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Post-GPT Computing

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Re: Post-GPT Computing

#211

Post by elif »

komposit wrote: post #181
angarg12 wrote: post #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…

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…

I think it's safe to assume anyone trying to criticize chatGPT who has access to gpt4 would specify that their attempts are using even the latest and greatest. The disclosure is in the interest of their core argument.

Therefore the inverse can be safely inferred by nondisclosure.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#212

Post by tjr »

antibasilisk wrote: post #128
tjr wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does GPT know beyond what we have (directly or indirectly) taught it? Could it have figured out how to extract five seconds of video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not been made available to it? Would it have invented the MPG format (or something comparable) on its own? Would it have developed the web and HTTP protocol on top of TCP/IP? And so on. Maybe the answer is in fact "yes", or even "yes, and it w…

>Could it have figured out how to extract five seconds of video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not been made available to it? Could you?

A good highlight to an ambiguous question! Which knowledge, exactly, is not being made available?

But let's say that an MPG format specification is available. Even other code examples of interacting with an MPG file. But no examples, no library, no documentation on specifically how to extract a subset of one file into another file.

I would think a competent programmer could figure that out. Perhaps an AI tool could also; I have not yet seen an example of it doing so, but perhaps it could.

Of the handful of questions I asked, this might be the least interesting one. More generally, can AI tools advance the state of the art?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#213

Post by tablespoon »

anonyfox wrote: post #206
tablespoon wrote: post #201

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. 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.

> 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.

I'm not talking about right now.

> And trump is simply an idiot that only get enough votes somehow because both parties in the US are a joke to begin.

Trump literally had "a crowd of people at some point ... walk into the [government's] home and make [them] agree with handing over [power]." How did that go?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#214

Post by politician »

bmitc wrote: post #167
angarg12 wrote: post #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…

You made me think: it feels like ChatGPT is just a less accurate StackOverflow answer generator. The culture of needing to use StackOverflow is not a good one, so I'm not sure why people are considering ChatGPT to be.

Counterpoint: ChatGPT will answer your question in a few moments whereas on StackOverflow, you might need up to 60 minutes for the question to be closed as "offtopic". ChatGPT never asks "why do you want to do this?"

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#215

Post by 49531 »

crop_rotation wrote: post #205
illiarian wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I've seen it use non existent APIs a lot. Working on a project that uses a dialect of python it told me it knew (Starlark) was like pulling teeth. It would tell me to use a python feature Starlark didn't have, I'd ask it to rewrite it without using that specific feature and it would with another feature Starlark didn't have access to, so I'd ask it to write the solution using neither and it would just give me the first solution again.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#216

Post by PeterisP »

tomp wrote: post #192
anonyfox wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

"they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" is a failure because currently the prosperity of the society needs these people to actually work effectively.

On the other hand, the hypothetical solution of "own the machines and distribute the wealth" is intended for a future which is substantially different, where it doesn't matter if everyone pretends to work or even explicitly avoids working, because that work isn't necessary for prosperity as it can be done by machines, and it ceases to be a problem if everyone can be as lazy as they want.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#217

Post by illiarian »

crop_rotation wrote: post #205
illiarian wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> For one, I have not seen GPT4 ever use non existent APIs.

Have you asked it to use any API that appeared after September 2021 (that's the cut off date for its data)?

Have you asked it to write code in less popular languages (e.g. Elixir)?

Have you asked it to write code for less popular or unavailable APIs (smart TV integrations)?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#218

Post by marcosdumay »

tomp wrote: post #192
anonyfox wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

> we pretend to work

That stops being a problem when the machines do all the work.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#219

Post by creeble »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #191
angarg12 wrote: post #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…

My experience was different than yours. I had an existential crisis, and it only got worse the more I used it. To be clear, I did not think ChatGPT was ready to replace me now (and, mind you, I only used the 3.5 version of ChatGPT). But it was so easy for me to see how in just a few years it can accelerate its pace of learning. I was discussing a bug with a colleague, so for curiosity's sake I decided to plug a simil…

But did you? Does it store and re-train on all of that input?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#220

Post by hokkos »

dudeinhawaii wrote: post #143
Jevon23 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don’t want my productivity to increase. Worst case scenario is that it gets SO good at writing code that software engineering teams are severely downsized or are made obsolete altogether, and I find myself out of a job. I’m not expecting UBI to start falling out of the sky any time soon, especially while there are still manual labor jobs that robots can’t do. Alternative scenario is that individual developer…

I think the rapid rate of change in modern software libraries has left me underwhelmed with ChatGPT when it comes to new libraries, C++, or niche APIs (financial, etc). If you're writing react/python/angular or something popular it seems to do amazing things and spit out entire websites (per demos). Unfortunately, when I try to put together C++, Rust, or even C# using recent libraries like Blazor it chokes up. I full…

Are niche libs safe or software platform will concentrate on the most popular with the most examples and better LLM completion/generation leading to ossification ?
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