Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Post-GPT Computing

grady.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 504 posts

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#201

Post by tablespoon »

anonyfox wrote: post #175
tablespoon wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world[?] If the technology pans out the way the techno-enthusiasts hope it will, upward social mobility will be nearly eliminated... unless there's some kind of successful Luddite revolution against the technology and the people that own it . But that's not going to happen: there are all kinds of social pressure against revolution, as well as strict gun control in mos…

you vastly underestimate civilians. probably not a single gun is needed. a crowd of people at some point will walk into the billionaire's home and make him agree with handing over his wealth. They might call the police, but all thats needed is the officers ignoring the call willingly. Why should they defend those billionaires? What should they do? Rich people depend on many individual poor laborers, all of them can s…

> you vastly underestimate civilians. probably not a single gun is needed. a crowd of people at some point will walk into the billionaire's home and make him agree with handing over his wealth.

I'm not underestimating civilians. If what you're suggesting was at all realistic, China would be a democracy and Trump would still be president.

Sure, tens of millions of unarmed people with a single mind could probably do anything (like a mass of zombies can), but you'll never actually get that. There are numerous mechanisms preventing such a mass from forming, and more to dismantle and negate it afterwards.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#202

Post by raldi »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #183
raldi wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now junior devs don't have to build the product of someone else's dreams; they can build the product of their own dreams.

Not everyone wants to do that though. There is a lot of extra crap that being a business owner entails. Some people just want to put in their work time and focus on other things. This basically forces everybody devote their lives to entrepreneurship.

We don't need everyone to, though. If AI increases dev productivity X-fold, and this leads to an X-fold increase in entrepreneurship, then the junior devs who want to build someone else's dream will have more opportunities to do so.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#203

Post by crop_rotation »

ollien wrote: post #197
LeoPanthera wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, that was exactly my experience with GPT-3.5, but GPT-4 is a lot better at generating code. Almost spookily good, at least for some languages. It makes far fewer mistakes.

Maybe the ChatGPT implementation of GPT-4 is different than the one in Bing AI, but I tried to ask Bing AI to write a fairly simple Python-based ini-parser yesterday (and by that I really mean using the built-in configparser module), and while it got a good amount of the way there, but attempted to index a string with a string-key, which was weird. After multiple notices of this mistake, it produced something that _c…

I can confirm that GPT4 is much better than Bing on such tasks (have used both extensively for same prompts.)

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#205

Post by crop_rotation »

illiarian wrote: post #200
komposit wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This skepticism absolutely baffles me. Have you been using gpt-4? To unlock gpt for real you have to be careful to prompt it correctly and find a way to improve the feedback loop for improving code. It is only a matter of time until tools arrive that integrate this into your development environment and give it access to test/console output such that it can suggest code and iterate over the result. It's not perfect ye…

So... nothing changes. It will be the tool for which you will need to manually construct prompts and clean up output (including imagined non-existent APIs). The availability of a button inside an IDE doesn't make this a fundamental change in how we work

It is so far ahead of even what the best IDEs do. For one, I have not seen GPT4 ever use non existent APIs. You don't need to carefully construct prompts. It tolerates typos to a good extent. You can just type a rough description and the output won't need cleaning manually. You might need to reiterate it to focus on some thing (like remove all heap allocations and focus on performance).

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#206

Post by anonyfox »

tablespoon wrote: post #201
anonyfox wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you vastly underestimate civilians. probably not a single gun is needed. a crowd of people at some point will walk into the billionaire's home and make him agree with handing over his wealth. They might call the police, but all thats needed is the officers ignoring the call willingly. Why should they defend those billionaires? What should they do? Rich people depend on many individual poor laborers, all of them can s…

> you vastly underestimate civilians. probably not a single gun is needed. a crowd of people at some point will walk into the billionaire's home and make him agree with handing over his wealth. I'm not underestimating civilians. If what you're suggesting was at all realistic, China would be a democracy and Trump would still be president. Sure, tens of millions of unarmed people with a single mind could probably do an…

you assume that the vast majority of people in china are outright unhappy with their government right now, I don't think that this is the case. And trump is simply an idiot that only get enough votes somehow because both parties in the US are a joke to begin.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#207

Post by marstall »

I tried to get chatgpt4 to generate a basic react app that had a public page and a private page. you get access to the private page by authenticating with a google auth popup. gpt valiantly generated code and instructions for google auth. the code was impressive but buggy (outdated api version), but successively pasting errors into chatgpt went most of the way toward fixing it.

the instructions for configuring google auth were off. I tried a number of different ways to get gpt to give me the right instructions, but to no avail.

so it was back to the old way, of spending a few hours reading google's documentation (which I'm doing today) to figure it out.

once I'm there, I feel confident I could better coach chatgpt to instruct me. though I wouldn't necessarily need the help at that point.

on the code side, staring at the google auth api code it had generated, I was faced with a hard truth. I didn't understand this code. to iterate with it, essentially to develop it, I would continue to be dependent on GPT. Even if there was a one liner needed, I wouldn't be able to come up with it on my own. I'd always have to rely on this outside "brain". How can that be more efficient than a tight REPL loop conducted by me, an evolving master of this API?

And how will we humans even maintain knowledge of these API surfaces if we are not putting in our hours and hours of repetitive usage of them? We become ignorant of the evolving capabilities of the computing platform. And chatgpt becomes useless without humans who understand what's out there, what's needed.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#208

Post by rootusrootus »

tablespoon wrote: post #171
CuriouslyC wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that's technically a valid potential future, it's unrealistic just because society would tear itself apart long before it reached that limit state.

> While that's technically a valid potential future, it's unrealistic just because society would tear itself apart long before it reached that limit state. I don't think it's that unrealistic. The trick will be, not going too fast, managing a few separate transitions, and making sure capital maintains control of the institutions with the monopoly on the use of force. The masses don't tend to act to project their inte…

> The masses don't tend to act to project their interests until it's too late.

The masses are already showing signs of restlessness, and the only real problem right now is wealth inequality. Actual unemployment rates remain low. Forward in time a little, let's say 20% unemployment due to AI. The only way anybody is going to maintain their monopoly on use of force is if they hire every one of those 20% to be police. Right now the ratio of police to citizens is really low, and the ratio of weapons to civilians really high. I don't think the masses will wait all that long.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#209

Post by tarruda »

> Yesterday, I watched someone upload a video file to a chat app, ask a language model “Can you extract the first 5 s of the video?”, and then wait as the language model wrote a few lines of code and then actually executed that code

Have we already solved AI safety problems? It seems like LLMs can now execute shell commands on our computers.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#210

Post by godtoldmetodoit »

dopeboy wrote: post #25
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…

I mean this in the least snarky, most sympathetic way possible: it's time to level up. Countless roles have had to do this, it's now our turn.

I've been leveling up since I started as a helpdesk rep at 18, becoming a Windows sysadmin, then a junior dev, and now a senior dev. College was not an option for me for reasons totally outside of my control, as my parents decided to not do their taxes for a number of years and I was unable to get any financial aid (grants or loans) whatsoever.

I scratched and clawed, read tons of books, blogs, spent extra time polishing features beyond what was needed so I could learn new skills... but now I am a father of two young kids, with a wife. How long am I supposed to put in all this extra work? I'm likely slightly above average intelligence, but I'm far from being at the level where I could be an AI researcher... if I am even capable of doing the kind of math required there, it would require many years of learning.

GPT4 isn't going to replace me, but watching this space unfold really has me worrying about the versions that come out over the next 2-5 years.

A human is only so moldable, and while I am more than happy to learn new skills, I have no idea where to even start. What profession is safe? Where will the growth be in a field that will have equivalent or even near equivalent earning potential?

If GPT ends up getting to the point where it can replace me at my job, I really have a hard time thinking of a career path I could get into at this stage in life. It would need to be able to architect systems at a high level, write code to implement various features, communicate with stakeholders, document design decisions... if it can do that, it can do a whole hell of a lot of other jobs too.

Once it gets to that point, I don't think physical jobs will be that far behind on being automated either. We already have robots of all shapes and sizes (including bipedal), the main thing slowing down their deployment is that they aren't adaptable enough. With AGI, that changes. It will take a bit longer due to the capital requirements and factory build outs that would be needed.

Post reply on HN