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

vishnumenon.com

191–200 of 219 posts

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

#191

> 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…

To this day i am still wondering what kind of code people write that chatgpt can possibly help with. All my attempts lead to garbage and i would spend more time fixing the output of the chat bot than writing the actual code. It does help with some documentation. But even that has glitches.

I’ve have used ChatGPT for

- De-obfuscate a obfuscated JS code

- Unminify a JS code. Asked it to guess function names based on the functionality

- Work with it like a rubber duck to plan out the possible solutions to a code problem

- To suggest function names based on the functionality

- To name repos

- Modify a piece of Go code to add specific functionality to it. I don’t know to write Go; I can read it and grok the high level functionality

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

#192
I can give a basic example of why chat-based UI will not dominate.

Let's say I want to change a setting that uses a traditional radio button UI:

- Autoscale servers - Manual scale servers

It's much easier to discover, understand the options, and make a decision via a radio button UI than to ask for my options via chat. That would look like:

"I'm having load issues on my servers. Can you increase the server capacity?" "Sure! Do you want to autoscale or manual scale?" "What's the difference? Are those the only two options or are there more?" "There are only these 2 options. The difference is..."

That's just a worse UX.

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

#193

I can give a basic example of why chat-based UI will not dominate. Let's say I want to change a setting that uses a traditional radio button UI: - Autoscale servers - Manual scale servers It's much easier to discover, understand the options, and make a decision via a radio button UI than to ask for my options via chat. That would look like: "I'm having load issues on my servers. Can you increase the server capacity?"…

That's just a worse UX.

So are touchscreens, especially in cars. Physical buttons are far better for the end user.

Imagine a future when all people know is blah blah to use computers, can't type, never see buttons, and barely read any more.

Now is it a bad UX?

(Before the Internet, the majority of people rarely read. And even now, most people don't read, they tiktok, they youtube.)

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

#194
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…

Anything long term is meaningless to think about, besides just the fun. AI on it's current track is going to so radically reshape society that it will be totally unrecognizable to people today. Society in it's current form makes no sense when there are smarter and cheaper non-human workers available.

There is a huge number of people - hundreds of millions - employed today that could quite literally be replaced with small shell scripts. Yet they are not being replaced. There is no reason why AI will not similarly fail to bring forth the revolution.

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

#195

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.

Low entropy data is what's more compressible. High entropy means unpredictable, which could mean high noise (like TV static which is incompressible) or high signal as GP intended.

[deleted]

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

#196

I can give a basic example of why chat-based UI will not dominate. Let's say I want to change a setting that uses a traditional radio button UI: - Autoscale servers - Manual scale servers It's much easier to discover, understand the options, and make a decision via a radio button UI than to ask for my options via chat. That would look like: "I'm having load issues on my servers. Can you increase the server capacity?"…

But it's not either/or. There's nothing that says you can't have a visual interface that adjusts based on both natural language feedback and traditional cursor-based input.

There are great examples of this in Westworld and The Expanse, with characters talking to screens to update and refine their queries.

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

#197

> 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…

To this day i am still wondering what kind of code people write that chatgpt can possibly help with. All my attempts lead to garbage and i would spend more time fixing the output of the chat bot than writing the actual code. It does help with some documentation. But even that has glitches.

It's what Clippy always wanted to be.

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

#198
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you have the right subscription level for your daemon.

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

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Me too, but allrecipes.com has already switched from “search for what you want” to “we’ll tell you what you want”. has anybody ever heard of a cookbook? it's the perfect ux for this. especially if you have a lot of different ones. even better if you collection is mostly physical copies.

OP here, as someone who does love cooking, I've gone down this route pretty heavily in the last few years - been growing my collection of physical cookbooks and definitely enjoy flipping through them in search of inspiration. So, yeah, very much endorse the cookbook UX!

[deleted]

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

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything long term is meaningless to think about, besides just the fun. AI on it's current track is going to so radically reshape society that it will be totally unrecognizable to people today. Society in it's current form makes no sense when there are smarter and cheaper non-human workers available.

There is a huge number of people - hundreds of millions - employed today that could quite literally be replaced with small shell scripts. Yet they are not being replaced. There is no reason why AI will not similarly fail to bring forth the revolution.

Which people exactly?
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