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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?

#161

Post by sanderjd »

jprete wrote: post #101
shanusmagnus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what's been so striking for me -- the stuff that is fun and playful for me I get to do; and a bunch of stuff that I hated I can now offload, with the net result that I get to work at the level of abstraction that is most interesting and most human, vs acting like a human robot trying to unearth documentation, API examples, etc. There's no question about this being the right way to use it for me, but I wonder i…

I think a lot of the drudgery is lack of language quality. But this is still a better argument than I’ve seen before for using it.

I dunno, I've used all kinds of languages, from the ones people often consider lower quality to the ones people often consider higher quality, and they all have something like this.

And maybe there's some as yet unexplored design space out there for which this isn't true, but my prior is that we're actually just circling around some essential complexity at the core of the problem, which will never be eliminated.

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

#162

Post by suoduandao3 »

One thing I hope we'll see is that the people with the big LLM servers try to be platforms as opposed to one-stop shops [1]. With AI getting better and better at executing, I think best case we'll see an era where good novel ideas are the currency of the realm[2]. That would be great - coming up with novel ideas and thinking deeply about what we should be pursuing is about the best alignment with human nature I can imagine. But it can only happen if access to the LLMs themselves is cheap and hacker-friendly.

[1] there's good arguments to evolve a business model in that direction, e.g. Apple beating blackberry not through superior hardware but a superior app store.

[2] I'd be remiss not to plug my own recent oevre here, https://eucyclos.wixsite.com/eucyclos/contact-8-1 inspired by the difficulty of conveying positive emotions over screens. Advice from people who have built this kind of thing successfully is of course welcome.

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

#163

Post by gnarcoregrizz »

> the “inefficiency” involved in carrying out many digital tasks “manually” is a core driver of the joy that comes with using computers (for me and, I assume, for at least some subset of others)

A lot of people feel this way. The romanticism of computing is diminished by LLMs. Call me a luddite. I even work in AI.

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

#164

Post by sanderjd »

shanusmagnus wrote: post #119
jprete wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 layer…

FWIW I'm a (geriatric) millennial, and we were totally taught all that same stuff. And yeah, it totally feels important to me to have this mental model up and down the layers. But I also do wonder whether we're just wrong about that, merely falling prey to nostalgia.

My messy answer is that for many projects it's either neutral or an actual hindrance - I have to remind myself to pragmatically not care about stuff that won't matter for years at the project's expected growth rate - but for other projects it's very useful. I think the way to go is to seek out those kinds of projects, in order to avoid frustration all around.

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

#165

Post by chx »

andsoitis wrote: post #113
_ugfj wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 huma…

Natural selection is not fast enough. It operates over many generations but we know climate change is driving the expansion of zoonotic diseases. Consider within the last generation -- generally understood to be 25 years -- we had a SARS outbreak, swine flu, SARS-CoV-2, mpox outbreak just to name the big ones. It is extremely likely we will have more within the next 25.

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

#166

Post by corethree »

n4r9 wrote: post #74
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.

Could you expand on the comment about "algebraic designs"? When I interact with an LLM it feels like I'm speaking to someone who lacks inherent conceptual understanding, but is doing their utmost best to bullshit me. This is problematic when it comes to algorithmic thinking. I sometimes need to solve problems that involve tweaking existing algorithms in somewhat novel ways. For example "k-medoid clustering but with v…

How is what you're doing mathematical? I mean you can call CS "math", but then I don't know what you mean by more "mathematical." Traditional cs algos are not what I term as more mathy from my pov. Maybe you can call stats "mathy" but this is more applied math and not too different from what "builders" do.

Also what you're doing here is asking chatGPT for the answer. chatGPT is more effective via collaboration. Meaning instead of shoving the entire problem down it's throat and asking it to solve it, you ask it for advice. Ask it for bits and pieces of things.

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

#167

Post by tines »

mywittyname wrote: post #133
hirundo wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the next generation will see it as the current see the TV - unimportant old boring low-entropy data which is not entertaining anymore. Don't you mean high-entropy data? High entropy data would be less orderly, more compressible, and have a lower signal to noise ratio ... like TV shows compared to a textbook.

Entropy is the "signal" within the noise.

Not necessarily. Pure noise has high entropy.

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

#168

Post by tines »

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…

Do you think that this will all function as one giant homogenizing force at the societal level? The AIs will all be trained on the same data, and so will have the same opinions, beliefs, persuasions, etc. It seems like everyone having AIs which are mostly the same will maximize exploitation, and minimize exploration, of ideas.

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

#169

Post by munificent »

> Basically, the thinking goes, once we’re able to express our desires to computers in natural language, and once natural-language agents can carry out actions on our behalf, we’d no longer need the myriad of individual task-specific applications that exist today. Personally, I neither believe in nor desire this outcome.

Strong agree.

I find it very telling that the kind of people who advocate for chat-like software are often managers and executives. Sure, if the kind of person you are is one that enjoys giving verbal orders to people, it makes perfect sense that that's the kind of job you'll seek, and the kind of software you'll want.

But for the rest of us creative hands-on people who like to feel that we're making things through direct manipulation, talking to a computer is just about the least joyful activity I can imagine.

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

#170

Post by famouswaffles »

tines wrote: post #168
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…

Do you think that this will all function as one giant homogenizing force at the societal level? The AIs will all be trained on the same data, and so will have the same opinions, beliefs, persuasions, etc. It seems like everyone having AIs which are mostly the same will maximize exploitation, and minimize exploration, of ideas.

There are a million different beliefs, opinions etc in the corpus LLMs get trained on and they can predict all of it. It doesn't have to have the same opinions.
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