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Terence Tao on O1

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Re: Terence Tao on O1

#361

Post by concordDance »

p-e-w wrote: post #317
rvnx wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also a problem of ego. It is difficult if you have been told all your life that you are the best, to accept the fact that a computer or even other people might be better than you. It requires lot of self-reflection. Real top-tiers programmers actually don’t feel threatened by LLMs. For them it is just one more tool in the toolbox like syntax highlighting or code completion. They choose to use these tools based…

> Real top-tiers programmers actually don’t feel threatened by LLMs. They should, because LLMs are coming for them also, just maybe 2-3 years later than for programmers that aren't "real top-tier". The idea that human intellect is something especially difficult to replicate is just delusional. There is no reason to assume so, considering that we have gone from hole card programming to LLMs competing with humans in a…

> > Real top-tiers programmers actually don’t feel threatened by LLMs.

> They should, because LLMs are coming for them also, just maybe 2-3 years later than for programmers that aren't "real top-tier".

Not worrying about that because if they've gotten to that point (note: top tier programmers also need domain knowledge) then we're all dead a few years later.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#362

Post by elbear »

imiric wrote: post #356
lifeformed wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people who are successfully using it to write code are just chaining APIs together to make the same web apps you see everywhere.

The vast majority of software is "just chaining APIs together". It makes sense that LLMs would excel at code they've been trained on the most, which means they can be useful to a lot of people. This also means that these people will be the first to be made redundant by LLMs, once the quality improves enough.

I would say all software is chaining APIs together.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#363

Post by elbear »

hatefulmoron wrote: post #304
rvnx wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also a problem of ego. It is difficult if you have been told all your life that you are the best, to accept the fact that a computer or even other people might be better than you. It requires lot of self-reflection. Real top-tiers programmers actually don’t feel threatened by LLMs. For them it is just one more tool in the toolbox like syntax highlighting or code completion. They choose to use these tools based…

Not to diminish your point at all: I think it's also just a fear that the fun or interesting part of the task is being diminished. To say that the point of programming is to solve real world problems ('productivity') is true, but in my experience it's not necessarily true for the person doing the solving. Many people who work as programmers like to program (as in, the process of working with code, typing it, debuggin…

The solution to this is to code your own things for fun.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#364

Post by elbear »

apsurd wrote: post #74
vasco wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT voice interface plugged into the audio stream, with the prompt: - I need you to assist me during a programming interview, you will be listening to two people, the interviewer and me. When the interviewer asks a question, I'd like you to feed me lines that seem realistic for an interview where I'm nervous, don't give me a full blown answer right away. Be very succinct. If I think you misunderstood something, I…

This made me laugh. I can't deny it isn't already happening. But wow people work so hard to avoid working hard.

I think the point is to avoid pointless hard work.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#365

Post by perching_aix »

pxc wrote: post #347
raincole wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> using vim keybindings is so literally going to make me a 10x 100x whatever rockstar developer - and it's like what, enabling me to edit text a bit faster? Yes, to me LLM is exactly like this: from nano to vim.

Nano is borderline unusable, so that's like... a lot?

holy hyperboly, clearly i picked the right example...

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#366

Post by kiehaBe »

Davidzheng wrote: post #286
asdasjhG wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "value of a degree" means the employment prospects for the degree holder. Which is going to zero if the optimistic predictions are correct, so the optimistic professors should warn their students. I understand the motivation for pure math quite well. It is about beauty, understanding things and discovering things for oneself. If computers do the work, the discovery part is gone and pure math is ruined. For the no…

do you also value your personal relationships based on employment prospects?

[flagged]

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#367

Post by rossant »

perihelions wrote: post #13

I'm so excited in anticipation of my near-term return to studying math, as an independent curiosity hobby. It's going to be epically fun this time around with LLM's to lean on. Coincidentally like Terence Tao, I've also been asking complex analysis queries* of LLM's, things I was trying to understand better in my working through textbooks. Their ability to interpret open-ended math questions, and quickly find distant…

I agree. Having access to a kind of semantic full search engine on basically all textbooks on Earth feels like a superpower. Even better would be if it could pinpoint the exact textbook references it found the answer in.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#368

Post by kaoD »

hobs wrote: post #191
bongodongobob wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, dude, I used to push bad code into production without ChatGPT. It is such a stupid argument. Do you really think people are just blindly pushing code they can't make heads or tails of? That they haven't tested? Do you seriously think people are just one shotting code and blasting it into prod? I am completely baffled by people in this industry that just don't get it . Learn to prompt. Write tests. Wtf.

Do you think ChatGPT has changed any of those answers from Yes to No? Because it hasn't. People blindly copied stack overflow code, they blindly copied every example off of MSDN, they blindly copy from ChatGPT - your holier than thou statements are funny, and frankly most LLMs cannot leave a local maxima, so anyone who says they dont write any code anymore I frankly think they are not capable of telling the mistakes,…

This. Most people I know that use LLMs to be super productive are like "make me a button, it's red" (hyperbolic statement but you know what I mean). I can do that faster and better myself.

When I'm deeply stuck on something and I think "let's see if an LLM could help here", I try (and actually tried many times) to recruit those prompting gurus around me that swear LLMs solve all their problems... and they consistently fail to help me at all. They cannot solve the problem at all and I'm just sitting there, watching the gurus spend hours prompting in circles until they give up and leave (still thinking LLMs are amazing, of course).

This experience is what makes me extremely suspicious of anyone on the internet claiming they don't write code anymore but refusing to show (don't tell!) -- when actually testing it in real life it has been nothing but disappointment.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#369

Post by langcss »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #246
fnordpiglet wrote: post #149

Rewind your mind to 2019 and imagine reading a post that said “The experience seemed roughly on par with trying to advise a mediocre, but not completely incompetent, graduate student.” With regard to interacting with the equivalent of Alexa. That’s a remarkable difference in 5 years.

The first profession AI seems on track to decimate is programming. In particular, the brilliant but remote and individual contributor. There is an obvious conflict of interest in this forum.

I believe LLMs decimating the role of a software engineer requires AGI, which the second that happens decimates all jobs.

What it may do is change the job requrements. Web/JS has decimated (reduced by 90% or more) MFC C++ jobs after all.

The programmer doesnt just write Python. That is the how... not the what.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#370

Post by kaoD »

p-e-w wrote: post #317
rvnx wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is also a problem of ego. It is difficult if you have been told all your life that you are the best, to accept the fact that a computer or even other people might be better than you. It requires lot of self-reflection. Real top-tiers programmers actually don’t feel threatened by LLMs. For them it is just one more tool in the toolbox like syntax highlighting or code completion. They choose to use these tools based…

> Real top-tiers programmers actually don’t feel threatened by LLMs. They should, because LLMs are coming for them also, just maybe 2-3 years later than for programmers that aren't "real top-tier". The idea that human intellect is something especially difficult to replicate is just delusional. There is no reason to assume so, considering that we have gone from hole card programming to LLMs competing with humans in a…

> They should, because LLMs are coming for them also, just maybe 2-3 years later than for programmers that aren't "real top-tier".

Would you be willing to set a deadline (not fuzzy dates) when my job is going to be taken by an LLM and bet $5k on that?

Because the more I use LLMs and I see their improvement rate, the less worried I am about my job.

The only thing that worries me is salaries going down because management cannot tell how bad they're burying themselves into technical debt and maintenance hell, so they'll underpay a bunch of LLM-powered interns... which I will have to clean up and honestly I don't want to (I've already been cleaning enough shit non-LLM code, LLMs will just generate more and more of that).

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