Hacker News Reader

Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

While there's an inherent conflict between copyright warrior corporations disrespecting the licenses of FOSS work, AI tooling will be an unprecedented boon for FOSS productivity. It's like giving every lonely cowboy developer a bunch of very skilled interns.

View on HN

That’s a very interesting point I had not thought about. Let’s say AI tooling results in an across-the-board 2x multiplier for FOSS. Like there is twice as much FOSS. Plus the FOSS that exists today has twice the features plus overall quality. What happens then?

Maybe long-term the main skill in software development is less about writing new code and more about architecting systems. And also using AI to glue components together and debug. Main difference if there’s way more FOSS there’s less need to write new greenfield modules.

I don’t know. I’m spitballing here. It’s fascinating to think about.

it is a problem that whether AI generate a code under copyright. but FOSS developer don't need to worry about this.

GPT-4 can reverse engineer binary assembly code. Everything that runs locally will soon be de facto OSS.

That’s awesome. Have you seen this demonstrated?

I suspect companies will fight this with a kind of runtime encryption.

You said in another thread it's in "the Microsoft paper" -- could you point me at which one you were referring to? I didn't see it in https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf , but it's possible that I missed it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com