This is my frustration put really well. When people talk about how humans are also just a form of LLM (not that the above comment did exactly that). That might even be true, but simplifying things to that degree doesn't help actually discuss what is going on. The original comment is as far as I know correct... while I don't have a PhD some of my undergraduate work was in control theory and ML, and it works really well. The underlying methods we used were from NASA in the late 70s.. surely there is something more in the field no?
Really good point too, though for the most part I like to think if I audit the code well enough it will work? That said the other day I used it for some string manipulation based on powers of 10, and the code looked correct as per my audit of it. However in reality when I ran the code it was really bad. You might say that I my self would produce buggy code the first time around, that is true... but I also find the LLM equally frustrating because for me (and only me, a sample size of 1 calm down people)? I find I can iterate faster over an idea by hand vs using an LLM for a lot of things.
That has been a bit of my experience with LLMs in general. If you know what you are doing before hand it's not too much of a boost, in fact it can be a bit frustrating to wrestle with it to do what you want when you can do it faster. I can see where it is amazing tooling though. Especially for a new project where you don't really have much of an idea or need a working demo.
I don't think it is a strange take but can we meet in the middle... there are a lot of things where I would just write them by hand and not look at a 3rd party source too. I think where some people are coming from is extremes on both ends. It seems silly (to me) to allow this thing to take full reigns of your project vs as a helper.
This same sort of logic can be applied to a lot of things like Soviet style collective farms. A few Kulaks killed and starved is better for the Soviet Union. I just don't think it is a good argument.
I dont think I have ever said this though. Telling truck drivers to learn to code was disgusting and horrible. There HAS to be a better solution to these things that society can come up with. I don't have those answers, but jesus christ look at the shit show below my original comment. I am not saying pause research, stop AI, or do anything like that. I welcome the eradication of certain medical issues. I just want to know what society will do? To be frank I have said in other threads as well... if I lose my visa and job my only solution I've thought of as of yet is suicide.
The other comment said it best. Let's say programming is going way. Do you think there is suddenly a need for hundreds of millions of trade workers? The economy will support that...? Have you thought this through?
Yeah I really hate this line of argument as well. We obviously understand it can have a lot of beneficial effects in society. It's a strawman to say that people don't see that. The problem is nobody seems to be properly discussing the bad things that can and will occur.
I think it's only natural to think of AI as the enemy no? Sure theoretically it means better healthcare, scientific improvement. However what nobody has really answered well is what happens to the artists, writers, programmers, scientists, maybe even doctors and lawyers. As we become potentially obsolete what happens to us. Saying that you can do art as a hobby or programming as a hobby really isn't an answer people want to hear. If you want people to not see AI as an enemy then perhaps you should have that discussion. Just to give an anecdotal sob story, my mother passed away from cancer and if AI means a solution to cancer that is amazing, that no other person has to go through the anguish my mother and family had to go through would be amazing. That still doesn't change the point that what will millions of people do in this new industrial revolution? I've said in other threads that my visa is a working visa, if (when?) AI takes my job without that permanent residence what do I do? I don't have anything that ties me to my home country anymore. For me I can only see AI as a future enemy who can do a lot of good...
That’s very depressing. It does make me wonder why the VP of engineering is thinking of firing new blood into the company. Senior people don’t stick around that long. Among other problems with their logic. If it increases their productivity wouldn’t that mean you could get more of out the employees you have?
My question to you is, if your company is probably going to fire more people, but it’s impossible stop. So what advice would you have to CS grads now? Just quit. Go find a job as an electrician. This isn’t worth it?
I don't think you are being difficult at all! Also, in fairness I've only ran into it once that I can remember off the top of my head but there was a problem with an optimization flag settings. A crash would only happen with a certain higher level optimization flag (you can also get linker issues but that is not really the issue here). When you get a compiler bug, or it feels like there is no way your source code could be wrong, sometimes it can be at a level that looking at the disassembly code can be inspected compared it with your written source code. In 10 years of doing iOS stuff I've only ever had to do it once. An edge case of an edge case, but I am glad that I could have run into that problem.
Sorry I didn’t mean it that way. What I mean to say is that even in cases of iOS and Android, there are edge cases where assembly knowledge does help. While LLVM isn’t exactly assembly it’s similar in logic. It’s not to say “computer science” more so, than it is to say it’s still a decently good topic to at least know and be familiar with when you get the build button on a native app even. Granted these are rare edge cases. It was similar to someone in this thread mentioned street navigation and how we don’t care about it anymore. I do… there will be a time and place in my life that a GPS will not be in my pocket, so it’s still important to familiarize how to physically navigate the world. As we abstract more and more away from our workflows, it’s still a good mentality to familiarize your self with the old tools. It’s why math is still important for programmers ti know! You won’t need a matrix multiplication anytime soon, but it helps if you are suddenly doing graphics and you want to know how something is working (or AI…)
You’ve never learned about it in university? It’s still a semi important concept to learn how a compiler is kind of rewriting your code and optimizing things. In rare occasions it can mess things up when you use optimization options. Even in rare iOS and Android development cases and LLVM. Not exactly assembly but similar logic. I think that goes to the original point, if you are just trying to make something? Sure JavaScript is enough, but I don’t think that’s a good mindset to have if you are trying to be an expert in computing/computer science.
I am sure it will improve even further as you pointed out the languages outside of English are fairly low in data represented. However, I guess you said you speak Chinese correct? How well does it do with certain things like older poetic Chinese hanzi? In Japanese if there is a string of kanji it tends to mess up the context. Another area of Japanese it seems poorest at is keigo or polite business Japanese. The way you speak to a superior is almost a different language. So I unfortunately still can't use GPT-4 to help me with business emails (yet).
I am also multilingual as well and I've tested it personally. English <-> Portuguese does really well, but Portuguese <-> Japanese or even Japanese <-> English is not as good as a human translator by a long shot because of a lot of hidden subtext in conversation. Even something that a university student would probably pickup on in their first year of Japanese as a foreign language. It is still much better than GPT-3.5, so much so that it made a lot of waves here in Japan, but a few friends who work in translation of books and manga find it is not really a go-to tool yet (yet...).
I hope so... I really do. Looking at HN, and I understand nobody knows what the future holds, but to get to those flowers a lot of pain is going to come I think. For me, for other people... to me the most disgusting comments I've seen on HN has been SV people who say that I should have saved up enough as a buffer. That isn't the case for us SWEs who live abroad. Not all of us make SV salary. I could go on and on about this. I really just hope there is a light at the end of the tunnel for us in the short term, because if it is coming for our jobs in 5 years or less, many of us in society will be left for rot.
Then what do us software engineers do? If we are obsolete. College diplomas are worthless outside of self improvement. UBI isn’t coming. Even then, I’m in the country I live in through a working visa. If what you say is true… I see this on HN every day at this point. It fills me with enough anxiety. To me, as an engineer I like to think of different scenarios but there is no good scenario with AI. The worst one is, I lose my visa, job, house, at that point I lose 10+ years of my life. I’ve thought about just ending it at that point… talking to a therapist over that obviously, but there are days when that dread is there. There is the thread about the 3D artist replaced essentially by AI. Due to my visa I can’t legally work a blue collar job that will be safe until a robot comes. I don’t want to move back to a country I don’t even know anymore. Death doesn’t sound bad…
Oh I personally agree I am just following this article to it's logical conclusion. IF it is even the start of an AGI, it's just used as a product? Ouch... It's literally the meme from rick and morty with the butter passing robot.
From the intro:
"we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system."
What does that mean? If we take it as fact, so if it is an early version of AGI, Microsoft is using this thing to push subscriptions to all their services? This thing that is potentially the greatest thing humanity has made, an artificial living thing, and it's used to sell CoPilot and 365 subscriptions. Paint me as really sad then. Instead of sharing the research with other entities, or anything that could further help or push us... we get subscriptions? Fuck me, the future sucks.
That is what makes them also optimal for LLMs as is. It would be more efficient to have something that is direct machine code, but LLMs are Large <Language> Models right?
This is the positive take I hope to see with AI. Because yes, blacksmiths no longer exist, but all the professions you named above have their roots in smithing.
I think that is true but rich countries are in a position to transfer to clean energies where as poor countries will still use fossil fuels unless they get cheaper alternative that is stable.
That is kind of what I thought about my self. I don't see how AI-driven improvements will help poorer countries. I don't think it will wreck them, but if things don't solve Climate Change and if richer countries don't subsidize poorer countries... I don't see anything really positive out of AI, but maybe my imagination is really bad.
While you are not wrong, the idea that gives me anxiety is that this replaces all programmers. My job theoretically is safe for now. I work on fairly novel stuff, while a lot of my day is json parsing there is a big chunk of it that is domain specific. That said... it's that one day it will just take over all of programming that has me in dread. The only option then in my somewhat middle age is to unironically "learn a trade" I guess?
That is certainly true about the hype-machine it is in full force. I imagine that will level off soon and the really useful and novel stuff will float to the top. I have no backup plan but as you said, what happens is going to happen? It's a rollercoaster for me personally where some days I am in absolute dread and fear about the future. Then other days I just go along my day as usual.
This is why my anxiety is at levels unseen before. I am a programmer who’s on a working visa. Assuming it does take my job, I have no idea what to do next… other than panic.
I don't know what I want as an outcome. I think that is part of the discussion. You have come at me with a lot of really good questions. I think the discussion is the most important before we hit that hypothetical soon.
For sake of clarity I am an engineer as well. I hope you are right? As I see it now, it seems like every single job is on the chopping block before I hit retirement age. We already see a few experts arguing about this already.
I think I am doing a poor job conveying what I want or mean by compassion, as you said that is true that the Luddites or coal miners in those examples want to pause time. That is clearly a very bad idea when it comes to something like coal, but at the same time I think when I say compassion it is not that I want to tug at the heartstrings of ourselves and others. I mean it in a selfish way that when we are able to answer the question as to what people do when their livelihoods are removed from them, we get a better functioning society. When we use coal miners as an example there has been a few studies that have shown much higher usage of drugs as despair has grown in those communities. I see that and have extrapolated that out to the large white-collar hypothetical hordes of unemployed commercial artists. Perhaps all desk workers (my self included).
It legitimately has kept me up at night trying to think what sort of policy, what responsibility do we all have now? Economically nobody owes anyone anything, but is that an ethical answer?
I don't know what that looks like. Which goes back to my original answer, I don't know what I want as an outcome. I just think that perhaps, we will see less animosity and less anxiety when we have better answers to our modern Luddites.
You are ultimately right. Progress cannot be stopped, won't be stopped. My only wish is to help mitigate the pain. You brought up t-shirt manufacturing. That was true and while the luddites ultimately lost, I thought maybe a lesson society could have gained from that was some level of compassion to who it is happening to. Because it's not just artists this time, it's not just the factory, this time it is every profession that can be done at a computer. I am a programmer and I feel like I see the writing on the wall for us too. Soon we will be the Luddite who is scorned, but yes, society and economics don't owe me or any artist a damn thing. This is an emotional post, but reading these stories I feel like the only answer I have come up with is to just allow it to up-end all of our worth, security, and jobs. If you are a 50 year old corporate artist, hopefully something help you on your way to a new profession. It's the same way why I feel like society doesn't do nearly enough for coal miners either. Coal is a nasty product, yes, and a coal miner should clearly not "just learn to code". I don't know what should be done, but something of compassion clearly needed to have been done ethically.