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Post-GPT Computing

grady.io

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Re: Post-GPT Computing

#311

Post by analyte123 »

wefarrell wrote: post #169
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…

Ironically administration overhead in many industries, particularly healthcare and education, has been growing over the past several decades despite increasing technology adoption. This is exactly the opposite of what you would expect given the increased efficiencies that come from adopting computer systems and automation. I see AI as a continuation of this trend and I don’t expect it to put people out of work, burea…

I’ve heard this stated as “jobs that don’t exist for economic reasons aren’t going to get automated for economic reasons”.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#312

Post by UncleEntity »

mcculley wrote: post #308

I am currently doing some difficult work that involves figuring out the right computational geometry algorithms to apply to my dataset in order to get the answers my users need in a reasonable time. ChatGPT is of no use to me there. When I need to ask for boilerplate code for fetching a web resource or using a well-defined API, ChatGPT is great. ChatGPT has made the mundane plumbing a lot easier. It is a threat to pl…

> ChatGPT is of no use to me there.

Today.

What happens when it understands computational geometry and can calculate an optimal strategy to apply it to a dataset and end goal you provide?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#313

Post by precompute »

barrkel wrote: post #88

I don't think this is quite correct. If the LLM has seen lots of instances of usage of an API, it can write code to target the API. It can generalize to some degree, but things go off track the further your requirements are away from the training data. If your code is a lot of duct tape between well-documented, or at least well-named, APIs, that code can be automated. Which is great. That kind of code was always bori…

Yes. Outsourcing engineering to LLMs is like building bridges based on structural integrity in minecraft. The real product here is just a "language calculator", that also does "code generation" because it makes financial and PR sense. That people even believe these models can be novel makes one look to the way this thing is marketed.

It's also a good time to really take our heads out of the sand and re-evaluate how we expect people to learn civil engineering if their only teacher is a minecraft world. You might get some people that are perfect in minecraft. The rest will be hopelessly stunted. Pretty soon it'll pivot to materials engineering to figure out how exactly a minecraft block adheres to a surface because we lost the original irl way to build a bridge.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#314

Post by mcculley »

UncleEntity wrote: post #312
mcculley wrote: post #308

I am currently doing some difficult work that involves figuring out the right computational geometry algorithms to apply to my dataset in order to get the answers my users need in a reasonable time. ChatGPT is of no use to me there. When I need to ask for boilerplate code for fetching a web resource or using a well-defined API, ChatGPT is great. ChatGPT has made the mundane plumbing a lot easier. It is a threat to pl…

> ChatGPT is of no use to me there. Today. What happens when it understands computational geometry and can calculate an optimal strategy to apply it to a dataset and end goal you provide?

I will be happy to provide value higher up instead of dealing with this frustrating problem. I want the answer, not the code that generates the answer. I am writing that code now because it does not exist yet. So far, I have only had ChatGPT give me answers that can be derived from existing code. Regardless, I look forward to it being smarter.

(My intuition is that ChatGPT, like all technologies before it, will end up making more wealth and more jobs possible.)

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#315

Post by fhd2 »

Nemi wrote: post #135
throwawayai2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when no junior devs are hired for 5 years? Who works their way up to replace the seniors who are leaving?

Is there a scenario where just the people that REALLY love programming start in the field? Could this be a situation where you reduce the field of programmers to only those that are truly passionate about programming, thus making the people left in the field the cream of the crop? We have all worked with individuals that are clearly in the field because they think they can make a lot of money and don’t give a crap ab…

I started as a programmer right during the dotcom crash - it sure felt like that.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#316

Post by PeterisP »

raldi wrote: post #156
tablespoon wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Competition from non-junior devs, who can do all the same things the junior+GPT can do and also the tricky parts which "GPTs" can't yet do; and also have the benefit of domain-specific expertise about some area of business and/or better connections for investors, marketing, B2B connections.

This hypothetical scenario is literally like "pull up the ladder behind you", as all this experience and connections is something that a senior person has gotten while being handsomely paid for their time, but a future junior person may have to get on their own time and dime.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is everything, and there's no reason to assume that random unemployed inexperienced people will be superior at execution.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#317

Post by vineyardmike »

orangesite wrote: post #237
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…

"You're holding it wrong"

There’s a difference between the iPhone “you’re holding it wrong” argument and not using a tool correctly. If you try to hammer a screw, it may enter the wood but that doesn’t mean it’s the correct way to use it.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#318

Post by IanCal »

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…

You can also just ask it to check if its result matches the spec or check it for bugs. I've done that and had it find things without me telling it what was wrong.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#319

Post by tablespoon »

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…

> ...but at least most people know that "Google programming" is sort of bad. I think we're going to be cleaning up the GPT messes for decades to come because it's very confidently incorrect and much more accessible as you point out.

Speaking of which: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831/temporary-po...

> Overall, because the average rate of getting correct answers from ChatGPT is too low, the posting of answers created by ChatGPT is substantially harmful to the site and to users who are asking and looking for correct answers.

> The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce. There are also many people trying out ChatGPT to create answers, without the expertise or willingness to verify that the answer is correct prior to posting. Because such answers are so easy to produce, a large number of people are posting a lot of answers. The volume of these answers (thousands) and the fact that the answers often require a detailed read by someone with at least some subject matter expertise in order to determine that the answer is actually bad has effectively swamped our volunteer-based quality curation infrastructure.

If we're lucky ChatGPT will poison itself by pissing in its well, but it will take a lot of good things with it.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#320

Post by tablespoon »

booleandilemma wrote: post #287
tablespoon wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

It does make sense, but you're not thinking about it clearly because you're too tied up in existing social structures. The end state "AI-fueled Elon Musks" (note that's a type, not a particular man) don't need common-man customers or their money, because they don't need to pay labor to operate their capital. They can directly operate their capital themselves, so they'll just do whatever the heck they want and nearly everyone who's now an employee becomes an ant.

At that point the main economy would mainly consist of billionaire ego projects and some trade between large corporations to support them. Common people would scrape by on billionaire largess and by squatting on resources not currently needed by billionaire ego projects and using it for small-scale subsistence production.

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