Live data from Hacker News

Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

old.reddit.com

191–200 of 580 posts

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#191
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny, but also interesting that it didn't "sign" it. I would naively have expected that being handed a clear instruction like "reply with the following information" would strongly bias the LLM to reply as requested. I wonder if they've special cased that kind of thing in the prompt; or perhaps my intuition is just wrong here?

AI can't, as I understand it, have copyright over anything they do. Nor can it be an entity to sign anything. I assume the "not-copyrightable" issue, doesn't in anyway interfere with the rights trying to be protected by the CLA, but IANAL .. I assume they've explicitly told it not to sign things (perhaps, because they don't want a sniff of their bot agreeing to things on behalf of MSFT).

Are LLM contributions effectively under public domain?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#192
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes feel like that is the right outcome for bad management and bad instructions. Only this time they can’t blame the junior engineer and are left to only blame themselves.

They'll probably blame openai/the AI instead.

AI has reproducible outcomes. If someone else can make it work, then they should too.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it probably depends on what you are doing. Outside of layers on top of these things (tooling), I personally haven't seen much progress.

What a time we live in. I guess it depends how pessimistic you are.

To their point, there hasn’t been any huge breakthrough in this field since the “attention is all you need” paper. Not really any major improvements to model architecture, as far as I am aware. (Admittedly, this is a new field of study to me.) I believe one hope is to develop better methods for self-supervised learning; I am not sure of the progress there. Most practical improvements have been on the hardware and tooling side (GPUs and, e.g., pytorch).

Don’t get me wrong: the current models are already powerful and useful. However, there is still a lot of reason to remain skeptical of an imminent explosion in intelligence from these models.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the code goes through a PR review process like any other? what are you talking about?

i don't know about you, but i would never EVER submit a PR that fails to compile . not tests are failing, those happen (specially flaky ci), but not compiling. that's literally the bare minimum.

and you think this beta system that launched like 2 days ago can’t achieve that?

it also opens the PR as its working session. there are a lot of dials, and a lot of redditor-ass opinions from people who don’t use or understand the tech

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#195
post #143

Malicious compliance should be the order of the day. Just approve the requests without reviewing them and wait until management blinks when Microsoft's entire tech stack is on fire. Then quit your job and become a troubleshooter on x3 the pay.

I know this is meant to sound witty or clever, but who actually wants to behave this way at their job? I'll never understand the antagonistic "us vs. them" mentality people have with their employer's leadership, or people who think that you should be actively sabotaging things or be "maliciously compliant" when things aren't perfect or you don't agree with some decision that was made. To each their own I guess, but I…

On the other hand: why should you accept that your employer is trying to fire you but first wants you to train the machine that will replace you? For me this is the most "them vs us" it can be.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#196
post #10

With how stochastic the process is it makes it basically unusable for any large scale task. What's the plan? To roll the dice until the answer pops up? That would be maybe viable if there was a way to automatically evaluate it 100% but with a human in the loop required it becomes untenable.

> What's the plan? Call me old school, but I find the workflow of "divide and conquer" to be as helpful when working with LLMs, as without them. Although what is needed to be considered a "large scale task" varies by LLMs and implementation. Some models/implementations (seemingly Copilot) struggles with even the smallest change, while others breeze through them. Lots of trial and error is needed to find that line for…

I mean I guess this isn't very ambitious, but it's a meaningful time saver if I basically just write code in natural language, and then Copilot generates the real code based on that. I don't have to look up syntax details, or what some function somewhere was named, etc. It will perform very accurately this way. It probably makes me 20% more efficient. It doubles my efficiency in a language I'm unfamiliar with.

I can't fire half my dev org tomorrow with that approach, I can't really fire anyone, so I guess it would be a big letdown for a lot of execs. Meanwhile though we just keep incrementally shipping more stuff faster at higher quality so I'm happy...

This works because it treats the LLM like what it actually is: an exceptionally good if slightly random text transformer.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#197
post #61
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well?? Did it sign it???

Not sure if a chatbot can legally sign a contract, we'd better ask ChatGPT for a second opinion.

I would imagine it can't sign it, especially with the options given.

>I have sole ownership of intellectual property rights to my Submissions

I would assume that the AI cannot have IP ownership considering that an AI cannot have copyright in the US.

>I am making Submissions in the course of work for my employer (or my employer has intellectual property rights in my Submissions by contract or applicable law). I have permission from my employer to make Submissions and enter into this Agreement on behalf of my employer.

Surely an AI would not be classified as an employee and therefore would not have an employer. Has Microsoft drafted an employment contract with Copilot? And if we consider an AI agent to be an employee, is it protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act? Is it getting paid at least minimum wage?

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#198
post #143

Malicious compliance should be the order of the day. Just approve the requests without reviewing them and wait until management blinks when Microsoft's entire tech stack is on fire. Then quit your job and become a troubleshooter on x3 the pay.

I know this is meant to sound witty or clever, but who actually wants to behave this way at their job? I'll never understand the antagonistic "us vs. them" mentality people have with their employer's leadership, or people who think that you should be actively sabotaging things or be "maliciously compliant" when things aren't perfect or you don't agree with some decision that was made. To each their own I guess, but I…

I suppose that depends on your relationship with your employer. If your goals are highly aligned (e.g. lots of equity based compensation, some degree of stability and security, interest in your role, healthy management practices that value their workforce, etc.) then I agree, it’s in your own self interest to push back because it can effect you directly.

Meanwhile a lot of folks have very unhealthy to non-existent relationships with their employers. There may be some mixture where they may be temporary hired/viewed as highly disposable or transient in nature having very little to gain from the success of the business, they may be compensated regardless of success/failure, they may have toxic management who treat them terribly (condescendingly, constantly critical, rarely positive, etc.). Bad and non-existent relationships lead to this sort of behavior. In general we’re moving towards “non-existent” relationships with employers broadly speaking for the labor force.

The counter argument is often floated here “well why work there” and the fact is money is necessary to survive, the number of positions available hiring at any given point is finite, and many almost by definition won’t ever be the top performers in their field to the point they truly choose their employers and career paths with full autonomy. So lots of people end up in lots of places that are toxic or highly misaligned with their interests as a survival mechanism. As such, watching the toxic places shoot themselves in the foot can be some level of justice people find where generally unpleasant people finally get to see consequences of their actions and take some responsibility.

People will prop others up from their own consequences so long as there’s something in it for them. As you peel that away, at some point there’s a level of poetic justice to watch the situation burn. This is why I’m not convinced having completely transactional relationships with employers is a good thing. Even having self interest and stability in mind, certain levels of toxicity in business management can fester. At some point no amount of money is worth dealing with that and some form of correction is needed there. The only mechanism is to typically assure poor decision making and action is actually held accountable.

Re: Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't imagine how the people who have to deal with this are feeling. It's like you have a junior developer except they don't even read what you're telling them, and have 0 agency to understand what they're actually doing. That comparison is awful. I work with quite a few Junior developers and they can be competent. Certainly don't make the silly mistakes that LLMs do, don't need nearly as much handholding, and te…

> That said, I really don't see how it could meaningfully replace an intern however And even if it could, how do you get senior devs without junior devs? ^^

Sounds like a next quarter problem (I wish it was /s).
Post reply on HN