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AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

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Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#491

Post by wiseowise »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #467
alphazard wrote: post #158

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…

LLM technology does not have a connection with reality nor venues providing actual understanding. Correction of conceptual errors require understanding. Vomiting large amounts of inscrutable unmaintainable code for every change is not exactly an ideal replacement for a human. We have not started to scratch the surface of the technical debt created by these systems at lightning speed.

> We have not started to scratch the surface of the technical debt created by these systems at lightning speed.

Bold of you to assume anyone cares about it. Or that it’ll somehow guarantee your job security. They’ll just throw more LLMs on it.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#492

Post by wiseowise »

veunes wrote: post #455
alphazard wrote: post #158

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…

Communication overhead between humans is real, but it's not just inefficiency, it's also where a lot of the problem-finding happens. Many of the biggest failures I've seen weren't because nobody could type the code fast enough, but because nobody realized early enough that the thing being built was wrong, brittle or solving the wrong problem

> Many of the biggest failures I've seen weren't because nobody could type the code fast enough, but because nobody realized early enough that the thing being built was wrong, brittle or solving the wrong problem

Around 99% of biggest failures come from absent, shitty management prioritizing next quarter over long strategy. YMMV.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#493

Post by aerhardt »

wcfrobert wrote: post #464

Ultimately, AI is meant to replace you, not empower you. 1 - This exoskeleton analogy might hold true for a couple more years at most. While it is comforting to suggest that AI empowers workers to be more productive, like chess, AI will soon plan better, execute better, and have better taste. Human-in-the-loop will just be far worse than letting AI do everything. 2 - Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about how…

Dario admitted in the same interview that he's not sure whether current AI techniques will be able to perform well in non-verifiable domains, like "writing a novel or planning an expedition to Mars".

I personally think that a lot jobs in the economy deal in non-verifiable or hard-to-verify outcomes, including a lot of tasks in SWE which Dario is so confident will be 100% automated in 2-3 years. So either a lot of tasks in the economy turn out to be verifiable, or the AI somehow generalizes to those by some unknown mechanism, or it turns out that it doesn't matter that we abandon abstract work outcomes to vibes, or we have a non-sequitur in our hands.

Dwarkesh pressed Dario well on a lot of issues and left him stumbling. A lot of the leaps necessary for his immediate and now proverbial milestone of a "country of geniuses in a datacenter" were wishy-washy to say the least.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#494

Post by [deleted] »

wcfrobert wrote: post #464

Ultimately, AI is meant to replace you, not empower you. 1 - This exoskeleton analogy might hold true for a couple more years at most. While it is comforting to suggest that AI empowers workers to be more productive, like chess, AI will soon plan better, execute better, and have better taste. Human-in-the-loop will just be far worse than letting AI do everything. 2 - Dario and Dwarkesh were openly chatting about how…

[deleted]

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#495

Post by overgard »

entrox wrote: post #234
overgard wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't agree more, isn't that the bizarre thing? "We have this great intellectually challenging job where we as workers have leverage. How can we completely ruin that while also screwing up every other white collar profession"

Why is it bizarre? It is inevitable. After all, AI has not ruined creative professions, it merely disrupted and transformed them. And yes, I fully understand my whole comment here being snarky, but please bear with me. Let's rewind 4 years to this HN article titled "The AI Art Apocalypse": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32486133 and read some of the comments. > Actually all progress will definitely will have a…

> It is inevitable.

Is it though? I agree the technology evolving is inevitable, but, the race/rush to throw as much money at scaling and marketing as possible before these things are profitable and before society is ready is not inevitable at all. It feels extremely forced. And the way it's being shoved into every product to juice usage numbers seems to agree with me that it's all premature and rushed and most people don't really want it. The bubble is essentially from investing way more money in datacenters and GPU's than they can even possibly pay for or build, and there's no evidence there's even a market for using that capacity!

It's funny you bring up artists, because I used to work in game development and I've worked with a lot of artists, and they almost universally HATE this stuff. They're not like "oh thank you Mr. Altman", they're more like "if we catch you using AI we'll shun you." And it's not just producers, a lot of gamers are calling out games that are made using AI, so the customers are mad too.

You keep talking about "progress", but "progress" towards what exactly? So far these things aren't making anything new or advancing civilization, they're remixing stuff we already did well before, but sloppily. I'm not saying they don't have a place -- they definitely do, they can be useful. My argument is against the bizarre hype machine and what sometimes seems like sock puppets on social media. If the marketting was just "hey, we have this neat AI, come use it" I think there'd be a lot less backlash then people saying "Get in line and adapt"

> And stop clinging to your "great intellectually challenging job" because you are holding back progress.

Man, I really wish I had the power you think I have. Also, I use these tools daily, I'm deeply familiar with them, I'm not holding back anyone's progress, not even my own. That doesn't mean I think they're beyond criticism or that the companies behind them are acting responsibly, or that every product is great. I plan to be part of the future, but I'm not just going to pretend like I think every part of it is brilliant.

> It can't be that challenging if it can be handled by a machine anyway.

This will be really funny when it comes for your job.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#496

Post by Jensson »

jychang wrote: post #320
lpapez wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you only realized how ridiculous your statement is, you never would have stated it.

It's also literally factually incorrect. Pretty much the entire field of mechanistic interpretability would obviously point out that models have an internal definition of what a bug is. Here's the most approachable paper that shows a real model (Claude 3 Sonnet) clearly having an internal representation of bugs in code: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/scaling-monosemanticit... Read the entire section around thi…

> This feature fires on actual bugs; it's not just a model pattern matching saying "what a bug hunter may say next".

You don't think a pattern matcher would fire on actual bugs?

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#497

Post by overgard »

joquarky wrote: post #212
overgard wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is I think these things would work much better if they WEREN'T so insistent on the agentic thing. Like, I find in-IDE AI tools a lot more precise and I usually move just as fast as a TUI with a lot less rework. But Claude is CONSTANTLY pushing me to try to "one shot" a big feature while asking me for as little context as possible. I'd much rather it work with me as opposed to just wandering off and wr…

Tell it to ask clarifying questions.

I do. But, there's a lot of annoying things about it being a TUI. I can't select a block of text in my editor and ask it to do something with it. It doesn't know what I'm looking at. Giving it context feels imprecise because I'm writing out filenames by hand instead of referencing them with the tools. A lot of other small things that I find are better in an IDE

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#498

Post by gaigalas »

emp17344 wrote: post #459
gaigalas wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a citation.

That’s because there’s no objective research on this. Similarly, there are no good citations to support your objection. They simply don’t exist yet.

Maybe not worth discussing something that cannot be objectively assessed then.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#499

Post by lich_king »

alphazard wrote: post #158

There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me", which I don't agree with especially in the long run, at least in software. In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh. In the medium run, "AI is not a co-worker" is exactly right. The idea of a co-worker will go away. Human collaboration on software is fundamentally inefficient. We pay huge communication/synchroniz…

> There's an undertone of self-soothing "AI will leverage me, not replace me",

Which is especially hilarious given that this article is largely or entirely LLM-generated.

Re: AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

#500

Post by overgard »

jimbokun wrote: post #220
overgard wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have literally every chess game in existence to train on, and they can't do better than 1800?

Why do you think they won’t continue to improve?

Because of how LLM's work. I don't know exactly how they're using it for chess, but here's a guess. If you consider the chess game a "conversation" between two opponents, the moves written out would be the context window. So you're asking the LLM, "given these last 30 moves, what's the most likely next move?". Ie, you're giving it a string like "1. e4 e5, 2. Nf3 Nc6, 3. Bb5 a6, 4..?".

That's basically what you're doing with LLMs in any context "Here's a set of tokens, what's the most likely continuation?". The problem is, that's the wrong question for a chess move. If you're going with "most likely continuation", that will work great for openings and well-studied move sequences (there are a lot of well studied move sequences!), however, once the game becomes "a brand new game", as chess streamers like to say when there's no longer a game in the database with that set of moves, then "what's the most likely continuation from this position?" is not the right question.

Non-LLM AI's have obviously solved chess, so, it doesn't really matter -- I think Chess shows how LLM's lack of a world model as Gary Marcus would say is a problem.

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