It's bittersweet, isn't it. Software is solved, but at a terrible cost.
Modern man has grown quite dumb. He only seems to be able to "invent" by massive scaling things that are decades or centuries old..
Fire? The wheel? Archimedes screw, maaaaybe?
Electricity runs from simple batteries (600 BCE) to today’s power grids.
RF was predicted but not demonstrated by Maxwell in the 1860’s. His work built on Faraday’s (1840’s) and Coulomb’s (1780’s). Coulomb built on Franklin and Newton, among others. Or do you mean Marconi and Tesla, who merely implemented what Maxwell predicted?
The same is true for lasers and transistors but it’s tedious. There was no single “back in the day people invented things from whole cloth” moment.
In what way is electricity an invention? Electricity is a physical phenomenon. Various machines for doing work with electrical energy, storing electrical energy, converting other types of energy to electrical energy, etc. are certainly inventions... Heck, rubbing an amber rod with a fur is an invention. The static charge transferred is not.
Tell me the date when humanity went from oblivious to electricity to generating and using it.
When LLMs were first introduced, they didn't have much of a feedback loop. They wrote code, but they couldn't compile it. Not surprisingly, the code had bugs.
Now, they run with harnesses that allow them to compile the code, and react to the issues they observe. They can fix their own bugs and solve problems that they create, just like humans.
Give an agent access to the physical world, and it seems highly likely that they will be able to "invent" things based on feedback they receive while working towards goals.
Of course, there are some well-known limitations of LLMs, one of the biggest being that they're pretrained. So there may be some things where they're not as good. Just like how some humans aren't as good at certain tasks, depending on their genetics and/or how they've been trained.
I don't think so. Imagine a model trained on data from an Internet that believes in hypothesis that earth is the center of the world. Even if you feed all the physical data, I don't think it can come up with the idea that all of its training data was wrong.
This might be also a good argument for why this LLMs are not "intelligent". You can feed contradicting training data all day and it will accept it without bating an eye. But that won't work with an entity that is truly intelligent.
Ah yes, that's why it only took 50 years instead of 100,000 years for homosapients to reach the space age....
Dude, there was no glorious past, we've always sucked.
Hell, looking back at the brilliant individuals, they had many, many grey areas.
That is exactly the point. Back then that could exist. Now, we would just cancel them for one of the grey areas.
The training set is about patterns, not facts or specific configurations. Yes, it’s possible to extract (some) of the training set verbatim, but that doesn’t mean it’s all you can do.
Humans rarely think of new things. We're a weak hivemind species. One or two individuals figure something out, and the rest of the troop of monkeys imitates. Brains are too fuel hungry for every brain to be innovating, "innovate and copy to the other brains" is the norm.
I was pointing out two things: first, your understanding of LLM capabilities is very outdated; and second, that in this respect, you're behaving much like an LLM with a training cutoff.
That further touches on the idea that the differences between you and an LLM may not be as large as you imagine. In particular, "cobbling something together if it's in their training set" is pretty much what all humans do.
It’s as if a runner were to give up running when beaten by a horse or a car. It suggests they may have had unexamined and perhaps somewhat strange reasons for doing the activity in the first place.
People have difficulty accepting just how significant their limitations actually are. We design our world to hide those limitations. As an example, it would be easy to make computer games that are unwinnable by humans because of our slow reaction times, low speed in general, and our cognitive limitations. But no-one makes such games, because few people would want to play them for very long.
The “terrible cost” in this specific case seems to be related to discovering that we were fooling ourselves about how good we were at software development.
Software development is now another fake job.
It will be bittersweet when there's no human needed at the wheel but IMHO we are far, far from that. These models/agents are just mimicking human text and need guidance because they often get lost or stuck.
Yes there is still human input but it requires comparatively no skill or depth and it gets easier by the month. If I were lobotimized today I'd still be able to function as half-assed architect to AIs anyway.
When was the last time you read fighting distractions/getting "in the zone"/complaint about open space offices thread or comment? They used to be a weekly feature on HN frontpage.
Hard doubt, software engineering is so much more than just literal coding and typing. At least for many of us, the coding/typing part is the easy stuff, everything around that is where the actual engineering happens. If I were lobotomized, maybe I'd get ~10% done today as the day before, if I'm lucky. Even with my full mental capabilities, the agents end up on wild goose-chases unless I'm very specific with what I want, and even sometimes ignoring things if they're too complicated/takes too long, so a bit of thinking is still required to get the right prompts.
And considering how subjective programming is, since it's a creative endeavour after all, I'm not that worried somehow all programmers will be unemployed in just some years.
> When was the last time
Frequency of something doesn't tell you how big of an issue something is, for all we know, HN community (or even the moderators) could have been tired of all the circular conversations where nothing new is being said, and downvote it. Doesn't really tell us much.
Beautiful burn.
But creating software is much more than that. Just like writing an essay involves more than just typing words. Other activities include: Architecture, Requirements analysis, Debugging, Testing, Integration,…
It’s still typing in code.
Coding (programming) is a tedious and expensive part of software engineering. There's other parts AI isn't doing, such as understanding and refining requirements, and delivery + accountability.
Why is that? Coding, for me, is kinda relaxing, and the fun part of developing software. Gathering requirements, especially in a corporate settings, is the tedious part and the most time consuming.