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Post-GPT Computing

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Re: Post-GPT Computing

#221

Post by tomp »

PeterisP wrote: post #216
tomp wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 n…

Sure but then you don’t need wealth redistribution, because everything is dirt cheap.

The correct mental model isn’t “communism” or “wealth distribution”, but instead “salt”.

Countries used to go to war because of salt. But now technology has eroded its value so much, restaurants are literally giving it away.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#222

Post by LeoPanthera »

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…

> Maybe the ChatGPT implementation of GPT-4 is different than the one in Bing AI

Yeah I think it definitely is, but I don't know why. Bing is better at looking things up (perhaps unsurprisingly) but Chat4 is better at creating things.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#224

Post by LesZedCB »

btbuildem wrote: post #142
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…

From your comment: > I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. From the second line of your comment: > Now you don’t need to hire junior devs Do you need GPT to put the two together? I think it's pretty obvious why folks are freaking out.

I simply don't understand why people are upset the ladder is being pulled up after me!?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#225

Post by tablespoon »

rootusrootus wrote: post #208
tablespoon wrote: post #171

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. 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. R…

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

> The masses are already showing signs of restlessness

IMHO, "restlessness" doesn't mean anything. It would be expected in a AI-driven usurpation of labor. People have already been restless for decades due to de-industrialization, and that mainly got us Trump and an opioids, but the factories are still gone.

The key to fucking over the masses is making sure the "restlessness" doesn't get too strong, and doesn't have a clear (and correct!) villain identified, and maintaining a sense of inevitability.

> I don't think the masses will wait all that long.

IMHO, they probably will. Any individual or small group who takes action will be pilloried as wackos and thrown in jail. A larger movement will be (rightly) characterized as an insurrection and dealt with harshly.

People are complacent, and often don't realize they're really losing something until it's already slipped from their fingers.

I also think the Western world lacks the ideological tools to stop technologies like this. They'd basically have to start looking at technology like Amish do: rejecting technology that would undermine their social structure, rather than expecting the social structure to adapt to the technology.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#226

Post by illiarian »

crop_rotation wrote: post #121
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…

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…

> The amount of people who create genuinely new things

The question isn't really about "genuinely new things". The number of permutations of existing things is such that at any given job you're likely to do old things in a new way.

E.g. you'd think that all streaming services are the same. Superficially, yes. Internally, Netflix, Disney+ and Apple Tv+ are likely to be different as night and day.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#227

Post by cortesoft »

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

I don’t know, I feel like it really does change how we can interact with a computer.

It feels like we are headed to a world where we can interact with a computer much more like they do in Star Trek; you ask the computer to do something using plain English, and then keep giving it refinements until you get what you want. Along the way, it is going to keep getting better and better and doing the common things asked, and will only need refinements for doing new things. Humans will get better at giving those refinements as the AI gets better at responding to them.

It is already incredibly good for being such a new technology, and will continue to rapidly improve.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#228

Post by asdff »

politician wrote: post #214
bmitc wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

Who even asks on stack overflow? The exercise is the generalize your issue, and then the thread from 7 years ago with your answer appears.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#229

Post by tel »

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.

Why do you believe that "open source" would imply greater safety? Here, I'll loosely define "safety" to be "avoidance of harm to individuals or society that would have otherwise not occurred without the use of LLM technology". Feel free to modify that definition as you see fit, but I'm genuinely curious what the argument is that open source is necessary, sufficient, or even a major component of achieving safety.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#230

Post by marcosdumay »

dsign wrote: post #22

In the last few weeks, I've noted on myself how I've been going through several stages of the Chat-GPT "disease", or whatever it is. My first reaction was to be afraid for my money-making skills. My second reaction was fear about us ourselves making ourselves irrelevant--that fear still lingers. My third wave of fright, cemented by days burning my eyes looking at a screen parsing logs and trying to figure out bugs fo…

> And now I dread that all of this AI is just hype, that it will never be good enough to come for our jobs

Some day it will be. Not those ones, those ones are only hype. Also whether or not they'll come for our jugulars depends on what they are commanded to do. But we will get them eventually, and they will be as good as articles like this pretend the hyped ones are.

The funny thing is that nobody will use the current panic to prepare. And everybody will use the current panic as an excuse to avoid preparing once the real AIs come. So they'll get us completely unprepared.

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