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Post-GPT Computing

grady.io

151–160 of 504 posts

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#151

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 wit…

The panic is needless. If one hour of design work generates $100 income, then one might assume that MidJourney/Dall-E/StableDiffusion will generate trillions of dollars, but the world doesn't work like this. What will happen is that the design jobs will transform.

As you might have noticed, the AI boom will decimate the code writing jobs as well, something that the EU is behind on. Europe missed the "tech" age, but notice how the EU is not any poorer than the USA. Sure, some countries are poorer than others, but not everywhere in the US is Silicon Valley. Why? Because despite the EU missing out on "tech", actually the EU is very technologically advanced. Tech doesn't mean only low-touch high-scale computer-based businesses. There are chemists, biologists, anthropologists out there who don't know how to write a single line of JS and are paid like 1/5th of a junior JS developer, but the work they do is very valuable to society. Guess they don't need to learn JS anymore.

Also, notice how despite the thousands of layoffs, the US job data keeps coming out very positive - there's no unemployment problem. This is because of the markets, but AI will have similar effects. The world no longer needs that many CSS experts and React gurus who pull in $200K; the world apparently needs more hard-tech engineers and retail workers.

The AI thingy is devastating just for a subset of the "tech" workers and creative industries. It will enable other types of people and industries.

Startups who are trying to solve food production issues, for example, might finally outshine the next grocery delivery startup.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#152
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could imagine an alternative where the API manifest was provided privately to OpenAI in the developer console or where the plugin developer had to implement an OpenAI-specific API structure. Doing it this way is more, dare I say, open than it might have been.

There'd still be nothing stopping Bard from adopting an extremely similar API structure, and people would just upload the same manifests to both.

Yes and when you're google then that might work out for you, but that point is that anyone who creates an llm can now integrate a whole range of services without the services needing to provide their manifest to each of them individually. This increases competition between ai companies, which is why it is a surprising move.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#153
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.

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Re: Post-GPT Computing

#154
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

extracting 5s of a video feels pretty trivial. Not that this isn't extremely impressive, but it doesn't feel "come for your jobs" impressive.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#155

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 wit…

This is a question to ask when this actually becomes a reality. The AI taking jobs narrative is more of a marketing ploy to convince companies to buy AI services but the truth is, none of this stuff is anywhere near market ready. If a person is doing a job an AI bot can currently replace you've probably already replaced that person with cheap labor overseas. Regardless of whatever optimism is being channeled into the hype about AI's "potential", it hasn't convinced many businesses.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#156

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 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. And if you're a junior software engineer? Fuck you and be unemployed.* Do you get it now? * Until you can climb up the ladder wher…

What are the barriers to a junior dev creating their own product?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of people who create genuinely new things is so tiny that I am not sure it is even relevant to the discussion. And here I mean genuinely new things, not translating some C lib to java or similar stuff, or changing existing libraries to handle more stuff. If the amount of people that will have social mobility opportunities will be equivalent to the amount of people who could have invented the MPG format or…

> people who create genuinely new things is so tiny This is my insurance against LLMs, only works if the market demands new things...

I doubt anyone would want their livelihood to depend upon being able to create genuinely new things with extreme consistency.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#158
Last week I used ChatGPT for the first time for a real world task at work. It was a self-contained lambda function to perform some admin tasks, so it seemed like an ideal fit. Although the experience was good, it's far from the end of programmers. This was my experience:

* Although ChatGPT is pretty good at generating code, it kept making simple mistakes such as calling non-existing APIs or introducing bugs. Some of them it could fix itself, some I had to fix.

* The code provided worked well for the "happy path" but failed miserably for some corner cases. I had to fix that manually.

* The code was working, but I wouldn't consider it production ready. It required some cleanup, unit tests, etc. Again, some of this with ChatGPT, some without.

* Not to mention that I was the one with the knowledge about the domain, what problem to solve, a vague idea of how...

Not to pick on OP but extracting a few seconds of video from a file is a pretty straightforward task, you can essentially do it with a bash one liner [1]. My biggest question is how ChatGPT performs with a large codebase, contributed over time by different authors, with complex domain logic and layers of abstraction.

I also had a brief existential crisis, but I just shrugged it off and got back to work.

[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/59383/extract-part-of-a-vide...

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#159
post #45

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…

[deleted]

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#160

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 wit…

Focussing on the climbing is the core problem I think. Why even do this? We collectlively should own the machines and guarantee just wealth distribution, so that its impossible for a few to have much more than than others. Then every increase in machine work is a great thing for everyone, instead of increasing competition between fewer and fewer people.

Europe in itself is (together) the single biggest market/economy in the world by the way, and the US is actually falling behind into developing-country territory when you look at the population and their access to basic services. And just because right now it is convenient to rely on the US companies, and we're deep allies btw, doesn't mean europeans couldn't spin up the same tech if really needed.

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