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AI teaches itself to use an API

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Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#61

Post by IncRnd »

vasco wrote: post #14
bsaul wrote: post #5

I’ve recently thought about iron man movies, where tony stark actually designs stuffs by simply talking to jarvis. I’ve always thought « if only i could have those kind of tools available, i would too be able to design crazy stuffs ». We didn’t think « damn, tony stark didn’t have to write a line of code, he got rendered obsolete by this damn AI ». That’s how i choose to think about AI tools for developers from now o…

Let's hope in reality it isn't available only to the billionnaire owners of software companies. In those movies everyone else wasn't designing cool suites by talking to voice assistants.

Tony Stark is an exception, though. He was once a slave who escaped after he fooled his captor into letting him create a minature arc reactor that he embedded into his own chest in order to fly to freedom and safety - as well as to magnetically keep shrapnel from invading his heart and killing him. He isn't the normal billionaire owner of a software company (outside of comic books).

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#62

Post by raldi »

DrewADesign wrote: post #47
raldi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know; in the 1970's, writing assembly code was "the part that gets you paid", and then when programs took over that aspect of programming, I'm pretty sure salaries didn't go down.

I'm not so confident. Places that industrialized during the industrial revolution saw explosive growth as automation yielded unprecedented productivity. Factory jobs paid very well and were readily available because demand was generally high for like a century... but automation and labor passed a tipping point and now we have very few manufacturing jobs and the days of guaranteed high salaries and growth are gone. Ru…

As the need for cog-in-the-machine factory workers declined over the years, the labor force moved to industries like service, construction, transportation, and technology. My understanding is that if you could take a 2023 UPS driver or WalMart employee back in time and give them a day working at a factory in 1930 or 1970, they would eagerly return to the present. And those modern jobs exist today at such great scale in large part due to automation eliminating the old factory jobs (i.e., allowing goods to be produced much more cheaply).

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#63

Post by codewiz »

slg wrote: post #45
bko wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The marginal cost of technology is pretty close to zero (albeit slightly higher for large LLM model inference) so it would make sense that the technology gets distributed widely. Kind of like how everyone has essentially the best smart phone. And it's laughable when someone tries to create a luxury smartphone for $10k and its just a sub-par Android with leather accents. If you have a technology with practically zero…

>If you have a technology with practically zero marginal cost, pricing it very low and distributing it widely would maximize your profit. This is just fundamentally not true or else all software would be sold for next to nothing. If a company is choosing between selling a billion copies of its software for $1 each or two copies of its software for $1b dollars each, it will choose to set the price at $1b. The sky-high…

> This is just fundamentally not true or else all software would be sold for next to nothing.

How much have you spent on purchasing software this year?

For the past 15 years, pretty much 100% of the code running on my personal laptop and work desktop is opensource. The few remaining non-opensource programs, such as UEFI and wifi firmware, came free of charge with the hardware.

The only software I directly purchased in this decade are videogames on Steam, and that's closer to purchasing artwork than a computer program.

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#65

Post by paxys »

skeaker wrote: post #49
paxys wrote: post #36

So the AI can learn to use APIs that follow perfect RESTful semantics, are fully documented and intuitively behave exactly like one would expect. Our jobs are safe.

How did you gather all that from the linked example?

Because that's what the linked example showed? Is there a similar example of a more complex case?

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#66

Post by LASR »

tbrownaw wrote: post #64

So how much longer before it can discover how to use cloud-provider APIs to (assuming you've given it a credit card number or cryptocoin wallet) get more hosting for itself?

How much longer till it can get its own wallet, spin up some alt-coin miners and pay for itself while it does other things on the side?

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#68

Post by gs17 »

IncRnd wrote: post #61
vasco wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's hope in reality it isn't available only to the billionnaire owners of software companies. In those movies everyone else wasn't designing cool suites by talking to voice assistants.

Tony Stark is an exception, though. He was once a slave who escaped after he fooled his captor into letting him create a minature arc reactor that he embedded into his own chest in order to fly to freedom and safety - as well as to magnetically keep shrapnel from invading his heart and killing him. He isn't the normal billionaire owner of a software company (outside of comic books).

Didn't he have JARVIS before all that? I'd expect the missiles he was demoing earlier in the movie to have had AI help in design.

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#69

Post by slg »

codewiz wrote: post #63
slg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you have a technology with practically zero marginal cost, pricing it very low and distributing it widely would maximize your profit. This is just fundamentally not true or else all software would be sold for next to nothing. If a company is choosing between selling a billion copies of its software for $1 each or two copies of its software for $1b dollars each, it will choose to set the price at $1b. The sky-high…

> This is just fundamentally not true or else all software would be sold for next to nothing. How much have you spent on purchasing software this year? For the past 15 years, pretty much 100% of the code running on my personal laptop and work desktop is opensource. The few remaining non-opensource programs, such as UEFI and wifi firmware, came free of charge with the hardware. The only software I directly purchased i…

This is actually a good example of my point. The important part is not the marginal cost to produce the software, it is the value it creates for the user.

As a salaried employee, there isn't much software out there that can either increase my income or decrease my expenses, so most of my personal software purchases end up being for leisure. However, software does provide tremendous value to my employer. As a result, they are willing to spend millions on it annually.

In the example of selling an AGI product, why bother selling it to me for whatever the maximum price I could afford? I'm not going to put a mortgage on the house to buy it because it won't allow me to maximize income by working 10 salaried positions or anything like that. But my employer could save millions with it and therefore they would be willing to spend millions to buy it.

Re: AI teaches itself to use an API

#70

Post by 4dahalibut »

tomalaci wrote: post #34

Is there a good way/site/method to keep up to date with the latest AI projects? Seems like a lot of people are now trying to specialize these GPT AIs and I would like to find out about them as there will likely be a few that could help me with my workflows.

I love this newsletter! https://www.boteatbrain.com/ it's written in a very accessible style
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