Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Terence Tao on O1

mathstodon.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 527 posts

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#431

Post by simonw »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #303
IncreasePosts wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before it can replace the brilliant programmer, it needs to be able to replace the mediocre programmer. There is so much programming and other tech/it related work that businesses or people want, but can't justify paying even low tech salaries in America for. So far, there is little chance of a non-technical person developing a technical solution to their problems using AI.

> Before it can replace the brilliant programmer, it needs to be able to replace the mediocre programmer Nope. Compensation is exponential. Being able to replace a top performer with a fee mediocre devs pair coding with an LLM is more than fine for 90% of use cases.

I would expect a top performer with LLM access to be able to produce even more of a multiple of the work of a mediocre developer with LLM access.

If a top performer can produce 5x or more of the value, I would expect companies to continue to value top performers.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#432

Post by mkarrmann »

dartos wrote: post #291
mkarrmann wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is most code being written the equivalent of high-art or Shutterstock?

I think most code being written is like a custom car made out of the most cost effective parts available. Not pretty, but it gets the job done for the specific use cases of a given business. Real production code doesn’t and have a shutter stock equivalent. If you think most code is stock, then you just haven’t had enough experience in industry yet.

I actually like that analogy. It's somewhere in between. Enough that LLMs can help in many ways, but the current models are still far away from doing everything.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#433

Post by ben_w »

threecheese wrote: post #429
codr7 wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're currently in the shiny toy stage, once the flaws are thoroughly explored and accepted by all as fundamental I suspect interest will fade rapidly. There's no substance to be found, no added information; it's just repeating what came before, badly, which is exactly the kind of software that would be better off not written if you ask me. The plan to rebuild society on top of this crap is right up there with basing…

The worry I have is that the net value will become great enough that we’ll simply ignore the flaws, and probabilistic good-enough tools will become the new normal. Consider how many ads the average person wades through to scroll an Insta feed for hours - “we’ve” accepted a degraded experience in order to access some new technology that benefits us in some way. To paraphrase comedian Mark Normand: “Capitalism!”

Indeed, even if I were to minimise what LLMs can do, they are still achieving what "targeted advertising" very obviously isn't.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#434

Post by htfy96 »

simonw wrote: post #426
jero1000 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I abandoned 3D art after witnessing DALL-E 2's capabilities, and I've observed the ripple effects across creative fields. Initially, photographers and fellow artists dismissed AI as a non-threat. That turned out to be misguided optimism. Now, with Midjourney producing such impressive work, the majority of us have become largely obsolete. These days, I'm noticing developers exhibiting the same denial. From my perspect…

Sure, Midjourney's work looks visually impressive, but have you seen evidence that it really is displacing professional 3D artists? Are legitimate companies genuinely switching to Midjourney over hiring artists now, or is Midjourney usage still mostly happening in places that previously wouldn't have commissioned custom illustrations at all (instead using things like stock photography)?

It raises the bar of 'professional 3D artist'.

There're hundreds of thousands of '3D worker' working behind the scene to create the 3D models for makeshift ads, and as far as I know many of them (including my high school mate) already got displaced by Midjourney and lost their job. This used to be a big industry but now almost entirely wiped out by AI.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#435

Post by teaearlgraycold »

someguy293 wrote: post #407
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is truth to this, but you’re overstating it. If AI is cheap and can replace grunt workers then we’ll have a massive wave of new businesses solving problems that previously required a massive capital investment.

not fully related to what the parent is saying, but I need to get this off my chest: isn't this development obviously going to result in the deprecation of the value of the human intellect to near-zero? which is the thing that virtually all people on this platform base their livelihood on? there's such a deafening silence around this topic on the internet where there should be - i don't know what but not this silence…

My cope is that by the time my job is stolen nearly every other job that involves sitting at a computer has also been lost. Once they come for my paycheck there will have already been an upheaval. Maybe it will be a disaster, maybe not. But I’m still better positioned than your average person.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#436

Post by CamperBob2 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #277
CamperBob2 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But many of the low-effort comments seem to mostly fall into (1) and (2) -- cynicism rather than cautious optimism. One good riposte to reflexive LLM-bashing is, "Isn't that just what a stochastic parrot would say?" Some HN'ers would dismiss a talking dog because the C code it wrote has a buffer overflow error.

It's understandable that people whose career and lifelong skill set that are seemingly on the precipice of obsolescence are going to be extremely hostile to that threat. How many more years is senior swe work going to be a $175k/yr gig instead of an $75k check-what-the-robot-does gig?

It depends. If you got into computing because it seemed like the most lucrative career choice to which you might be suited, then yes, I can imagine feeling threatened. Bummer, sucks to be you. But if you got into computing because it seemed like the most interesting thing available to work on, then no, I can't imagine not being fascinated by, and supportive of, the progress being made in the ML field today. Any hostility you feel should be directed at the people who want to lock it all up behind legislative, judicial, or proprietary doors.

In my case, it's all I can do not to walk away from everything else I'm doing to follow this particular muse. I don't have a lot of sympathy for my colleagues who see it as a threat. If you're afraid of new ideas, technologies, and methodologies, you picked the wrong line of work.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#437

Post by lupire »

> GPT-o1, which performs an initial reasoning step before running the LLM.

Is that an accurate description? I thought it just runs the LLM for longer, and multiple times,and truncates the beginning of the output.

Re: Terence Tao on O1

#440

Post by DragonStrength »

simonw wrote: post #430
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The programmers who will find LLMs most useful are going to be those who prior to LLMs were copying and pasting from Stack Overflow, and asking questions online about everything they were doing - tasks that LLMs have precisely replaced (it has now memorized all that boilerplate code, consensus answers, and API usage examples). The developers who will find LLMs the least useful are the "brilliant" ones who never found…

I like to think I'm more of a "challenging and novel problems" developer than a "copy and paste from Stack Overflow" developer, and I've been finding LLMs extremely useful for over two years at this point. Notes: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming/

Yeah, I was gonna say this is not how I see this going. The copy/paste dev is replaced by the novel dev using LLM for the stuff they used to hire interns and juniors for.

In law, this sort of thing already happened with the rise of better research tools. The work L1s used to do a generation ago just does not exist now. An attorney with experience gets the results faster on their own now. With all the pipeline and QoL issues that go with that.

Post reply on HN