431–440 of 504 posts
I tried to get chatgpt4 to generate a basic react app that had a public page and a private page. you get access to the private page by authenticating with a google auth popup. gpt valiantly generated code and instructions for google auth. the code was impressive but buggy (outdated api version), but successively pasting errors into chatgpt went most of the way toward fixing it. the instructions for configuring google…
One thing I don't understand well is how much computation using GPT-4 takes. Some of these discussion remind me of Bitcoin as a global payments processor: sure, it can work, but it's doing a tremendous amount of computation and the maximum rate of transactions it can sustain is pretty low. I know it used a huge amount of energy / GPU cycles / time to train , but now that the weights are computed, what's involved in r…
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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…
And then your senior engineer class ages out and you are left with who? You need a ladder to create that senior class in the first place.
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> 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.
>Cutting out that middle band of ability and resources is a surefire recipe for social unrest. I don't know, the US has been pushing that envelope for 40+ years and people are still paying taxes...
And people can push the "meth consumption" envelope for years before they finally die from it, too.
Getting away with unsustainable practices for X amount of time doesn't prove they're sustainable and won't end in collapse. It just means collapse can take more than X amount of time.
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There is already software to basically run unit tests on LLM output and re-run the prompt until it passes. As the models get better and the tooling improves, a lot of programming will become specifying constraints on the program you want, and letting the AI explore the latent space until it finds a solution, which you then evaluate before providing more detailed constraints until it does everything you want.
Where do you get those unit tests though?
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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 your parent is on to something: it won't be the programmers trusting GPT a little too much, it will be the PMs, and there won't be a programmer :-)
People claim that AI can write code so they start firing programmers. Universities stop software engineering programs as there is no one taking the courses. People stop writing blogs or stackoverflow. Software engineers either move to other fields or start living offgrid. No new innovation or new line of code written by human.
Meanwhile, software quality get worse by each passing day and there’s no one to fix. AI poisons it’s own well by generating shitty code and now even simple tasks are taking 30 seconds. People say, “In the good old days, we used to get response in under 1 second”. Just like how they talk about cars and their durability in the good’ol days.
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.
> Basically we need to equate "safety" in LLMs to mean "being open-source". Another way to put it is to make it more accessible to everyone, right? The opposite of that is happening to nuclear power. They're actually trying to stop any more countries to have the technology at their disposal. So no, make it "open source" doesn't make it safe by any stretch of imagination.
reactor blueprints have been accessible to IAEA members for something like 50 years
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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'm sure secretaries had similar thoughts about the arrival of personal computers. Yet, few would argue that computers have made the world a worse place. The truth is people will do less work, or it will feel like it. Most of our ancestors did not have the comfortable software jobs we have today. Life will become easier, products and services will become more abundant. Of course, the transition will be harder for tho…
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> 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.
>Cutting out that middle band of ability and resources is a surefire recipe for social unrest. I don't know, the US has been pushing that envelope for 40+ years and people are still paying taxes...
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> 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?
The information society is a machine maximizing information exchange, something that only incidentally implies increasing profit or increasing productivity.