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Post-GPT Computing

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Re: Post-GPT Computing

#281

Post by thisoneworks »

crop_rotation wrote: post #103

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…

You hit the nail on the head. GPT/copilot in some sense is democratization of specialized knowledge. Now on one end you'll have product engineers/managers prompt gpt to write boilerplate code of all kind, on the other end you'll have senior engineers reviewing, optimizing writing specialized code. Where do junior engineers fit? Can you be a full stack engineer? I believe it'll squeeze out all the could-be devs out of the field forever. Gender diversity/DEI? Forget it. Upward mobility? Will become much harder, you'll basically need to have a specialization to even be considered

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#282

Post by raldi »

raincole wrote: post #231
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.

... and starve? You know what kind of people create content of their own dreams? Artists. And the stereotype isn't "well-fed artists" for a good reason.

> You know what kind of people create content of their own dreams?

Every entrepreneur that ever existed.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#283

Post by mattgreenrocks »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #144
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…

I don't think social mobility will be eliminated, I think the variance of individual mobility will just be radically increased. This technology will allow entrepreneurs and solo content creators to accomplish a lot more, but it'll also eliminate a lot of safe career paths. As a result, if you don't want to be stuck in the underclass doing manual labor or customer service, you'll need to either be brilliant, well conn…

> The people who do well will do very well, but a lot of people who would have done decently before are going to fail.

How is this not a huge problem? The vast majority of people are not exceptional. Cutting out that middle band of ability and resources is a surefire recipe for social unrest.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#284

Post by seydor »

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.

Good luck after a decade of convincing the public about the opposite (walled gardens)

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#285

Post by angarg12 »

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…

Is not skepticism, it's curbed optimism.

I don't feel that my job is at risk of disappearing. Instead I think we'll be using LLMs as tools to do our job better.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#286

Post by dopeboy »

asdff wrote: post #244
dopeboy wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, it is disorienting. I think the best thing one can do is learn how LLMs work, acquaint themselves with real implementations of it (ChatGPT, copilot), and then find ways to integrate these techniques into their companies.

Or that could be a way to end up in the woods. What if you made a bet like this on metaverse being the future? You'd be wishing you hadn't now. Instead, look at the job postings for titles you want. Note the skills in demand at more than one job. Focus on those skills. There's your set of skills the market currently is in demand of.

Some of those skills that you see in those job postings today are devaluing due to tools like ChatGPT. Not all those skills and certainly not fundamental ones like communication and leadership. But if you see something like "writing CRUD endpoints for a Rails stack" everywhere, having that skill is no longer a differentiatior.

Don't pivot your career. Don't burn the boat and jump into AI. Just be aware of these tools and get good at what they're poor at.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#287

Post by booleandilemma »

tablespoon wrote: post #141
CuriouslyC wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As AI progresses, job options will reduce to various flavors of people who tell AI what to do, or tell other people what to do, or do physical things that machines are bad at. Over time that will reduce to executives, "architects" of various sorts, social media entertainers and manual laborers/direct customer service. The entire "middle" portion of most organizations that exist to connect the people making the high l…

> Over time that will reduce to executives, "architects" of various sorts, social media entertainers and manual laborers/direct customer service. And at the very end, it will reduce to capital only , with no need for labor at all. Most people will be unemployed, and whatever capital they've amassed is unlikely to be enough to sustain themselves and their families for the long term. They (you) will end up as little mo…

It doesn't really make sense though does it? Musk is rich because people buy his cars. If we're all impoverished ants, no one is going to be buying cars. Musk's money has to come from somewhere.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#288

Post by tjpnz »

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…

Under a capitalist system hell bent on endless and unfettered growth there's no slowing down. All it's going to take is a handful of players across a handful of industries to set things in motion. Perhaps AI will inadvertently eat the rich.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#289

Post by [deleted] »

saulpw wrote: post #277
asdff wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am positive there are plenty of undergrads who are probably going to try to get chatgpt to write up an entire app they can sell so they don't have to try and find a job in a recession. I imagine you could get this entire process automated from the prompts to the app store submissions, maybe you could have 10,000 junk apps each giving you maybe a dollar a month in return before long, that would be a good take for pa…

Even if you created 10 junk apps a day, it would still take you 3 years to create 10,000 junk apps. And each one requires more than $1 to list on the app store.

[deleted]

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#290

Post by dwaltrip »

devjab wrote: post #265
idopmstuff wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a PM who is relatively technical, but I haven't written more than a few lines of code (stuff like minor modifications to my Shopify site) in a decade. I saw a bunch of people talking about how GPT helped them code stuff on Twitter, so I thought I'd give it a try. Right now I'm building a sort of simple, mock version of the type of software that integrates with my company's APIs. I've successfully managed to creat…

One of the reasons I'm not blown away is that everything we've tasked it to do has resulted in rather terrible answers. A lot of them outright didn't work. When they did, the way GPT created our solutions were often in a way that wouldn't work well over time. Unfortunately you wouldn't necessarily know that unless you really know your tools. In many ways, this isn't too different from people performing brute-force pr…

Have you tried gpt-4? It's not perfect but it is a clear improvement for code.
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