Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Post-GPT Computing

grady.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 504 posts

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#191

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

angarg12 wrote: post #158

Last week I used ChatGPT for the first time for a real world task at work. It was a self-contained lambda function to perform some admin tasks, so it seemed like an ideal fit. Although the experience was good, it's far from the end of programmers. This was my experience: * Although ChatGPT is pretty good at generating code, it kept making simple mistakes such as calling non-existing APIs or introducing bugs. Some of…

My experience was different than yours. I had an existential crisis, and it only got worse the more I used it. To be clear, I did not think ChatGPT was ready to replace me now (and, mind you, I only used the 3.5 version of ChatGPT). But it was so easy for me to see how in just a few years it can accelerate its pace of learning.

I was discussing a bug with a colleague, so for curiosity's sake I decided to plug a similar question into ChatGPT. I was quite impressed with the solution it gave, and interestingly, it had the same subtle bug that our code had. What blew me away is that when I pointed out the bug, ChatGPT fixed the code by itself. On one hand I felt "phew, at least it needed me to point out the bug", but then I thought "I just (perhaps stupidly) provided training data so that down the road ChatGPT would get it right the first time."

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#192

Post by tomp »

anonyfox wrote: post #160
crop_rotation wrote: post #103

What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world. Given that knowledge work (not just software) has been one big option for people to climb the social ladder. If the AI can reasonably do all knowledge work in future, the amount of social climbing opportunities will drastically decrease. And no, UBI will not create more opportunities for social mobility. It seems like more and more people will have to compete wit…

Focussing on the climbing is the core problem I think. Why even do this? We collectlively should own the machines and guarantee just wealth distribution, so that its impossible for a few to have much more than than others. Then every increase in machine work is a great thing for everyone, instead of increasing competition between fewer and fewer people. Europe in itself is (together) the single biggest market/economy…

[flagged]

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#193

Post by bitcoin_anon »

green_man_lives wrote: post #186
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luddites failed the first time around. What could they do this time to succeed?

The first time around (and every subsequent time) the tools used for production, lets call them capital, made laborers more efficient and cheapened goods and drove wages up (mostly). In all of these cases there was still the need for a laborer. At a point when all labor is obsolete there will be literally no method of survival for anyone who doesn't own the "compute capital". The two options will be to let everyone s…

> At a point when all labor is obsolete there will be literally no method of survival for anyone who doesn't own the "compute capital".

How about subsistence farming?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#194

Post by ticviking »

crop_rotation wrote: post #103

What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world. Given that knowledge work (not just software) has been one big option for people to climb the social ladder. If the AI can reasonably do all knowledge work in future, the amount of social climbing opportunities will drastically decrease. And no, UBI will not create more opportunities for social mobility. It seems like more and more people will have to compete wit…

I’m not terribly worried. Though I assume my work will begin to resemble that of the Adeptus Mechanicus rather than proper engineering.

The fact is that anyone who understands even at a basic level what the computer is actually doing and isn’t afraid to look at it at a low level can’t be replaced by an AI trained on stack overflow.

It may be that I will spend more of my time on code review of LLM generated code, or make my money in the new kinds of legacy code created by copy pasting ChatGPT snippets together instead of SEO optimized stack overflow scrapes.

For me the outcome is the same. The skills I need to be more effective than the machine are the exact same as they were decade, century or even millennium ago. I still don’t see these LLMs do any synthesis of knowledge, and they don’t seem to have a grasp of logic or grammar at the level I expect a bright middle school student to have.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#195

Post by the_only_law »

bitcoin_anon wrote: post #193
green_man_lives wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first time around (and every subsequent time) the tools used for production, lets call them capital, made laborers more efficient and cheapened goods and drove wages up (mostly). In all of these cases there was still the need for a laborer. At a point when all labor is obsolete there will be literally no method of survival for anyone who doesn't own the "compute capital". The two options will be to let everyone s…

> At a point when all labor is obsolete there will be literally no method of survival for anyone who doesn't own the "compute capital". How about subsistence farming?

Maybe, but they still need a different type of capital. Unless property rights stop being enforced, where are all the people who don’t own land, or people who don’t own arable land supposed to farm? Are we bringing back manorialism?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#196

Post by anonyfox »

tomp wrote: post #192
anonyfox wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Focussing on the climbing is the core problem I think. Why even do this? We collectlively should own the machines and guarantee just wealth distribution, so that its impossible for a few to have much more than than others. Then every increase in machine work is a great thing for everyone, instead of increasing competition between fewer and fewer people. Europe in itself is (together) the single biggest market/economy…

[flagged]

it begins with everyone has enough to begin with, and whatever is importent is available as public services. there are different flavors to do this, the currently best implementation is to have very high&progressive taxes that fund a strong public sector, that in turn makes people feel safe and allows them to pursue higher education (doctors, teachers, ...) that again are needed for all this.

Sure you can work to have more, but not 100x more than your neighbor, nobody is worth that. instead of focussing on the single one elon musk, try to give everyone access to a good safety net and encourage them to try something, so statistically you will end up with many high-contributors instead of few parasitic billionaires.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#197

Post by ollien »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #180
angarg12 wrote: post #158

Last week I used ChatGPT for the first time for a real world task at work. It was a self-contained lambda function to perform some admin tasks, so it seemed like an ideal fit. Although the experience was good, it's far from the end of programmers. This was my experience: * Although ChatGPT is pretty good at generating code, it kept making simple mistakes such as calling non-existing APIs or introducing bugs. Some of…

For what it's worth, that was exactly my experience with GPT-3.5, but GPT-4 is a lot better at generating code. Almost spookily good, at least for some languages. It makes far fewer mistakes.

Maybe the ChatGPT implementation of GPT-4 is different than the one in Bing AI, but I tried to ask Bing AI to write a fairly simple Python-based ini-parser yesterday (and by that I really mean using the built-in configparser module), and while it got a good amount of the way there, but attempted to index a string with a string-key, which was weird. After multiple notices of this mistake, it produced something that _could_ work in some cases, but was definitely brittle.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#198

Post by yoyohello13 »

ticviking wrote: post #194
crop_rotation wrote: post #103

What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world. Given that knowledge work (not just software) has been one big option for people to climb the social ladder. If the AI can reasonably do all knowledge work in future, the amount of social climbing opportunities will drastically decrease. And no, UBI will not create more opportunities for social mobility. It seems like more and more people will have to compete wit…

I’m not terribly worried. Though I assume my work will begin to resemble that of the Adeptus Mechanicus rather than proper engineering. The fact is that anyone who understands even at a basic level what the computer is actually doing and isn’t afraid to look at it at a low level can’t be replaced by an AI trained on stack overflow. It may be that I will spend more of my time on code review of LLM generated code, or m…

> Though I assume my work will begin to resemble that of the Adeptus Mechanicus rather than proper engineering.

Lol, I was thinking about this the other day. Eventually most devs will essentially just be praying to the Machine spirit to make the computer do what they want. A small few high clerics will bother to learn how computers actually work. The rest will simply be cargo culting to the maximum extent possible.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#199

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

bmitc wrote: post #167
angarg12 wrote: post #158

Last week I used ChatGPT for the first time for a real world task at work. It was a self-contained lambda function to perform some admin tasks, so it seemed like an ideal fit. Although the experience was good, it's far from the end of programmers. This was my experience: * Although ChatGPT is pretty good at generating code, it kept making simple mistakes such as calling non-existing APIs or introducing bugs. Some of…

You made me think: it feels like ChatGPT is just a less accurate StackOverflow answer generator. The culture of needing to use StackOverflow is not a good one, so I'm not sure why people are considering ChatGPT to be.

Yeah, it seems like a better search engine would be easier and more accurate to use in this case.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#200

Post by illiarian »

komposit wrote: post #181
angarg12 wrote: post #158

Last week I used ChatGPT for the first time for a real world task at work. It was a self-contained lambda function to perform some admin tasks, so it seemed like an ideal fit. Although the experience was good, it's far from the end of programmers. This was my experience: * Although ChatGPT is pretty good at generating code, it kept making simple mistakes such as calling non-existing APIs or introducing bugs. Some of…

This skepticism absolutely baffles me. Have you been using gpt-4? To unlock gpt for real you have to be careful to prompt it correctly and find a way to improve the feedback loop for improving code. It is only a matter of time until tools arrive that integrate this into your development environment and give it access to test/console output such that it can suggest code and iterate over the result. It's not perfect ye…

So... nothing changes. It will be the tool for which you will need to manually construct prompts and clean up output (including imagined non-existent APIs).

The availability of a button inside an IDE doesn't make this a fundamental change in how we work

Post reply on HN