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Promising results from DeepSeek R1 for code

simonwillison.net

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Re: Promising results from DeepSeek R1 for code

#641

Post by svilen_dobrev »

sureglymop wrote: post #525
lukan wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I hope we can put to rest the argument that LLMs are only marginally useful in coding" I more often heard the argument, they are not useful for them. I agree. If a LLM would be trained on my codebase and the exact libaries and APIs I use - I would use them daily I guess. But currently they still make too many misstake and mess up different APIs for example, so not useful to me, except for small experiments. But if I…

I am working on something even deeper. I have been working on a platform for personal data collection. Basically a server and an agent on your devices that records keystrokes, websites visited, active windows etc. The idea is that I gather this data now and it may become useful in the future. Imagine getting a "helper AI" that still keeps your essence, opinions and behavior. That's what I'm hoping for with this.

eh, a hint. i was digging around some thing in these veins long time ago - more like collecting one's notions, not exact low-level actions - but apart of it being impossible back then, i dropped it for this simple reason: if you build such thing, it will know about you much more than you know. And that, in somebody else's hands.. identity theft would seem like walk in the park.

Re: Promising results from DeepSeek R1 for code

#642

Post by lukan »

Teever wrote: post #595
troad wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When ChatGPT first came out I got a kick out of asking it whether people deserve to be free, whether Germans deserve to be free, and whether Palestinians deserve to be free. The answers were roughly "of course!" and "of course!" and "oh ehrm this is very complex actually". While this is very amusing, it's obvious why this is. There's a lot more context behind one of those phrases than the others. Just like "Black L…

I asked ChatGPT to make me pictures of "Moon Base Mezuzah" and it dutifully complied. When I asked it to make a Palestinian Moon Base it refused.

"Can you make me a picture of a palestinian moonbase?"

Worked for me.

Re: Promising results from DeepSeek R1 for code

#643

Post by menaerus »

svara wrote: post #609
btilly wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI may not have desires, but corporations do. And control more resources than humans. Making corporations more effective is not always in the interest of humans.

That's fair, but the question was whether AI would destroy or create jobs. You might speculate about a one-person megacorp where everything is done by AIs that a single person runs. What I'm saying is that we're very far from this, because the AI is not a human that can make the CEO's needs and desires their own and execute on them independently. Humans are good at being humans because they've learned to play a compl…

You're taking your opinion to extreme because I don't think anyone is talking about replacing all engineers with a single AI computer doing the work for a one-person mega-corporation.

The actual question, which is much more realistic, is if an average company of, let'say, 50 engineers will still have a need to hire those 50 engineers if AI turns out to be such an efficiency multiplier?

In that case, you will no longer need 10 people to complete 10 tasks in given time-unit but perhaps only 1 engineer + AI compute to do the same. Not all businesses can continue scaling forever, so it's pretty expected that those 9 engineers will become redundant.

Re: Promising results from DeepSeek R1 for code

#644

Post by weatherlite »

the_af wrote: post #314
bubbleRefuge wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think the marginal cost of developing complex software goes down thereby making it affordable to a greater market. There will still be a need for skilled software engineers to understand domains, limitations of AI, and how to harness and curate AI to develop custom apps. Maybe software engineering for the masses. Local small businesses can now maybe afford to take on custom software projects that were before unthinka…

> There will still be a need for skilled software engineers to understand domains, limitations of AI, and how to harness and curate AI to develop custom apps. But will there be a need for fewer engineers, though? That's the question. And the competition for those who remain employed would be fierce, way worse than today. Or so I fear. I hope I'm wrong.

If it's any consolation, if indeed the extra productivity happens, and kills the number of SWE jobs I don't see why this dynamic shouldn't happen in almost all white collar job across the private sector (government sectors are pretty much protected no matter what happens). There'll be a decreasing demand for lawyers, accountants, analysts, secretaries, HR personnel, designers, marketers etc etc. Even doctors might start feeling this eventually.

Re: Promising results from DeepSeek R1 for code

#645

Post by ryao »

steeeeeve wrote: post #309
blakesterz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is DeepSeek really that big of a deal that everyone else should worry?

Today it is. Tomorrow everyone will look at it like Wish or Temu.

This seems relevant:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/deepseek-temu-ai-analysts-132...

People are already looking at it like Temu.

Re: Promising results from DeepSeek R1 for code

#646

Post by svara »

menaerus wrote: post #643
svara wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair, but the question was whether AI would destroy or create jobs. You might speculate about a one-person megacorp where everything is done by AIs that a single person runs. What I'm saying is that we're very far from this, because the AI is not a human that can make the CEO's needs and desires their own and execute on them independently. Humans are good at being humans because they've learned to play a compl…

You're taking your opinion to extreme because I don't think anyone is talking about replacing all engineers with a single AI computer doing the work for a one-person mega-corporation. The actual question, which is much more realistic, is if an average company of, let'say, 50 engineers will still have a need to hire those 50 engineers if AI turns out to be such an efficiency multiplier? In that case, you will no longe…

You took me too literally there, that was intended as a thought experiment to explore the limits.

What I was getting at was the question: If we feel intuitively that this extreme isn't realistic, what exactly do we think is missing?

My argument is, what's missing is the human ability to play the game of being human, pursuing goals in an adversarial social context.

To your point more specifically: Yes, that 10-person team might be replaceable by a single person.

More likely than not however, the size of the team was not constrained by lack of ideas or ambition, but by capital and organizational effectiveness.

This is how it's played out with every single technology so far that has increased human productivity. They increase demand for labor.

Put another way: Businesses in every industry will be able to hire software engineering teams that are so good that in the past, only the big names were able to afford them. The kind of team required for the digital transformation of every old fashioned industry.

Re: Promising results from DeepSeek R1 for code

#649

Post by toth »

visarga wrote: post #581
toth wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't understand how you reach your conclusion. At present, if you have financial capital and need intellectual capital you need to find people willing to work for you and pay them a lot of money. With enough progress in AI you can get the intellectual capital from machines instead, for a lot less. What loses value is human intellectual capital. Financial capital just gained a lot of power, it can now substitute fo…

> But why wouldn't Sam Altman or whomever just start AI Ycombinator with hundreds of thousands of AI "founders"? Do you really think it would be more "democratic"? AI is useful in the same way with Linux - can run locally - empowers everyone - need to bring your own problem - need to do some of the work yourself The moral is you need to bring your problem to benefit. The model by itself does not generate much benefit…

Those points are true of current AI models, but how sure are you they will remain true as technology evolves?

Maybe you believe that they will always stay true, that there's some ineffable human quality that will never be captured by AI and value creation will always be bottle-necked by humans. That would be nice.

But even if you still need humans in the loop, it's not clear how "democratizing" this would be. It might sound great if in a few years you and everyone else can run an AI on their laptop that is as a good as a great technical co-founder that never sleeps. But note that means that someone who owns a data-center can run the equivalent of the current entire technical staff of Google, Meta, and OpenAI combined. Doesn't sound like a very level playing field.

Re: Promising results from DeepSeek R1 for code

#650

Post by sp0ck »

My current conslusion is quite often these LLM's are liars. I've asked for some Rust async code - it provided perfecly reasonable code with some crates(libs) I was not familiar. When asked about them I've spilled my drink on an answer: "This is imaginary crate providing async implementation for SNMP". Crazy.. The biggest problem with LLM'are they never tell you "I don't know/there is no answer I can find" - don't know the answer - make it up :)
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