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LLMs reward expertise

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Re: LLMs reward expertise

#81

Post by kwakubiney »

lucb1e wrote: post #76
kwakubiney wrote: post #69

Might be a very noob question but in this era of LLMs, let me ask the reverse, how do you gain expertise? It seems this rewards people who had expertise pre LLMs, but what about people who don’t have that in a specific domain? What approaches are viable now in this current system?

I'm not sure I understand the question. What would prevent you from doing what these people did now that LLMs are here?

Those people had no choice. In my opinion, it’s harder to grind through problems knowing very well an answer is a prompt away.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#82

Post by icedchai »

wrs wrote: post #46
natsucks wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question i wonder about is, when will an event come along that persuades everyone that human understanding is still required? Or will it never come?

That question makes me think about Boeing. Or NASA. Or Enron. Reality always wins, no matter what management and Investor Relations says.

It makes me think about The Terminator.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#83

Post by sega_sai »

bumblehean wrote: post #68
petcat wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem Hours + Hours of reading and a lot of trial-and-error. The loop was so long and sooo slow. Now it's instant. As if your very first Google search just solved the problem for you immediately.

>Hours + Hours of reading and a lot of trial-and-error. The loop was so long and sooo slow. But that's how you learn...

Yes, but sometimes I don't need and want to learn. One example from my recent experience in research -- building custom dashboard pages for results of scientific analyses. Each analysis is bespoke, and building interactive webpages is simply not the skill many researchers have (and it's boring IMO). But here with LLM you could easily explore the results visually/share them with collaborators etc. There are plenty examples like that. But certainly there are cases where learning is required.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#84

Post by henryfjordan »

neilv wrote: post #44

> In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the internet. You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem (without searching for "how to center a div", or whatever your exact problem was, and copy&pasting the answ…

I've seen junior engineers be productive on their first day in the industry because of AI, so I don't think the article is the whole truth.

The example math is boundary-pushing and definitely not a solved problem. But most of us work on CRUD backends with a React frontend. Those are more or less solved problems that have well-documented solutions. For those kinds of tasks, LLMs just reward usage.

I can count on one hand the number of times in my career I've needed to solve a problem that's not described on Stack Overflow.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#86

Post by whateveracct »

neilv wrote: post #44

> In the 2010s, if you had technical gaps (say, you couldn’t write CSS), you had to either rely on a skilled colleague or just hope that the answer to your exact problem was out there on the internet. You could read some general reference/guide/tutorial documentation on CSS, and then probably solve your problem (without searching for "how to center a div", or whatever your exact problem was, and copy&pasting the answ…

the author forgot you could also do a secret third thing: learn!

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#87

Post by hvs »

petcat wrote: post #80
lionkor wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "instant" loop is so fast because it doesn't involve the part where you learn

You seem to be hung up on the part about "learning". Do you know how x86 registers work? Or atomic instructions available on ARM, SPARC, or POWER architectures? No, of course not. Because all of that got abstracted to higher-level instructions decades ago.

Yes, I do. And it wouldn't take you that long to learn, either.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#88

Post by petcat »

kibwen wrote: post #78
petcat wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't need to learn CSS anymore. Just like we don't need to learn ASM since GCC does a great job generating it from higher-level code.

I want to believe this is sarcasm, but it's so hard to tell these days.

It's not sarcasm.

We've all accepted that code-generation has been required and accepted for decades.

Re: LLMs reward expertise

#90

Post by michaelchisari »

kwakubiney wrote: post #69

Might be a very noob question but in this era of LLMs, let me ask the reverse, how do you gain expertise? It seems this rewards people who had expertise pre LLMs, but what about people who don’t have that in a specific domain? What approaches are viable now in this current system?

Same way you get strong in an age of heavy machinery: Lift heavy weights yourself.

Skills will have to be built through artificial constraints. Pen & paper, reading books, not using AI, etc.

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