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Comment by scrum-treats | Hacker News Reader

Okay. So, really basic things like unit tests, forecast models, or VS Code Extensions Not useful? Hard sell.

The reason why ChatGPT isn't "good at code" is because it just needs more training data and feedback. That's it. And it appears that this is a decision from above to not give GPT-4 that kind of training data (for now). One can guess as to why (...job market).

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> One can guess as to why (...job market).

I guess the farm tractor killed way more jobs (from potato harvesters, cereal harvesters, ...) than AI would even in the most utopian ways. But that doesn't matter: Both tractors and AI would and did shift wealth from the working class to the owning class. So I don't get why the "above" would try to not give GPT-4 the training data that they currently own anyway...

There's an acute shortage of programmers, especially in a world that increasingly relies on software.

If AI can solve that problem it will be a paradigm shift.

But I find it incredibly amusing the tech industry considers itself working class. Truly the oppressed of our world LMAO.

Needing more training data seems wrong. Imagine the space of all programs. Can we agree that one can only train a model on a given subset of that space? Now, imagine wanting a program P that solves a particular problem, and that the program P is not in the training data. How does more training data guarantee that the output is P and not a neighboring P' that is almost correct, but subtly different and therefore utterly wrong? I think (and the author seems to agree) that the most we can hope for is a less sloppy approximation, not a correct program.

What does "forecast model" mean in this context?

I am surprised to hear an unfamiliar term described as a basic tool!

As someone whose job involves primarily developing forecasting models, I’m not sure I’d trust ChatGPT for any but the most basic problems.

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