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Post-GPT Computing

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Re: Post-GPT Computing

#451

Post by snickerbockers »

For now ChatGPT will refuse to solve any bon-trivial programs, but i expect that getting behavior just right will require a prompt so specific that its actually hard than just writing the source code yourself.

It's one thing to ask GPT to write a high level script to trim 5s off a video using ffmpeg. It's another thing to ask GPT to make ffmpeg, or even to make a specific modification to ffmpeg.

It's hard to say how good GPT will be at real-world programming since we currently can't try it out. Maybe it can scale to the task, or maybe it can't, but i wouldn't say that programming is "finished".

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#452

Post by meghan_rain »

tjr wrote: post #116
crop_rotation wrote: post #103

What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world. Given that knowledge work (not just software) has been one big option for people to climb the social ladder. If the AI can reasonably do all knowledge work in future, the amount of social climbing opportunities will drastically decrease. And no, UBI will not create more opportunities for social mobility. It seems like more and more people will have to compete wit…

What does GPT know beyond what we have (directly or indirectly) taught it? Could it have figured out how to extract five seconds of video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not been made available to it? Would it have invented the MPG format (or something comparable) on its own? Would it have developed the web and HTTP protocol on top of TCP/IP? And so on. Maybe the answer is in fact "yes", or even "yes, and it w…

> What does GPT know beyond what we have (directly or indirectly) taught it? Could it have figured out how to extract five seconds of video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not been made available to it? Would it have invented the MPG format (or something comparable) on its own? Would it have developed the web and HTTP protocol on top of TCP/IP?

Would you?

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#453

Post by thewarrior »

marstall wrote: post #207

I tried to get chatgpt4 to generate a basic react app that had a public page and a private page. you get access to the private page by authenticating with a google auth popup. gpt valiantly generated code and instructions for google auth. the code was impressive but buggy (outdated api version), but successively pasting errors into chatgpt went most of the way toward fixing it. the instructions for configuring google…

Have you tried getting it to explain the code to you

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#454

Post by saurik »

Cyphase wrote: post #447
AverageDude wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see an Idiocracy inspired future for programming. People claim that AI can write code so they start firing programmers. Universities stop software engineering programs as there is no one taking the courses. People stop writing blogs or stackoverflow. Software engineers either move to other fields or start living offgrid. No new innovation or new line of code written by human. Meanwhile, software quality get worse b…

It seems like you're assuming that the only way for it to get better is more human-written code. Also, why would software quality get worse over time, as opposed to stagnating at worst? Attempting to use it for more complex applications? There is already so far beyond enough data available online for an AI to be a super-human senior software engineer/architect/whatever. Because there's enough for the humans, and an A…

Yeah, but we don't have that kind of tech yet. When someone figures out how to build something that learns like a human does--where, even though all the books I ever read sucked, I am still a better programmer than any of those authors ever were and notably better than I was yesterday despite not reading anything new--then the world is going to change in a fundamental and potentially devastating way... but while that day might come literally tomorrow, it also isn't obvious it will ever come, and just because GPT exists doesn't imply it is going to happen. GPT is not that, though, and no matter how much data you throw at it it isn't going to become that without a fundamentally different architecture.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#455

Post by kamaal »

foobarian wrote: post #396
devjab wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons I'm not blown away is that everything we've tasked it to do has resulted in rather terrible answers. A lot of them outright didn't work. When they did, the way GPT created our solutions were often in a way that wouldn't work well over time. Unfortunately you wouldn't necessarily know that unless you really know your tools. In many ways, this isn't too different from people performing brute-force pr…

I think your parent is on to something: it won't be the programmers trusting GPT a little too much, it will be the PMs, and there won't be a programmer :-)

>>it will be the PMs

IMO PM's are the clueless bunch of the whole set up. Often they are just making up things as they go and making it right through 'authority'.

PM's remind of me of early days of Sudoku craze when people thought they can put in any numbers in any squares and then later on puzzle would automagically rearrange itself to help them win. Backtracking never clicked for such people.

Once you are beyond simple toy apps, and have to build large engineering artifacts in iterations and realise it can't be from scratch in every iteration. The real fun begins.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#456

Post by gmd63 »

Reducing coding to "deciding what to build" is not a pleasant endgame.

In that endgame, anyone who can speak can command AI can do whatever they want it to do. Any kid with a louder mouth can outwish the wisest man on earth.

That means shortsighted impulsive criminals can use it to learn how to steal. Shady politicians can use it to astroturf entire campaigns. Everyone knows the tropes but it bears repeating as we all march dumbly towards what's coming.

It is far easier to destroy than it is to create. And humanity aside from China has not demonstrated any sort of sensible strategy to temper the tendency of destruction to outpace harmonious creation when it comes to AI. The more I see AI emerge and see people use it for exactly what people fear it shouldn't be used for, the more I feel China's centralized adoption of it, though maybe not "feel good", might be the DNA that survives in the natural selection of societies.

I know of one person who pays for GPT, and I'm guessing they use it to astroturf demand for their own business's products, since that's what they were doing by hand when they were younger.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#457

Post by AverageDude »

Cyphase wrote: post #447
AverageDude wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see an Idiocracy inspired future for programming. People claim that AI can write code so they start firing programmers. Universities stop software engineering programs as there is no one taking the courses. People stop writing blogs or stackoverflow. Software engineers either move to other fields or start living offgrid. No new innovation or new line of code written by human. Meanwhile, software quality get worse b…

It seems like you're assuming that the only way for it to get better is more human-written code. Also, why would software quality get worse over time, as opposed to stagnating at worst? Attempting to use it for more complex applications? There is already so far beyond enough data available online for an AI to be a super-human senior software engineer/architect/whatever. Because there's enough for the humans, and an A…

Because AI doesn’t have it’s own mind. It’s gonna put some bugs here and there, sooner or later, and then it’s gonna repeat that same thing everywhere, after enough iteration the bug will be so prominent that it’s gonna be a pain in the neck for user (also the premises of almost every AI bad Sci-fi movie/book). It’s a blackbox. It’s like infection spreading.

And because of the corp greed. Cheap solution will always triumph good solution, so I am pretty confident that they will remove the guardrails way sooner that they should. I mean Facebook literally fanned the flames in Myanmar[1] so my bet is on corp greed this time too.

1. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#458

Post by magpi3 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #337
sharemywin wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This video kind of scared me even more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dBq9sKTKTY

Holy fuck. I don't see how people can see stuff like that and say "oh, it's just a fancy Markov chain generator" or "it can't reason". Even if that stuff is nominally true, how can people not be totally blown away by this? Just a couple years ago I think people would have been amazed that it can have totally natural, grammatically correct conversations. Moreover, for nearly 3/4 of a century the scientific community h…

I watched the video. Chat GPT is impressive, but exactly as the person creating the video mentioned, the deeper you get into the project, the easier it is for Chat GPT to get confused. And Chat GPT has no idea it's confused. You have to point out each individual error, and the Chat GPT scans for it, makes a correction, and potentially introduces more errors. I don't see how you could use it with any confidence on a project with sufficient complexity.

EDIT

And here is something else that just struck me. The errors in the code are obvious the minute you run the program, particularly in the beginning when the population dies off after day 1. Chat GPT is apparently incapable of running the simulation to check if its code actually makes sense. It needs someone to tell it. Think about that for a second. Can you imagine a fellow programmer handing you a piece of code without bothering to try to run it first?

I can see Chat GPT as an advanced assistant who can save a programmer a LOT of time right now, but definitely nothing more than that.

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#459

Post by KrugerDunnings »

anon7725 wrote: post #174
KrugerDunnings wrote: post #77

Working as a software engineer I often feels like I am living in the world of the Handmaidens Tale as a women with a functioning womb where the hole of society is organised around controlling everything I do. Hopefully LLM will change this but I do not underestimate the intellectual laziness of most "knowledge workers"

You’re saying this un-ironically in the post-Roe world?

No, this is dead serious

Re: Post-GPT Computing

#460

Post by olalonde »

ipatec wrote: post #382
olalonde wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure secretaries had similar thoughts about the arrival of personal computers. Yet, few would argue that computers have made the world a worse place. The truth is people will do less work, or it will feel like it. Most of our ancestors did not have the comfortable software jobs we have today. Life will become easier, products and services will become more abundant. Of course, the transition will be harder for tho…

Most of our ancestors actually had less stressful jobs and worked less than we do today. The average agricultural worker 100 years ago was not even doing a part-time in terms of time spent doing actual work. More like 2h/day on average.

You could still live like that today. But most people chose not to.
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