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Comment by linkregister | Hacker News Reader

LLMs are trained with a large corpus of commercially available source code. However, intentional training on individual skills such as medicine, finance, mathematics, and software engineering is conducted to the tune of a few billion dollars per year.

Your scenario would only unfold if frontier labs decided not to compete on capabilities. It sounds unlikely.

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How will they hire experts from those professions on whose output to train on, if they destroy the skills currently extant in those professions? Maybe lawyers will still read contracts every once in a while. Certainly, programmers around me no longer bother with reading code. ...and you can make an argument that a similar effect will happen that is widely observed in language-learners: Namely, if you only ever use a language passively (to read/listen), you're not necessarily able to use it actively (to write/speak).

> large corpus of commercially available source code

Like garbling up GitHub? Currently, people put hand-crafted code there to earn "street cred". Will people continue to do that, if AIs regurgitate their code without giving credit? Will people continue to bother with learning to code, when AI has reconfigured the economy to make this skill a worthless commodity?

Your argument assumes premises that are hardly certain. We use automobiles to travel, yet tens of thousands can still ride horses today. Hell, there are thousands of blacksmiths and glass blowers. If there's a several hundred million dollar market for programming language experts, this will provide sufficient incentive for some people to remain sharp.

We still have COBOL programmers for a reason. The economic incentive to keep the skill never left.

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>linkregister: LLMs are trained with a large corpus of commercially available source code. However...

This concedes your point. Hence the following "however". It's bizarre to argue against it.

Actually, riding horses is a great example, and you happened to pick a domain within which I dabble: People are not capable of riding horses today at the level of skill of a nobleman from Renaissance Europe. People at the forefront of the riding arts today read manuscripts from Guérinière, second-guessing at the meaning of every last syllable, because many of those sources describe things that are unintelligible and unfathomable today that seem to have been quite commonplace. And this is despite even the centuries of continuity of government funding for institutions that have been dedicated to trying to prevent precisely this. (Namely the Spanish Riding School of Vienna and similar institutions in Lisbon and Jerez, the Cadre Noir, etc.)

Also: Saying that "learn to code" has been reduced from a meme about a surefire ticket to economic security to the equivalent of glassblower, is not really refuting what, in broad strokes, the original point actually was; is it?

Similarly, I spent a few hours one day going down a rabbit hole of modern marble carvings, wondering if there were any hidden great masters of the art. I found that despite there being essentially limitless wealth and people compared to when the Pietà was made, there’s nobody making marble carvings like the masters did. Now there are some somewhat stylized marble carvings but in my opinion they pale in comparison to a masterwork marble statue. After all, why do that when you can just snap a photograph?

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