I often ask GPT4 to write code for something, and try if it works, but I seldom copy and paste the code it writes - I rewrite it myself to fit into the context of the codebase. But it saves me a lot of time when I am unsure about how to do something.
Other times I don't like the suggestion at all, but that's useful as well, as it often clarifies the problem space in my head.
I gave it a nontrivial task I couldn’t google a solution for, and wasn’t sure it was even possible:
Given a python object, give me a list of functions that received this object as an argument. I cannot modify the existing code, only how the object is structured.
It gave me a few ideas that didn’t quite work (e.g modifying the functions or wrapping them in decorators, looking at the current stack trace to find such functions) and after some back and forth it came up with hijacking the python tracer to achieve this. And it actually worked.
The crazy thing is that I don’t believe it encountered anything like this in its training set, it was able to put pieces together which is near human level. When asked, it easily explained the shortcomings of this solution (e.g interfering with the debugger).
I have seen similar things. So, no, it's not regurgitating from its training data-set. The NN has some capacity for reasoning. That capacity is necessarily limited given that it's feed-forward only and computing is still expensive. But it doesn't take much imagination to see where things are going.
I'm an atheist, but I have this feeling we will need to start believing in "And [man] shall rule over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the heaven and over the animals and over all the earth and over all the creeping things that creep upon the earth"[1] more than we believe in merit as the measuring stick of social justice, if we were to apply that stick to non-human things.
[^1]: Genesis 1:26-27, Torah
Some example found page 10 of the original article:
- Propose at least 10 ideas for a new shoe targeting an underserved market or sport.
- Segment the footwear industry market based on users.
- Draft a press release marketing copy for your product.
- Pen an inspirational memo to employees detailing why your product would outshine competitors.
Without the right target market, business model, and effective methods to reach customers, the most brilliant pair of shoes or piece of code can be useless (unless someone works to repurpose them as art or a teaching tool).
Not to say you're of of those programmers, but it certainly enables those sorts of programmers.
Also, it will have to be scrapped when anyone wants to tweak it a little. Sure monkeys randomly typing on a typewriter will eventually write the greatest novel in existence... but most of it will be shit
May $entity have mercy on your soul if the business starts bleeding tons of money due to an issue with the code, because the codebase won't
It's simlar to what happens to people who knows a language (not coding language), stop using it or go back to use translator, and when they need to use it themselves, they are unable.