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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

#141

Post by HDThoreaun »

nprateem wrote: post #74
glimshe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next version will be 40% garbage. Then 30%, then 20%... And we got to the point where it has as much garbage as human code.

That's what you might expect, but it requires another breakthrough IMO. From what I understand of LLMs, they can't be incrementally improved to add logical reasoning since they're just guessing the next word. It's impressive and fine in many cases, but there are many where it's not enough.

They already have some form of reasoning though. GPT4 can solve novel problems. It's certainly not incredible at it, but the incremental logical reasoning improvements have already begun.

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

#142

Post by alexanderchr »

ezedv wrote: post #135

Nevertheless, you can do great things with GPT development: https://www.ratherlabs.com/gpt-development GPT Development Services are hard to come by and we are at the forefront!

Nice pivot! Good idea to get on the next hypetrain as blockchain slows down.

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

#143

Post by endigma »

loudmax wrote: post #126
lasagna_coder wrote: post #19

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 pa…

In compiled code? Just moving assembly around to move tabs from one part of the screen to another? This seems nonsensical, you'd have to have your magic AI bullshit not only understand the abstractions at play in, say, chromium, i.e. skia and xorg or wayland or whatever, but also be able to surgically affect not the code from skia, but specific instructions that (dynamically) position elements.

This abstraction, compiled away, into machine code that does one thing. Compilers also tend to take all kinds of shortcuts to make programs a lot faster, and therefore changing them might not be as straightforward as you think.

If you think I'm wrong, I'd like to see what "fundamental reasons" you've considered and how you've reasoned that they aren't an issue for this sort of system.

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

#144

Post by mcphage »

> I have lost complete motivation for self improvement in terms of keeping my skills sharp due to the rapid AI takeover.

How long ago was this? Is this a long term change, or just a short term aberration that you're assuming will last forever?

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

#145

Post by Balgair »

I'm of the mind that gpt4 has just made you even better than before. Combine your skills with it, make yourself a consulting powerhouse. Tutor and teach others at a pace heretofore unknown. Your future may have just gotten a lot brighter!

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

#146

Post by aristofun »

This can only mean 2 things in its essence (either of them or both):

1. You're not far away from beginner level in your C++/Networking enthusiasm 2. The types of products/codebase you deal with was overengineered, outdated, dumb or poorly designed in the first place

Unfortunately there are still piles of piles of garbage code and so called "architecture" being produced every day. That is a low hanging fruit for AI and rightfully so.

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

#147

Post by scotty79 »

loudmax wrote: post #130
scotty79 wrote: post #53

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.

For now AI has nearly zero debugging skills. Which I'm not surprised by because debugging requires reasoning, often over large parts of the system.

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

#148

Post by jillesvangurp »

lasagna_coder wrote: post #19

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…

Exactly. There is also the notion that making certain things easier/cheaper, will simply raise the ambition level for everyone. And you get to spend more time directing what the best outcome should look like rather than building it very slowly over a long period of time. It will be the kind of stuff you'd previously thought would be beyond your skills to do. But now you can.

People expecting that their jobs never change would have a rough time surviving for decades in IT anyway. Automate all the drudgery away, new drudgery always comes back in its place.

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

#149

Post by kbelder »

jwestbury wrote: post #138
gmt2027 wrote: post #80

In light of the quote, "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them," I agree that LLMs will undoubtedly transform the landscape of work. By automating tedious tasks, they'll enable engineers to become vastly more productive (10-100x), allowing them to focus on strategic and creative aspects of their projects while developing larger, more comp…

> they'll enable engineers to become vastly more productive (10-100x) Will that come along with a 10-100x pay increase? Why should I care about being so much more productive, when it won't come with any pay increase (and will likely come with a pay decrease)?

A general 100x productivity increase, if there's no change in pay, will result in massive price decreases and increases in selection and variety.

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

#150

Post by loudmax »

endigma wrote: post #143
loudmax wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

In compiled code? Just moving assembly around to move tabs from one part of the screen to another? This seems nonsensical, you'd have to have your magic AI bullshit not only understand the abstractions at play in, say, chromium, i.e. skia and xorg or wayland or whatever, but also be able to surgically affect not the code from skia, but specific instructions that (dynamically) position elements. This abstraction, comp…

Not assembly. Machine code. The ones and zeroes.

Abstractions like assembly code or C or Python are for the benefit of us humans. We can't reason about even fairly trivial x86 binaries because our minds aren't designed for that much complexity. An AI will have a completely different set of limitations.

This isn't going to happen tomorrow, but you'd be foolish to bet against it happening within the next decade. This advanced, but it isn't any more "magic bullshit" than ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion.

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