create a software business in days. Heck I’ll be a owner instead of a worker

You will prompt a whole GPT company into existence, staffed with various bots each with its own role and personality profile. The bots could collaborate through regular tools like Slack or MS Office, and be like a remote company. They could do Zoom calls and use Github, interface with humans (customers, partners).

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Re: Build full “product skills” and you'll probably be fine

#759
post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have some meticulous API docs I've written, which I tried to get ChatGPT to convert into swagger It failed spectacularly I wonder if it's because the API is quite large, and I had to paste in ~10 messages worth of API docs before I was finished. It kept repeating segments of the same routes/paths and wasn't able to provide anything cohesive or useful to me. Was your API pretty small? Or were your docs pretty concis…

It can accept about 4k tokens, maybe 3000 words or 3500. GPT-4 can now accept 8k or 32k. The 32k version is 8 times larger than the one you tried. And these advances have come in a matter of a few months. Over the next several years we should expect at least one, quite easily two or more orders of magnitude improvements. I don't believe that this stuff can necessarily get a million times smarter. But 10 times? 100? I…

So people want to build a nuclear reactor on the moon, I think these things should probably live on the moon or better yet Mars.

That should be the place for experiments like this.

Lowery latency links back to Earth and first see how it goes.

Also you don’t think there will be resource constraints at some stage ? It’s funny we yelled at people for Bitcoin but when it’s ChstGPT, it’s fine to run probably tens of thousands of GPUs? In the middle of a climate crisis ? Not good.

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