Post-GPT Computing • Hacker News Board

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#481

Post by falcor84 » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 10:35 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #83

falcor84 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please elaborate

Stupid greed is taking so much as to starve your supply. Smart greed is sustainable greed. Smartest greed is one that feeds back into the supply, making it grow exponentially.

But isn't this just hindsight tautology? How would you know ahead of time how much greed is too much?

For example, I've been predicting the financial demise of Facebook for over a decade now (amongst other things for being too greedy), but Zuck's still doing well enough. Even if Meta is declining now, it still might have been rational for him to be so greedy over the past decade.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#482

Post by Canada » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 11:04 AM UTC

anonyfox wrote: post #479

meghan_rain wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but not 100x more than your neighbor, nobody is worth that. Hard disagree. Have you seen the average human, and compare him to somebody like John Carmak, Andrej Karpathy, etc. They create value at least 100x as big as the avg person

And without a society around them to support them, they would be unknown and busy trying to survive. Even if many people might not be able to do some genius things, they do other stuff that is ultimately mandatory for the geniuses. So yes, they might produce massively more value, but are still not worth that much more, since they wouldn’t be able to thrive without the others to begin with.

Society supports everyone in that way, so why should someone who is 100x more productive have to pay proportionally more than the average person?

To put it another way, how does society provison more support for John Carmack than it does for me or you?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#483

Post by tmaly » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 12:58 PM UTC

8organicbits wrote: post #355

vehementi wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Is there a primer on how to engineer prompts? I didn't like my results, tried engineering my prompts a bit, but it kept introducing different error. I had the domain knowledge to see them, but it felt like whack-a-mole.

There are a lot of posts of different prompts on some subreddits. I have seen people selling a live course on prompts to make titles for social media or blogs.

There is also some research to show giving examples and answers sets up ChatGPT to give better results in the style of examples.

But overall, I have not seen anything that covers a process that would work most of the time.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#484

Post by boh » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 1:53 PM UTC

random_cynic wrote: post #475

boh wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a question to ask when this actually becomes a reality. The AI taking jobs narrative is more of a marketing ploy to convince companies to buy AI services but the truth is, none of this stuff is anywhere near market ready. If a person is doing a job an AI bot can currently replace you've probably already replaced that person with cheap labor overseas. Regardless of whatever optimism is being channeled into the…

> it hasn't convinced many businesses. Those businesses would not be around for very long, so who cares?

Like what?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#485

Post by tmaly » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 2:40 PM UTC

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…

I did an experiment of GPT-3.5 vs Bing vs GPT-4

Bing produced incomplete code.

Only GPT-4 was close enough to be correct.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#486

Post by hn_throwaway_99 » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 3:26 PM UTC

magpi3 wrote: post #458

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

I watched the video. Chat GPT is impressive, but exactly as the person creating the video mentioned, the deeper you get into the project, the easier it is for Chat GPT to get confused. And Chat GPT has no idea it's confused. You have to point out each individual error, and the Chat GPT scans for it, makes a correction, and potentially introduces more errors. I don't see how you could use it with any confidence on a p…

While I agree with you about the status of ChatGPT right now, it seems pretty obvious to me that all of the problems you state will be easily surmountable in time, and I've just been shocked at the pace of advancements in AI in the past couple years. I think it's totally plausible that the AI community hits a "brick wall" eventually in some number of years with regards to their pursuit of AGI with LLMs, but the problems you point out seem to me exactly the type of things LLMs can solve with more training data/parameters/dimensions, and added functionality to test code.

Also, I see lots of comments downplaying the potential impacts of LLMs because they can hallucinate or they have errors, and though I agree with all these points, I also want to shout "Gang, we're having a fully natural, back-and-forth conversation, with a computer. It speaks English and French and TypeScript!" This is stuff that seemed fully planted in the realm of science fiction only a decade or so ago. For example, I'm not sure I've ever seen ChatGPT make a grammatical mistake, or even generate code that can't compile (though I have seen ChatGPT "crap out" if the program it's writing gets too long).

I think I'm naturally a pretty skeptical person when it comes to tech hype, to the point of usually being over-conservative about potential impacts (I drastically underestimated the impact mobile would have on society, for example). But with ChatGPT, I feel like I need to take breaks just from the constant mind-blowing nature of it.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#487

Post by CatWChainsaw » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 3:39 PM UTC

Hizonner wrote: post #334

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…

Those who control the present control the past; those who control the past control the future.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#488

Post by Nemi » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 3:50 PM UTC

somethingreen wrote: post #389

Nemi wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If there is a way to produce senior software engineers without years of work experience, why aren't we doing it now?

There is no way. What I am alluding to is that, the only people who will go down the path of being a junior to senior dev are those that truly love the field. It will purge those that only go down the path because they think it will make them a lot of money. Is this good or bad? Only you can decide.

What I didn’t say but should be a given is that these AI tools won’t be able to completely eliminate the need for any human touch, it will just reduce the need to the point where there won’t be the current huge demand for developers, and thus, the only people that travel down that path will be the ones that are truly passionate about development.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#489

Post by CatWChainsaw » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 3:54 PM UTC

Version467 wrote: post #165

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…

> a collective really decide to spare power It's either my imagination that has gone for a vacation, or yours is running wild, but that is the one thing I really can't see at all. Reducing power consumption? I don't think that's happening any time soon, or ever really.

It will be involuntary.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#490

Post by CatWChainsaw » Sat, Mar 25, 2023, 4:25 PM UTC

tablespoon wrote: post #133

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…

> 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…

It's not that they don't think about the consequences, it's that, as useful idiots, they think they'll be protected from them. It will be delicious when reality finally dawns on them. They helped build the big club, and they didn't even get to be in it.