I wish GPT4 had never happened • Hacker News Board

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#411

Post by n0tahacker » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 3:57 PM UTC

logicalmonster wrote: post #138

1) Chaudry's article is amazing in its lack of creative thinking. If people like Priya can be ~10 times more productive wielding some AI tools, that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives. Though some people in some companies might be laid off, it doesn't necessarily mean that more people will be laid off than new jobs…

> 1) Chaudry's article is amazing in its lack of creative thinking.

If that's true, he'll really have problems in a GPT-4 world. Seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#412

Post by carapace » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 3:57 PM UTC

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #251

pavel_lishin wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives. This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure? > Though some people in some companies might be laid…

> This has been the promise over and over again And over and over again, we've underestimated and then normalized the capacity of our institutions, made of otherwise decent people, to achieve outcomes that we would call abhorrent if they were carried out by an individual. So the door closes on that opportunity because we fail to act. If we're ever going to walk through that door, companies need to fear us, because th…

> they sure as hell aren't going to share with us out of the goodness of their hearts

You know you can buy stock, right? And, as a shareholder, those companies will give you the profit?

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#413

Post by isaacremuant » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 3:57 PM UTC

sigstoat wrote: post #275

pavel_lishin wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives. This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure? > Though some people in some companies might be laid…

> Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure? if you'd like the standard of living of a few centuries ago, you can probably fund that by programming for a couple hours a week. instead you want entertainments, medicines and foods that take correspondingly more effort to produce.

Funnily enough. People without a leg up in the system can't get a property to save their life (and have that standard of living) and the quality of goods decreases while surveillance and authortiarianism increases.

A lot has improved but in the last 20/25 years, the inequality and increasing centralisation has worsened.

And if you don't realize this it probably means your safety net was too cozy for you to notice.

With that said, my comments don't relate to GPT4 which i find interesting and hope that people can be instructed how to make the most of these LLMs for themselves and not just as a tool for a company.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#414

Post by proamdev123 » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 3:57 PM UTC

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #85

Calavar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I experimented with coding with GPT a few times now. GPT is legitimately interesting as an alternative search interface to StackOverflow. I've found that 15 to 45 minutes of searching with Google/StackOverflow can be reduced to just 5 minutes with GPT. But beyond that, it's been very disappointing. Whenever I've tried getting it to write something even slightly non-trivial (i.e. tougher than just copy/pasting from on…

It’s odd how we have such different experiences. As an example yesterday I had GPT4 take an existing python script, clean it up, add timing statistics and progress bars. 10 mins works. Would have taken me probably 1 hour. I do think you have a point about it being most useful for trivial or boilerplate problems but it’s still very useful as there is always much of that.

How long was the script you provided as a prompt (roughly how many LOC)?

I’m curious because it seems like perhaps providing longer, detailed prompts (and then iterating) might be the best approach for getting coding help.

Thoughts?

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#415

Post by ip26 » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 3:58 PM UTC

jvanderbot wrote: post #387

pavel_lishin wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives. This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure? > Though some people in some companies might be laid…

What part of "a company can produce 10x more goods" translates necessarily to "they decide to not grow and instead let people go home at 10am." They're going to try to grow and get rich off the increased productivity.

That isn’t just motivated by greed. In a competitive industry, if you take your foot off the gas, a hungrier competitor who is willing to go home at 5pm or 6pm will eat your lunch.

It’s partly a product of capitalism within a nation, but also a product of the basic struggle for wealth and power at the international level. This is a common discussion in my chosen industry; we have well paying jobs and good working conditions, but only because we are (significantly) ahead. Our lead, and by extension the good life, could completely vanish in five to ten years if we stop pushing forward.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#416

Post by n0tahacker » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 3:58 PM UTC

jszymborski wrote: post #400

pavel_lishin wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives. This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure? > Though some people in some companies might be laid…

> This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure? Not to be that guy, but income inequality in the US has continued to increase [0], so it's not that automation isn't making people richer, it's just that it isn't being distributed fairly. If it we…

I agree, but less profits mean more consumption and less investment in capital.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#417

Post by electrondood » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 3:59 PM UTC

With LLMs shifting the developer's role from imperative (writing explicit instructions) to declarative (writing the prompt and supervising the output), it seems far easier for Priya to become a productive developer, no?

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#418

Post by sebzim4500 » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 4:00 PM UTC

luckylion wrote: post #180

pavel_lishin wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that means that many companies can potentially produce 10 times as many products/services and make more things that will enrich peoples' lives. This has been the promise over and over again, for centuries, and it has consistently not paid off. Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure? > Though some people in some companies might be laid…

> Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure? It's here, you're living in it, most likely. You just have to lower your wants to the standards of whenever that prediction was made.

Is this actually true though? Suppose you want to own a house and a car, not to mention be able to send your kids to university. That was affordable 50 years ago, and the only one of those things which has gotten better is the car.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#419

Post by ehnto » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 4:00 PM UTC

ricksunny wrote: post #148

"...has a bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology and works as biomedical data curator. Her job is to go through scientific papers that publish RNA sequencing data. She understands the design of the experiment and cleans and annotates the data accordingly... Her work requires just enough domain expertise that it is been non-trivial to automate (until now). I think you know where this is headed. The day I got off the GPT4…

That's currently the same issue it has for programming. It takes me longer to transcribe and factcheck the output than it would have for me to just write it from scratch. Writing the code stops being the bottleneck in software pretty quickly, and instead translating and merging business logic into existing software takes the most time.

Re: I wish GPT4 had never happened

#420

Post by didip » Sat, Apr 08, 2023, 4:01 PM UTC

Ugh, with every leap of innovation and technology, everyone bemoans: Won't you think of all these people whose jobs are gonna be lost??

But guess what? Life continues and new kind of jobs are created! Unemployment number is some of the lowest it has ever been. Now, you might argue that number is inaccurate, but that's a different topic.