It's really interesting how back then no one was considering these tools for coding at all. Today, the hype around Mythos is mostly around security vulnerabilities, while in the original GPT 2 post they don't mention coding once. The "danger" was probably spam content and mis-information.
Even if the ReAct paper was published in 2019, I don't think GPT-2 was robust enough to actually work with a tool-calling approach even when finetuned.
For regular coding, GPT-2 was effectively useless because it was only trained from links posted on Reddit.
We still didn't "solve" software engineering, try to give Claude code access to your friends or family and see what they do with it.
My partner wrote an android app which was doing what she wanted to do. She did this experiment 5 month ago and she did this in one day. My wife has 0 knowledge how any of this works. That was shocking to see. Progress is not stoping and Fable proves that.
You could always do this, though.
Before gen code killed the freelance business model, there were hoards of people on Upwork/Fiverr willing to fuck other freelancers over and underpay themselves to make whatever barely-working slop you wanted.
Hell, before managers got the idea of AI layoffs, they had been off-shoring to low-quality code sweatshops for years. That was supposed to kill software engineering in the States 20 years ago. And it was just as frustrating (if not moreso) to get them to actually fulfill the project requirements.
In hindsight, they were entirely correct. The social damage caused by low cost content generation that’s hard to distinguish from human authorship is astronomical. You don’t need to entertain the more ridiculous doomsday scenarios to wish that this technology had never been created.
A lot of low cost content generation would've come regardless with something like 50% of the developing world getting access to mobile internet between 2018-2026 and social media incentivizing certain types of content (monetizing). But AI certainly didn't help.
There's significant overlap between the smartest bots and dumbest humans. Internet platforms have a negative incentive to encourage quality content. Google embraced the spam and scams decades ago.
In hindsight, they were entirely correct. The social damage caused by low cost content generation that’s hard to distinguish from human authorship is astronomical. You don’t need to entertain the more ridiculous doomsday scenarios to wish that this technology had never been created.
What is the astronomical social damage that this has caused? I am having so much trouble relating to and even understanding what the anti-AI crowd's position is. It looks like a caricature to me.
The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person. I feel like that is a good example. Now multiply that by hundreds of millions of AI generated propaganda images across the world. And that’s even without touching the effect of fake videos on democracy or Elons pedo-bot that generates CSAM on demand of specific people…
> The president of the United States tweeted an AI generated image of himself as Jesus Christ descending from the sky and saving a sick person. Does that say anything about AI or everything about Donald Trump?
A large portion of the content on the internet is now generated by AI. You can and do have full conversations with bots and not know. I want to interact with humans not LLMs. There’s no way to combat it. An army of bots can post a specific rhetoric and it can and does sway people’s opinions. The new version of Digg was shut down because they couldn’t find a way to combat AI. They were at least trying to, other platfo…
The sloppification of the internet began before AI. Google was SEOing the open internet to death, Reddit had fully baked in a hivemind, and social media became dominated by professional influencers. AI is accelerating but also perhaps backfilling in what was already being lost.
AI is the same slop but cheaper. Ideally the value of slop approaches zero but the value of quality stays the same.
Same vibes: In 2000 Sony "declared that the company’s PlayStation2 has been hit with export restriction because it could be used for military purposes" "Trade officials said they initially placed restrictions on the game console because PlayStation2’s high-speed graphic processing could be used for missile guidance." [1] https://variety.com/2000/biz/news/playstation2-export-regs-e...
And the same with PS3 and again with PowerPC G5 mac.
How is this a gimmick? It changes my whole profession on a level i couldn't even imagine how we would 'solve' software engineering.
For starters it makes you able to bypass having to go on Reddit to find incomplete trace of solution to some niche problem and acts as a sophisticated (but sometimes wrong) search engine. This already is worth every penny and improved my mental health immensely.
Fortunately you still get the reddit experience with AI.
In hindsight, they were entirely correct. The social damage caused by low cost content generation that’s hard to distinguish from human authorship is astronomical. You don’t need to entertain the more ridiculous doomsday scenarios to wish that this technology had never been created.
What is the astronomical social damage that this has caused? I am having so much trouble relating to and even understanding what the anti-AI crowd's position is. It looks like a caricature to me.
How easy it is now to forge data (video, images, etc) will rott society. Cheating for students is now so much easier. There many examples.
In hindsight, they were entirely correct. The social damage caused by low cost content generation that’s hard to distinguish from human authorship is astronomical. You don’t need to entertain the more ridiculous doomsday scenarios to wish that this technology had never been created.
On the other hand, maybe it makes people just get off the internet and value in-person interactions more. I've stopped scrolling social media and tired of seeing fake landscapes, fake foods, and fake cities that don't exist.
I use the internet because I enjoy seeing what the best of humanity, globally, has to offer. There are millions of incredibly skilled individuals in the world - artists, musicians, developers, and so on - and I had access to all of them at my fingertips, both for entertainment and learning to develop my own skills. That is now being drowned out, with generated content being produced at 100x or 1000x the rate of human content. "Hurrdurr it's good if the internet is destroyed because I have no self control and needed to be incentivized to touch grass anyways" is such a lowbrow pseudo-contrarian-intellectual take.