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The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

mazzzystar.github.io

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Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#151

Post by gfodor »

collaborative wrote: post #139
gfodor wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been programming for two decades and you’re just plain wrong here. It’s useful throughout the dev process for many things, the worst part right now is just how slow GPT-4 is to run inference. You’re probably not using it right, aren’t using GPT-4, or something. It’s a multiplier, for specific parts of development - the amount of annoying nonsense I no longer have to spend my limited time on earth thinking about…

Also got a couple decades, a ChatGPT Plus subscription on top of running my own local instance of Vicuna and access to Bard. Enjoy it while it lasts. The training set (Stack Overflow) will dry as people move away from it, resulting in model degradation, resulting in not having a useful AI AND not having a useful SO I admit to using AI, but only for what I was using SO before. Which is 0% of the work I actually get pa…

What? You're jumping to so many conclusions here, it's absurd. You're going to have to go into research for a few years if you want to get anywhere on proving that the capability of the current systems is somehow determined by the presence of StackOverflow. Sounds like you have a very tall tower of speculative assumptions about LLMs today, LLMs in the future, the evolution of the web corpus, and other big, dynamic, absolutely unknowable things.

Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#152

Post by hoorayimhelping »

stasmo wrote: post #142
the_doctah wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who use ChatGPT to spit out code as a method of learning software engineering are going to be seriously deficient in fundamentals like performance. I've already worked with way too many engineers who copy/paste code without understanding what it does.

The good news is that those copy/pasters are probably going to be copy/pasting higher quality code if they’re using GPT4.

I don't think this is good news, it's at best not-bad news. We're already inundated with content, most of it copycatting other content, and it's replacing meaningful things, like archetypal stories and philosophy. Look at how people describe Marvel movies and Star Wars shows - it's content, not stories. Scaling the ability to just repeat things without an understanding of those things will at best just add more content. It will likely contribute to the further creation of complex systems people don't understand and can't control.

"Um, I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're, that you're using here. It didn't require any discipline to attain it. Ya know, you read what others had done, and you, and you took took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses, uh, to accomplish something as fast as you could..." (Emphasis mine).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PLvdmifDSk&t=61s

Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#153

Post by throwuwu »

boh wrote: post #113
vemv wrote: post #40

There's a long gap from: I built a podcast search website to: Staying in any company right now is a negative return. We humans are too easily impressed by tricks, and are too willing to extrapolate them to fantasy land. GPT can certainly accomplish an impressive variety of small tasks. Whether it can build large-scale systems that will power tomorrow's world is uncharted territory. Can you build something meaningful,…

Despite the novelty and excitement, the profit potential for AI generated applications and content isn't particularly strong. If you can make something using AI, so can everyone else. You work at a company to make money. Using AI doesn't magically allow you to do that. If you have the ability to make a profitable company, AI may help, but it's not a business plan.

As always, you still have to bring your own ideas and hustle to the table. The difference is that GPT flattens the learning curve on a lot of things that would previously prevent you from executing on your ideas and it helps keep the momentum up when you hit the hard part of the grind.

Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#154

Post by nr2x »

nielsole wrote: post #53
vemv wrote: post #40

There's a long gap from: I built a podcast search website to: Staying in any company right now is a negative return. We humans are too easily impressed by tricks, and are too willing to extrapolate them to fantasy land. GPT can certainly accomplish an impressive variety of small tasks. Whether it can build large-scale systems that will power tomorrow's world is uncharted territory. Can you build something meaningful,…

> If you believe it's possible, where's everyone's array of profitable, newly-founded ventures? Or at least have you automated your job away yet? Come on now. GPT 4 is not even out for two months. API access is not yet widely available. Legal questions are preventing many conservative players from adoption. How fast do you think progress propagates?

On top of no generally available API, GPT-4 in ChatGPT is really damn slow right now.

Unless you have a special deal (Microsoft) the only performant option is 3.5-turbo. In my experience for coding and text summarization it’s totally fine with a limited benefit from GPT-4, which is more impressive at higher order reasoning and planning.

Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#155

Post by simonw »

the_doctah wrote: post #128
lyair1 wrote: post #87

I am happy that so many people get to experience the feeling me and other software engineers feel when we write code. OpenAI democratize some of this feeling and now people that never knew how to code can experience the rush of creating something new using code. In a world where a lot of AI Researchers that develop these amazing models are slowed down by their lack of "normal" engineering skills I think it's very app…

People who use ChatGPT to spit out code as a method of learning software engineering are going to be seriously deficient in fundamentals like performance. I've already worked with way too many engineers who copy/paste code without understanding what it does.

I think this is currently an open question.

It may turn out that ChatGPT results in a new generation of developers who produce terrible code, full of flaws, with no understanding of how it actually works.

Or... it might be that ChatGPT helps newcomers get over that horrendous initial learning curve, start by writing bad code... and then get better at it.

I'm currently cautiously optimistic that the latter scenario is going to win out.

Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#156

Post by dclowd9901 »

I’m genuinely excited about integrating AI into our IDEs and metrics gathering and pipelines because I think it’ll pay off dividends in tracking down bugs and preventing shipping regressions.

But I am having existential dread over my pay decreasing by a large margin over the next decade. Not sure what I’ll do next. Maybe general contracting.

Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#157

Post by bjornsing »

gmt2027 wrote: post #132

There's a lot of focus on AI taking away jobs. I believe it will constitute an existential threat to a lot of companies. Highly productive solo individuals and very small teams will outcompete large companies by leveraging AI. When capital requirements, transaction and information costs drop dramatically, the optimal size of a firm will change. I believe they will become dramatically smaller.

> When capital requirements, transaction and information costs drop dramatically, the optimal size of a firm will change. I believe they will become dramatically smaller.

I hope so. Oh how I hope so.

Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#158

Post by mritchie712 »

nielsole wrote: post #53
vemv wrote: post #40

There's a long gap from: I built a podcast search website to: Staying in any company right now is a negative return. We humans are too easily impressed by tricks, and are too willing to extrapolate them to fantasy land. GPT can certainly accomplish an impressive variety of small tasks. Whether it can build large-scale systems that will power tomorrow's world is uncharted territory. Can you build something meaningful,…

> If you believe it's possible, where's everyone's array of profitable, newly-founded ventures? Or at least have you automated your job away yet? Come on now. GPT 4 is not even out for two months. API access is not yet widely available. Legal questions are preventing many conservative players from adoption. How fast do you think progress propagates?

a lot of good software doesn't take off today because selling it is a slog. AI could help there too, but probably not much (especially for getting the first 10 to 100 customers).

e.g. say you used GPT-4 to clone something like Fivetran but with your own unique features. It could even be way better across some dimensions, but you still need to convince users to try it and I don't see AI helping with that (at least not yet!).

Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#159

Post by nr2x »

throwuwu wrote: post #153
boh wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite the novelty and excitement, the profit potential for AI generated applications and content isn't particularly strong. If you can make something using AI, so can everyone else. You work at a company to make money. Using AI doesn't magically allow you to do that. If you have the ability to make a profitable company, AI may help, but it's not a business plan.

As always, you still have to bring your own ideas and hustle to the table. The difference is that GPT flattens the learning curve on a lot of things that would previously prevent you from executing on your ideas and it helps keep the momentum up when you hit the hard part of the grind.

It’s amazing for prototypes and writing utility functions, but for fully scalable and supportable architecture it’s a long ways off.

Likewise, it often generates very complex and confusing code - specifically regex in my experience where I can get the job done in a much more readable way.

Don’t get me wrong, I use it all day as a little coding helper, but while it can say, advise you on how to set up a distributed system, it’s not rolling out VMs and DB clusters.

Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#160

Post by SamPatt »

gexla wrote: post #59
geek_at wrote: post #7

Learning something with GTP-4 is so much more fun than using google/Stack Overflow. It's like having a tutor that knows your code and gives you hints and solutions based on your actual project. It's a real game changer for learning

And this is what you might say while you're learning. As you gain more experience, you realize that there's a wide range of solutions with some spectrum of a fit to your situation. A given solution may fall down in certain cases. What I love you Stack Overflow, is the context which comes with it. You get replies on a given proposed solution which point out where the solution may fail.

This is partially down to good promoting though.

It has seen those Stack Overflow responses and if you ask it to give you more context about a certain approach, it will.

I've learned when asking GPT-4 for help to push past the first answer, or ask it to offer more solutions. Also to ask why it choose a certain approach.

Quite often it will give me a response that doesn't fit well with my code, and I'll say "I don't want to do it this way, please give me another option, keeping in mind that [some important aspect of the code base]."

It then spits it out and it's usually way closer. Iterate on this and it's often quite good.

I think you're completely right if a person were copy pasting the first response every time, but that person is simply using it wrong in my opinion.

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