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GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

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Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#42

With increases in productivity from systems like this, and a guaranteed bottom line improvement from cutting labor and running leaner teams, has anyone here heard of any large corporations using LLM's as an excuse for headcount reduction yet? In all honesty, I wouldn't be surprised if this has already played a large behind the scenes role in the layoffs at Google/Microsoft.

I work at a big tech company and there is a complete ban on coding using LLMs. The fear is sending our code for the model to learn in the future. This is also why then hype around GTP4-powered Office is overhyped. Very rarely will a corporation be OK with GPT-4 running inferences on their internal documents and excel sheets

Until an on-prem solution is offered, many of these companies won't get anything out of the technology

The layoffs at big tech are caused by un-even profit generating, Where 5% or 20% of the company generate 99.9% of income. The rest are essentially startups being funded by rich VCs. Eventually if you don't find PMF the VC cuts the funding

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#45
Yesterday, Copilot could not write a program with SymPy, which is a library for doing symbolic math in Python. (e.g., it would consistently confuse symbols in equations with Python variables). Today it uses SymPy as well as it uses NumPy (occasional mistakes, but overall it has the right idea). Absolutely astounding.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#46
post #45

Yesterday, Copilot could not write a program with SymPy, which is a library for doing symbolic math in Python. (e.g., it would consistently confuse symbols in equations with Python variables). Today it uses SymPy as well as it uses NumPy (occasional mistakes, but overall it has the right idea). Absolutely astounding.

I don’t think people understand the hockey stick we’re on. Don’t focus too hard on the failings, look at the scaffolding being rapidly deployed that makes the iterative improvement process exceptionally tight.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#48
post #45

Yesterday, Copilot could not write a program with SymPy, which is a library for doing symbolic math in Python. (e.g., it would consistently confuse symbols in equations with Python variables). Today it uses SymPy as well as it uses NumPy (occasional mistakes, but overall it has the right idea). Absolutely astounding.

They were probably apprehensive beforehand, and now just unleashed it on everything.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>IMHO it will drastically reduce real productivity for those who will remain on this platform Why do you believe this? Everyone I know who has used copilot has found it made them more productive. Admittedly, reports differ wildly on how much more productive from ~10% to ~100%.

sorry if i was unclear, by "real productivity" i meant something that requires more creativity than copypasting stackoverflow/copilot to your code, not measured in "lines of code" but rather in how much it is unique. Highly subjective, yes...

Right, but the idea is that copilot frees up more of your time for the creative part. That is what I have found in practice.

Re: GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

#50

With increases in productivity from systems like this, and a guaranteed bottom line improvement from cutting labor and running leaner teams, has anyone here heard of any large corporations using LLM's as an excuse for headcount reduction yet? In all honesty, I wouldn't be surprised if this has already played a large behind the scenes role in the layoffs at Google/Microsoft.

In general demand for programmers has been growing over the long term. So if the baseline is an upward trend, these tools can have a demand-reducing effect and the overall demand can still be going up just at a lesser rate.

Or it could be flat or go down - my point is that one thing reducing demand doesn't necessarily mean that demand is going down.

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