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Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

kabir.au

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Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#201

Post by brookst »

Gigachad wrote: post #86
baq wrote: post #44

Replace ‘CTF’ with ‘high school’ or ‘university’ and you’ve described the total slow motion collapse of education; the only saving grace is that most of it requires in person presence. We’ve figured out the human replacement pipeline it seems, but we haven’t figured out the eduction part. LLMs can be wonderful teachers, but the temptation to just tell it ‘do it for me’ is almost impossible to resist.

We are interviewing for a software dev role and we made the first round in person to prevent cheating. The gap between people who learned pre ai vs post is immense. I had a dev with supposedly 3 years experience and a degree in software who wouldn't have been able to write fizzbuzz without AI.

Isn’t this like interviewing accountants but prohibiting use of calculators or spreadsheets?

I don’t care what someone can do without the tools of their trade, I care deeply about their quality of work when using tools.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#203

Post by slowcache »

brookst wrote: post #201
Gigachad wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are interviewing for a software dev role and we made the first round in person to prevent cheating. The gap between people who learned pre ai vs post is immense. I had a dev with supposedly 3 years experience and a degree in software who wouldn't have been able to write fizzbuzz without AI.

Isn’t this like interviewing accountants but prohibiting use of calculators or spreadsheets? I don’t care what someone can do without the tools of their trade, I care deeply about their quality of work when using tools.

We would still expect an accountant to know the formula to arrive at the expected result if they did not have a calculator at hand

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#204

Post by weird-eye-issue »

brookst wrote: post #201
Gigachad wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are interviewing for a software dev role and we made the first round in person to prevent cheating. The gap between people who learned pre ai vs post is immense. I had a dev with supposedly 3 years experience and a degree in software who wouldn't have been able to write fizzbuzz without AI.

Isn’t this like interviewing accountants but prohibiting use of calculators or spreadsheets? I don’t care what someone can do without the tools of their trade, I care deeply about their quality of work when using tools.

You absolutely need to have some basic level of abilities if you are going to be operating AI coding tools for software that is going to have paying users.... I use these tools very very heavily I'm not against them at all and I don't scrutinize every single line of code that they write but it is very often that I catch it doing some brain dead stuff and if I didn't have a decade plus of experience I wouldn't know that it was brain dead.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#205

Post by jaybrendansmith »

baq wrote: post #44

Replace ‘CTF’ with ‘high school’ or ‘university’ and you’ve described the total slow motion collapse of education; the only saving grace is that most of it requires in person presence. We’ve figured out the human replacement pipeline it seems, but we haven’t figured out the eduction part. LLMs can be wonderful teachers, but the temptation to just tell it ‘do it for me’ is almost impossible to resist.

Everything we've learned in the last 10 years is telling us that computers do not help human education in the slightest. We remember better when we write with pen and paper. We learn better with whiteboards and paper books. The simple answer: Remove most computing from education entirely. Blue composition books, pencils, whiteboards is what trains humans. Calculators are helpful perhaps but it is quite possible that slide rules are better. We need humans that can critically think from first principles to counter the recycled information generated by AI.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#206

Post by brookst »

raincole wrote: post #193
Retr0id wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had a dev with supposedly 3 years experience and a degree in software who wouldn't have been able to write fizzbuzz without AI. If you remove the "without AI" and the end, I've been hearing similar anecdotes about fizzbuzz for years (isn't the whole point of fizzbuzz to filter out those candidates?)

Because "the next generation is ruined" is always a popular sentiment. It has been with us for at least two thousand years, and it surely won't go away in our lifetime. When this AI era's devs grow older they'll complain the newer generation can't even vide code too.

I remember when everyone bemoaned the kids not knowing assembly language. How can anyone understand software if you don’t know assembly?

“Kids these days don’t work as hard / know as much / value the important things” is as tired as it is universal.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#207

Post by dreamcompiler »

brookst wrote: post #201
Gigachad wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are interviewing for a software dev role and we made the first round in person to prevent cheating. The gap between people who learned pre ai vs post is immense. I had a dev with supposedly 3 years experience and a degree in software who wouldn't have been able to write fizzbuzz without AI.

Isn’t this like interviewing accountants but prohibiting use of calculators or spreadsheets? I don’t care what someone can do without the tools of their trade, I care deeply about their quality of work when using tools.

Calculators and spreadsheets cannot autonomously create a double-entry bookkeeping system for a small business and prepare their taxes. AI can. Poorly, but it can.

Everybody knows calculators and spreadsheets are adjuncts to skill. Too many people believe AI is the skill itself, and that learning the skill is unnecessary.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#208

Post by npilk »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #166
baq wrote: post #44

Replace ‘CTF’ with ‘high school’ or ‘university’ and you’ve described the total slow motion collapse of education; the only saving grace is that most of it requires in person presence. We’ve figured out the human replacement pipeline it seems, but we haven’t figured out the eduction part. LLMs can be wonderful teachers, but the temptation to just tell it ‘do it for me’ is almost impossible to resist.

The best frontier LLMs can't solve 4th grade math homework yet. Don't hold your breath on that collapse of education. (Real mathematics problems, not American-style ""math"".)

Do you have an example of a 4th grade problem in mind that isn't "American-style"?

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#209

Post by dreamcompiler »

bernds74 wrote: post #133
dguest wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll always remember my middle school science teaching telling us that nuclear fusion violates conservation of mass because the 2 protons in a pair of hydrogen nuclei combine to make helium with 4 nucleons. It's not true, but that's not the point. But he was a great teacher anyway. He was engaging and kept the kids in line and learning. I eventually learned the truth, and most of my classmates forgot about it. Teachi…

I had a chemistry teacher who told us that hydrogen reacts violently with oxygen, and this is how the hydrogen bomb works.

Well you can make a hydrogen "bomb" that way. Just not the hydrogen bomb.

Re: Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format

#210

Post by lacewing »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #204
brookst wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t this like interviewing accountants but prohibiting use of calculators or spreadsheets? I don’t care what someone can do without the tools of their trade, I care deeply about their quality of work when using tools.

You absolutely need to have some basic level of abilities if you are going to be operating AI coding tools for software that is going to have paying users.... I use these tools very very heavily I'm not against them at all and I don't scrutinize every single line of code that they write but it is very often that I catch it doing some brain dead stuff and if I didn't have a decade plus of experience I wouldn't know th…

I think we're rediscovering management from first principles. The main selling point of AI is that it writes code faster than you could. Checking it line by line undoes most of that benefit. In the same vein, there's no real benefit to leading a team if you plan on supervising every task.

But here's the thing: for humans, this is manageable because we've come up with a number of mechanisms to select for dependable workers and to compel them to behave (carrot and stick: bonuses if you do well, prison if you do something evil). For LLMs, we have none of that. If it deletes your production database, what are you going to do? Have it write an apology letter? I've seen people do that.

So I think that your answer - that you'll lean on your expertise - is not sufficient. If there are no meaningful consequences and no predictability, we probably need to have stronger constraints around input, output, and the actions available to agents.

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