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The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

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Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#141

Post by asHg19237 »

stavros wrote: post #3

I see this fallacy being committed a lot these days. "Because LLMs, you will no longer need a skill you don't need any more, but which you used to need, and handwaves that's bad". Academia doesn't want to produce astrophysics (or any field) scientists just so the people who became scientists can feel warm and fuzzy inside when looking at the stars, it wants to produce scientists who can produce useful results. Bob pr…

The arguments of the LLM psychosis afflicted get more and more desperate. Astrophysics is about understanding and thinking, this comment paints it as result oriented (whatever that means).

The industrialization of academia hasn't even produced more results, it has produced more meaningless papers. Just like LLMs produce the 10.000th note taking app, which for the LLM psychosis afflicted is apparently enough.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#142

Post by CuriouslyC »

ernst_klim wrote: post #96
tonfa wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They aren't going away but for some they may become prohibitively expensive after all the subsidies end. Even if inference was subsidized (afaik it isn't when paying through API calls, subscription plans indeed might have losses for heavy users, but that's how any subscription model typically work, it can still be profitable overall). Models are still improving/getting cheaper, so that seems unlikely.

It probably is still subsidized, just not as much. We won't know if these APIs are profitable unless these companies go public, and till then it's safe to bet these APIs are underpriced to win the market share.

Anthropic has shared that API inference has a ~60% margin. OpenAI's margin might be slightly lower since they price aggressively but I would be surprised if it was much different.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#143

Post by Kon5ole »

defrost wrote: post #17
stavros wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it was saying that what matters is the process of training people to be good scientists, so they can produce other, more useful, results. That's literally what training is, everywhere. This argument boils down to "don't use tools because you'll forget how to do things the hard way", which nobody would buy for any other tool, but with LLMs we seem to have forgotten that line of reasoning entirely.

> This argument boils down to "don't use tools because you'll forget how to do things the hard way", which nobody would buy for any other tool, This is false. There absolutely are people that fall back on older tools when fancy tools fail. You will find such people in the military, in emergency services, in agriculture, generally in areas where getting the job done matters. Perhaps you're unfamiliar. They other week…

>This is false. There absolutely are people that fall back on older tools when fancy tools fail. >They other week I finished putting holes in fence posts with a bit and brace as there was no fuel for the generator to run corded electric drills and the rechargable batteries were dead.

It depends on the task though. If you are in a similar scenario as with your fence posts and want to edit computer programs, you can't. (Not even with xkcd's magnetic needle and a steady hand). ;-)

As technology marches on it seems inevitable that we will get increasingly large and frequent knowledge gaps. Otherwise progress would stop - we need the giant shoulders to stand on.

How many people in the world can recreate a ASML lithography machine vs how many people are surviving by doing something that requires that machine to exist?

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#144

Post by duskdozer »

kelnos wrote: post #117
sd9 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is it doesn’t matter whether he can fix things without agents. The real world isn’t an exam hall where your boss tells you “no naughty AI!”, you just get stuff done, and if Bob can do that with agents, nobody cares how he did it.

But can Bob actually do that with agents, without limit? Right now, he's going to hit a ceiling at some point, and the Alices of the world will run circles around him. The question is: will agents improve to the point that even the most capable Alices will never be needed to solve problems? Maybe? Maybe not? I'm worried that they won't improve to that degree. And even if they do, what is the purpose of humans in this…

I think the real issue is that no, he can't, but corporate and government entities that decide won't care. Things will simply get worse. The problems will be left to fester as things that simply "can't be done".

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#145

Post by Almondsetat »

torben-friis wrote: post #61
sd9 wrote: post #6

The thing is, agents aren’t going away. So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. I mourn the loss of working on intellectually stimulating programming problems, but that’s a part of my job that’s fading. I need to decide if the remaining work - understanding requirements, managing teams, what have you - is still enjoyable enough to continue. To be honest, I’m looking at leaving software because the job…

Can you run an industry level LLM at home? If not, you're changing learning to cook for Uber only meals. And since the alternative is starving, Uber will boil the pot. Don't give up your self sufficiency.

Can you build a computer at home?

There is absolutely nothing self-sufficient about computer hardware

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#146

Post by dsqrt »

stavros wrote: post #3

I see this fallacy being committed a lot these days. "Because LLMs, you will no longer need a skill you don't need any more, but which you used to need, and handwaves that's bad". Academia doesn't want to produce astrophysics (or any field) scientists just so the people who became scientists can feel warm and fuzzy inside when looking at the stars, it wants to produce scientists who can produce useful results. Bob pr…

The goal of academic research is to create understanding, not papers. If we outsource all research to LLMs, then we are only producing the latter.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#147

Post by lelanthran »

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #57
sd9 wrote: post #6

The thing is, agents aren’t going away. So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. I mourn the loss of working on intellectually stimulating programming problems, but that’s a part of my job that’s fading. I need to decide if the remaining work - understanding requirements, managing teams, what have you - is still enjoyable enough to continue. To be honest, I’m looking at leaving software because the job…

> if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things I’ve been reminded lately of a conversation I had with a guy at hacker space cafe around ten years ago in Berlin. He had been working as a programmer for a significantly longer time than me. Long enough that for many years of his career, he had been programming in assembly. He was lamenting that these days, software was written in higher level languages, and that m…

> He had been working as a programmer for a significantly longer time than me. Long enough that for many years of his career, he had been programming in assembly.

Please, not this pre-canned BS again!

Comparing abstractions to AI is an apples to oranges comparison. Abstractions are dependable due to being deterministic. When I write a function in C to return the factorial of a number, and then reuse it again and again from Java, I don't need a damn set of test cases in Java to verify that factorial of 5 is 120.

With LLMs, you do. They aren't an abstraction, and seeing this worn out, tired and routinely debunked comparison being presented in every bloody thread is wearing a little thin at this point.

We've seen this argument hundreds of times on this very site. Repeating it doesn't make it true.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#148

Post by sd9 »

kelnos wrote: post #121
sd9 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your job has been totally unaffected by AI, then I am jealous. I’m not trying to argue that AI can do everything today. I acknowledge that there are many things that it is not good at.

But do you believe that they'll continue to improve until they're good at everything, all the time, in ways a human can never match? If yes, then that's dangerously optimistic. If not, then we'll always need humans who have learned the "hard way" (the Alices, not the Bobs). But if LLMs make it impossible for Alices to come up in the field, we're screwed.

I think that a lot of software engineering work is a lot simpler than people like to think, and that the demand for Alices is far outweighed by the demand for Bobs. I think there will always be a place for Alices, but there will be a drastic reduction in the workforce. I think all of this unconditionally about future improvement in AI - in my view the models today are more than capable of bringing about this shift, it will just take time.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#149

Post by omega3 »

jacquesm wrote: post #21
djaro wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. The problem arrises when Bob encounters a problem too complex or unique for agents to solve. To me, it seems a bit like the difference between learning how to cook versus buying microwave dinners. Sure, a good microwave dinner can taste really good, and it will be a lot better than what a beginning cook will make. But imagine aspiring cooks just buying premade…

Precisely. The first 10 rungs of the ladder will be removed, but we still expect you to be able to get to the roof. The AI won't get you there and you won't have the knowledge you'd normally gain on those first 10 rungs to help you move past #10.

That’s a good analogy but I think we’ve already went from 0 to 10 rungs over the last couple of years. If we assume that the models or harnesses will improve more and more rungs will be removed. Vast majority of programmers aren’t doing novel, groundbreaking work.

Re: The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

#150

Post by asHg19237 »

sd9 wrote: post #6

The thing is, agents aren’t going away. So if Bob can do things with agents, he can do things. I mourn the loss of working on intellectually stimulating programming problems, but that’s a part of my job that’s fading. I need to decide if the remaining work - understanding requirements, managing teams, what have you - is still enjoyable enough to continue. To be honest, I’m looking at leaving software because the job…

Many things have come and gone in this fashion oriented industry. Everyone is already bored to hell by AI output.

AI in software engineering is kept afloat by the bullshitters who jump on any new bandwagon because they are incompetent and need to distract from that. Managers like bullshit, so these people thrive for a couple of years until the next wave of bullshit is fashionable.

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