The negative comments on this post will probably be brought up in 5 years when most SQL is generated through GPT- n+1 like models
Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
121–130 of 311 posts
Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Glad i'm not the only one who saw this. Feels extremely overblown. Very impressive, don't get me wrong, and is yet another bridge closer to letting business side do plain text queries. But that said, stuff like this has existed for awhile, and it's certainly not replacing analysts. For a start, this assumes a VERY clean model, which is of course what you strive for, but the moment you step out of FAANG you'll find th…
Still, while it might not be useful yet , can’t it stand its own as an intriguing proof of concept? The first car was hardly ready to replace the horse. But look where we are now.
Large language models are very intriguing as a technology to replace business people. Make a few PowerPoint slides, fill in an excel sheet. Generate a summary for a pointless meeting.
Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
You just described most SQL analysts I've worked with
I think that's because most SQL analyst who can understand the data model, assumptions, quirks, etc. usually get promoted into other positions.
Unless they actually like what they do...
It can actually be pretty rewarding to be the person who knows most about the data in the company, while solving logic puzzles during the day.
PS. i do hope most analysts solve more interesting problems than the ones in TFA.
Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
#124Anyone who's been asked more than a couple of times for data that requires a non-trivial bit of ad-hoc SQL will know the sinking "oh shit" feeling that comes when you subsequently realise you borked the query logic in some subtle way and have accordingly emailed out a completely bogus answer/report. From the article it doesn't seem that GPT is significantly better or worse than a human in this regard, although an exp…
I've done too little SQL to be traumatized by it, but I experienced it plenty of times doing more complex data processing on the backend. I would e.g. spend a week on first discussing a solution, then researching both theoretical background and relevant libraries, and finally writing code to do the math and render the answers (probability distributions). I eyeball them, they seem to all match expectations, so I decla…
Your anecdote gave me an idea. What if we use AI to enhance the communication between people instead of replacing the people?
Imagine you give a problem statement to the LLM, then it tried to find all the subtleties, confusing parts, room for interpretation, etc. All of the people involved revise the problem statement to make it more clear and give it back to the LLM. Iterate like that until satisfied
Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
#125Side/meta-question:
Do you all think that GPT and such will see a pattern of usefulness starting with:
1) blatantly wrong but helping to train/give examples to the most rudimentary and beginning stages of people learning a task? (since that's what it's doing at the same time?) I.e. replacing low-skilled intro training, or more charitably, helping to make it possible for far more people to learn something with assistance?
And then moving up the sophistication level to where it's, say:
2) "ok, I can tell this is not blatantly wrong, and might even be plausible from a medium skilled practitioner or analyst" and I can use this with some error checking.
to
3) even more capable / actually worrisome?
Or, does it occupy a different "sphere" of usefulness / purpose?
Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
#126How much was your access to the data? I'd love to build something off of it, but everytime I hear 'enterprise plan' I think welp, that counts me out as a solo dev, just trying to build side projects.
Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience, in many cases, the so-called "first draft" (of code, content, etc.) is more just helpful for a mental warm-up. It isn't actually suitable. The time it takes to write/code/etc. isnt in the typing, that's trivial. It's in modelling the problem (, audience) and solving it. ChatGPT isnt in the game of modelling problems and solving them, it possesses only superficial semantic characteristics of the ques…
> ChatGPT isnt in the game of modelling problems and solving them, it possesses only superficial semantic characteristics of the questions posed You can give it the datamodel and a semantic description and it will do a pretty good job of reprojecting your data. People talk about chatgpt as being a fixed thing, it isn't. ChatGPT is the Apple II of LLMs. 3-4 moore units from now every issue that people think is a "gotc…
By the time the semantic description is sufficiently exact, you may as well have written the code, though. [1]
[1] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e3/2f/22/e32f2209b4c3d6b32bbc...
Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
#128The problem is that you never really know whether the chat bot gets it right or terrifically wrong unless you already know how to do the task yourself. And in some cases, paying an analyst $50/hr. for a higher degree of confidence than you can get from a $1 chat bot is still very much worth it. The stakes are higher, too. If the chat bot gets it wrong, what are you going to do, fire it? There goes a small trickle of…
Imagine you keep someone on staff at 50/hr, or you just consult based on need, i.e. 15 minute consults are 1/4th the cost, and you simply just ping them to double-check queries you've ran, that look right but maybe could be optimized. You've just cut back from maybe 20/hours to 8 per week needed for that freelancer.
Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
#129I wonder if/when we'll get comfortable with the errors that an AI like this makes. Certainly human analysts still make errors, and may be able to explain them (which I think LLMs would have a hard time doing), but what if the overall error rate is less than a human analyst?
I imagine this is sort of similar to our comfort with self-driving cars - what if they make fewer dangerous mistakes than humans? Would we actually prefer _more_ mistakes but having a human who can be held accountable and explain themselves? Are we ok with an AI that makes fewer, but categorically different mistakes?
Re: Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts
#130I don't know, has this thing ever seen a real world table? Or a real world query that needs to get data from numerous tables and run numerous functions and aggregations to get the proper result?