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Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

stevekrouse.com

371–380 of 486 posts

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#371
This morning a person posted a question to the Reddit group r/Mathematica (https://www.reddit.com/r/Mathematica/comments/1s1fin2/can_ho...).

I asked GPT to write code to address their question and the code was quite acceptable drawing the circle and finding the correct intersection point. It would have take me about 40 minutes to write the code, so I would not have done it myself.

Currently, GPT is great for writing short programs. The results often have a bug or two that is easy to fix, but it's much faster to have GPT write the code. This works fine for projects that are less than 100 lines of code where you just want something that works.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#373
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turing conpleteness is not associated with crativity or intelligence in any ateaightforward manner. One cannot unconditionally imply the other.

No, but unless you find evidence to suggest we exceed the Turing computable, Turing completeness is sufficient to show that such systems are not precluded from creativity or intelligence.

I believe that quantum oracles are more powerful than Turing oracles, because quantum oracles can be constructed, from what I understand, and Turing oracles need infinite tape.

Our brains use quantum computation within each neuron [1].

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-62539-5

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#374

Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language recently took a look at a compiler entirely written by Claude AI. Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI [1]. And this is why humans will be needed to advance the state of the art. AI tends to accept conventional wisdom. Because of this, it struggles with genuine critical thinking and cannot independently advance the state of the art. AI…

Anther perspective, AI is fast turning [0.1x to 0.5x] low cost X-world Sofwate Engineers into >1x engineers. Contrary to pre AI era, one of my close relative he has become very good "understand / write the requirement" guy. HN may be dominated by >1x engineers, another revolution is happening at lower /bulk end of spectrum as well.

AI makes it possible for someone who has never written code to generate a program that does what they want. One of my friends wanted to simulate a 7,9 against a dealer 10 upcard in the card game blackjack. GPT was able to write the simulation for him in javascript/html. So it took a 0.001x coder and turned him into a 0.2x coder.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#375

Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language recently took a look at a compiler entirely written by Claude AI. Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI [1]. And this is why humans will be needed to advance the state of the art. AI tends to accept conventional wisdom. Because of this, it struggles with genuine critical thinking and cannot independently advance the state of the art. AI…

> You can prod AI systems to think critically There is no critical thought, you can't prod an LLM to do such a thing. Even CoT is just the LLM producing text that looks like it could be a likely response based on what it generated before. Sometimes that text looks like critical thought, but it does not at all reflect the logical method or means the AI used to generate it. It's just riffing.

I think that finding proofs for open mathematical questions should count as critical thought. (See https://medium.com/%40cognidownunder/three-erdős-problems-fe...)

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#376

> unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence I find this flippancy about the greatest mystery in the universe extremely arrogant and incurious and wish it wouldn't be so prevalent.

Hans Moravec introduced the idea of the "landscape of human competence" , a topology representing the peaks and valleys of human capabilities. Art, writing, coding, game playing. Elevation corresponds to cognitive difficulty, and the landscape maps to everything humans are capable of doing. AI is represented as the rising waterline - when Moravec created the idea, AI was more or less constrained to a few scattered lakes, with humans clearly demonstrating superiority nearly everywhere. After transformers, the waterline began to rise, and today we no longer have a vast contiguous majority, but are left with a scattered handful of islands, and the waterline continues to rise.

It's not arrogant or incurious to acknowledge the flood, but it might be to deny that flood is happening.

If you think there are fundamental human qualities or capabilities that AI can't ever have, you might put in the work to articulate that, instead of projecting negativity onto people who have watched the vast majority of the human competencies landscape get completely submerged over the last 10 years. The islands we have remaining don't really suggest any unifying principle underlying things that AI is still bad at, but instead they highlight the lack of technical capabilities and various engineering tracks to solve for. Many of the problems are solved in principle, but are economically infeasible; for all intents and purposes, you might consider those islands completely submerged as well.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can prod AI systems to think critically There is no critical thought, you can't prod an LLM to do such a thing. Even CoT is just the LLM producing text that looks like it could be a likely response based on what it generated before. Sometimes that text looks like critical thought, but it does not at all reflect the logical method or means the AI used to generate it. It's just riffing.

I think that finding proofs for open mathematical questions should count as critical thought. (See https://medium.com/%40cognidownunder/three-erdős-problems-fe... )

That's impressive, but it isn't thought, anymore than neurons in a dish that learn to play Tetris have thoughts, or if you spent eons painstakingly calculating what the TPU did with the model to come up with the same output tokens, but via pen and paper instead.

When the TPU does it, is the TPU thinking? Where does the critical thinking take place in the endless pages of matrix math that eventually evaluates into the same token output as the TPU?

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#379
post #303
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...generate answers near the center of existing thought. This is right in the Wikipedia's article on universal approximation theorem [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theore... "n the field of machine learning, the universal approximation theorems (UATs) state that neural networks with a certain structure can, in principle, approximate any continuous function to any desired degree of ac…

> approximate any continuous function It wouldn't surprise me if many interesting functions we'd like to approximate aren't continuous at all.

This is one of the reasons current AI tech is so poor at learning physical world dynamics.

Relationships in the physical world are sparse, metastable graphs with non-linear dynamics at every resolution. And then we measure these dynamics using sparse, irregular sampling with a high noise floor. It is just about the worst possible data model for conventional AI stacks at a theoretical level.

Re: Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Business problems are essentially neverending That feels overly optimistic. LLMs seems on track to automate out basically any "email job" or "spreadsheet job," in which case we'll be looking at higher unemployment numbers than the great depression for at least some period of time. Combine with increased automation... There are a LOT of people in the world and already a not insignificant portion can't find work desp…

Do you really think the billionaires are willing to have consumers so impoverished that they can’t continue to spend large sums of discretionary income buying the things that make the billionaires themselves richer?

Megacap investors already cargo cult business practices that reduce their own return and harm employees. This is why they all over-hired at the start of covid only to begin layoffs a couple of years later.

In summary: billionaires aren't as competent as you'd hope.

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