So err, this whole IT thing has been nice for the last decades.
Maybe we have another decade until it can handle its own fingers...
Maybe we have another decade until it can handle its own fingers...
If you ask it about AWS - you need to already know AWS, same with business etc.
And if you can't make your own elevator pitch - the odds that you will be able to run a successful company are little to none.
Website builders and ready-to-use templates have been around for decades and they only increased the demand for devs.
Even if GPT will be able to produce complete system from start to end - those systems will need support, fixes, etc. Sure you will need less engineers per system but the amount of systems will increase.
Also consider how long it takes you to bake a feature into code you have never seen before to code that you wrote.
OP's startup idea is in a well-understood domain. There are lots of existing competitors offering basically that exact service. There are clear, obvious paths to building it. GPT can draw from blog posts and tutorials.
On the other hand, it does poorly with significantly novel ideas. I tried it with one I've been working on that combines 3D printing and crafting in new ways. Its answers just regurgitated blog posts about existing combinations. It even ignored the grammar of my questions, which switched the usual direct object with the object of the preposition. Which makes sense, because it isn't doing critical thinking - it's pattern matching.
And coding is supposedly an area where it shines.
GPT is waaay better than us humans at finding and summarizing information. Way way faster. But I've tried to write a blog post about some technical stuff and I finally gave up after many tries.
It's good. It's frightening already. But it's still not "there". It's like having a extremely fast but bit dumb virtual assistant.
Way better than anything we had before.
Is that true, though? These AIs seem pretty capable to extract abstractions, like an author's style, and apply it to novel concepts.
I remember being shown this software almost a decade ago in dealing with chat in online video gaming and it ended becoming a serious conversation at the ACM SIG CHI about it's use and abuse for spreading certain things. At the end of the day, we realized it was an arms race and the only way to win, was to simply not play. But of course these ideas were rejected for it went against the financial interests of the parties involved.
How good will ChatGPT be in 5 years?
It's scary to imagine.
There's also mathematically excellent reasons why that happened.
Self-driving cars are an impossibly complex problem.
Statistics are statistics.
Predicting the minority class correctly 99% of the time isn't good enough for autonomous driving. A car has to break for little Suzie 100% of the time.
However, generating 1,000 lines of code for a CRUD app? That's 99% bug free?
That's a helluva lot better than I can do.
As with all things. The solution is watch what the domain experts do.
But even if we do go with 99% bug free for the sake of argument, the usefulness depends on the type of bug. How harmful is it? How easy is it to detect?
I had my wife (a physician) ask ChatGPT medical questions and it was almost always subtly but dangerously and confidently wrong. It looked fine to me but it took an expert to spot the flaws. And frequently it required specialist knowledge that a physician outside of my wife’s specialty wouldn’t even know to find the problems.
If you need a senior engineer to read and understand every line of code this thing spits out I don’t see it as providing more than advanced autocomplete in real world use (which to be fair could be quite helpful).
It frequently takes more time to read and really comprehend a junior engineers PR than it would have to just do it myself. The only reason I’m not is mentoring.
...knowing my first employer out of college, they'd be VERY happy with 99%.
"The end user will test the software" is very much the adage of the age. Cut priced, low quality.
Just as a reminder, after we had spectacular results on ImageNet, highly respected AI researchers were predicting the end of the radiologist occupation. Turns out that even when some state-of-the-art CV classification algorithm is used on any kind of scan, you still need a radiologist to look at the image basically in the same way as before.
If you write large-scale applications with the help of a system like ChatGPT you will still need to create accurate test coverage and an understanding of the problem that is essentially equivalent to that of the people writing the code themselves. Whether all of this would in the end actually lead to large enough productivity increases depends on how error-prone the AI generated code will be and given that it takes a lot more time to dig into unfamiliar codebases than those you've written yourself, I think it's anything but obvious that this will have a huge overall impact on the industry. But obviously I might be biased here, since I have a stake in the game.
And GPT-3 et al has a lot of knowledge, even if it messes up certain expert level details. Rather than comparing against domain experts, my anchor point here is the sort of mistakes that novelists, script writers, and journalists make when writing about any given topic.
It still seems highly likely that "stitching libraries together" development workflows in 10-15 years will involve large amounts of copy-editing the output of large language models.
The trajectory of improvements, from GitHub Copilot to ChatGPT, is too steep.
Because it can literally almost do that stitching libraries together task now, if you give it a compiler and runtime environment and have it iterate on errors. Open AI has said they will release a big update before Christmas. This could include an API. And if we assume a text-only environment. But we already have the first text-to-video models, so we should assume that ChatGPT like systems will be built with multimodal models such that they would include information about UI interactions etc. in the near future. No reason to suppose that those advances would take ten years. We are seeing major improvements every 6-12 months.
I do recommend you play with it. But if you don’t feel like signing up with their free account, here’s a screen recording of me asking it some random general knowledge questions and instructing it to use a different language in the response each time: https://youtu.be/XX2rbcrXblk
To be fair, the post might be from Schmidhuber, in which case it’s true he saw it 20 years ago.
I saw it 10 years ago and it was called MegaHAL, wasn’t this good though.
Using "it" in this way to refer to both that and GPT-family LLMs, or similarly saying "I remember being shown this software almost a decade ago" like the other commenter, is like saying "I remember seeing Kitty Hawk fly, and there's no way that can get someone across the Atlantic" when being presented with a chance to a free seat on the first flight of the Concord. (Actual human level intelligence in this analogy is a spaceship we still have not built, that's not where I'm going with this).
This is not a turn based game ran in dos. You value yourself way to highly and maybe its you who should update their knowledge base ;)