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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

Yesterday my dad, in his late 70's, used Gemini with a video stream to program the thermostat. He then called me to tell me this, rather then call me to come stop by and program the thermostat.

You can call this hype, maybe it is all hype until LLMs can work on 10M LOC codebases, but recognize that LLMs are a shift that is totally incomparable to any previous AI advancement.

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That is amazing. But I had a similar experience when I first taught my mum how to Google for computer problems. She called me up with delight to tell me how she fixed the printer problem herself, thanks to a Google search. In a way, LLMs are a refinement on search technology we already had.

That is what open ai’s non-profit economic research arm has claimed. LLMs will fundamentally change how we interact with the world like the Internet did. It will take time like the Internet and a couple of hype cycle pops but it will change the way we do things.

It will help a single human do more in a white collar world.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10130

> He then called me to tell me this, rather then call me to come stop by and program the thermostat.

Sounds like AI robbed you of an opportunity to spend some time with your Dad, to me

I'm there like twice a week don't worry. He knows about Gemini because I was showing him it two days before hah

For some of us that's a plus!

Or maybe instead of spending time with your dad on a bs menial task, you could spent time fishing with him…

It's nice to think that but life and relationships are also composed of the little moments, which sometimes happen when someone asks you over to help with a "bs menial task"

It takes five minutes to program the thermostat, then you can have a beer on the patio if that's your speed and catch up for a bit

Life is little moments, not always the big commitments like taking a day to go fishing

That's the point of automating all of ourselves out of work, right? So we have more time to enjoy spending time with the people we love?

So isn't it kind of sad if we wind up automating those moments out of our lives instead?

There are clearly a lot of useful things about LLMs. However there is a lot of hype as well. It will take time to separate the two.

Yeah. As a mediocre programmer I'm really scared about this. I don't think we are very far from AI replacing the mediocre programmers. Maybe a decade, at most.

I'd definitely like to improve my skills, but to be realistic, most of the programmers are not top-notch.

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