The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals • Hacker News Board

Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#81

Post by l33tman » Wed, May 10, 2023, 2:13 PM UTC

valine wrote: post #70

collaborative wrote: post #57

AI tools are absolutely useless once you get past any initial stage in a software development cycle They just can't comprehend what needs to be done even if all that's required are 2 lines of code However, we keep seeing posts from people who don't know html or how to create a chrome extension paternalizing about how we can be much more productive with AI tools. Last I heard a CEO was demanding dev increased producti…

This sounds to me like you have no idea how to properly integrate LLMs into your workflow. Just because they’re not useful for changing large code bases doesn’t mean they can’t be valuable. A few examples of things I’ve used LLMs for: Writing bash scripts to automate various parts my workflow Quickly interpreting complex regex Tutoring me on how to use poorly documented APIs Proof reading important emails Everything…

Could you? Do you have to? Would someone pay you to implement an FPGA design, given that you know nothing about it but have access to GPT-4? In practice, I've found that the advantage it might give you quickly ebbs out. It surely helps filling details and blanks though.

Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#82

Post by zoogeny » Wed, May 10, 2023, 2:14 PM UTC

gexla wrote: post #59

geek_at wrote: post #7

Learning something with GTP-4 is so much more fun than using google/Stack Overflow. It's like having a tutor that knows your code and gives you hints and solutions based on your actual project. It's a real game changer for learning

And this is what you might say while you're learning. As you gain more experience, you realize that there's a wide range of solutions with some spectrum of a fit to your situation. A given solution may fall down in certain cases. What I love you Stack Overflow, is the context which comes with it. You get replies on a given proposed solution which point out where the solution may fail.

Step 1: Microsoft buys Stack Overflow

Step 2: They implement GPT-4 responses to questions

Step 3: The community + context provide the same feedback

Step 4: GPT-5/6/7 gets progressively better

Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#83

Post by Karunamon » Wed, May 10, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

jstx1 wrote: post #80

Karunamon wrote: post #24

The confusion in terms called out here (and even demonstrated) is probably not to OpenAI's benefit and I am surprised they haven't spent more effort in trying to correct that. ChatGPT is a website that lets you do chat completion [1] against LLM models, and it exposes some extra functions like plug-ins if you are lucky enough to be white listed for them. GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 are the actual models. Someone telling you th…

ChatGPT is more than an interface, the models it uses have gone through additional training and modifications. > Someone telling you that they did something cool with ChatGPT probably means GPT 3. This seems like an incorrect assumption. 3 is very old at this point, 3.5 is free and the best demos are based on 4 which is a huge improvement compared to the previous versions.

Have they? Querying 3.5 through the completion API does not return meaningfully different results than doing it through the website. Aside from the extra functions like plug-ins that most of us can't use yet, the main difference appears to be everything on the website is forced through the moderation API as well.

Typo fixed.

Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#84

Post by Veen » Wed, May 10, 2023, 2:17 PM UTC

chpatrick wrote: post #52

Semaphor wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I got API access quite quickly. Applied March 20, got access March 27. My application was only some 2 line bullshit, their example for "why do you want access" rewritten.

I applied March 16 and I'm still waiting.

I got API access to GPT-4 almost immediately too, but I know people who have been waiting weeks. On the other hand, I don't have plugin access on ChatGPT yet, even though I applied for that as soon as it came out. There's probably quite a lot of luck involved.

Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#85

Post by drvdevd » Wed, May 10, 2023, 2:21 PM UTC

vemv wrote: post #40

There's a long gap from: I built a podcast search website to: Staying in any company right now is a negative return. We humans are too easily impressed by tricks, and are too willing to extrapolate them to fantasy land. GPT can certainly accomplish an impressive variety of small tasks. Whether it can build large-scale systems that will power tomorrow's world is uncharted territory. Can you build something meaningful,…

While I agree that is a bit of an extreme statement (many companies are also adopting LLMs from what I've been reading here on HN), this part just below that does seem insightful:

> Unless you work for OpenAI, your GPT leverage is likely wasted on trivial business code, and even more likely that due to the overwhelming amount of poor code, GPT with its 4/8k context window is unable to optimize, further weakening the leverage.

If you are sitting at a company in this situation it is of course arguable that you were already experiencing a negative return pre GPT-4, but certainly that productivity feeling from GPT-4 probably makes it seem even worse.

Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#86

Post by zoogeny » Wed, May 10, 2023, 2:24 PM UTC

ukuina wrote: post #74

akiselev wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The API rate limit is 40k tokens per minute (I’ve hit it with a personal project).

That's high enough for most users, I reckon.

40k tokens per minute is enough for most users is the next "640K ought to be enough for anybody"

Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#87

Post by lyair1 » Wed, May 10, 2023, 2:32 PM UTC

I am happy that so many people get to experience the feeling me and other software engineers feel when we write code. OpenAI democratize some of this feeling and now people that never knew how to code can experience the rush of creating something new using code.

In a world where a lot of AI Researchers that develop these amazing models are slowed down by their lack of "normal" engineering skills I think it's very apparent that software engineering goes well beyond writing a snippet of code.

Like the internet, stackoverflow, forums and other advances in technology that opened new doors and opportunity and democratized the industry - this is another one, a big one! the smart ones will use this push as an entry point to the software development world rather than looking for an oracle function for software development (which does not exist yet)

Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#88

Post by ozfive » Wed, May 10, 2023, 2:35 PM UTC

biql wrote: post #38

bostonsre wrote: post #33

Has anyone been able to use it to effectively build more than a green field poc? It's absolutely great for that, but it's been a little clunky when trying to iterate when the context gets too large or when trying to add stuff to am existing system.

I see limited context and the lack of sandbox dev environment is the main obstacle on way to have more sophisticated usage and faster feedback loop. The value would be greater if it could know everything about the code base, business requirements, related documentation, and, it could even avoid a lot mistakes by simple running type checks and the tests and correct itself before giving the answer.

Could this be done with a vector database?

Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#89

Post by zackproser » Wed, May 10, 2023, 2:35 PM UTC

What all are you using as your primary interface for ChatGPT et al LLMs? I've had some success with OpenAI's default UI but mostly I've been trying out various community Neovim plugins.

I feel strongly that I want an in-IDE pair-programming assistant, but so far I've had at least one or more blocking issues with many of the currently available open source options.

NeoAI is great - for example - I've had it working well on multiple machines before - but today after a Neovim / Astronvim update I'm getting errors about my quotas (which are fine) back from the plugin - and I don't really have time to debug that because I need to get some work done :/

Re: The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals

#90

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Wed, May 10, 2023, 2:36 PM UTC

zoogeny wrote: post #79

> Perhaps soon, documentation and APIs will become GPT-friendly first. I can imagine documentation becoming ChatGPT plugin aware. Like, the automatically generated stuff that comes out of Swagger and the like. Maybe a killer feature for a new API documentation startup?

My dream is that we all adopt tools for detecting when docs have become stale. That risk is one of the big reasons for not writing extensive docs in the first place, so the whole dynamic could change.