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Post-GPT Computing

grady.io

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Re: Post-GPT Computing

#51

Post by rvz »

DethNinja wrote: post #14

I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days. Instead of worrying, learn to work with it. It wil…

> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.

And so-called "senior engineer" salaries will now be brought down and deflated since they were inflated and unjustifiably high in the first place and are the main reason why these tech startups run themselves into the ground with little to no path to profitability.

I guarantee you that so far, the only winner in this is OpenAI. Not the 'senior engineers' building on top of someone else's AI API.

In fact, why hire 3 over-priced seniors when one junior with ChatGPT is significantly much cheaper? I quite find it funny that somehow, all hope is instantly lost because of a "AI" spitting out code will replace them. It just shows that the majority of these tech startups were just good at losing money and being solely dependent on VC cash.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#52

Post by kakadzhun »

erdaniels wrote: post #10

I can't wait for the positive feedback loop of statically trained LLMs being retrained on data that was generated from the N-1th generation of statically trained LLMs. There's so much of talk about what these models can generate, which is cool in relation to plugins, but there's still a lot of interesting code to write, companies to build, and ideas to formulate, that an LLM cannot do on its own. If you're terrified…

If Reinforcement Learning is anything to go by, then a naive implementation of learning from past models will overfit to the previous model and start performing worse than even earlier models.

There was a paper by someone @ Microsoft who tried to train a boardgame playing AI like this. The "best" models started losing to beginner level players from some point onwards.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#53

Post by sebzim4500 »

> OpenAI made the extraordinary and IMO under-discussed decision to use an open API specification format, where every API provider hosts a text file on their website saying how to use their API. This means even this plugin ecosystem isn’t a walled garden that only the first mover controls. I don’t fully understand why they went this way, but I’m grateful they did.

Why is this extraodinary? What would be the advantage of going through all the effort of defining a new format just to create busywork for people trying to integrate with you?

It's not like there would be anything stopping Bard/Alpaca/etc. from reading the same format as OpenAI.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#54

Post by Traubenfuchs »

edgyquant wrote: post #38
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. You are overestimating the vast amount of "software engineers" in the world. The overwhelming majority of us are just programmers, we are just gluing together CRUD spaghetti in the random language we grew up with. We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want…

If your goal was to spend the rest of your life doing something you learn once and getting paid well for it you seriously picked the wrong industry. Engineers have been told to constantly learn new things, know multiple languages etc since the dawn of programming. I’ve worked with tons of programmers like you describe. I’ve continued to tell them that simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to dbs are solved problems we shoul…

Which industry would you recommend? I hate studying and I especially hate everything software development related with a passion.

In any case, I need to refute your argument, in my work as software engineer spanning more than a decade, I have noticed zero deprecation of my skills (Java, SQL, HTML/JS/CSS) (while keeping them up to date!) until now and only had to learn a few new complementing skills (cloud, docker, SPA, Kubernetes). The only skill that got replaced might have been "Java application server management" since that got replaced by whatever docker runtime is en vogue at the moment. I have worked for the government and met PL1/Cobol mainframe programmers that refused to learn Java and still got paid generously for their long term expertise.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#55

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

muffles wrote: post #45
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. You are overestimating the vast amount of "software engineers" in the world. The overwhelming majority of us are just programmers, we are just gluing together CRUD spaghetti in the random language we grew up with. We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want…

> We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want to get a decent salary for our boring work. Yikes. Productive work is not just a way to earn a living but also a way to achieve personal fulfillment and happiness. It's a means of creating value and contributing to society. A person who works just for the salary and does not find any meaning in his work is not living up to…

Maybe not, but they do get to eat, see a doctor, and enjoy some vacation time every now and then.

If I could make money doing something I found a lot of meaning in I'd be doing that instead. Thing is, we usually don't have that option.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#56

Post by imtringued »

margorczynski wrote: post #29
ChatGTP wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's time to build a business I guess? Others have said exactly what I'm thinking, welcome to the age of the micro-startup, 1-3 engineers, designers, product mangers building some very cool, albeit niche products.

And what that business will be worth when any random guy can create an identical one using a LLM? You remove the scarcity and the value plummets.

More importantly, accountants, lawyers, sales people and other generic business expenses are now making up a bigger portion of your company expenses than the development process.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#57

Post by michaelmior »

meghan_rain wrote: post #17

We need to push the notion that "closed-source LLMs are super dangerous, an existential risk to humanity". Basically we need to equate "safety" in LLMs to mean "being open-source". OpenAI keeps talking about "safety" as the most important goal. If we define it to mean "open-source" then they will be pushed into a corner.

> Basically we need to equate "safety" in LLMs to mean "being open-source".

I think open source is a reasonable component to safety, but I wouldn't want to make them equal. Open source may be necessary for safety, but I wouldn't call it sufficient.

For example, assume the source code, the model, the training data, and all the model weights are open source. How do you know that the model was actually trained using that training data? Very few organizations have the capacity to train models at this scale themselves.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#58

Post by Traubenfuchs »

michaelmior wrote: post #49
edgyquant wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your goal was to spend the rest of your life doing something you learn once and getting paid well for it you seriously picked the wrong industry. Engineers have been told to constantly learn new things, know multiple languages etc since the dawn of programming. I’ve worked with tons of programmers like you describe. I’ve continued to tell them that simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to dbs are solved problems we shoul…

> I’ve continued to tell them that simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to dbs are solved problems we should not be fighting with. Maybe we shouldn't be, but it's still a problem that regularly needs to be solved.

...because of the limitless customization that sneaks into every growing software project. This limitless customization is also my last hope, maybe GPT-n won't be able to solve it as good as I do.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#59

Post by falcor84 »

brushfoot wrote: post #20

> I think over time, we’ll see that what many of us really liked about building software deep down wasn’t coding, but intricately imagining the things computers could do for us and then getting them to do it. Spot on. It's a good time for existential reflection: Who would you have been hundreds or thousands of years ago? Who will you be now that technology is radically changing again? There will always be interesting…

>Who would you have been hundreds or thousands of years ago?

I'll just use this opportunity to recommend the video game "Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey". It's a game where you start as an early hominid and have to gradually discover how to make and use rudimentary tools in order to take control of your environment, literally evolving in the process. It's weird and unforgiving, and it made me really think.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#60

Post by geraneum »

DethNinja wrote: post #14

I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days. Instead of worrying, learn to work with it. It wil…

I think if we have the "final software" there won't be a need for a website to sell you products or another for renting a place for your vacation or the one that processes your payments. All is done in one software with one interface. I don't see a need for most of the current founders, especially for solo ones. Also consolidating this capability in a few big tech companies means whatever happened to other industries after industrial age, will happend to ours. Compare the current software industry to other industries with big players (chemical, aviation, power, etc.) where the barrier to entry is higher. Sure there are startups, but not as many as in software scene and even then, many of the are digitalizing those industries.
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