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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#701

Post by JoshCole »

1718627440 wrote: post #542
JoshCole wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't claim that. They say LLMs only generate text someone has written. Another way you could refute their premise was by showing the existence of AI-created programs for which someone isn't a valid description of the writer (e.g., from evolutionary algorithms) then training a network on that data such that it can output it. It is just as trivial a way to prove that the premise is false. Your claim here is sligh…

But doesn't reward for "**C" means that "C" is in the training data? I am not sure if that is an accurate model, but if you think of it as a vectorspace, sure you can generate a lot of vectors from some set of basevectors, but you can never generate a new basevector from others, since they are linearly independent, so there are a bunch of new vectors you can never generate.

For an example of a reward model that doesn't include "C" explicitly consider a reward model defined to be the count of the one bits in letters in the input. It would define a reward for "C" but "C" doesn't show up explicitly, because the reward had universal reach and "C" was among its members as a result.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#702

Post by sigotirandolas »

tharkun__ wrote: post #332
chucksmash wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbf, there's a phase of learning to code where everything is pretty much an incantation you learn because someone told you "just trust me." You encounter "here's how to make the computer print text in Python" before you would ever discuss strings or defining and invoking functions, for instance. To get your start you kind of have to just accept some stuff uncritically. It's hard to remember what it was like to be in…

Fair enough on 'cutting the learning tree' at some points i.e. ignoring that you don't understand yet why something works/does what it does. We (should) keep doing that later on in life as well. But unless you teach a kid that's never done any math where `x` was a thing to program, what's so hard about understanding the concept of a variable in programming?

You'd be surprised. Off the top of my head:

Many are conditioned to see `x` as a fixed value for an equation (as in "find x such that 4x=6") rather than something that takes different values over time.

Similarly `y = 2 * x` can be interpreted as saying that from now on `y` will equal `2 * x`, as if it were a lambda expression.

Then later you have to explain that you can actually make `y` be a reference to `x` so that when `x` changes, you also see the change through `y`.

It's also easy to imagine the variable as the literal symbol `x`, rather than being tied to a scope, with different scopes having different values of `x`.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#703

Post by fl7305 »

fhd2 wrote: post #564
fl7305 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The crazy thing is that people think that a model designed to" It's even crazier that some people believe that humans "evolved" intelligence just by nature selecting the genes which were best at propagating. Clearly, human intelligence is the product of a higher being designing it. /s

I would consider evolution a form of intelligence, even though I wouldn't consider nature a being. There's a branch of AI research I was briefly working in 15 years ago, based on that premise: Genetic algorithms/programming. So I'd argue humans were (and are continuously being) designed, in a way.

(non-sarcastically from me this time)

Sure, I would agree with that wording.

In the same way, neural networks which are trained to do a task could be said to be "designed" to do something.

In my view, there's a big difference in what the training data is for a neural network, and what the neural network is "designed" for.

We can train a network using word completion examples, with the intent of designing it for intelligence.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#704

Post by fl7305 »

sunrunner wrote: post #186
cortesoft wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently, I find AI to be a really good autocomplete

Earlier this week ChatGPT found (self-conscious as I am of the personification of this phrasing) a place where I'd accidentally overloaded a member function by unintentionally giving it the name of something from a parent class, preventing the parent class function from ever being run and causing . After walking through a short debugging session where it tried the four things I'd already thought of and eventually sug…

> it [...] suggested (assertively but correctly) where the problem was

> it was a decent, if probabilistic, rubber duck

How is it a rubber duck if it suggested where the problem was?

Isn't a rubber duck a mute object which you explain things to, and in the process you yourself figure out what the solution is?

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#706

Post by bluefirebrand »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #35

I think we need to accept that in the not too far future LLMs will be able to do most of the mundane tasks we have to do every day. I don't see why an AI can't set up kubernetes, caching layers, testing, databases, scaling, check for security problems and so on. These things aren't easy but I think they are still very repetitive and therefore can be automated. There will always be a place for really good devs but for…

> There will always be a place for really good devs but for average people (most of us are average) I think there will be less and less of a place

You open your post with "we need to accept" and then end with this

This terrifies me. The idea that AI results in me having "less of a place" in society?

The idea of mass unemployment?

We should be scared

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#707

Post by bluefirebrand »

SKILNER wrote: post #427

There's a lot of resistance to AI amongst the people in this discussion, which is probably to be expected. A chunk of the objections indicate people trying to shoehorn in their old way of thinking and working. I think you have to experiment and develop some new approaches to remove the friction and get the benefit.

> I think you have to experiment and develop some new approaches to remove the friction and get the benefit.

What benefit to me?

If I'm 50% more productive using AI that's great for my employer, but what do I get out of it?

I get to continue to be employed? I already had that before AI

So what do I get out of this, exactly?

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#708

Post by zahlman »

vidarh wrote: post #642
msgodel wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Language models with a loop absolutely aren't Turing complete. Assuming the model can even follow your instructions the output is probabilistic so in the limit you can guarantee failure. In reality though there are lots of instructions LLMs fail to follow. You don't notice it as much when you're using them normally but if you want to talk about computation you'll run into trivial failures all the time. The last time…

> Language models with a loop absolutely aren't Turing complete. They absolutely are. It's trivial to test and verify that you can tell one to act as a suitably small Turing machine and give it instructions to use to manipulate the conversation as "the tape". Anything else would be absolutely astounding given how simple it is to implement a minimal 2-state 3-symbol Turing machine. > Assuming the model can even follow…

If you'd care to actually implement what you describe, I'm sure the resulting blog post would make a popular submission here.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#709

Post by zahlman »

cushychicken wrote: post #629
Panzer04 wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of things is it doing? I have a hard time imagining an LLM being able to do arbitrary things. It always feels like LLMs can do lots of the easy stuff, but if they can't do everything you need the skilled engineer anyway, who'd knock the easy things out in a week anyway.

What kind of things is it doing? Wrote me: - a SPI deserializer that sets a bit after 12 bits read in, to trigger a prefetch - an SDC constraints file for the deserializer that correctly identified the SPI clock and bus clock as separate domains requiring their own statement - a test bench that validated both that the prefetch bit was being set, and that it was being set at the proper time relative to the SPI clock -…

> I personally believe that most of the doubt and cynicism is due to:

> 1) a pretty big collective identity crisis among software professionals, and

> 2) a suspicion that LLMs make it so that anyone who is good at articulating the problem precisely no longer needs a software engineer as a translation specialist from specs to code.

... But "articulating the problem precisely" is a huge part of what software engineers do, and there's a mountain of evidence that other people are not very good at that.

Re: Human coders are still better than LLMs

#710

Post by gitaarik »

JoshCole wrote: post #688
gitaarik wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So to clarify, it could potentially come up with (something close to) C, but if you want it to get to D, E, F etc, it will become less and less accurate for each consequentive step, because it lacks the human curated reward models up to that point. Only if you create new reward models for C, the output for D will improve, and so on.

> Only if you create new reward models for C, the output for D will improve, and so on. Again, tons of false claims. One is that 'you' have to create the reward model. Another that it has to be human-curated at all. Yet another is that you even need to do that at all: you can instead have the model build a bigger model of itself, train using its existing resources or more of them, then synthesize itself back down. An…

Ok, so you claim that LLMs can get smarter without human validation. So why do they hallucinate at all? And why are all reward models currently curated by humans? Or are you claiming they aren't?
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