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AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

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Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#451

Post by simonw »

gavinhoward wrote: post #267
simonw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will you use a spellchecker when you send out emails about your company? How about doing research with a regular search engine? "Refusing to use AI" doesn't make sense to me as a blanket policy. If you're going to make that commitment - to yourself or to anyone else - you'll need to be a lot more precise in what you actually mean by that.

It's a difference of degree. I still check the output of the spell checker. I still check the output of the search engine. The problem with these "AI" tools is that they are magnitudes more likely to encourage you to not check the output because checking the output takes orders of magnitude longer than it does to check the output of a spell checker or search engine. Do people refer to spell checkers as AI? No, so I d…

It sounds like your big objection here is to using ChatGPT to generate entire paragraphs of text.

I agree: I think it's rude to expect people to spend more time reading something than you spent writing it!

But... there are still plenty of ways to integrate ChatGPT-like-tools into a writing process that I think avoid disrespecting your audience like that. I use it as a thesaurus, or to suggest ways my writing could be improved, or as a brainstorming companion for example.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#452

Post by carlosjobim »

tricksforfree wrote: post #22
lolsowrong wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re an inspiration. I’m going to open an accounting firm and refuse to use calculators.

How often are calculators confidently wrong?

Every time they are wrong, which is every time the user slips on a key.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#453

Post by Herval_freire »

danogentili wrote: post #438
Herval_freire wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>1) That is a horribly denigrative view of human creativity, one that simply does not reflect reality. No it's not. It's a realistic view. Do not discount a view just because it's not inline with positivity. Only the realism of the view should be considered. And unfortunately it does reflect reality. There's a huge amount of data supporting my viewpoint. Most of the content right now on the internet in books and in m…

> There's a huge amount of data supporting my viewpoint. Most of the content right now on the internet in books and in movies are generic human generated content. You literally picked the closest thing to AI-generated content, soulless statistics-driven garbage, literally the first thing that will be automated by AI in corporate media ;) > You can be creative all you want, it doesn't mean other people will care or wa…

>You literally picked the closest thing to AI-generated content, soulless statistics-driven garbage, literally the first thing that will be automated by AI in corporate media ;)

I also picked the majority of all content. Generic soulless content makes up 99% of what's out there. Anything more than that is usually a random permutation which is immediately picked up and regurgitated until that unique content itself becomes soulless and generic.

You call it the first thing that will be automated and you're likely right. Another synonym for soulless content that is 99% of all jobs. Do you have 100 coworkers? Well that means 99 of them are gone.

>If there are any people at all with my same worldview (and there are, outside of HN of course), people will want to enjoy creations made by a human, not by a corporate AI. Either way, as I said, the absence of a market does not affect in any way my will to create ;)

Plenty of people on HN share your world view. The problem is both people on or off HN won't be able to tell the difference. They just choose the better content while the people utilizing AI are mum about where that content came from.

For example the post you wrote is obviously written by an AI. You went to chatGPT and told it to craft a specific response to my points. Prove to me you didn't. Prove to me you did. You can't. So what does it matter? I'm talking to you anyway.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#454

Post by rented_mule »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #356
throwaway22032 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People do want to do them. That's why they do them. They simply don't ask for more money than the AI would require yet. Once there's a sufficient margin in it, not exactly at the cut-off but perhaps at 150-200%, they're gone.

> People do want to do them. That's why they do them. Incredibly naive. Very few people enjoy their jobs. I imagine job satisfaction of anything dealing with garbage is low. The only reason people stick to it is because it pays decently, plus maybe some sort of factor intrinsic to the job like not having to deal with people. But generally, people do their job because they have to do them in order to put a roof over t…

In middle school (in 1981), my buddy and I took an elective called Custodial Services. We were helpers for the school janitor. That often meant picking up garbage and cleaning things. We like it a lot. We were almost always outside getting exercise, but it also gave us lots of time to think. We talked a lot about whether that was the right career for us.

I went on to get a degree in math and become a software engineer. That buddy is a high school janitor. We've often talked about who picked a better career. Mine has clearly been better financially. But, in terms of fulfillment, it's less clear and probably leans towards his choice.

When the movie Good Will Hunting came out, we were quite amused.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#455

Post by Retric »

lanstin wrote: post #429
Retric wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they can’t actually write the next Marvel movie today. I suspect AI getting good enough to create a Marvel movie is basically indistinguishable from it being able to create a good movie. The problem is LLM’s are basically just creating gibberish which mimics meaningful text well enough you don’t notice it’s meaningless as long as it’s a short enough sample. Modern AI techniques are approaching human level capa…

Are you sure about the nearly human levels of computational? Even at a trillion or so, I thought we still had several orders of magnitude before the free parameters approached anything like the (currently known) information density of an adult brain?

Yea, I mean close on a logarithmic scale though it’s not easy to make direct comparisons.

A low end estimate of say 10 cycles per neuron / second * 90 billion neurons * 10,000 connections per neuron is already 90 peta operations per second.

Of course we also expect AI’s to be faster but conversely we aren’t trying to simulate a person that needs to walk and talk, just a rough equivalent of whatever is needed for some task.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#456

Post by gavinhoward »

Closi wrote: post #450
gavinhoward wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is your definition of reasoning that you do not think GPT-4 would demonstrate signs of? Heh, there have been many attempts to define reasoning. I haven't seen a good one yet. However, I'm going to throw my hat into the ring, so be on the lookout for a blog post with that. I've got a draft and a lot of ideas. I'm spending the time to make it good.

Well GPT4 certainly fulfils the existing definitions of reasoning, so maybe you should call your thing something else instead of redefining ‘reasoning’ to mean something different? Otherwise it’s just moving the goalposts.

GPT4 is certainly not fulfilling the definition of reasoning. It's borrowing the intelligence of every human who wrote something that went into its model.

To demonstrate this, ask it to prove something that most or all people believe. Say some "intuitive" math thing. Perhaps the fact that factorial grows faster than exponential functions.

And no, don't just have it explain it, have it prove it, as in a full mathematical proof. Give it a minimal set of axioms to start with.

Merriam-Webster's definition of "reasoning" [1] says that reasoning is:

> the drawing of inferences or conclusions through the use of reason

So starting GPT4 off with some axioms would give it a starting point to base its inferences on.

Then, if it does prove it, take away one axiom. Since you started with a minimal set, it should now be impossible for GPT4 to prove that fact, and it should tell you this.

Having GPT4 prove something with as few axioms as possible and also admit that it cannot prove something with too few axioms is a great test for if it is truly reasoning.

[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/reasoning

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#457

Post by gavinhoward »

fl7305 wrote: post #440
gavinhoward wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. > This doesn't need AGI This is where we disagree. Code is so complex that I believe, strongly, that anything less than AGI will not be good enough. Notice I said "good enough". Sure, something less might be able to do something, but not good enough to make it a part of my toolkit. Also, code is Turing-complete. These LLM's are not Turing-complete. How could something that is not Turing-complete hope to…

> These LLM's are not Turing-complete. Aren't they? I view them as "language processors", that execute one token (instruction) at a time, and use the token window as their working memory. Sure, they have a limit to their instruction count (8k/32) before stopping. The working memory is small, but 8k tokens goes a lot longer than 8 kB. I've seen you state in other comments that LLM's cannot reason. I used to think so t…

To demonstrate that LLM's are Turing-complete, give them a small program and some inputs, then tell them to tell you the outputs for each of the inputs.

In order to be Turing-complete, they would need to have edges between nodes (I don't know what they are called in ML parlance) that can go to previous nodes, as well as edges that are only conditionally taken.

> They exhibit intelligence in that they can understand a given problem statement, reason about it, and make predictions and recommendations.

They exhibit the intelligence of the humans that wrote the material used to train their models, nothing more. They are borrowed intelligence.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#458

Post by gavinhoward »

eloff wrote: post #428
gavinhoward wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I think "AI" is the handicap. "AI" will help at first, sure, but as it is used more and more, the code will become less and less well-designed and built. My code, on the other hand, will retain full quality, and my long-term velocity will out-pace anyone using those tools. "A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept." [1] [1]: https://gist.github.com/gtallen1187/e83ed02eac6cc8d7e185

I’ve been using GitHub copilot and ChatGPT at work for a year now. I think you’re wrong. You don’t just wily nilly accept code from the AI anymore than you would from stackoverflow. But it would also be silly to ban yourself from copying code from stackoverflow. Don’t trust any code, regardless of the source, and don’t stop using your brain.

With how bad SO has gotten, I actually don't copy code from there anymore.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#459

Post by Closi »

gavinhoward wrote: post #456
Closi wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well GPT4 certainly fulfils the existing definitions of reasoning, so maybe you should call your thing something else instead of redefining ‘reasoning’ to mean something different? Otherwise it’s just moving the goalposts.

GPT4 is certainly not fulfilling the definition of reasoning. It's borrowing the intelligence of every human who wrote something that went into its model. To demonstrate this, ask it to prove something that most or all people believe. Say some "intuitive" math thing. Perhaps the fact that factorial grows faster than exponential functions. And no, don't just have it explain it, have it prove it, as in a full mathemati…

In order for an AI to reason it doesn’t mean it has to be able to reason about everything at any level - most humans cant rediscover fundamental mathematical theorems from basic axioms, particularly if you keep removing them until they fail, but I don’t think that means most humans are unable to reason.

Take this problem instead which certainly requires some reasoning to answer:

“Consider a theoretical world where people who are shorter always have bigger feet. Ben is taller than Paul, and Paul is taller than Andrew. Steve is shorter than Andrew. Everyone walks the same number of steps each day. All other things being equal, who would step on the most bugs and why?”

I think it’s a logical error to say “AI can’t reason about this, so that proves that it can’t reason about anything at all” (particularly if that example is something most humans can’t do!). The LLMs reasoning is limited compared to human reasoning right now, although it is still definitely demonstrating reasoning.

Re: AI won't steal your job, people leveraging AI will

#460

Post by aezart »

Retric wrote: post #145
chewz wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The economic value of mediocre and derivative work is plummeting. But the value of truly excellent and original work will become even more unique, more highly prized. > A chasm between the third best and fourth best script writer, graphic designer, lawyer, etc. is just starting to open. ChatGPT might write the next Marvel movie but will never write the next Everything Everywhere All at Once. Not my words. By Eric P…

Except they can’t actually write the next Marvel movie today. I suspect AI getting good enough to create a Marvel movie is basically indistinguishable from it being able to create a good movie. The problem is LLM’s are basically just creating gibberish which mimics meaningful text well enough you don’t notice it’s meaningless as long as it’s a short enough sample. Modern AI techniques are approaching human level capa…

"Short enough sample" is definitely key. With a small model like llama 13B, you can watch the output degrade in real time as it gets longer. When the only thing in its context is 1000 words of human prompt, the next LLM-predicted sentence will probably be acceptable. But by the time it's added a few hundred words of its own output to the context, it's going downhill fast.

Bigger models slow the rate of degradation, but that's it.

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