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Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

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Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#101

Post by queenkjuul »

pc86 wrote: post #44
vrganj wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody is suggesting we "replace labor" with LLMs. I take it you haven't been listening to what the guys at the AI labs have been saying? Plus that's what the whole article is about. I'm not sure how you could've missed that?

You could replace every software engineer on the planet with a perfect LLM tomorrow and it would not lead to mass unemployment-triggered riots. If you're talking about software engineering specifically, you're not correct. If you're talking about all labor, you're talking about something unrelated to the article.

The article very explicitly discusses the replacement of all knowledge workers. You sure you read it?

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#102

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

ryanackley wrote: post #28

AI maximalism is making a lot of assumptions that I think are not a given * The curve of AI improvement will continue at the current pace * AI companies will have the capital continue to expand infrastructure * there will be some kind of functioning economy if all knowledge workers are replaced There are strong headwinds to all three of these. Hey it may come to pass but it’s very speculative at this point. I see a l…

AI/LLMs have been dramatically improving for 7+ years. There's now a lot more funding to support continued improvement. You're correct this is an "assumption", but continued improvement at the same pace (or faster) for the next 3+ years is just extrapolating a trend. Believing we've hit the top today is based on nothing at all. Continued improvement is much more likely.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#103

Post by pu_pe »

vrganj wrote: post #14

[flagged]

Here is another scenario. You mobilize your local community or even country to choose option 1, communal ownership. Then another country or region follows path 2. If option 2 is more productive (maybe because you redirected productivity gains towards wellbeing instead of more compute) you are toast, you now have a sort of Cold War scenario where eventually the technofeudalists will have the upper hand and could outcompete or destroy the technocommunalists or whatever you want to call them.

Note that I am not shitting on the idea of option 1 at all, in fact personally I would very much like to see it succeed. I just think this is more of a global issue than a local one.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#104

Post by Ukv »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #75

> The models will learn good engineering principles at some point. This is just silly. It's fairly clear that the current design (by which I mean the entire concept of the deep neural network) has its limits and that they just aren't that good. We're seeing lots of other AI and software engineering brought to bear, but there's nothing 'inevitable' that means this is close. "at some point" is so vague as to be irrelev…

> It's fairly clear that the current design (by which I mean the entire concept of the deep neural network) has its limits

Maybe, but people have been saying deep learning is about to hit a wall since 2012, and many reasonable-sounding "machines fundamentally can't do X" have since fallen.

Feels like we're standing on a roof with floodwater up to our ankles - maybe it stops rising now, but we didn't foresee it getting anywhere near this high in the first place.

I do agree that progress will probably be more slow/gradual than others seem to predict, no "hard takeoff", but even being decades away is still relevant to someone starting a career in software development.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#105

Post by raincole »

grebc wrote: post #13

Your argument boils down to: it’s different this time.

The article: it's different this time because X and Y.

You: you're saying "it's different this time."

I don't know. It looks like AI really rots people's brains. As if that they just shut down their minds when they see an anything AI-related. Imagine if this article were about anything else, like:

Article: the stock bubble is going to burst because...

Comment: your argument boils down to "the stock bubble is going to burst."

It'd be so stupid. But somehow when it comes to AI this kind of weird comment is tolerated even celebrated.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#106

Post by RugnirViking »

altmanaltman wrote: post #88
RugnirViking wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

does it never? seems to me that people pay me precisely for my knowledge, learned over many years. The knowledge translates into action, sure. But thats like the old parable about a plumber being paid €150 for a 5 minute consult that involves turning a single screw. "i could have turned that screw!" the customer cries, ignoring that yes, they could have. But they didn't know to. I think perhaps the problem is instead…

I think a more sane minded customer would not mind paying for the assurance and having someone to blame in case things go wrong, not necessarily because of their domain knowledge. I could theoretically learn everything about plumbing but would still rather call a professional for the peace of mind that it was done "correctly" and it the process goes wrong, I would have an instant fix instead of trying to go back and…

I agree. I also think that deciding that LLMs encode all knowledge perfectly, either now or in an imagined future, is foolish. My experience is that they match the average general state of experts among the field. The sort of thing a junior might read to start to grasp the general ideas and issues in a field. They rarely have opinions, or good intuitions around more specific scenarios. This is why the current equilibrium of a senior piloting one works so well- theyre leaning on it to speed up, but pushing it away from the "average" where circumstances demand.

We can argue about imagined future progress, but I don't see that getting much better, given that the literature doesn't often do that, and how often experts in one scenario end up being poorly suited given another set of facts.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#107

Post by red75prime »

grebc wrote: post #99
pc86 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that a perfectly fair argument if you can articulate why?

There’s not much articulation except some personal snippets about someone caught in the hype cycle of a product, that the hive mind is buzzing about deafeningly. Tools/improvements have rarely been negative in such a massive way except rare instances, and even then society moved on and past those tools to bigger & better things. How many people today seriously consider agriculture as a career prospect but almost all…

This is the technology that aims to replicate all of the human functionality. So, the aim is unprecedented. You might not be convinced that this aim is achievable (despite having the human brain that achieves it, unlike, say, superluminal travel), but, at least, you might be inclined to recognize that something potentially unprecedented is going on.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#108

Post by keybored »

pu_pe wrote: post #103
vrganj wrote: post #14

[flagged]

Here is another scenario. You mobilize your local community or even country to choose option 1, communal ownership. Then another country or region follows path 2. If option 2 is more productive (maybe because you redirected productivity gains towards wellbeing instead of more compute) you are toast, you now have a sort of Cold War scenario where eventually the technofeudalists will have the upper hand and could outco…

These thought scenarios are bunk. There is no isolated silo in the real world. See foreign interference between Capitalist and Communist countries. Cuba isn’t even allowed to be a sovereign, Communist country in the Carribean (see attempted invasions, embargoes, now the crippling oil embargoes).

> Note that I am not shitting on the idea of option 1 at all, in fact personally I would very much like to see it succeed. I just think this is more of a global issue than a local one.

That’s why socialists argue for international revolution.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#109

Post by naveen99 »

lelanthran wrote: post #52
danieltanfh95 wrote: post #25

> The demand for software most certainly has an upper limit. No, it does not. There is no ceiling for complexity.

>> The demand for software most certainly has an upper limit. > No, it does not. There is no ceiling for complexity. There's an upper limit on everything. Maybe there's no ceiling on incidental complexity for s/ware development, but there sure as shit a ceiling on the essential complexity.

s/complexity/entropy

No ceiling.

Re: Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post

#110

Post by bluefirebrand »

watwut wrote: post #66
pc86 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just reading comments the other day where people who dragging a company because they apparently used AI for some low level copywriting stuff. No art assets, no code (so far as anyone knows), not actually writing copy but more like "is everything spelled right, does the copy structure flow, have all these points been addressed, etc." Not only that but the only reason anyone even knew is because the company was c…

> There is a visceral hate in the artistic community toward AI that doesn't really make sense to me tbh. Really? Have you seen how the CEOs marketed it and talked about people in that community? Artists hate it, because they listened to what AI community and leadership were openly saying. The weirdest thing on this all is how people find the hate puzzling considering initial rhetoric coming from the industry itself.…

Right? AI evangelists never seem to miss an opportunity to be clueless about this

"Why do you guys hate AI so much? All I did was tell you it's so great that it makes your skills worthless and how glad I am that I won't need people like you around in the future to make art and designs. What's wrong with that?"

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