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Post-GPT Computing

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Re: Post-GPT Computing

#101

Post by olalonde »

jwestbury wrote: post #96
olalonde wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure secretaries had similar thoughts about the arrival of personal computers. Yet, few would argue that computers have made the world a worse place. The truth is people will do less work, or it will feel like it. Most of our ancestors did not have the comfortable software jobs we have today. Life will become easier, products and services will become more abundant. Of course, the transition will be harder for tho…

> we will either live lives of abundance and leisure or face extinction Third option, the workers no longer control the means of production, and we see levels of inequality that make the railroad barons look like they were middle class.

I doubt this third option exists. If the AI(s) lack empathy for us and we are useless to them, they will either exterminate us directly, or indirectly by denying us resources. If they have empathy for us, they will probably let us live good lives. I doubt we will be useful to them, so I doubt there is a scenario where we live miserable lives working for the AI(s).

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#102

Post by rdg42 »

breck wrote: post #26

> 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. Interesting! Somehow I missed this. https://spec.openapis.org/oas/latest.html

Mixing up OpenAI with OpenAPI here ?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#103

Post by crop_rotation »

What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world. Given that knowledge work (not just software) has been one big option for people to climb the social ladder. If the AI can reasonably do all knowledge work in future, the amount of social climbing opportunities will drastically decrease. And no, UBI will not create more opportunities for social mobility. It seems like more and more people will have to compete with the fewer and fewer social climbing opportunities.

Also what happens to Europe? All these companies behind LLMs are from US, and Europe is nowhere to be found. This seems like it will dramatically accelerate the wealth different between the US and the EU.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#104

Post by awb »

nunez wrote: post #92
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…

Yeah, and look at where YouTube is now. Millions of creators grinding for pennies while the lucky ones that got in early and made it rake in the profits. I think success in tech is going to become extremely pyramidal in the coming years. This is a huge shame, as this was one of the only fields out there where you could make a really good living without going to the "right" school for years and years and years.

New creators have success all the time, as will new software engineers.

But you’re right, the more level the playing field, the greater the competition.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#105

Post by coldtea »

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…

>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.

This 10x productivity absense of a 10x expansion of programming industry (which is very unlikely) translates to less developers in general, including senior ones. Even more so in an economy like this...

>It means competition between companies will increase but it isn’t necessarily bad for existing software engineers, especially solo founders.

"Solo founders" is what? 1/10,000 of working programmers? And they're absolutely not the ones people worry about regarding GPT replacements...

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#106

Post by edgyquant »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #54
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…

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, SP…

I seriously doubt you’re writing the same kind of webapps you were a decade ago, if so you’re a minority. Regardless a decade doesn’t “refute” that the web itself is a total disruption of the way people wrote code prior. This industry is always changing paradigms and were constantly exposing more high level ways to instruct the processor.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#108

Post by andsoitis »

> To be clear, it is also an end, or at least the beginning of an end, for a lot of the present day activities of software engineers.

Or the end of the beginning (of software development)...

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#109

Post by carapace »

Check out: "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" SRI Summary Report AFOSR-3223 by Douglas C. Engelbart, October 1962 https://dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html

> Accepting the term "intelligence amplification" does not imply any attempt to increase native human intelligence. The term "intelligence amplification" seems applicable to our goal of augmenting the human intellect in that the entity to be produced will exhibit more of what can be called intelligence than an unaided human could; we will have amplified the intelligence of the human by organizing his intellectual capabilities into higher levels of synergistic structuring.

Now that the computers can talk and think and program themselves, and we can expect them to become exponentially better at it (to some limit, presumed greater-than-human), there is approximately only one problem left: how to select from the options the machines can generate for us.

It's still an open-ended challenge, it's just a new and different challenge from the ones faced by all previous generations. And again, just to repeat for emphasis: this is the only intellectual challenge left. All others are subsumed by it (because the machines can (soon) think better than we can.)

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#110

Post by crop_rotation »

piokoch wrote: post #74

Ok, so we have that software written by AI, AI is clever, it does not need good variable names or functions/methods/class names, some of the stuff it will call according to passed specification so it will be understandable, but the further it goes, everything will get more generic, taken from kirjillion of other code snippets on Github. And it all will be working. Until someone starts testing this and finds a bug. An…

You should try GPT4. It does use very reasonable variable, function, method class names. And if you point out that the code doesn't match your intent, it comes with new code fixing your issues.

The code it generates is by no measure "a huge pile of spaghetti code with cryptic names and conventions".

I was sceptical myself before trying GPT4. I asked it to change the Python C internals for a new feature, and googled to ensure the description doesn't exist anywhere. It came up with very good changes and explanations.

And this is all not even mentioning the pace of improvements. It didn't take too long to go from GPT3 to GPT4. Even if the pace slows down, it is still huge.

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