Comment by byyyy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by byyyy | Hacker News Reader

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>Unfortunately, a lot of people make entire careers of that kind of work. "Paper pusher" type jobs are the most at risk but so are the low end of lots of creative jobs like copywriting, graphic design and even script writing.

Don't forget programming jobs. I wouldn't classify programmers as "low end" as that's sort of an offensive categorization.

But among the set of careers you have chosen as a target for replacement... Programming is among that group. I mean LLMs are obviously translating English to code in a way that was never seen before.

Given that you're a programmer on a site that is mostly made up of programmers I wonder why that specific career was not mentioned. Seems a little convenient to me.

I'm not saying this is you, but I feel there is a lot of hostile defensiveness on the capabilities of AI because the AI potentially trivializes our abilities as programmers. If we are among the group of careers you labeled as "low level" then are we not "low level" ourselves? Do we have the fortitude and objectiveness to accept that?

Probably not.

Programming en large requires reasoning and thinking, so it is definitely AGI territory. LLMs are good at spitting out code that looks like what it should, but besides trivial logic, or patterns that were explicit in its training set, I haven’t seen it solve anything what I would consider even remotely complex.

Google could also spit out that leetcode tutorial page given the correct keywords 10 years ago (which it shamefully can’t do anymore.. am I the only one that can’t find anything non-trivial anymore with it?!), but that didn’t make anyone with access to the internet a programmer either.

>I haven’t seen it solve anything what I would consider even remotely complex.

Its solving things that was unthinkably impossible to solve by AI.

Think of it logically. Before it could do 0% of our ability. With chatGPT it increases to 30%. With a domain specific LLM trained to target code... that increases to about 50%.

A person with 50% of their brain is obviously mentally deficient. It's not even comparable to human intelligence. It's like a stupid assistant. Helpful, but still stupid.

The issue here isn't really about the comparison between ai capabilities and human capabilities. It's about progress.

That 30% to 50% trendline in LLMs and other areas of improvement in AI is the Same trendline as we see in say creative writing, art, etc. Etc.

It points to the fact that coding is not inherently superior to other forms of creation because the trendline is exactly the same. In fact drawing really good art is actually harder then programming (no 6 months boot camps for art).

We are unfortunately on target for replacement because the next data point on that trendline is obviously not 51%. It's wishful thinking and illogical to ignore the obvious trendline.

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