Being average is a just stage LLMs pass through as AI makes its way towards 'expert' and 'super human' levels.
LLMs are trained to predict tokens on highly mediocre code though. How will it exceed its training data?
Average is all you need
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Re: Average is all you need
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Half of people will be below average. s/average/median
The article assumes a normal distribution, making the distinction moot But it is useful to question whether that is true in all cases. The cases that aren't normal-distributed might be exactly the cases where it pays off to be neither average or median
It is almost never true. If you filter people you're going to get a Pareto distribution.
Re: Average is all you need
#23The majority of devs are average. What a shocker.
The majority of any filtered group are below average. Imposter syndrome isn't a thing, 80% of people really did just barely make the cutoff.
Re: Average is all you need
#24Being average is a just stage LLMs pass through as AI makes its way towards 'expert' and 'super human' levels.
LLMs are trained to predict tokens on highly mediocre code though. How will it exceed its training data?
Humans can decide to write above-average code by putting in more effort, writing comprehensive tests, iteratively refactoring, profile-informed optimization, etc.
I think you can have LLMs do that too, and then generate synthetic training data for "high-effort code".
Re: Average is all you need
#25Re: Average is all you need
#26If average is all we need, then anyone can do it. What value do I add? How does an employee differentiate themselves? Why didn’t the boss ask the AI for the charts to begin with? Everyone’s income is going to be below average, because they got fired.
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Re: Average is all you need
#27If average is all we need, then anyone can do it. What value do I add? How does an employee differentiate themselves? Why didn’t the boss ask the AI for the charts to begin with? Everyone’s income is going to be below average, because they got fired.
Reducing the amount of time I spend on the average code has meant I'm spending more time adding my above-average contributions to the code base. Amdahl's law, basically. Reducing the amount of time spent on one task means the percentage of time spent on the others increases.
How stable that is on the long term, I don't know any more than the next guy, but it is where I'm contributing now.
Re: Average is all you need
#28This is yet another ad, it's tiring.
It's a post claiming average AI is useful... by a for-profit "data platform with a CLI that LLM agents can use directly". What are they going to do? Criticize the whole industry they are selling to?
Re: Average is all you need
#29If average is all we need, then anyone can do it. What value do I add? How does an employee differentiate themselves? Why didn’t the boss ask the AI for the charts to begin with? Everyone’s income is going to be below average, because they got fired.
The power saw makes average cuts, it didn't disemploy carpenters, we just made better homes.
Re: Average is all you need
#30If average is all we need, then anyone can do it. What value do I add? How does an employee differentiate themselves? Why didn’t the boss ask the AI for the charts to begin with? Everyone’s income is going to be below average, because they got fired.
That isn't a sane starting point; if a corporation's strategy is to only hire above average employees they're going to fail. Enron springs to mind. Corporations generally take average people and give them a reasonably well defined scopes of simple work to complete that adds value. The bigger the corporation the more difficulty they have handling even the standard deviation above average differently to the one below; almost everyone just becomes a human resource to be swapped around based on social factors.
The people who need to be above average and exceptionally are senior management and maybe a few bright sparks in middle management. Most of the value-add happens there that builds social machines that then do the work.
> If average is all we need, then anyone can do it.
Pretty much, yes. That is why the range of salaries on offer is pretty compressed compared to the range of returns capitalists get.