However, I agree with you in general: there’s a certain amount of surprise in laughing off the creation an AI agent that could pass as a reasonably intelligent person if it just weren’t straight up wrong about random things.
The last x% to make this bot a full fledged programmer does not matter. The clients will accept bugs that would be fatal in FSD. We will lose our jobs at an astonnishing rate in some kinds of companies in the coming years. I guess agile sweatshops will be first but I have no clue how far it will go.
Even if you happen to be safe there will be a downwards pressure on wages. Algorithm cranking might be largely obsolete and our main focus might be skeleton writing. It removes a big obstacle for becoming a programmer. The "good at math in school" requirement.
Additionally, it is hard to put my finger on a good explanation, but FSD is a very specific problem that we're trying to handcraft an AI solution for.
You have to appreciate how broad this model is and how decent the results it produces are without being told specifically how to do it.
Good at math at school isn’t even a requirement to be a good programmer nowadays. Maybe in certain sub-disciplines, but not all.
Being a programmer is much more than coding “in the small”. It’s about analyzing requirements and creating high level abstractions. There has been a pressure towards reducing the amount of “coding in the small” since languages started incorporating standard libraries. Then there’s been web frameworks, open source packages, API services, etc. Despite all this the need for developers has exploded and there is a perennial supply gap for talent…
Then there is the question of who is going to be manipulating these tools? Programmers.
Same promise was made of low-code tools, and what do we have now?
- As many app devs as before
- Most low-code tools (at least in the enterprise) are operated by… app devs?
So is my Uncle. This is very much a "human level intelligence" problem.
ChatGPT is impressive at generating text, but it doesn't generate better information than GPT3, it just hides its ignorance better behind more political/vague speech so it is harder to find its errors/information. To me that is regression, not progress, the results looks better but are harder to parse correctly for humans.
When the creators of this tool present it as the frontier of machine intelligence, and when its persona revolves around being intelligent, authoritative, and knowledgeable, and yet it gets some basic, not random, stuff awfully wrong, you can't really discount the skeptic sentiments expressed in the comments here like this.
You’re assuming that this will only be used when it’s perfect and in helpful ways
This will be used at scale THIS YEAR and every subsequent year to infiltrate social networks including this one and amass points / karma / followers / clout. And also to write articles that will eventually dwarf all human-generated content.
With this and deepfakes and image/video generation, the age of trusting or caring about internet content or your friends sharing online is coming to an end. But it will be a painful 10 years as online mobs and outrage will happen over and over since people think they’re reacting to their friends’ posts of real things.
No, forget violent killbots. Today’s tech puts the nail in the coffin of human societal organization and systems of decision making and politics over the next 10 years. And AI doesn’t have to be right about stuff to destroy our systems.
We’ve been analyzing the performance of ONE agent among say 9 humans at a poker table. But imagine untold swarms of them, being owned by competing groups, infiltrating ALL human content exchange.
Not much different than what happened in trading firms over the last 20 years. Bots will be WELCOMED because they perform better on many metrics but will F everyone on the others.