With llms the changes are transformative. I’m trying to learn 3d modeling and chatgpt just gave me a passable sketch for what I had in my mind. So much better than googling for 2 hours. Is the cooling off because industry leadership promised agi last year and it’s not here yet?
I'm not discounting the value of having ChatGPT just hand you the answer straight up. If you just want to get the task done as fast as possible that's a pretty cool option that didn't used to exist. But the old way wasn't really worse.
What the LLM gives you is essentially an example project, and you can ask for the specific examples you need. You can compare and contrast alternative ways of doing it. You can give it an example in terms of what you already know, and ask it to show you how that translates into whatever you're trying to learn. You don't have to just blindly take what it produces and use it unread.
LLMs are making up for the lack of this.
It’s the Backus-Naur approach vs the Human approach.
Humans learn by example. IMHO this is why math education (and most software documentations) fails so hard - starting with axioms instead of examples.
It's endlessly mind-boggling to me how there's so many people who can't grasp the idea of just using llms as a tool in your engineering toolkit, and that you should still be responsible, thoughtful, and do code review - as you would if you delegated to a junior dev (or anyone!)
They see complete fools just accepting the output wholesale, and somehow extrapolate that to thinking everyone works that way
Here's the iPhone 13, it makes better pictures, lasts longer on battery, and plays games faster than the iPhone 12. Buy it for $699.
Now it has become:
Here's the iPhone 13, the greatest breakthrough in the history of civilization. But enough about that, let's talk about the iPhone 14. We've released a whitepaper showing the iPhone 14 will almost certainly take your job, and the iPhone 15 will kill us all, provided no further steps are taken. It's so powerful, that we decided to instill powerful moral safeguards into it, so it will steer you towards goodness, and prevent it being used for evil (such as looking at saucy pictures). We also find it necessary to keep a permanent and comprehensive log of every interaction you have with it.
You also can't have it, but can hold it in your hand, provided you pay us $20/month and we deem you morally worthy of accessing this powerful technology. (Do not doubt any of this, we are intellectually superior to you, and have humanity's best interests at heart, you don't want to look like a fool, do you?)
The company at some point crossed the billion-dollar valuation, yet only handed out a single-digit million as pay for the maintainers.
Education has a shelf life. AI needs the pre-AI world in order for AI to train and be useful, but AI also wants to replace the pre-AI world with a new AI world. So the world will need to freeze in place between the two.
AI in an entropy machine.
You can say it does a bit more than education material aggregators, but it doesn't do that much more, it doesn't replace paid education in any way so far.
(I am, FWIW, _super_ unconvinced that our magic robot friends will be even as helpful there as any decent tutorial on the subject, but even if they are, that’s not really touching on education writ large.)
Effectively, yes: the promises are so huge, that even the impressive usefulness and value it brings today is dwarfed in comparison.
Exactly. The business world isn't remotely close to being rational. The technology is incredible, but that doesn't mean it's going to translate to massive business value in the next quarter.
The market reaction to this is driven by hype and by people who don't understand the technology well enough to see through the hype.
I wonder if I should have listened to the hype generators (which you sound like one) and just have created ‘passable’ models with help of an LLM, instead of exercising my brain, learning something new and getting out of my comfort zone.
At the risk of sounding controversial, I’ll add that I also have a diametrically opposed view of crypto’s utility vs LLM than you, especially in the long-term: one will allow us to free ourselves from the shackles of government policy as censorship expands, the other is a very fancy and very expensive nonsense regurgitator that will pretty much go on to destroy the Internet and any sort of credibility and sense of truth, making people dumber at large scale, while lining the pockets of a lucky few.
Building a small script is easy for chatgpt, but actually leveraging the workforce consistently turns out to be a lot harder than the hype promised.
I remember in college during the late 90's the hype was that CASE tools (Computer Aided Software Engineering) was going to make software engineers irrelevant, you just tell the system your requirements and it spits out working code. Never turned out.
Today, the only way the amount of investment returns a profit if it replaces a whole bunch of workers. If it replaces a whole bunch of workers, well there will be a whole lot less people to buy stuff. So either the bubble bursts or a lot of people lose their job. Either way we are in for a rough ride.