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Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4

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Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4

#121

I'm definitely very worried mainly because I still have several years until even "lean" financial independence. Thinking about switching to a better paid job and / or starting a side-project that would be able to generate semi-passive income. I'm surprised the majority of devs don't see this as a threat. Check out r/cscareerquestions or r/programming, the general mood is people ridiculing the prospects of AI having i…

> Thinking about switching to a better paid job and / or starting a side-project that would be able to generate semi-passive income.

Are you sure that's possible? If so, why haven't you done so already? Were you deliberately earning less money than you could?

Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4

#122
>It can do almost everything I can do a bit better

At this particular point in time, I would not worry too much about getting replaced by an AI.

To wit:

     > Please write me a C++ program to compute the 1000000-th decimal of pi

     GPT-4 answers:

    #include 
    #include 
    #include 

    using namespace std;

    int main() {
      int n = 1000000;
      int k, j;
      double pi = 0.0;
      double denom;

      for (k = 0; k 
The code is totally broken: GPT-4 entirely fails to understand that floats have limited precision.

It's cool (and very helpful) that it can regurgitate Plouffe's algorithm (although I haven't checked that the algo in the answer is correct), but to me, this example clearly proves that GPT-4 is simply a parrot with a very large memory that does not understand anything it does.

A glorified hash table with a very sophisticated compression and retrieval algorithm, but a very far cry from AGI.

It's going to allow us to build a much better search engine, a great coding assistant, it will enhance your productivity as a programmer, but it is - so far - altogether incapable of replacing you: it does not understand what it's doing.

[EDIT 1]: I checked Plouffe's formulas and GPT-4 gets it wrong: Plouffe formula's key feature is that it yields binary or decimal digits of pi directly [1] (no iteration required), so ... why does GPT-4 loop a million time to produce the answer, ... meh.

[1] http://plouffe.fr/NEW/A%20formula%20for%20the%20n%27th%20dig...

[EDIT 2]: oh, and, I just tried to same example on Bard, it fares way, way worse than GPT-4:

    #include 
    #include 

    using namespace std;

    int main() {
      // Calculate the first 1000000 decimal places of pi.
      double pi = 3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679;

      // Write the first 1000000 decimal places of pi to the console.
      for (int i = 0; i 
These things are impressive, but they have a very long way to go.

Worst of all: they seem at this point incapable of verifying the consistency of their answers, correct and iterate until they at least output something vaguely coherent.

Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4

#123
post #100
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You kids didn't learn programming from magazine articles typing in your favorite little game into a computer that went away when you powered it off. You didn't have to toggle in a boot loader before you could use the computer. You didn't dream of one day having a modem and being able to call BBSs, then dream of your own phone line that you didn't have to share. Yet, ya'll turned out ok, despite all those changes. T…

I'm not sure how the current (or last year's) trend of "don't go to useless college just take this bootcamp" will fare in face of the AI revolution. because I have the impression those bootcamps only teach the technology du jour, none of which teaching those high-level solutions you are hinting about. So yes I also think there will be a need for computer people, just much less "programmers".

Yes, bootcamps are somewhat effective for simpler, structured, higher level software development like web development frameworks, ecommerce integration like Shopify, and IT support, which is what most of them target. However, it is not as effective for other forms of software development like lower level server-side, devices, operating systems, compilers, db admin, and parallel processing or advanced level skills like requirements gathering, project management, and architecture.

My guess is ai’s will largely replace the benefits of rote memorization learned in these bootcamps and make these skills less marketable to companies.

Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4

#124
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without wanting to sound arsey, why should I have to? If I'd had the relevant docs to hand I wouldn't have needed it. This is the problem IMO. The model needs to somehow learn that out of its entire training set, the single sentence in the AWS docs saying not to use the assumed role ARN takes precedence over any patterns it may have learnt elsewhere in this specific situation.

What you are describing is very different from the hallucination behavior of GPT-3 and GPT-3.5. Yes, GPT-4 came up with an incorrect answer, but it's an incorrect answer an experienced programmer could legitimately have come up with, and one they probably would have come up with before actually testing their code against the AWS endpoints. GPT-4 sometimes gets hard questions wrong. GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 make up nonsense.…

Yeah sure. But the OP is in fear of their job. I think there's a fair way to go until we're out of work. Wrong is still wrong.

Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4

#125
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you show me sample prompts where GPT4 gives garbage? I am yet to find one.

>Can you show me sample prompts where GPT4 gives garbage? I am yet to find one. Agreed. GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 commonly hallucinate. GPT-4 can certainly be made to behave badly, but on real questions I've put to GPT-4 it has a 0% hallucination rate. The few wrong answers it has given have been "sensibly wrong" in that it's highly likely an experienced human programmer would have made the same mistake (eg lots of Stack Ove…

My experience has been different. It very often hallucinates variables or function identifiers for me. I never witnessed it doing that for code on the first output. But once the chat/context grows larger and I already asked for modifications to the posted code, it happens quite often.

A non-code example: Some days ago I asked it about "Searle's Wall" [0]. It gave me a mashup of the correct description and the Chinese Room experiment. So it clearly had the right answer somewhere in its data, but it mixed it up with the much more famous thought experiment.

[0]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260138925_Searle's_...

Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4

#126

Faster code writing still requires people who know what the code should do, what it should look like, etc, like you if it's true what you say you're capable of. It sounds like you sharpened the right skills: how the code should work, and didn't waste time, ie. practicing being faster with a keyboard. Now you're more a developer, and less a typist, that's all. We still use engineers to design bridges, despite much of…

I think the next phase will be to train GPT-type AIs to forego the compiler entirely and just write binary rather than C or code that's designed to be understood by humans. You should be able to point the AI to a binary executable file and tell it to produce a version with a slightly different behavior. Point the AI to say, /usr/bin/chromium, and tell it you'd like a version that displays tabs at the bottom of the page instead of the top. Or port it to RISC-V, or optimize for speed rather than memory use.

Obviously, ChatGPT can't do this today, but I don't see any fundamental reason AI won't be able to do this in the decade or so.

Even in this context I don't know that there won't be demand for humans that have the mental rigor to program computers. I do think we will need to adapt.

Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4

#127
post #121

I'm definitely very worried mainly because I still have several years until even "lean" financial independence. Thinking about switching to a better paid job and / or starting a side-project that would be able to generate semi-passive income. I'm surprised the majority of devs don't see this as a threat. Check out r/cscareerquestions or r/programming, the general mood is people ridiculing the prospects of AI having i…

> Thinking about switching to a better paid job and / or starting a side-project that would be able to generate semi-passive income. Are you sure that's possible? If so, why haven't you done so already? Were you deliberately earning less money than you could?

Yes, I'm basically afraid of change, I quite like the current work environment, wage is the only downside.

Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4

#128
post #50

As an AI researcher: don't forget that we're at the peak of the hype-trend: a lot of what LLMs can do looks extremely impressive, but most of it falls apart on more detailed inspection. Unless you ask about mundane things, they will tend to get a lot of tiny (and not so tiny) details wrong. At the very best, these systems will allow us to automate some boiler plate things, but they're not good enough to do complicate…

There is no comparison with bitcoin here. Bitcoin is still struggling to find a single legitimate use case, while GPT4 is already proving so useful to so many people (including me). > What you're seeing now is as good as it gets (in terms of big breakthroughs, there will still be lots of small and medium ones). Unless you have a strong source for this, I find it hard to believe. Also, GPT3 didn't have many big breakt…

My comparison was merely in terms of how the technology evolves, not it's applications. Sure, Ether and zero-trust coins seem to add a lot, but from a 10.000 feet it's pretty much more of the same. Also, agreed that GPT1->4 didn't involve any breakthroughs. In my eyes, there's not much diff between them.

> Unless you have a strong source for this, I find it hard to believe

Like I said, this is just my opinion. I do have a world-expert level understanding of the technology, but at the same time I'm a strong believer that even experts are bad at predicting the future, so make of this what you will. Also, my impression of what constitutes a breakthrough and what doesn't might vary a lot from yours.

Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4

#129
LLMs are parrots with very, very large memories, an amazing compression algorithm, and a very good "interpolator" (something that can take a bunch of retrieved facts and synthesize a mix of them)

I've met a lot of people in my professional career that are deemed "experts" because they have the exact same skill set as LLMs : huge memory and a gift for crafting BS.

But in both cases, there is no actual thinking involved.

In particular, if the answer produced does not actually solve the problem at hand, there is no "check that my solution works, correct and iterate towards an actually working solution", something most human do very instinctively and naturally.

So, TL;DR: if you are an "expert" in the same way LLMs are "experts", i.e. you just regurgitate knowledge and fudge it to make it look like it makes sense, then YES: you will get replaced, and by the way: thank god for that.

If, on the other hand, you're an actual "expert" in that you are capable of leveraging you vast encyclopedic knowledge of a subject to guide you towards an actual working solution to a problem, then you're very likely safe for quite a while longer.

Re: Tell HN: I stopped caring about personal development in tech after seeing GPT-4

#130

Check back in few months when subtle bugs introduced by AI will start to surface. There'll be plenty of work and money for you then.

That could well be. But also check back in a few years when the AI is chasing down subtle bugs introduced by humans.
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