5 ms·

Here's a pretty impressive demo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGUCcjHTmGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGUCcjHTmGY I think they said it handles somethin

Here's a pretty impressive demo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGUCcjHTmGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGUCcjHTmGY I think they said it handles something like 37% of requests. Btw, don't watch it if your worried at losing your job to a computer.

bavell 5y ago
Watched it, very impressive for AI but not at all worried about losing my job :)
- Traubenfuchs 5y ago
  Hi! What is your job and why are you not worried? I am also looking for reasons not to be worried!
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    i'm curious - if you're worried based off that video - why?
    - OneEyedRobot 5y ago
      It seems to me that the problem from a programmers standpoint isn't that their job will disappear but that the definition of their job will change quite a lot. I always think of the example of supermarket cashiers. Formerly a fairly skilled job but now merely providing cheap meat-robot manipulators for a scanner. The person is still there but has a job concentrated down to the few things a person does better, and those things aren't always the fun things.
      - MrsPeaches 5y ago
        I wonder if “coding/coder” will go the same way as “computing/computer” [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
      - bcrosby95 5y ago
        I don't see a world where this happens. Not because the AI will never be smart enough, but instead because if the system is smart enough to turn this into a low skill job, then you could just have domain experts use it - which is the holy grail of programming tools.
      - Jensson 5y ago
        The job already has changed, we have been using AI to write code for decades already. Most people no longer write a lot of code based on their own understanding, rather they google for code libraries or snippets, include them and then fiddle with it until they do what the coder wants it to. I don't see how this situation is any different from that.
    - Traubenfuchs 5y ago
      I wrote what I wrote before watching it. After watching it I am not afraid for the coming... 5-10 years. Ok. But what then? Why am I afraid, what am I afraid of? In the last years "AI" started to make surprising leaps every few years. What we got now is the "child of a new species". It's still a child. But it can grow. The species we are seeing scares me, as an overpaid codemonkey. I can compete with a child of it, but I could not compete with an adult of it. Imagine this system, but more advanced, more tuned to your specific domain. The systems we work with are all trapped in mind boggling complexity, but what if AI starts to untangle this, what if AI starts to truly become the only human-machine interface to produce software?
      - qualudeheart 5y ago
        Eventually you’ll need better control systems. As AI becomes more advanced it becomes harder to understand and then control. Everything that isn’t AGI is still easy to control. My vision would be a brain computer interface, which lets you perceive the data processed by the AI and so on like you’d perceive sounds or colors. It would be like synesthesia where you perceive multiple modes of qualia correlated with together. You’d have an extremely high level “programming language” using your thoughts, the brain computer interface automatically interprets that to machine instructions. In this scenario the AI doesn’t become a human machine interface. The AI is the machine and the brain-computer interface is the human-machine interface you described. In theory you could use this to access cloud compute and delegate tasks to machines like you would today with a computer. I suspect this will help us compete with and survive artificial general intelligence.
  - wing-_-nuts 5y ago
    https://www.old.reddit.com/r/financialindependence https://www.old.reddit.com/r/financialindependence
sethammons 5y ago
That is a very impressive demo! However, I don't see this as a job eliminator. I see this as a turbo button for some development tasks, like starting out and scaffolding an application. Notice that they still had to define "functions" that the neural net could then leverage, they had to speak in precise ways in a given order; it is a different way of coding, but still coding.
Andy_G11 5y ago
This is pretty amazing. The guys are absolutely right - it's still early days for this tech and the sky would seem to be the limit. Coders are always climbing the learning ladder and should add co-working with a code-writing AI to their toolkit, especially if it truly is 'open' (CoPilot will be a paid service I believe?). The long term possibilities for eliminating many types of labour seem enormous. It is not so easy yet to understand what forms of labour will be not only resilient in the face of this developing tech, but even 'antifragile' to it. If these are few (could by definition be an oxymoronic assumption), how will the relative returns on labour vs returns on asset ownership diverge? Will a fundamental revision of socio-economic systems be required?
- qualudeheart 5y ago
  I expect an increased upward wealth transfer, as has already been happening in most countries for a long time. The real problem facing our elites will be how to both control their immiserated and angry population, and the AIs now running most of the economy. I propose cyborgization for such people and will advise the rich people I know to invest in brain computer interfaces and related tech. We are going to have to think long and hard about the social contract we live under. How do we deal with never before seen unemployment rates? Is liberalism able to cope with that? How do we stop something much worse from exploiting the coming automation crisis?
- YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  >> The guys are absolutely right - it's still early days for this tech and the sky would seem to be the limit. It depends on what you mean "early days". If it's about Codex itself, then that's probably right, it's a new-ish system. However, the task of creating a computer program by another computer program, variously known as "automatic programming", "program synthesis", "program induction", "inductive programming" and so on is not new, rather it goes back to the 1970s and probably earlier still. Very briefly, these terms describe a constellation of approaches that automatically create a program according to a specification. Placing Codex in the context of this earler work, it is an example of program synthesis system that composes programs from incomplete specifications, variously given as natural language specifications or what we can call "code snippets" (i.e. you start writing code and the system completes it; I don't know the propper term for this kind of specification). As such, it is one in a long line of systems that predate it and it is not even the most impressive of those systems (37% accuracy is nothing to write home about). The reason that you misidentify it as something new, by your "early days" turn of phrase, is a peculiar tendency of deep learning researchers to ommit any references to relevant prior work, for reasons that are difficult to discern. Sometimes the reason seems to be honest-to-god lack of familiarity with other approaches than deep learning (even other neural networks approaches). Sometimes it seems to be more of an attempt to claim well-trodden territory as brand new and trumpet a small step forward (or not even that much forward) as the breaking of new ground. Sometimes there seems to be an attempt to avoid unwanted comparisons to different approaches with different trade-offs, that could make the deep learning system look more lackluster than desired. In any case, there you have it. Codex is not any kind of breakthrough or innovation. What is new is the sudden interest in program synthesis. Perhaps this is a positive thing and program synthesis approaches will finally begin to be adopted in the industry. But knowing how these things work, and how what gets hyped and what doesn't is altogether without any rationality, I'd guess probably not.
notimrelakatos 5y ago
In the 2000's you had people getting paid 6-figure salaries to just "program" in HTML, that was, of course, before the dotcom bubble burst. This seems to be a modern response to the same kind of developer that's been popping up for the last 10 years, all the fuss over the newest shiny tools will never replace good fundamentals, and most of this fear comes from the fact that people know their fancy frontends/APIs are glorified glue code in messy codebases. There are still systems today that'll require knowledgeable people to maintain for decades to come. The MS Word example is the best part because it'll reduce my free IT consultancy to parents/friends. Look at your work as a craft, invest time into getting incrementally better and you shall know no fear.

bavell 5y ago

Watched it, very impressive for AI but not at all worried about losing my job :)

Traubenfuchs 5y ago
Hi! What is your job and why are you not worried? I am also looking for reasons not to be worried!
- endisneigh 5y ago
  i'm curious - if you're worried based off that video - why?
  - OneEyedRobot 5y ago
    It seems to me that the problem from a programmers standpoint isn't that their job will disappear but that the definition of their job will change quite a lot. I always think of the example of supermarket cashiers. Formerly a fairly skilled job but now merely providing cheap meat-robot manipulators for a scanner. The person is still there but has a job concentrated down to the few things a person does better, and those things aren't always the fun things.
    - MrsPeaches 5y ago
      I wonder if “coding/coder” will go the same way as “computing/computer” [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
    - bcrosby95 5y ago
      I don't see a world where this happens. Not because the AI will never be smart enough, but instead because if the system is smart enough to turn this into a low skill job, then you could just have domain experts use it - which is the holy grail of programming tools.
    - Jensson 5y ago
      The job already has changed, we have been using AI to write code for decades already. Most people no longer write a lot of code based on their own understanding, rather they google for code libraries or snippets, include them and then fiddle with it until they do what the coder wants it to. I don't see how this situation is any different from that.
  - Traubenfuchs 5y ago
    I wrote what I wrote before watching it. After watching it I am not afraid for the coming... 5-10 years. Ok. But what then? Why am I afraid, what am I afraid of? In the last years "AI" started to make surprising leaps every few years. What we got now is the "child of a new species". It's still a child. But it can grow. The species we are seeing scares me, as an overpaid codemonkey. I can compete with a child of it, but I could not compete with an adult of it. Imagine this system, but more advanced, more tuned to your specific domain. The systems we work with are all trapped in mind boggling complexity, but what if AI starts to untangle this, what if AI starts to truly become the only human-machine interface to produce software?
    - qualudeheart 5y ago
      Eventually you’ll need better control systems. As AI becomes more advanced it becomes harder to understand and then control. Everything that isn’t AGI is still easy to control. My vision would be a brain computer interface, which lets you perceive the data processed by the AI and so on like you’d perceive sounds or colors. It would be like synesthesia where you perceive multiple modes of qualia correlated with together. You’d have an extremely high level “programming language” using your thoughts, the brain computer interface automatically interprets that to machine instructions. In this scenario the AI doesn’t become a human machine interface. The AI is the machine and the brain-computer interface is the human-machine interface you described. In theory you could use this to access cloud compute and delegate tasks to machines like you would today with a computer. I suspect this will help us compete with and survive artificial general intelligence.
- wing-_-nuts 5y ago
  https://www.old.reddit.com/r/financialindependence https://www.old.reddit.com/r/financialindependence

sethammons 5y ago

That is a very impressive demo! However, I don't see this as a job eliminator. I see this as a turbo button for some development tasks, like starting out and scaffolding an application. Notice that they still had to define "functions" that the neural net could then leverage, they had to speak in precise ways in a given order; it is a different way of coding, but still coding.

Andy_G11 5y ago

This is pretty amazing. The guys are absolutely right - it's still early days for this tech and the sky would seem to be the limit. Coders are always climbing the learning ladder and should add co-working with a code-writing AI to their toolkit, especially if it truly is 'open' (CoPilot will be a paid service I believe?). The long term possibilities for eliminating many types of labour seem enormous. It is not so easy yet to understand what forms of labour will be not only resilient in the face of this developing tech, but even 'antifragile' to it. If these are few (could by definition be an oxymoronic assumption), how will the relative returns on labour vs returns on asset ownership diverge? Will a fundamental revision of socio-economic systems be required?

qualudeheart 5y ago
I expect an increased upward wealth transfer, as has already been happening in most countries for a long time. The real problem facing our elites will be how to both control their immiserated and angry population, and the AIs now running most of the economy. I propose cyborgization for such people and will advise the rich people I know to invest in brain computer interfaces and related tech. We are going to have to think long and hard about the social contract we live under. How do we deal with never before seen unemployment rates? Is liberalism able to cope with that? How do we stop something much worse from exploiting the coming automation crisis?
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
>> The guys are absolutely right - it's still early days for this tech and the sky would seem to be the limit. It depends on what you mean "early days". If it's about Codex itself, then that's probably right, it's a new-ish system. However, the task of creating a computer program by another computer program, variously known as "automatic programming", "program synthesis", "program induction", "inductive programming" and so on is not new, rather it goes back to the 1970s and probably earlier still. Very briefly, these terms describe a constellation of approaches that automatically create a program according to a specification. Placing Codex in the context of this earler work, it is an example of program synthesis system that composes programs from incomplete specifications, variously given as natural language specifications or what we can call "code snippets" (i.e. you start writing code and the system completes it; I don't know the propper term for this kind of specification). As such, it is one in a long line of systems that predate it and it is not even the most impressive of those systems (37% accuracy is nothing to write home about). The reason that you misidentify it as something new, by your "early days" turn of phrase, is a peculiar tendency of deep learning researchers to ommit any references to relevant prior work, for reasons that are difficult to discern. Sometimes the reason seems to be honest-to-god lack of familiarity with other approaches than deep learning (even other neural networks approaches). Sometimes it seems to be more of an attempt to claim well-trodden territory as brand new and trumpet a small step forward (or not even that much forward) as the breaking of new ground. Sometimes there seems to be an attempt to avoid unwanted comparisons to different approaches with different trade-offs, that could make the deep learning system look more lackluster than desired. In any case, there you have it. Codex is not any kind of breakthrough or innovation. What is new is the sudden interest in program synthesis. Perhaps this is a positive thing and program synthesis approaches will finally begin to be adopted in the industry. But knowing how these things work, and how what gets hyped and what doesn't is altogether without any rationality, I'd guess probably not.

notimrelakatos 5y ago

In the 2000's you had people getting paid 6-figure salaries to just "program" in HTML, that was, of course, before the dotcom bubble burst. This seems to be a modern response to the same kind of developer that's been popping up for the last 10 years, all the fuss over the newest shiny tools will never replace good fundamentals, and most of this fear comes from the fact that people know their fancy frontends/APIs are glorified glue code in messy codebases. There are still systems today that'll require knowledgeable people to maintain for decades to come. The MS Word example is the best part because it'll reduce my free IT consultancy to parents/friends. Look at your work as a craft, invest time into getting incrementally better and you shall know no fear.