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Learning to Reason with LLMs

openai.com

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Re: Learning to Reason with LLMs

#591

Post by usaar333 »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #505
deisteve wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so o1 seems like it has real measurable edge, crushing it in every single metric, i mean 1673 elo is insane, and 89th percentile is like a whole different league, and it looks like it's not just a one off either, it's consistently performing way better than gpt-4o across all the datasets, even in the ones where gpt-4o was already doing pretty well, like math and mmlu, o1 is just taking it to the next level, and the f…

1673 ELO is wild If its actually true in practice, I sincerely cannot imagine a scenario where it would be cheaper to hire actual junior or mid-tier developers (keyword: "developers", not architects or engineers). 1,673 ELO should be able to build very complex, scalable apps with some guidance

I'm not sure how well codeforces percentiles correlate to software engineering ability. Looking at all the data, it still isn't. Key notes:

1. AlphaCode 2 was already at 1650 last year.

2. SWE-bench verified under an agent has jumped from 33.2% to 35.8% under this model (which doesn't really matter). The full model is at 41.4% which still isn't a game changer either.

3. It's not handling open ended questions much better than gpt-4o.

Re: Learning to Reason with LLMs

#592

Post by fakedang »

lumost wrote: post #526
cs391231 wrote: post #408

Student here. Can someone give me one reason why I should continue in software engineering that isn't denial and hopium?

LLMs perform well on small tasks that are well defined. This definition matches almost every task that a student will work on in school leading to an overestimation of LLM capabiity. LLMs cannot decide what to work on, or manage large bodies of work/code easily. They do not understand the risk of making a change and deploying it to production, or play nicely in autonomous settings. There is going to be a massive amou…

Truth is, LLMs are going to make the coding part super easy, and the ceiling for shit coders like me has just gotten a lot lower because I can just ask it to deliver clean code to me.

I feel like the software developer version of an investment banking Managing Director asking my analyst to build me a pitch deck an hour before the meeting.

Re: Learning to Reason with LLMs

#593

Post by spaceman_2020 »

cs391231 wrote: post #408

Student here. Can someone give me one reason why I should continue in software engineering that isn't denial and hopium?

I honestly think that unless you’re really passionate or really good, you shouldn’t be a coder. If you, like the vast majority of coders today, picked it up in college or later, and mostly because of the promise of a fat paycheck, I can’t really see a scenario where you would have a 30 year career

Re: Learning to Reason with LLMs

#594

Post by stale2002 »

cs391231 wrote: post #408

Student here. Can someone give me one reason why I should continue in software engineering that isn't denial and hopium?

Sure. Software engineers are actually the best situated to take advantage of this new technology.

Your concern would be like once C got invented, why should you bother being a software engineer? Because C is so much easier to use than assembly code!

The answer, of course, is that software engineering will simply happen in even more powerful and abstract layers.

But, you still might need to know how those lower layers work, even if you are writing less code in that layer directly.

Re: Learning to Reason with LLMs

#595

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

reliabilityguy wrote: post #507
w4 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two basic versions of “safety” which are related, but distinct: One version of “safety” is a pernicious censorship impulse shared by many modern intellectuals, some of whom are in tech. They believe that they alone are capable of safely engaging with the world of ideas to determine what is true, and thus feel strongly that information and speech ought to be censored to prevent the rabble from engaging in wr…

> In order for AIs to fit into our society and behave ethically they need to know how to flag that thought as a bad idea and not act on it. Don’t you think that by just parsing the internet and the classical literature, the LLM would infer on its own that poisoning someone to solve a problem is not okay? I feel that in the end the only way the “safety” is introduced today is by censoring the output.

There’s a lot of text out there that depicts people doing bad things, from their own point of view. It’s possible that the model can get really good at generating that kind of text (or inhabiting that world model, if you are generous to the capabilities of LLM). If the right prompt pushed it to that corner of probability-space, all of the ethics the model has also learned may just not factor into the output. AI safety people are interested in making sure that the model’s understanding of ethics can be reliably incorporated. Ideally we want AI agents to have some morals (especially when empowered to act in the real world), not just know what morals are if you ask them.

Re: Learning to Reason with LLMs

#596

Post by almostuseful »

cs391231 wrote: post #408

Student here. Can someone give me one reason why I should continue in software engineering that isn't denial and hopium?

If at some point a competent senior software engineer can be automated away, I think we are so close to a possible 'AI singularity' in as much as that concept makes sense, that nothing really matters anyway.

I don't know what will be automated first of the competent senior software engineer and say, a carpenter, but once the programmer has been automated away, the carpenter (and everything else) will follow shortly.

The reasoning is that there is such a functional overlap between being a standard software engineer and an AI engineer or researcher, that once you can automate one, you can automate the other. Once you have automated the AI engineers and researchers, you have recursive self-improving AI and all bets are off.

Essentially, software engineering is perhaps the only field where you shouldn't worry about automation, because once that has been automated, everything changes anyways.

Re: Learning to Reason with LLMs

#597

Post by fakedang »

al_borland wrote: post #480
LouisSayers wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't do it, help us keep our high salaries :D Joking aside, even with AI generating code, someone has to know how to talk to it, how to understand the output, and know what to do with it. AI is also not great for novel concepts and may not fully get what's happening when a bug occurs. Remember, it's just a tool at the end of the day.

> may not fully get what's happening when a bug occurs. And may still not understand even when you explicitly tell it. It wrote some code for me last week and made an error with an index off by 1. It had set the index to 1, then later was assuming a 0 index. I specifically told it this and it was unable to fix it. It was in debug hell, adding print statements everywhere. I eventually fixed it myself after it was clea…

Well now you're going to be paid a high salary for knowing when to use a 1 index vs a 0 index. :)

Re: Learning to Reason with LLMs

#598

Post by noshitsherlock »

noshitsherlock wrote: post #579
cs391231 wrote: post #408

Student here. Can someone give me one reason why I should continue in software engineering that isn't denial and hopium?

There's so much software yet to to be written, so much to automate, so many niches to attack that you need not worry. It takes humans to know where to apply the technology based on their heart, not brains. Use AI in the direction only you can ascertain; and do it for the good of HUMANITY. It's a tool that makes the knowledge posterity has left us accessible, like mathematics. Go forth an conquer life's ills young man…

And the knowledge acquisition impedance is reduced

Re: Learning to Reason with LLMs

#600

Post by jstummbillig »

cs391231 wrote: post #408

Student here. Can someone give me one reason why I should continue in software engineering that isn't denial and hopium?

One angle: There are a million SMBs and various other institutions, using none or really shitty software, that could be xx% to xxx% times more productive with custom software that they would never have been able to afford before. Now they can, en masse, because you will be able to built it a lot faster.

I have been coding a lot with AI recently. Understanding and putting into thought what is needed for the program to fix your problem remains as complex and difficult as ever.

You need to pose a question for the AI to do something for you. Asking a good question is out of reach for a lot of people.

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