5 ms·

If you're alluding to the notion "AI will take ALL the jobs!", well, here I am, still building websites for well established companies that still don't (in 2023

If you're alluding to the notion "AI will take ALL the jobs!", well, here I am, still building websites for well established companies that still don't (in 2023!!!) have a web presence. Hell, half the worlds banking system still runs on COBOL! Leading edge tech development is rapid, sure. But tech understanding, adoption, and implementation is painfully slow. Humans gon' be humans. It's like the same thing every 5 years now, last time it was crypto "end of inequality!" "bank the poor!" "same global currency!" sorry to be skeptical, but I didn't see the quantum leap with crypto, and I don't see the quantum leap with GPT - what are essentially fancy NLP models

hilbertseries 4y ago
I don’t really know to what extent AI is going to take over. But crypto is a Terri comparison, it didn’t really solve any problems. There’s nothing you can do with a blockchain that’s you couldn’t already do before. The potential with Chatgpt if it can be refined is wild.
- lui8906 4y ago
  - I can send someone 1 million USDC for 0.000001 US cent with confirmation in <1 second. - I can send any twitter user address money by tweeting (eg. Send 100 USDC to @randomuser) Couple examples that have come up recently for me personally. I can agree that there is something comparable (i.e. international wire) but the cost and speed is in a different ballpark and international wires are not available to some parts of the world.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    > I can send someone 1 million USDC for 0.000001 US cent with confirmation in <1 second This is clearly a very big problem for the majority of the world population! It's like saying tesla solved the problem of going from 0 to 60 in 3 second in a 2t+ car, it's neato but virtually nobody had that problem, if you're not into illegal activities you will most likely never need or want to transfer 1m usd outside of a safe environment anyways
  - ilaksh 4y ago
    Which chain and service is that?
    - imtringued 4y ago
      Doesn't matter, cryptocurrency won apparently.
- lm28469 4y ago
  > The potential with Chatgpt if it can be refined is wild. potential for good or bad ? Last time they tried to use AI for police/justice it ended up exacerbating existing biases. > There’s nothing you can do with a blockchain that’s you couldn’t already do before. What can you do with an AI you can't with humans in a court of law ? When a human is wrong you get a single judicial error, when the only software used is wrong (bug, bias, &c.) you'll get thousands every day. What happens if an update makes the same case get a better defence and as an outcome a lesser sentence ? do you retrial all the other similar cases ? The only potential I see is saving money and this is certainly not on the top of the list of things I would like the justice system to focus on
  - ben_w 4y ago
    > potential for good or bad ? Last time they tried to use AI for police/justice it ended up exacerbating existing biases Both. OpenAI are trying to be politically neutral, but it's not hard to break the rails, and someone else can and will replicate the work without those protections anyway. > What can you do with an AI you can't with humans in a court of law ? Me personally? Afford more than a fairly small case. > What happens if an update makes the same case get a better defence and as an outcome a lesser sentence ? do you retrial all the other similar cases ? That's actually a great idea. The estimated cost of each query is cents, so we might very well be able to retry everyone on each update, for less than the cost of keeping them imprisoned.
    - lm28469 4y ago
      > That's actually a great idea. The estimated cost of each query is cents, so we might very well be able to retry everyone on each update, for less than the cost of keeping them imprisoned. You're thinking like a developer and you're absolutely blind when it comes to the lives and families potentially destroyed by something like that. And that's exactly why technocrats should rarely be in charge "ah really sorry dude, we released you last year but now you're on death row, wait for the next update, if it comes before you're fried on the chair you might get a lesser sentence. The last dude forgot to uncomment a branch in a switch/case and you were flagged incorrectly. Sorry for the inconvenience xoxo" > Me personally? Afford more than a fairly small case. That's a regulation issues, not an AI issue.
- fullstackchris 4y ago
  > The potential with Chatgpt if it can be refined is wild. But this is exactly my point. I likely saw in 2018 word for word "The potential with blockchain technology if it can be refined is wild." Then everyone slowly realized - as you mentioned - "there's nothing you can do with a blockchain that you couldn't already to before". Same with chatGPT, it's just regurgitating what we collective know as a species. I just don't see how, if ever, any sort of AI system (even granted geometric improvement blah blah blah) is going to take over my daily type of work.
izacus 4y ago
Oh it won't take all the jobs, it'll just make your life and your job a bigger hell than they already are. There's so many creative ways in how an arbitrary and empathyless AI can make someone's profit a bit bigger and your life a bit worse :) We can start with practically unlimited amount of personalised advertising spam that can be directed at you at any point. Articles, phone calls, billboards, conversations with your partners... so many chances to cheaply increase profits and engagements. The AI takeover isn't going to be evil in Skynet sense... it'll be a constant stream of lowkey bullshit on every aspect of your life you won't be able to fight because "computer said so". Think on how Google randomly bans people from YouTube/Play Store/Drive over AI and put this into every aspect of your life.
angusturner 4y ago
I agree that adoption tends to be slow and there’s a lot of legacy systems that will need humans to look after them for a good while. But I think you are selling GPT a bit short. Partly because transformers are incredibly general architectures, which make few assumptions about the domain. They are basically SOTA on every domain for which learning-based methods are applicable. And secondly because ChatGPT can perform “in-context learning”. That is to say, purely by scaling next-token prediction, there is an emergent phenomena where GPT gains the ability to learn from the prompt it is given, and solve new tasks outside of the training distribution. Hattie Zhou has a cool paper showing how you can teach GPT addition by prompting - a toy example, but it signifies something profound in my opinion. In the last 6-months I have shifted my own view from “scaling is a waste of compute” to a recognition that LLMs are a serious leap forward. For something very hyped, I think it’s still under hyped and under appreciated.
ben_w 4y ago
> If you're alluding to the notion "AI will take ALL the jobs!", well, here I am, still building websites for well established companies that still don't (in 2023!!!) have a web presence. Hell, half the worlds banking system still runs on COBOL! One thing that I have noticed in the just-over-a-decade since Word Lens first demonstrated real time augmented reality translations on a smart phone (IIRC they were later bought by Google for Google Translate), is that a surprisingly large number of people aren't following what AI can do. In fact, fellow developers even a decade later have been surprised when I told them about this feature of Google Translate. And we are both Ausländer living in Berlin, so we both have need of it. This means that I am not surprised by your experiences, nor would I be surprised if you can continue to do that business, even though it's already possible to get GPT-3 (ChatGPT is more like 3.5) to build you a website. ChatGPT knows more Python than I do, and I have been paid to write Python (albeit a while ago now). Don't get me wrong, I can see things I'd do differently, but it worked, and it did know stuff that had been added to the language more recently than the last time I used it: https://github.com/BenWheatley/Studies-of-AI/blob/main/coding-assistant/daily-plan-parser-conversation.md https://github.com/BenWheatley/Studies-of-AI/blob/main/codin...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  *The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.* The Economist, December 4, 2003 William Gibson
NoPicklez 4y ago
The problem is looking at these technologies in absolutes and thinking "this is the end", "massive change", "game changer" etc. If these AI technologies help to do even 50% of low skilled tasks, that's still huge.

hilbertseries 4y ago

I don’t really know to what extent AI is going to take over. But crypto is a Terri comparison, it didn’t really solve any problems. There’s nothing you can do with a blockchain that’s you couldn’t already do before. The potential with Chatgpt if it can be refined is wild.

lui8906 4y ago
- I can send someone 1 million USDC for 0.000001 US cent with confirmation in <1 second. - I can send any twitter user address money by tweeting (eg. Send 100 USDC to @randomuser) Couple examples that have come up recently for me personally. I can agree that there is something comparable (i.e. international wire) but the cost and speed is in a different ballpark and international wires are not available to some parts of the world.
- lm28469 4y ago
  > I can send someone 1 million USDC for 0.000001 US cent with confirmation in <1 second This is clearly a very big problem for the majority of the world population! It's like saying tesla solved the problem of going from 0 to 60 in 3 second in a 2t+ car, it's neato but virtually nobody had that problem, if you're not into illegal activities you will most likely never need or want to transfer 1m usd outside of a safe environment anyways
- ilaksh 4y ago
  Which chain and service is that?
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Doesn't matter, cryptocurrency won apparently.
lm28469 4y ago
> The potential with Chatgpt if it can be refined is wild. potential for good or bad ? Last time they tried to use AI for police/justice it ended up exacerbating existing biases. > There’s nothing you can do with a blockchain that’s you couldn’t already do before. What can you do with an AI you can't with humans in a court of law ? When a human is wrong you get a single judicial error, when the only software used is wrong (bug, bias, &c.) you'll get thousands every day. What happens if an update makes the same case get a better defence and as an outcome a lesser sentence ? do you retrial all the other similar cases ? The only potential I see is saving money and this is certainly not on the top of the list of things I would like the justice system to focus on
- ben_w 4y ago
  > potential for good or bad ? Last time they tried to use AI for police/justice it ended up exacerbating existing biases Both. OpenAI are trying to be politically neutral, but it's not hard to break the rails, and someone else can and will replicate the work without those protections anyway. > What can you do with an AI you can't with humans in a court of law ? Me personally? Afford more than a fairly small case. > What happens if an update makes the same case get a better defence and as an outcome a lesser sentence ? do you retrial all the other similar cases ? That's actually a great idea. The estimated cost of each query is cents, so we might very well be able to retry everyone on each update, for less than the cost of keeping them imprisoned.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    > That's actually a great idea. The estimated cost of each query is cents, so we might very well be able to retry everyone on each update, for less than the cost of keeping them imprisoned. You're thinking like a developer and you're absolutely blind when it comes to the lives and families potentially destroyed by something like that. And that's exactly why technocrats should rarely be in charge "ah really sorry dude, we released you last year but now you're on death row, wait for the next update, if it comes before you're fried on the chair you might get a lesser sentence. The last dude forgot to uncomment a branch in a switch/case and you were flagged incorrectly. Sorry for the inconvenience xoxo" > Me personally? Afford more than a fairly small case. That's a regulation issues, not an AI issue.
fullstackchris 4y ago
> The potential with Chatgpt if it can be refined is wild. But this is exactly my point. I likely saw in 2018 word for word "The potential with blockchain technology if it can be refined is wild." Then everyone slowly realized - as you mentioned - "there's nothing you can do with a blockchain that you couldn't already to before". Same with chatGPT, it's just regurgitating what we collective know as a species. I just don't see how, if ever, any sort of AI system (even granted geometric improvement blah blah blah) is going to take over my daily type of work.

izacus 4y ago

Oh it won't take all the jobs, it'll just make your life and your job a bigger hell than they already are. There's so many creative ways in how an arbitrary and empathyless AI can make someone's profit a bit bigger and your life a bit worse :) We can start with practically unlimited amount of personalised advertising spam that can be directed at you at any point. Articles, phone calls, billboards, conversations with your partners... so many chances to cheaply increase profits and engagements. The AI takeover isn't going to be evil in Skynet sense... it'll be a constant stream of lowkey bullshit on every aspect of your life you won't be able to fight because "computer said so". Think on how Google randomly bans people from YouTube/Play Store/Drive over AI and put this into every aspect of your life.

angusturner 4y ago

I agree that adoption tends to be slow and there’s a lot of legacy systems that will need humans to look after them for a good while. But I think you are selling GPT a bit short. Partly because transformers are incredibly general architectures, which make few assumptions about the domain. They are basically SOTA on every domain for which learning-based methods are applicable. And secondly because ChatGPT can perform “in-context learning”. That is to say, purely by scaling next-token prediction, there is an emergent phenomena where GPT gains the ability to learn from the prompt it is given, and solve new tasks outside of the training distribution. Hattie Zhou has a cool paper showing how you can teach GPT addition by prompting - a toy example, but it signifies something profound in my opinion. In the last 6-months I have shifted my own view from “scaling is a waste of compute” to a recognition that LLMs are a serious leap forward. For something very hyped, I think it’s still under hyped and under appreciated.

ben_w 4y ago

> If you're alluding to the notion "AI will take ALL the jobs!", well, here I am, still building websites for well established companies that still don't (in 2023!!!) have a web presence. Hell, half the worlds banking system still runs on COBOL! One thing that I have noticed in the just-over-a-decade since Word Lens first demonstrated real time augmented reality translations on a smart phone (IIRC they were later bought by Google for Google Translate), is that a surprisingly large number of people aren't following what AI can do. In fact, fellow developers even a decade later have been surprised when I told them about this feature of Google Translate. And we are both Ausländer living in Berlin, so we both have need of it. This means that I am not surprised by your experiences, nor would I be surprised if you can continue to do that business, even though it's already possible to get GPT-3 (ChatGPT is more like 3.5) to build you a website. ChatGPT knows more Python than I do, and I have been paid to write Python (albeit a while ago now). Don't get me wrong, I can see things I'd do differently, but it worked, and it did know stuff that had been added to the language more recently than the last time I used it: https://github.com/BenWheatley/Studies-of-AI/blob/main/coding-assistant/daily-plan-parser-conversation.md https://github.com/BenWheatley/Studies-of-AI/blob/main/codin...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BlueTemplar 4y ago
*The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.* The Economist, December 4, 2003 William Gibson

NoPicklez 4y ago

The problem is looking at these technologies in absolutes and thinking "this is the end", "massive change", "game changer" etc. If these AI technologies help to do even 50% of low skilled tasks, that's still huge.