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What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

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Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#111

Post by croo »

wbm1 wrote: post #100
croo wrote: post #83

I'll tell you my vision which is kinda long term - like 20-30 year from now on. I think the future is that everyone will have their own personalized AI assistant on their phone. Internet as it is will be mostly useless because only robots will be able to wade through the generated shit ocean and the next generation will see it as the current see the TV - unimportant old boring low-entropy data which is not entertaini…

An LLM/AI companion based on your ledger, that grows and evolves with you, acting as a sort of Socratic daimon, a psychologic twin, assistant, advisor, and sparring partner. Like a journal that talks back and thinks with you. It'd need to be only personally accessible and safe/private. Biometric access and local running could solve this.

Exactly! Most will have a name given by its owner, a pet of sort but much more in function. You will need to reach a certain age to get it, the beginning of adulthood.

People will mourn them and there will be real world AI cementeries.

Diffie Whitfield envisioned an internet highway where every computer is connected to every other in 1974 and then went on to find out how to do that communication in secure channels.[1]

I think my vision is quite tame and deductible from the current situation compared to his.

[1] according to Singh Simon: The Code Book

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#112

Post by j-a-a-p »

throwuwu wrote: post #102
j-a-a-p wrote: post #40

My prediction: knowledge will start to be reformatted into an LLM directly and knowledge providers will stop publishing it otherwise. Thus the chat interface will both improve and protect knowledge access once the traditional formats are not published anymore. This will come together with the downfall of search, a prime driver why so much knowledge was published on the web. Search will start to drown in an explosion…

If you can sell your knowledge to an existing audience and then add a special category with a higher price for companies training LLMs why would you take the financial hit of selling to a single customer where they can now make demands of you as your only source of revenue?

I don't get your reasoning. First not all knowledge is the source of revenue. Many products and services are supported by know how to implement, use and maintain. This kind of knowledge can benefit from protection.

And if selling knowledge is the main revenue, why would transferring it to an LLM mean losing the opportunity to sell it multiple times? Au contraire.

For any category I assume the owner of the knowledge keeps in control and my case is that a LLM can be beneficial for them.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#113

Post by andsoitis »

_ugfj wrote: post #30
prakhar897 wrote: post #29

I also wrote an article a while ago in the same vein. https://prakgupta.com/blog/envisioning_a_future_with_gpt The largest problem with a gpt future imo would be bot networks creating manufactured outrage. these will shift the decisions of policymakers towards those who controls these networks ie big corp.

Nowhere near that, the largest problem will be when the misinformation will be manufactured on an unprecedented scale by these LLM. In the US alone some 300 000 people died from homemade artisan anti vaxx propaganda, it's very scary to think what will happen when GPT switches that to industrial scale. Doctorow called them "plausible sentence generators" and that's indeed what they are and it being plausible will make…

> In the US alone some 300 000 people died from homemade artisan anti vaxx propaganda, it's very scary to think what will happen when GPT switches that to industrial scale.

From a human moral viewpoint this is indeed despicable and worth considering mitigation.

I am optimistic though that in the grand unfolding that natural selection brings, it will pressure an elevation of rationality, but with the cost of some human suffering.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#114

Post by ozten »

makestuff wrote: post #110

Clippy is going to make a triumphant return as the AI assistant of the future. Clippy will be on every phone/tablet/computer just talking to other instances of itself. In 5-10 more years models will all run locally on device with weight updates being pushed OTA. Advertisers will somehow figure out how to train ads into these models so you get subtle references to new products.

… concludes your helpful outdoor activities this weekend. Also, try Lawn Darts, which the cool kids call “Jarts”. (Sorry, training data was cut off in Jan 1970)

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#115

Post by wbm1 »

croo wrote: post #111
wbm1 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An LLM/AI companion based on your ledger, that grows and evolves with you, acting as a sort of Socratic daimon, a psychologic twin, assistant, advisor, and sparring partner. Like a journal that talks back and thinks with you. It'd need to be only personally accessible and safe/private. Biometric access and local running could solve this.

Exactly! Most will have a name given by its owner, a pet of sort but much more in function. You will need to reach a certain age to get it, the beginning of adulthood. People will mourn them and there will be real world AI cementeries. Diffie Whitfield envisioned an internet highway where every computer is connected to every other in 1974 and then went on to find out how to do that communication in secure channels.[1…

The more personal value it holds, the more risk it has. Imagine gaining access to this digital daimon of someone, it'll be like accessing their most inner thoughts. The upside however could be exponential personal growth. I've seen many examples of real life twins that basically live as a superhuman individual. E.g. the Liberman twins. This tech could be a digital equivalent of that.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#116

Post by bostonsre »

realce wrote: post #99
jprete wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a bit there it didn’t sound too bad!

You'll be a God, but a God who has to look at ads all the time, and your angels will... also be ads.

If your interface to the internet is a locally running open source ai assistant, couldn't you just tell it to strip out ads from the information it returns? It could change the internet economy some.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#117

Post by bumbledraven »

shanusmagnus wrote: post #81
tyingq wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That matches my experience. It's a sort of shortcut to the old process of googling for examples and sifting through the results. And those results, I didn't typically cut and paste from them, or if I did, it was mostly as a sort of a scaffold to build from, including deleting a fair amount of what was there. Many times it works really well, and it surfaces the kind of example I need. Sometimes it works badly. Usually…

Me too. As someone who used to be a dev but hasn't written code professionally in twelve years or so, it was such an amazing accelerant. My iteration loop was to contextualize it (in English and in code), ask how to do a thing, look at its response, tweak it, execute, see what happened, alter it some more. The fact that it usually had errors didn't bother me at all -- it got much of the way there, and it did so by do…

With GPT-4, you can often just paste the error message in without any further commentary, and it will reply with a modified version of the code that it thinks will fix the error.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#118

Post by bostonsre »

depletedgherkin wrote: post #47
ryanjshaw wrote: post #38

> I don’t believe that natural language is an adequate medium for conveying instructions with the precision required for many applications. Not clear to me if the author actually uses LLMs to do meaningful work, or is speculating about how they might be used. I've written about 2500 lines of F# for the first time in the past 1.5 weeks using ChatGPT-4 to guide me. It has been an constant back and forth, iterative proc…

Bit of an aside, but I wonder if the rise of LLMs will lead to new programming languages being much slower to be adopted. Like you said, you might have given up on F# without ChatGPT assistance, and the main way ChatGPT is able to help with F# is because of all of the example code it's been trained on. If developers rely more and more on LLM aid, then a new language without strong LLM support might be a dealbreaker t…

Wouldn't you just need to publish a Rosetta stone type translation for it to be able to digest the new language fully? e.g. here is how you do this in python and here is how you do it in this new language

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#119

Post by shanusmagnus »

jprete wrote: post #104
sanderjd wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've said a bunch that I'm worried about people starting out from scratch. So much of what I do after I get responses from LLMs is best described as "taste", but how would I have developed that taste without the years of slogging through? But I also think this is probably just a classic geezer's concern about kids being on my lawn, and it will probably work out just fine for these youths :)

Eh. I think the peak of computer ability was GenX. I’m not in that group but made up for it with sheer intensity. If you grow up on a phone you’re not getting any of the mental modeling to get close to what the machine is doing and you’re only going to be able to work with the limited tools of that level until you deliberately dive deeper.

I think both you and the GP are onto something important. I am one of the vaunted Gen-Xers (this is the first time someone has said anything nice about us, so thanks) and there is something to the idea that my understanding of systems goes down to assembly language (fully) and even CPU architecture (very sketchily) all the way up to, like, web frameworks. So for the stuff I'm usually doing, I understand several layers up and down, and that often seems valuable.

This strikes me as the essence of expertise, the difference between talking to someone who's read a book or a review paper, vs someone who is a real expert at that thing. You can be quite competent and insightful from having done a modest amount of reading and thinking, but if you're seeing the Matrix, and know how all these forces are interacting with each other, that's just a whole other level. It makes an impression when you brush up against it.

However: it always weighs on me how this is all a matter of framing. Like, I don't know the electronics. There's a level of metal that I don't get. Some of the really high-level stuff is now beyond me, too. I catch myself saying "I should really take x {weeks, months, years} and really grok that." And yet my actual experience suggests this is a mirage.

More briefly: there are always more layers for a fuller understanding. It's hard to see how many of them are really useful. Maybe the kid who is 10x better than me at LLM collaboration will benefit more than from having a deeper stack. It's interesting to ponder how these different consequences will play out.

Re: What will LLM-powered software look like in the medium-term future?

#120

Post by bumbledraven »

jprete wrote: post #108
corethree wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mathematically oriented software engineers have the most to benefit off of software assistance due to algebraic designs. As one myself LLMs don't feel like giving up control it feels like collaboration. You probably don't like collaboration.

Claiming that someone doesn’t like collaboration because they don’t want to use ChatGPT is a very unreasonable and biased take.

Not especially more biased than GGP's claim that people who use LLMs as coding assistants are "builders, i.e. interested in quickly knocking up something that works most of the time".
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