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Post-GPT Computing

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Re: Post-GPT Computing

#331

Post by [deleted] »

crop_rotation wrote: post #110
piokoch wrote: post #74

Ok, so we have that software written by AI, AI is clever, it does not need good variable names or functions/methods/class names, some of the stuff it will call according to passed specification so it will be understandable, but the further it goes, everything will get more generic, taken from kirjillion of other code snippets on Github. And it all will be working. Until someone starts testing this and finds a bug. An…

You should try GPT4. It does use very reasonable variable, function, method class names. And if you point out that the code doesn't match your intent, it comes with new code fixing your issues. The code it generates is by no measure "a huge pile of spaghetti code with cryptic names and conventions". I was sceptical myself before trying GPT4. I asked it to change the Python C internals for a new feature, and googled t…

[deleted]

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#332

Post by margorczynski »

travisjungroth wrote: post #263
mrtksn wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The panic is needless. If one hour of design work generates $100 income, then one might assume that MidJourney/Dall-E/StableDiffusion will generate trillions of dollars, but the world doesn't work like this. What will happen is that the design jobs will transform. As you might have noticed, the AI boom will decimate the code writing jobs as well, something that the EU is behind on. Europe missed the "tech" age, but n…

> but notice how the EU is not any poorer than the USA. EU is significantly poorer than the US. Lots of different ways to measure it, but it’s a factor of roughly 1.5-2x in purchasing power parity.

The problem is that many when saying "EU" are thinking mainly Germany and other countries among the top-3/5. But even Germany is behind the US in terms of GDP/capita, PPP probably also.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#333

Post by idopmstuff »

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…

> I think it'll do wonders in the world of office automation because it seems to have the ability to succeed at this much better than any previous "no-code" attempt where the logic would almost always end up requiring people who are basically programmers for it to work. I think GPT will help here, requiring less "superusers" for a department to move their data flows into automation. Especially in areas, where efficiency and stability aren't necessarily that important if the automation-tools mean you don't need three full time employees moving data from one system to another.

Yeah, at this point I think this is a valid use case for GPT-4 in its current form. I would be comfortable using it to build internal process tools or standalone things like a simple browser extension. Nobody in engineering at my company would be dumb enough to let me start monkey around with our actual codebase though.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#334

Post by Hizonner »

So, the parts where AI makes human labor irrelevant, and where that's a disaster for 99.999 percent of humans unless the whole economy is restructured, isn't exactly news. If ChatGPT doesn't do that, something else will. It wasn't going to be more than 50 years no matter what, and now I don't think it'll be more than 20.

The part I'm finding is kind of a shock to me is the impact of the centralization on what you can even think about doing. If your application falls under their random definition of "unsafe", then you can't do it. Not even manually, probably, because the infrastructure for that will go away. If your one off question or task doesn't meet their approval, it doesn't happen.

Basically not only do the owners of these things become the only really important people in the economy, but they also get a new kind of direct control over people's lives.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#335

Post by margorczynski »

donkeyd wrote: post #130
coldtea wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This 10x productivity absense of a 10x expansion of programming industry (which is very unlikely) translates to less developers in general, including senior ones. Even more so in an economy like this... > It…

> This 10x productivity absense of a 10x expansion of programming industry (which is very unlikely) I think I disagree. If software then becomes 10x cheaper, a lot of use cases that used to be too expensive to build now becomes affordable. At my own job, I think we could easily do 10x the business, because our customers need tons of tooling (for example for energy transition) but we don't have the people (among other…

What if those use-cases disappear also because they were made for humans? Will there really be a need for spreadsheets and spreadsheet plugins when all that works is done by an AI with a little help of some headless tool or scripting language?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#336

Post by davidhaymond »

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.

This is one of my major concerns with ChatGPT, and I'm not sure why it hasn't been discussed more. StackOverflow is a massively useful resource, to be sure, but it takes knowledge to wade through the outdated (or just plain bad) answers. StackOverflow can be a useful starting point, but I don't think I have ever copy/pasted code directly from StackOverflow. I don't think any LLM will be able to replace the skill of reading the docs and learning your tools.

I have no doubt that ChatGPT will become even better than StackOverflow at answering questions. Is this really going to make us better programmers?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#337

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

sharemywin wrote: post #303
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This video kind of scared me even more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dBq9sKTKTY

Holy fuck.

I don't see how people can see stuff like that and say "oh, it's just a fancy Markov chain generator" or "it can't reason". Even if that stuff is nominally true, how can people not be totally blown away by this? Just a couple years ago I think people would have been amazed that it can have totally natural, grammatically correct conversations. Moreover, for nearly 3/4 of a century the scientific community has pretty much coalesced on only using the output to define intelligence (aka the Turing Test). While I understand that ChatGPT may not 100% be there yet, I see no reason to believe that all this interaction people are having with it won't be fed back into it to drastically improve its responses over time.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#338

Post by vehementi »

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…

> everything we've tasked it to do has resulted in rather terrible answers

Maybe this is the chatGPT equivalent of "learning to google search properly". You got bad answers, but maybe someone more competent at chatGPT prompts and workflow would have gotten to a better solution more quickly, and we need to figure out what that means

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#339

Post by booleandilemma »

tablespoon wrote: post #320
booleandilemma wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cu…

Thanks for explaining that. It's terrifying.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#340

Post by atq2119 »

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]

With all the talk of "quiet quitting", it seems like "they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" is a potential failure mode of capitalism as well.
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