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The thing about ChatGPT is that it warning shot. And all these people I see talking about it, laughing about how the shooter missed them. Clearly ChatGPT is go

The thing about ChatGPT is that it warning shot. And all these people I see talking about it, laughing about how the shooter missed them. Clearly ChatGPT is going to improve, and AI development is moving at a breakneck pace and accelerating. Dinging it for totally fumbling 5% or 10% of written code is completely missing the forest for the trees.

jhbadger 4y ago
Sure, it will improve, but I think a lot of people think "Hey, it almost looks human quality now! Just a bit more tweaking and it will be human quality or better!". But a more likely case is that the relatively simple statistical modeling tools (which are very different from how our brains work, not that we fully understand how our brains work) that chatGPT uses have a limit to how well they work and they will hit a plateau (and are probably near it now). I'm not one of those people who believe strong AI is impossible, but I have a feeling that strong AI will take more than that just manipulating a text corpus.
- ben_w 4y ago
  I'd be surprised if it did only take text (or even language in general), but if it does only need that, then given how few parameters even big GPT-3 models have compared to humans, it will strongly imply that PETA was right all along.
throwaway82388 4y ago
Anyone who has doubts has to look at the price. It’s free for now, and will be cheap enough when openai starts monetizing. Price wins over quality. It’s demonstrated time and time again.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Depends on the details. Skip all the boring health and safety steps, you can make very cheap skyscrapers. They might fall down in a strong wind, but they'll be cheap.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    After watching lots of videos from 3rd world countries where skyscrapers are built and then tore down a few years later, I think I know exactly how this is going to go.
  - throwaway82388 4y ago
    It does depend on the details. In special fields, like medical software, regulation might alter the market—although code even there is often revealed to be of poor quality. But of all the examples of cheap and convenient beating quality: photography, film, music, et al, the many industries that digital technology has disrupted, newspapers are more analogous than builders. Software companies are publishers, like newspapers. And newspapers had entire building floors occupied by highly skilled mechanical typesetters, who have long been replaced. A handful of employees on a couple computers could do the job faster, more easily, and of good enough quality. Software has already disrupted everything else, eventually it would disrupt the process of making software.
woeirua 4y ago
Yeah, but people were also saying this about self-driving cars, and guess what that long tail is super long, and its also far fatter than we expected. 10 years ago people were saying AI was coming for taxi drivers, and as far as I can tell we're still 10 years away. I'm nonplussed by ChatGPT because the hype around it is largely the same as was for Github Copilot and Copilot fizzled badly. (Full disclosure: I pay for Copilot because it is somewhat useful).
- pleb_nz 4y ago
  I wonder if some of this is the 80 20 rule. We're seeing the easy 80 percent of the solutions which has taken 20% of the time. We still have the hard 80% (or most of) to go for some of these new techs
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    Replacing 80% of a truck driver's skill would suck but replacing 80% of our skill would be an OK programmer.
  - lostmsu 4y ago
    Considering the deep conv nets that melted the last AI winter happened in 2012, you are basically giving it 40 years till 100%.
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  Tesla makes self-driving cars that drive better than humans. The reason you have to touch the steering wheel periodically is political/social, not technical. An acquaintance of mine read books while he commutes 90 minutes from Chattanooga to work in Atlanta once or twice a week. He's sitting in the driver's seat but he's certainly not driving. The political/social factors which apply to the life-and-death decisions made driving a car, don't apply to whether one of the websites I work on works perfectly. I'm 35, and I've paid to write code for about 15 years. To be honest, ChatGPT probably writes better code than I did at my first paid internship. It's got a ways to go to catch up with even a junior developer in my opinion, but it's only a matter of time. And how much time? The expectation in the US is that my career will last until I'm 65ish. That's 30 years from now. Tesla has only been around 19 years and now makes self-driving cars. So yeah, I'm not immediately worried that I'm going to lose my job to ChatGPT in the next year, but I am quite confident that my role will either cease existing or drastically change because of AI before the end of my career. The idea that we won't see AI replacing professional coders in the next 30 years strains credulity. Luckily for me, I already have considered some career changes I'd want to do even if I weren't forced to by AI. But if folks my age were planning to finish out their careers in this field, they should come up with an alternative plan. And people starting this field are already in direct competition to stay ahead of AI.
tarranoth 4y ago
The thing is though, it's trained on human text. And most humans are per difinition, very fallible. Unless someone made it so that it can never get trained on subtly wrong code, how will it ever improve? Imho AI can be great for suggestions as for which method to use (visual studio has this, and I think there is an extension for visual studio code for a couple of languages). I think fine grained things like this are very useful, but I think code snippets are just too coarse to actually be helpful.
- tintor 4y ago
  Improve itself through experimentation with reinforcement learning. This is how humans improve too. AlphaZero does it.
  - lostmsu 4y ago
    The amount of work in that area of research is substantial. You will see world shattering results in a few years. Current SOTA: https://openai.com/blog/vpt/ https://openai.com/blog/vpt/
idontpost 4y ago
This is magical thinking, no different than a cult. The fundamental design of transformer architecture isn't capable of what you think it is. There are still radical, fundamental breakthroughs needed. It's not a matter of incremental improvement over time.
allisdust 4y ago
Excellent summation. Majority of the software developers work on crud based frontend or backend development. When this thing's attention goes beyond the 4k tokens its limited to, there will be very less number of developers needed in general. Same way less number of artists or illustrators will be needed for making run of the mill marketing brochures. I think majority wouldn't know what hit them when the time comes. My experience with chatgpt has been highly positive changing me from a skeptic to a believer. It takes a bit of skill to tune the prompts but I got it to write frontend, backend, unit test cases, automation test cases, generate test data flawlessly. I have seen and worked with much worse developers than what this current iteration is.

jhbadger 4y ago

Sure, it will improve, but I think a lot of people think "Hey, it almost looks human quality now! Just a bit more tweaking and it will be human quality or better!". But a more likely case is that the relatively simple statistical modeling tools (which are very different from how our brains work, not that we fully understand how our brains work) that chatGPT uses have a limit to how well they work and they will hit a plateau (and are probably near it now). I'm not one of those people who believe strong AI is impossible, but I have a feeling that strong AI will take more than that just manipulating a text corpus.

ben_w 4y ago
I'd be surprised if it did only take text (or even language in general), but if it does only need that, then given how few parameters even big GPT-3 models have compared to humans, it will strongly imply that PETA was right all along.

throwaway82388 4y ago

Anyone who has doubts has to look at the price. It’s free for now, and will be cheap enough when openai starts monetizing. Price wins over quality. It’s demonstrated time and time again.

ben_w 4y ago
Depends on the details. Skip all the boring health and safety steps, you can make very cheap skyscrapers. They might fall down in a strong wind, but they'll be cheap.
- pixl97 4y ago
  After watching lots of videos from 3rd world countries where skyscrapers are built and then tore down a few years later, I think I know exactly how this is going to go.
- throwaway82388 4y ago
  It does depend on the details. In special fields, like medical software, regulation might alter the market—although code even there is often revealed to be of poor quality. But of all the examples of cheap and convenient beating quality: photography, film, music, et al, the many industries that digital technology has disrupted, newspapers are more analogous than builders. Software companies are publishers, like newspapers. And newspapers had entire building floors occupied by highly skilled mechanical typesetters, who have long been replaced. A handful of employees on a couple computers could do the job faster, more easily, and of good enough quality. Software has already disrupted everything else, eventually it would disrupt the process of making software.

woeirua 4y ago

Yeah, but people were also saying this about self-driving cars, and guess what that long tail is super long, and its also far fatter than we expected. 10 years ago people were saying AI was coming for taxi drivers, and as far as I can tell we're still 10 years away. I'm nonplussed by ChatGPT because the hype around it is largely the same as was for Github Copilot and Copilot fizzled badly. (Full disclosure: I pay for Copilot because it is somewhat useful).

pleb_nz 4y ago
I wonder if some of this is the 80 20 rule. We're seeing the easy 80 percent of the solutions which has taken 20% of the time. We still have the hard 80% (or most of) to go for some of these new techs
- rightbyte 4y ago
  Replacing 80% of a truck driver's skill would suck but replacing 80% of our skill would be an OK programmer.
- lostmsu 4y ago
  Considering the deep conv nets that melted the last AI winter happened in 2012, you are basically giving it 40 years till 100%.
kerkeslager 4y ago
Tesla makes self-driving cars that drive better than humans. The reason you have to touch the steering wheel periodically is political/social, not technical. An acquaintance of mine read books while he commutes 90 minutes from Chattanooga to work in Atlanta once or twice a week. He's sitting in the driver's seat but he's certainly not driving. The political/social factors which apply to the life-and-death decisions made driving a car, don't apply to whether one of the websites I work on works perfectly. I'm 35, and I've paid to write code for about 15 years. To be honest, ChatGPT probably writes better code than I did at my first paid internship. It's got a ways to go to catch up with even a junior developer in my opinion, but it's only a matter of time. And how much time? The expectation in the US is that my career will last until I'm 65ish. That's 30 years from now. Tesla has only been around 19 years and now makes self-driving cars. So yeah, I'm not immediately worried that I'm going to lose my job to ChatGPT in the next year, but I am quite confident that my role will either cease existing or drastically change because of AI before the end of my career. The idea that we won't see AI replacing professional coders in the next 30 years strains credulity. Luckily for me, I already have considered some career changes I'd want to do even if I weren't forced to by AI. But if folks my age were planning to finish out their careers in this field, they should come up with an alternative plan. And people starting this field are already in direct competition to stay ahead of AI.

tarranoth 4y ago

The thing is though, it's trained on human text. And most humans are per difinition, very fallible. Unless someone made it so that it can never get trained on subtly wrong code, how will it ever improve? Imho AI can be great for suggestions as for which method to use (visual studio has this, and I think there is an extension for visual studio code for a couple of languages). I think fine grained things like this are very useful, but I think code snippets are just too coarse to actually be helpful.

tintor 4y ago
Improve itself through experimentation with reinforcement learning. This is how humans improve too. AlphaZero does it.
- lostmsu 4y ago
  The amount of work in that area of research is substantial. You will see world shattering results in a few years. Current SOTA: https://openai.com/blog/vpt/ https://openai.com/blog/vpt/

idontpost 4y ago

This is magical thinking, no different than a cult. The fundamental design of transformer architecture isn't capable of what you think it is. There are still radical, fundamental breakthroughs needed. It's not a matter of incremental improvement over time.

allisdust 4y ago

Excellent summation. Majority of the software developers work on crud based frontend or backend development. When this thing's attention goes beyond the 4k tokens its limited to, there will be very less number of developers needed in general. Same way less number of artists or illustrators will be needed for making run of the mill marketing brochures. I think majority wouldn't know what hit them when the time comes. My experience with chatgpt has been highly positive changing me from a skeptic to a believer. It takes a bit of skill to tune the prompts but I got it to write frontend, backend, unit test cases, automation test cases, generate test data flawlessly. I have seen and worked with much worse developers than what this current iteration is.