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Terence Tao on O1

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Re: Terence Tao on O1

#411

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

objektif wrote: post #410
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The programmers who will find LLMs most useful are going to be those who prior to LLMs were copying and pasting from Stack Overflow, and asking questions online about everything they were doing - tasks that LLMs have precisely replaced (it has now memorized all that boilerplate code, consensus answers, and API usage examples). The developers who will find LLMs the least useful are the "brilliant" ones who never found…

How many of them are there of the latter type? In my 15 yrs of experience I would say 95%+ of all developers belong to your first category.

95% sounds way high, but maybe I'm wrong. I think it's part generational - old school programmers are used to having to develop algorithms/etc from scratch, and the younger generation seem to have been taught in school to be more system integrators assembling solutions out of cut and paste code and relying on APIs to get stuff done (with limited capability to DIY if such an API does not exist).

But not all younger programmers can be Stack Overflow cut-n-pasters, because not all (and surely not 95%!) programming jobs are amenable to that approach. There are lots of jobs where people are developing novel solutions, interacting with proprietary or uncommon hardware and software, etc, where the solution does not exist on Stack Overflow (and by extension not in an LLM trained on Stack Overflow).

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#412

Post by zamadatix »

buddhistdude wrote: post #406
Davidzheng wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

not fully related to what the parent is saying, but I need to get this off my chest: isn't this development obviously going to result in the deprecation of the value of the human intellect to near-zero? which is the thing that virtually all people on this platform base their livelihood on? there's such a deafening silence around this topic on the internet where there should be - i don't know what but not this silence…

I wouldn't say there is a silence (as in avoidance) there are just folks convinced it's going to completely replace people (with 2 main subgroups: utopia and dystopia), folks convinced it's a parlor trick and never going to result in more, and folks convinced it's just the next efficiency increasing tool where some busy-ness we have will go away but only to make room for increasing total output not for replacing everyone wholesale.

Generally these folks have all said their piece and are tired of talking about it every time LLMs come up -> silence (as in nothing more to say) as each group is self convinced and most don't necessarily feel the need to get 100% of folks on board with their view. The dystopia or "doomer" group are the main ones left feeling like they need more of an answer, the rest move on quietly in either excitement or disinterest.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#413

Post by achierius »

TrackerFF wrote: post #285
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.

Even more amazing, there plenty - PLENTY - of posters here that routinely either completely shit on LLMs, or casually dismiss them as "hype", "useless", and what have you. I've been saying this for quite some time now, but some people are in for a very rude awakening when the SOTA models 5-10 years from now are able to completely replace senior devs and engineers. Better buckle up, and start diversifying your skills.

Diversifying to what? When AI can fully replace senior developers the world as we know it is over. Best case capitalism enters terminal decline: buy rifles. Worst case, hope that whatever comes out the either side is either benevolent or implodes quickly.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#414

Post by codr7 »

ben_w wrote: post #345
codr7 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building the software is usually like 10% of the actual job, we could do a better job of teaching that. The other 90% is mostly mushy human stuff, fleshing out the problem, setting expectations etc. Helping a group of people reach a solution everyone is happy with has little to do with technology.

Mostly agree. Until ChatGPT, I'd have agreed with all of that. > Helping a group of people reach a solution everyone is happy with has little to do with technology. This one specific thing, is actually something that ChatGPT can help with. It's not as good as the best human, or even a middling human with 5 year's business experience, but rather it's useful because it's good enough at so many different domains that it…

We're currently in the shiny toy stage, once the flaws are thoroughly explored and accepted by all as fundamental I suspect interest will fade rapidly.

There's no substance to be found, no added information; it's just repeating what came before, badly, which is exactly the kind of software that would be better off not written if you ask me.

The plan to rebuild society on top of this crap is right up there with basing our economy on manipulating people into buying shit they don't need and won't last so they have to keep buying more. Because money.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#415

Post by pxc »

perching_aix wrote: post #365
pxc wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

I don't think basic vim usage (which is all I know, really) makes anyone super efficient. I don't think typing/editing speed is generally an important factor in programmer productivity or 'coding speed'.

It's just that every time I use nano it's (a) unintentional, as it's opened via EDITOR; (b) sort-of coerced, because most distros installing it by default also think it's somehow too much to install Vim or Emacs alongside it; and (c) extremely painfully awkward, because all other editors I use, I've invested at least as couple years of practice into.

If I spent a year using nano every day, and if I evolved a config file and read the manual during that time, I might eventually reach a place where using nano didn't feel cumbersome and irritating, but why would I do that if I already use Emacs and Vim every day? If I learn a 'new' editor it's going to be something extensible that I could see myself programming in every day: Emacs without evil; or one of the newer modal editors with a reversed sentence order, like kakoune and Helix; or, hell, VSCode.

So nano is likely doomed to remain forever cumbersome and irritating for me, somewhere on the level of typing on a touchscreen instead of a real keyboard.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#416

Post by gtirloni »

panarky wrote: post #305
Nadya wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to quantify how much time learning how to search saves because the difference can range between infinite (finding the result vs not finding it at all) to basically no difference (1st result vs 2nd result). I think many people agree it is worth learning how to "properly search" though. You spend much less time searching and you get the results you're looking for much more often. This applies outside of just…

> how much time learning how to search saves >>> you do need to break down the problem into smaller chunks so GPT can reason in steps To search well, you need good intuition for how to select the right search terms. To LLM well, you can ask the LLM to break the problem into smaller chunks, and then have the LLM solve each chunk, and then have the LLM check its work for errors and inconsistencies. And then you can hav…

Yes you can. What was the name of the agent that was going to replace all developers? Devin or something? It was shown it took more time iterate over a problem and created terrible solutions.

LLMs are in the evolutionary phase, IMHO. I doubt we're going to see revolutionary improvements from GPTs. So I say time and time again: the technology is here, show it doing all the marvelous things today. (btw, this is not directed at your comment in particular and I digressed a bit, sorry).

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#417

Post by RayVR »

wenc wrote: post #5

Once GPT is tuned more heavily on Lean (proof assistant) -- the way it is on Python -- I expect its usefulness for research level math to increase. I work in a field related to operations research (OR), and ChatGPT 4o has ingested enough of the OR literature that it's able to spit out very useful Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) formulations for many "problem shapes". For instance, I can give it a logic problem like "…

I’m amazed you have had any luck with 4o. I found 4 was much better than 4o but still quite bad.

I tried to use 4/4o for a MIP several months ago. Frequently, it would iterate through three or four bad implementations over and over.

Claude 3.5 has been a significant improvement. I don’t really use chatgpt for anything at this point.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#418

Post by smallnamespace »

kaoD wrote: post #370
p-e-w wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 manageme…

> 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?

This is just a political question and of course so long as humans are involved in politics they can just decide to ban or delay new technologies, or limit their deployment.

Also in practice it's not like people stopped traditional pre-industrial production after industrialization occurred. It's just that pre-industrial societies fell further and further behind and ended up very poor compared to societies that chose to adopt the newest means of production.

I mean, even today, you can make a living growing and eating your own crops in large swathes of the world. However you'll be objectively poor, making only the equivalent of a few dollars a day.

In short I'm willing to bet money that you'll always be able to have your current job, somewhere in the world. Whether your job maintains its relative income and whether you'd still find it attractive is a whole different question.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#419

Post by calmworm »

atomic128 wrote: post #315
idiotsecant wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too.

Somebody tested people on Hacker News to evaluate programming competency. This was part of a larger evaluation comparing the Hacker News population to people on Reddit programming subreddits. Here is a very heated discussion of the result: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33293522 It appears that Hacker News is perhaps NOT populated by the programming elite. In contrast, there are real wizards on Reddit. Surprisi…

Not surprised there would be a “heated” discussion as a result of this one link, that measured only those who engaged it, and how? I opened the link, hit Submit just to see what would happen… now the percentage of HN users who are competent programmers is even fewer than before, by that metric.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#420

Post by maxglute »

>The experience seemed roughly on par with trying to advise a mediocre, but not completely incompetent, graduate student. However, this was an improvement over previous models, whose capability was closer to an actually incompetent graduate student.

Appreciate the no fucks given categorization of grad students.

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