821–830 of 1001 posts
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I sincerely worry about a future when most people act in this same manner. You have - for now - sufficient experience and understanding to be able to review the AI's code and decide if it was doing what you wanted it to. But what about when you've spent months just blindly accepting" what the AI tells you? Are you going to be familiar enough with the project anymore to catch its little mistakes? Or worse, what about…
You and I seem to live in very different worlds. The one I live and work in is full of over confident devs that have no actual IT education and mostly just copy and modify what they find on the internet. The average level of IT people I see daily is down right shocking and I'm quite confident that OP's workflow might be better for these people in the long run.
Too many get into the field solely due to promises of large paychecks, not due to the intellectual curiosity that drives real devs.
The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. It's not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply…
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A toddler's crayon art doesn't end up in the Louvre, nor does AI slop. Most art is bad art and it's been this way since the dawn of humanity. For as long as we can distinguish good art from bad art we can curate and there is nothing to worry about.
That's just the problem -- you can't. Not because you can't distinguish between _one_ bad piece and _one_ good piece, but because there is so much production capacity that no human will ever be able to look at most of it. And it's not just the AI stuff that will suffer here, all of it goes into the same pool, and humans sample from that pool (using various methodologies). At some point the pool becomes mostly urine.
Why does any human have to look at any art in your problem statement?
I get it. The last two decades have soured us all on the benefits of tech progress. But the previous decades were marked by tech optimism. The difference here is the shift to marketing. The largest tech companies are gatekeepers for our attention. The most valuable tech created in the last two decades was not in service of us but to manipulate us. Previously, the customer of the software was the one buying it. Our li…
4. Get tragedy-of-the-commons-ed out of existence.
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LLMs have been improving exponentially for a few years. let's at least wait until exponential improvements slow down to make a judgement about their potential
In some domains (math and code), progress is still very fast. In others it has slowed or arguably stopped. We see little progress in "soft" skills like creative writing. EQBench is a benchmark that tests LLM ability to write stories, narratives, and poems. The winning models are mostly tiny Gemma finetunes with single-digit parameter counts. Huge foundation models with hundreds of billions of parameters (Claude 3 Opu…
Many people have anecdotally, when I tell them what I do for a living, have told me that any other profession would have the common sense/street smarts to not make their scarce skill redundant. It goes further than that; many professions have license requirements, unions, professional bodies, etc to enforce this scarcity on the behalf on their members. After all a scarce career in most economies is one not just of wealth but higher social standing.
If all it does is allow us to churn more high level software, which let's be honest is demand inelastic due to mostly large margins on software products (i.e. they would of paid a person anyway due to ROI) it doesn't seem it will add much to society other than shifting profit in tech from Labor to Capital/owners. May replace call centre jobs too I guess and some low level writing jobs/marketing. Haven't seen any real new use cases that change my life yet positively other than an odd picture/ai app, fake social posts,annoying AI assistants in apps, maybe some teaching resources that would of been made/easy to acquire anyway by other means etc. I could easily live without these things.
If this is all it is seems Ai will do or mostly do it seems like a bit of a disappointment. Especially for the massive amount of money going into it.
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> If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right - Arthur C. Clarke Geoffrey Hinton is a 76 year old Turing Award* winner. What more do you want? *Corrected by kranner
I'd like to see a study on this, because I think it is completely untrue.
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"They're really good at some things, terrible at others, and prone to doing something totally wrong some fraction of the time." I agree 100% with this sentiment, but, it also is a decent description of individual humans. This is what processes and control systems/controls are for. These are evolving at a slower pace than the LLMs themselves at the moment so we're looking to the LLM to be its own control. I don't thin…
> I agree 100% with this sentiment, but, it also is a decent description of individual humans. But you can understand individual humans and learn which are trustworthy for what. If I want a specific piece of information, I have people in my life that I know I can consult to get an answer that will most likely be correct and that person will be able to give me an accurate assessment of their certainty and they know ho…
Another example from just yesterday is I needed to solve a complex recurrence relation. A friend of mine who is good at math (math PhD) helped me for about 30 minutes still without a solution and a couple of false starts. Then he said try ChatGPT and we got the answer in 30s and we spent about 2 minutes verifying it.