Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobedawson | Hacker News Reader

I think most people see where the puck is going, and even where it is right now is very impressive. It's not hard to see that it will be likely less than 5 years before it will be able to do what you did on day 2, and much more, at a tiny fraction of the cost, with no downtime, no attitude problems, sick days, etc. The things you mentioned (taking on board feedback, testing across devices, iterating on solutions) doesn't seem very far away at all.

The rate of increase in capabilities is also unpredictable, which is what is amazing & terrifying.

View on HN

> I think most people see where the puck is going

Overinflated hype about “where the puck is going” being wrong is…not a new phenomenon. And the non-tech media (traditional and social, and particularly a whole lot of the elite commentariat that spans both more than the “hard” news side of traditional media, though that is influenced too) perspective on this is driven quite disproportionately by the marketing message of the narrow set of people with the most financial stake in promoting the hype. Even the cautionary notes being sounded there are exactly the ones that are being used by the same people to promote narrow control.

You know the shoeshine boy indicator story [1]? That's the vibe I've been getting with ChatGPT lately, I have multiple old high school teachers with 0 computational background who hardly ever spoke about ML before posting regularly on LinkedIn about ChatGPT the last couple months.

The part that gets me is they aren't just aimlessly making posts, they're getting involved with webinars targeted at educators in their respective topics, speaking at regional events about the future with ChatGPT, etc.

One of them was a really excellent teacher but like this dude absolutely does not have any qualifications to be speaking on ChatGPT, and I hope it hasn't actually changed his teaching style too much because I'm having trouble imagining how ChatGPT could've fit in well with the way he used to teach.

Don't get me wrong, hype often surrounds something legitimately good, but I think ChatGPT is being taken way out of context in both the ML achievement it is and in what things the tool is actually useful for. I guess it is easy for a layperson to make mistaken assumptions about where the puck is going when they see what ChatGPT can do.

[1] "The story took place in 1929: Joseph Patrick Kennedy Sr., JFK's father, claimed that he knew it was time to get out of the stock market when he got investment tips from a shoeshine boy."

I can see why educators are getting involved. They are seeing it change how their students do work in real time.

I grew up and using a pocket calculator was verboten. You just did not do it. You better learn and memorize all of that stuff. Spin on 10 years after me and all kids have them now. If you have the right app on your phone the thing will OCR the problem and auto solve it and show you the steps. ChatGPT and its ilk are here, now. How we learn and create things has dramatically changed in under a year. It is not clear how much though.

Teachers are trying to get ahold of what does it mean to teach if you can just ask some device to summarize something as complex as the interactions of the 6 major countries in WWII and what caused it. Then the thing thinks for 2 seconds and spits out a 1000 word essay on exactly that. Then depending on which one you use it will footnote it all and everything.

This style of learning is going to take some getting used to. This tool is in their classrooms right now. Right or wrong. It will be there. The teachers are going to have to figure out what this means to their class planning. Not 5 years from now, today.

Yeah there is a broader issue here for sure. I don't think that means within a few weeks of the launch of the pocket calculator there should have been dozens of random talks from people that have no understanding of what a pocket calculator does trying to pitch a curriculum based around it.

These posts ooze hype bullshit, not nuanced talk about pros and cons and how it will affect education. ChatGPT should be thought of as a writing tool and perhaps an information source on very surface level topics. Trying to teach an advanced research course at a top school with ChatGPT heavily involved is a terrible idea on the other hand.

I have tested asking it about a number of specific topics in biology research/asking questions about particular papers, and it gives horrible answers the majority of the time. If someone submitted that as a paper to me I'd give it a bad grade because it is dumb, I wouldn't need to know if it were ChatGPT or not. I would be alarmed if my kid's teacher went from organically teaching how to dissect a scientific paper to suggesting that a major part of the curriculum can be replaced with talking to GPT.

I've seen articles about teachers taking the other extreme against ChatGPT too, but I haven't personally seen anything that was a realistic take on what LLMs can do. Maybe it boils down again to disagreement on "where the puck is going" but to me most of the hype is making ridiculous assumptions about what is imminent meanwhile ignoring the things worth discussing now.

Which sounds a lot like bubbles. The dot com crash didn't mean the internet was a bad idea or that it wasn't worth discussing at that time.

The thing was when pocket calculators came out they were expensive to get ahold of. Like 500-1000 bucks for one (in 1970s terms that is a lot). This sort of NLM is effectively free. All you need is an account and the cell phone you already have. This is disrupting classrooms right now. Everyone I talk to that has a kid is saying their kids are using it for coursework. I get why teachers are 'oh no...' as of right now it is exploding on them. They have not had time to digest it. Unfortunately at this point chatgpt is like an reporter summing up information it has no idea what it is talking about and putting it into nice prose that looks good. So while in your area of expertise you can spot out the issues. But you flip the page and it is on a different subject it will be tough to spot out the errors. Simply because you do not know and attribute expertise they do not really have onto it. This NLM is that but turned up to 11.

"where the puck is going" is something to consider and we will 100% get that wrong, but right now this thing is creating waves and making issues now.

Teaching is going to be a career affected early by chatgpt because students will use it (are using it) to do assignments. A good teacher doesn't need to know much about machine learning to think about how that will affect his job, he just needs to know his students and have an idea how to work with them given the new tools they have.

> Teaching is going to be a career affected early by chatgpt because students will use it (are using it) to do assignments.

Already happening. A student in Russia submitted his thesis written with the help of GPT, it was accepted, then rejected, then accepted: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/02/02/russian-student-al...

Yes for generic 9th grade English or poorly taught science classes it is easy to just use ChatGPT. His class would've been pretty immune to GPT plagiarized assignments though, assuming a serious grader were evaluating them, which one used to at least. Yes GPT could've been used to assist in the writing itself, but that wouldn't disrupt the educational goals achieved by developing the content, which required synthesizing multiple modern scientific papers in a coherent way.

In any event, he isn't concerned at all about students using it for assignments, it's the degree to which he seems to think it can be integrated in his current curriculum that alarms me. I think he is misunderstanding the capabilities and therefore pitching something that doesn't actually make sense.

The other teacher I didn't follow as closely, I just got a kick out of seeing she was now advertising some sort of webinar about ChatGPT filled with buzzwords too.

Also if a teacher is really serious about wanting to plan around what GPT can and can't do to the point they want to be a teaching authority on it, they should be consulting with people in the relevant domain. When I want to use a new tool in the lab I talk with colleagues that have a great deal of relevant experience before I start working it into experiments. I can't imagine starting to give advice to others on the matter when I don't actually know the current nuances.

Soon, a lot of people will realize that the puck doesn't travel in a straight line. Eventually, it will veer to the right in a logarithmic fashion. When it does is up for debate, but - in my experience - it always happens very short of where the hype claims it was heading.

The puck can also hit you in the face and break your jaw.

Certainly a likelihood for everyone too lazy to write their own code.

Personally I think it's 99% hype. The current iteration and architecture of these systems means they will never be at the level where they can actually replace a programmer. The best they will ever get is barfing up snippets for a programmer (who still needs the industry-specific knowledge to VERIFY the snippets).

Additionally, "the rate of increase in capabilities" is very much a false flag. Past performance (especially for second-order things like 'rate of improvement') is an absolute batshit insane metric for predicting future success.

https://russellinvestments.com/us/blog/past-performance-no-g...

The advancements have eaten low hanging fruit. Once all the low hanging fruit is gone, we'll all realize GPT will never be tall enough to reach the good stuff.

That's why I said it was unpredictable, in both directions.

But obviously increasing avg and sr programmer productivity by many x implies many fewer jobs for programmers. That’s the point we’re interested in.

Is that obvious? The history of programming has been full of things that have at least claimed to increase programmer productivity, everything from high level languages to smart refactoring IDEs, debuggers, PaaS, etc and in all that time the trend has been towards more jobs for programmers not fewer.

Productivity with modern tools (SPAs, microservices) is often a lot lower than oldschool stuff (django/rails, maybe even Visual Basic, Delphi)

You seem to be saying that there is fixed demand for programmers and oversupply means less hiring.

But the history of technology says that demand is recursive; the more tech produced, the more demand there is for producers.

There may be a time when we hit the old “the whole world only needs 5 computers”[0] limit, but I don’t think we’re anywhere close. AI is providing leverage to create net more programming; it is not replacing programmers in a zero sum game.

0. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/feb/21/computing...

Sounds a bit too much like a perpetual motion machine to me.

Isn’t that true of any economy? Think of how many people are employed in general. How could this number of people have been employed 200 years ago?

I’ve got a computer in all of my light switches. There’s a limit to this, but I’m not quite sure where it is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

> In economics, the lump of labour fallacy is the misconception that there is a fixed amount of work—a lump of labour—to be done within an economy which can be distributed to create more or fewer jobs.

The lump of labor fallacy says nothing about a particular type of job. A category of jobs can become non-productive versus a technology and the workers within those jobs should get reallocated to more productive jobs.

The fact that we’re even having this conversation should concern you. Move the goalposts if you want, but the rate of progress should concern you.

That's what they said about Watson and Wolfram Alpha. You only hear this nonsense on HN.

Demonstrably untrue, it’s taken up semi-residence in everything from oped pages to boardrooms since the New Year. Welcome to the mid singularity, my friend.

You can’t say “singularity” on HN without a ton of downvotes. It’s not because people disagree (or they’d say so), but because they literally shit their pants when they think about it. Hard to blame them.

I'm saving my money, so I can live enough off savings to learn a new profession. I'm not sure if that will happen, but I consider this option as likely enough to affect my life decisions. The world is changing at alarming rate.

Though I think that it's more likely that I'll become shaman who talks to the spirits. Managers hate computers and they'd prefer to pay someone to deal with them.

Who's not disagreeing? Singularity feels like "man facing existential dread confuses saturation curve for exponential".

When I say singularity, I mean “changes the nature of human life irreversibly and to a greater degree than any prior technology through a rapid progression of self-reinforcing growth.”

That rapid progression can be modeled with an exponential growth curve, like Moore’s law, even though nothing material can have a sustained exponential growth. Regardless of how the curve is modeled, the steepness is such that it serves as a step function in evolution.

With that clarified, there is first the question of “is the technological progression going to level off soon?” And I think the answer is no. The second question is, “how are we going to deal?” And the answer to that question can only be addressed once we answer the question: “what kind of world do we want to live in?”

I think you just declared radio, television, the internet, the macaroon, and mobile phones to be singularities.

People generally use the term to mean the point at which progress is automatic, unbounded, and instant. E.g. AIs that can produce smarter AIs themselves, in short order.

'step change' sounds less exciting than 'singularity' but in terms of the original definition there's very little distinction.

Hmm. I see the singularity as a recursive step change; the last step where the average slope becomes vertical.

I’m not a singularity believer (singularitist?); from the perspective of 1000 years ago we’re already at the point of infinite progress in zero time. I think individuals, the culture, and the species adapt to accelerating progress, and I intuit, maybe wrongly, that Gödel‘s theorem means that technology will never become runaway and recursive.

But I think that’s what people mean, more than just a step/paradigm change like the internet.

I think everywhere except HN the expectations on Watson’s and Wolfram’s second seasons where even more inflated

Who? Crying wolf makes sense to discredit an individual but not a whole argument. Almost everything is being predicted by someone at any given time. If your criteria for predictions is “no one can have made a similar prediction and been wrong in the past”, then you’ll disbelieve all predictions.

And seriously, how many people were actually saying “WolframAlpha will destroy a huge amount of programming jobs”?

Except Watson and Alpha weren’t useful out of the box to everyone. They weren’t the fastest growing app of all time and couldn’t even remotely play that way. ChatGPT isn’t hype because it is so useful — it’s already on the “Plateau of Productivity”.

But it looks like an exponentially steep climb from here. indefinitely

They said the same thing about transistor scaling

Being that you and I are talking to each other by forming thoughts in meat that us causing other meat to move around tells me that digital thought still has a lot of scaling room ahead of it.

Maybe superintelligence isn't possible for some reason, but the fact we exist should tell you that general intelligence is not magic.

Your brain is analog. Trying to emulate this with a digital computer is bound to come with some computational cost.

Good thing we aren’t trying, then. GPT works in a completely different fashion.

The world created by human thought has given us such excess means of power production that we have literal gigawatts of electricity we can use in a trade off where it doesn't take us 4 billion years to make efficient circuits.

> The things you mentioned (taking on board feedback, testing across devices, iterating on solutions) doesn't seem very far away at all.

This is a very bold claim IMO.

Modeling/understanding interactions in a complex system of potential black boxes is much, much more computationally difficult problem that source code to source code operations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com