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What it feels like to work in AI right now

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Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it’s a perfect replacement for Stack Overflow. Except every solution is tailored to my exact code and situation. I’ve even gotten it to walk me through things like installing WSL 2 without using the Microsoft Store after I nuked all Appx packages. Maybe my favorite was pasting in pages of documentation describing all of the error codes for a library (the docs are the only source of truth) and getting it to out…

You don't need a full-blown LLM to find answers to questions on StackOverflow. You can do that today with any search engine. > "I’ve even gotten it to walk me through things like installing WSL 2 without using the Microsoft Store after I nuked all Appx packages." That's a search engine query you can issue already today, without involving any LLMs. It will cost a fraction of the cost of running this with an LLM, and i…

I remember cross referencing with Google to see where ChatGPT was pulling from and it wasn’t immediately obvious. So yes I probably could have found a guide through a search engine with more digging. But clearly the LLM is the superior product.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it’s a perfect replacement for Stack Overflow. Except every solution is tailored to my exact code and situation. I’ve even gotten it to walk me through things like installing WSL 2 without using the Microsoft Store after I nuked all Appx packages. Maybe my favorite was pasting in pages of documentation describing all of the error codes for a library (the docs are the only source of truth) and getting it to out…

Please write a blog post about this! That is an amazing story.

Which one?

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#613
post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically you've proven you have no value add over GPT-4 by choosing to use it to complete your tasks.

That seems like it supports his point pretty well. If he can use it to basically replace most of his work, then it doesn't seem like a bubble at all

What it does is it makes you multidisciplinary. You might be a coder who struggles with writing social media posts and blog headlines. GPT fills that shortcoming.

It’s also a massive skill multiplier. It can turn someone with a 3-6 months knowledge of a discipline equivalent to someone with 2-3 years (or even more) in the field.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#614
post #517
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At some point, I became disenchanted with tech and working as a software engineer when I realized that tech doesn't ethically fit into our primitive economic organization right now. It's made me feel bad about myself and the career path I've chosen. Basically, with tech, you can build a product with a very limited amount of people and resources with a potentially infinite customer base. And this means that this produ…

> you can build a product with a very limited amount of people and resources If you can do it with limited resources, then so can anyone else. (This is an oversimplification, of course)

this is not so straight forward, i've been using google for ten years even though it has been progressively getting worse. Inertia is a hell of a thing. Given a lot of choices, people generally choose one or two and stick to them (these choices mostly being determined by things like first movers advantage, good marketing, etc...)

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#615

I feel like the whole ChatGPT bubble has really highlighted what feel like some fundamental shortcomings in the worldview that is represented in tech. That is, there seems to be a winner take all dynamic baked into the tech world. Maybe this arises from the simple fact that tech places a lot of power in the hands of individuals. But there's an emergent downside to this which is that it makes those who were already mu…

This is literally threatening the winner (Google) taking it all forever. Some of these innovations are winner take all until they aren't anymore. The cycle seems to be 1 to 2 decades. The profits during that cycle are probably fair on average given the risk necessary to make the tech ready for wide-spread usage

Well it seems like the biggest winner over google is Microsoft?

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can program GPT in English. > Let me repeat that: You can program GPT in English. ENGLISH! How? Let me repeat that: How? I had a little script that from time to time parses a list of jobs from a specific board, extracts some categories, inserts them into an SQLite and have a frontend that displays them to me in a way I want. The board has since changed some things which would mean maybe 2 hours of commitment fr…

> make this happen without a lot of back and forth Perhaps this is the part you're missing. When I've watched people program with ChatGPT it _is_ a lot of back and forth because an enormous amount of context is able to be stored and back referenced. I.e. one wouldn't say "make me a Flappy Bird clone for iOS", they'd start with: "Give me the code for a starter SpriteKit project". Then "Now draw a sprite from bird.png…

> Perhaps this is the part you're missing. When I've watched people program with ChatGPT it _is_ a lot of back and forth because an enormous amount of context is able to be stored and back referenced.

I've tried to build a lot of fun stuff with it so far. Haven't been able to properly 'program it in English' for anything non-trivial. Back and forth ended up in loops of not what I wanted. I'm just utterly confused at the difference in experiences I've had with it vs. what some people are preaching.

> There are obviously _huge_ limitations to this approach and professionals will get hit them fast, but the proof is in the pudding: people who can barely code are producing real software through this approach. It's happening.

I've had 4 product people I know try to create products using ChatGPT. All 4 of them basically got stuck on the first steps of whatever they were trying to do. "Where do I have to put this code?", "How do I put it online?", "How do I store user data?", "Where do I get a database from?". Basic questions to any professional, but to them it was impossible to overcome the obstacles from code to deployment.

I don't doubt that it's happening and it will become better in the future; I'm just having a hard time trying to grasp where some people are coming from when my experience as a professional, using it, has been mixed.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#617
post #603

From my perspective it’s just _confusing_ to work in AI right now. We have some massive models that are doing some really neat stuff, and apparently hundreds of millions of people are using them—but I keep wondering: to do _what_, exactly? I’m not asking what the models can do, I’m asking what people want the models to do every day, all the time. I’ve been shown some neat pictures people made that they thought were c…

Latvian is a language, that's spoken by less than 2 million people. It's irrelevant outside of Latvia. All of our government funded researchers who worked on natural language processing can now throw their work in the trash and resign. ChatGPT is leagues better than anything that they've done. And OpenAI weren't even trying. Windows wasn't even localised in Latvian properly until very recently. Google translate still…

Quality machine translation for less common languages would be a service worth paying for. Any links to examples and evaluation of ChatGPT capabilities?

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can program GPT in English. > Let me repeat that: You can program GPT in English. ENGLISH! How? Let me repeat that: How? I had a little script that from time to time parses a list of jobs from a specific board, extracts some categories, inserts them into an SQLite and have a frontend that displays them to me in a way I want. The board has since changed some things which would mean maybe 2 hours of commitment fr…

Honestly don't think it will be long before gpt can read this comment, then politely ask you for the urls of the job board and your git repo and 2 seconds later you will have a pull request to review

Perhaps, but I'm talking about right now. I would love to be able to do this as I have 1000 ideas and no time to try them out.

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#619
post #86

I won't try to predict the future as far as such ML models will take our jobs or not. However, I'd like to point out to most people that working on and studying fundamentals won't be a time wasted. Even if programming disappears as an employable job, people will still need to understand and learn things. You'll still need to know the math/physics/philosophy/history/literature/art/music etc. It might turn out that it'…

> I think the end of the world is greatly exagarated. We actually have much bigger problems than "AI". Millions of people are going to have problems putting food on the table and providing a roof over their head, if the progress of these AIs doesn't halt immediately, or if some form of UBI isn't enacted.

That's an opinion framed as a fact. It's equally likely that more people will have jobs as "AI" becomes increasingly adopted across sectors, where new jobs will emerge to integrate them, of existing jobs are supplemented by them.

Why half research "immediately"?

Re: What it feels like to work in AI right now

#620

From my perspective it’s just _confusing_ to work in AI right now. We have some massive models that are doing some really neat stuff, and apparently hundreds of millions of people are using them—but I keep wondering: to do _what_, exactly? I’m not asking what the models can do, I’m asking what people want the models to do every day, all the time. I’ve been shown some neat pictures people made that they thought were c…

It's just a glorified google search. You'd save more time googling what you need and picking 2-3 results to read briefly. People have no clue human intelligence has very little to do with "statistical analysis of old data".

Google search is a trillion dollar product.
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