11 ms·

I think most people see where the puck is going, and even where it is right now is very impressive. It's not hard to see that it will be likely less than 5 year

I think most people see where the puck is going, and even where it is right now is very impressive. It's not hard to see that it will be likely less than 5 years before it will be able to do what you did on day 2, and much more, at a tiny fraction of the cost, with no downtime, no attitude problems, sick days, etc. The things you mentioned (taking on board feedback, testing across devices, iterating on solutions) doesn't seem very far away at all. The rate of increase in capabilities is also unpredictable, which is what is amazing & terrifying.

mlycv 4y ago
That's what they said about Watson and Wolfram Alpha. You only hear this nonsense on HN.
- refulgentis 4y ago
  Demonstrably untrue, it’s taken up semi-residence in everything from oped pages to boardrooms since the New Year. Welcome to the mid singularity, my friend.
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    You can’t say “singularity” on HN without a ton of downvotes. It’s not because people disagree (or they’d say so), but because they literally shit their pants when they think about it. Hard to blame them.
    - vbezhenar 4y ago
      I'm saving my money, so I can live enough off savings to learn a new profession. I'm not sure if that will happen, but I consider this option as likely enough to affect my life decisions. The world is changing at alarming rate. Though I think that it's more likely that I'll become shaman who talks to the spirits. Managers hate computers and they'd prefer to pay someone to deal with them.
    - suction 4y ago
      [dead]
    - Ygg2 4y ago
      Who's not disagreeing? Singularity feels like "man facing existential dread confuses saturation curve for exponential".
      - dr_dshiv 4y ago
        When I say singularity, I mean “changes the nature of human life irreversibly and to a greater degree than any prior technology through a rapid progression of self-reinforcing growth.” That rapid progression can be modeled with an exponential growth curve, like Moore’s law, even though nothing material can have a sustained exponential growth. Regardless of how the curve is modeled, the steepness is such that it serves as a step function in evolution. With that clarified, there is first the question of “is the technological progression going to level off soon?” And I think the answer is no. The second question is, “how are we going to deal?” And the answer to that question can only be addressed once we answer the question: “what kind of world do we want to live in?”
        brookst 4y ago
        I think you just declared radio, television, the internet, the macaroon, and mobile phones to be singularities. People generally use the term to mean the point at which progress is automatic, unbounded, and instant. E.g. AIs that can produce smarter AIs themselves, in short order.
        SuoDuanDao 4y ago
        'step change' sounds less exciting than 'singularity' but in terms of the original definition there's very little distinction.
        brookst 4y ago
        Hmm. I see the singularity as a recursive step change; the last step where the average slope becomes vertical. I’m not a singularity believer (singularitist?); from the perspective of 1000 years ago we’re already at the point of infinite progress in zero time. I think individuals, the culture, and the species adapt to accelerating progress, and I intuit, maybe wrongly, that Gödel‘s theorem means that technology will never become runaway and recursive. But I think that’s what people mean, more than just a step/paradigm change like the internet.
- theK 4y ago
  I think everywhere except HN the expectations on Watson’s and Wolfram’s second seasons where even more inflated
- travisjungroth 4y ago
  Who? Crying wolf makes sense to discredit an individual but not a whole argument. Almost everything is being predicted by someone at any given time. If your criteria for predictions is “no one can have made a similar prediction and been wrong in the past”, then you’ll disbelieve all predictions. And seriously, how many people were actually saying “WolframAlpha will destroy a huge amount of programming jobs”?
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  Except Watson and Alpha weren’t useful out of the box to everyone. They weren’t the fastest growing app of all time and couldn’t even remotely play that way. ChatGPT isn’t hype because it is so useful — it’s already on the “Plateau of Productivity”. But it looks like an exponentially steep climb from here. indefinitely
  - photonbeam 4y ago
    They said the same thing about transistor scaling
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Being that you and I are talking to each other by forming thoughts in meat that us causing other meat to move around tells me that digital thought still has a lot of scaling room ahead of it. Maybe superintelligence isn't possible for some reason, but the fact we exist should tell you that general intelligence is not magic.
      - swexbe 4y ago
        Your brain is analog. Trying to emulate this with a digital computer is bound to come with some computational cost.
        Filligree 4y ago
        Good thing we aren’t trying, then. GPT works in a completely different fashion.
        pixl97 4y ago
        The world created by human thought has given us such excess means of power production that we have literal gigawatts of electricity we can use in a trade off where it doesn't take us 4 billion years to make efficient circuits.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> I think most people see where the puck is going Overinflated hype about “where the puck is going” being wrong is…not a new phenomenon. And the non-tech media (traditional and social, and particularly a whole lot of the elite commentariat that spans both more than the “hard” news side of traditional media, though that is influenced too) perspective on this is driven quite disproportionately by the marketing message of the narrow set of people with the most financial stake in promoting the hype. Even the cautionary notes being sounded there are exactly the ones that are being used by the same people to promote narrow control.
- caddemon 4y ago
  You know the shoeshine boy indicator story [1]? That's the vibe I've been getting with ChatGPT lately, I have multiple old high school teachers with 0 computational background who hardly ever spoke about ML before posting regularly on LinkedIn about ChatGPT the last couple months. The part that gets me is they aren't just aimlessly making posts, they're getting involved with webinars targeted at educators in their respective topics, speaking at regional events about the future with ChatGPT, etc. One of them was a really excellent teacher but like this dude absolutely does not have any qualifications to be speaking on ChatGPT, and I hope it hasn't actually changed his teaching style too much because I'm having trouble imagining how ChatGPT could've fit in well with the way he used to teach. Don't get me wrong, hype often surrounds something legitimately good, but I think ChatGPT is being taken way out of context in both the ML achievement it is and in what things the tool is actually useful for. I guess it is easy for a layperson to make mistaken assumptions about where the puck is going when they see what ChatGPT can do. [1] "The story took place in 1929: Joseph Patrick Kennedy Sr., JFK's father, claimed that he knew it was time to get out of the stock market when he got investment tips from a shoeshine boy."
  - sumtechguy 4y ago
    I can see why educators are getting involved. They are seeing it change how their students do work in real time. I grew up and using a pocket calculator was verboten. You just did not do it. You better learn and memorize all of that stuff. Spin on 10 years after me and all kids have them now. If you have the right app on your phone the thing will OCR the problem and auto solve it and show you the steps. ChatGPT and its ilk are here, now. How we learn and create things has dramatically changed in under a year. It is not clear how much though. Teachers are trying to get ahold of what does it mean to teach if you can just ask some device to summarize something as complex as the interactions of the 6 major countries in WWII and what caused it. Then the thing thinks for 2 seconds and spits out a 1000 word essay on exactly that. Then depending on which one you use it will footnote it all and everything. This style of learning is going to take some getting used to. This tool is in their classrooms right now. Right or wrong. It will be there. The teachers are going to have to figure out what this means to their class planning. Not 5 years from now, today.
noitpmeder 4y ago
Personally I think it's 99% hype. The current iteration and architecture of these systems means they will never be at the level where they can actually replace a programmer. The best they will ever get is barfing up snippets for a programmer (who still needs the industry-specific knowledge to VERIFY the snippets). Additionally, "the rate of increase in capabilities" is very much a false flag. Past performance (especially for second-order things like 'rate of improvement') is an absolute batshit insane metric for predicting future success. https://russellinvestments.com/us/blog/past-performance-no-guarantee-future-results https://russellinvestments.com/us/blog/past-performance-no-g... The advancements have eaten low hanging fruit. Once all the low hanging fruit is gone, we'll all realize GPT will never be tall enough to reach the good stuff.
- jacobedawson 4y ago
  That's why I said it was unpredictable, in both directions.
- malborodog 4y ago
  But obviously increasing avg and sr programmer productivity by many x implies many fewer jobs for programmers. That’s the point we’re interested in.
  - mattnewport 4y ago
    Is that obvious? The history of programming has been full of things that have at least claimed to increase programmer productivity, everything from high level languages to smart refactoring IDEs, debuggers, PaaS, etc and in all that time the trend has been towards more jobs for programmers not fewer.
    - redox99 4y ago
      Productivity with modern tools (SPAs, microservices) is often a lot lower than oldschool stuff (django/rails, maybe even Visual Basic, Delphi)
  - brookst 4y ago
davemp 4y ago
> The things you mentioned (taking on board feedback, testing across devices, iterating on solutions) doesn't seem very far away at all. This is a very bold claim IMO. Modeling/understanding interactions in a complex system of potential black boxes is much, much more computationally difficult problem that source code to source code operations.

mlycv 4y ago

That's what they said about Watson and Wolfram Alpha. You only hear this nonsense on HN.

refulgentis 4y ago
Demonstrably untrue, it’s taken up semi-residence in everything from oped pages to boardrooms since the New Year. Welcome to the mid singularity, my friend.
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  You can’t say “singularity” on HN without a ton of downvotes. It’s not because people disagree (or they’d say so), but because they literally shit their pants when they think about it. Hard to blame them.
  - vbezhenar 4y ago
    I'm saving my money, so I can live enough off savings to learn a new profession. I'm not sure if that will happen, but I consider this option as likely enough to affect my life decisions. The world is changing at alarming rate. Though I think that it's more likely that I'll become shaman who talks to the spirits. Managers hate computers and they'd prefer to pay someone to deal with them.
  - suction 4y ago
    [dead]
  - Ygg2 4y ago
    Who's not disagreeing? Singularity feels like "man facing existential dread confuses saturation curve for exponential".
    - dr_dshiv 4y ago
      When I say singularity, I mean “changes the nature of human life irreversibly and to a greater degree than any prior technology through a rapid progression of self-reinforcing growth.” That rapid progression can be modeled with an exponential growth curve, like Moore’s law, even though nothing material can have a sustained exponential growth. Regardless of how the curve is modeled, the steepness is such that it serves as a step function in evolution. With that clarified, there is first the question of “is the technological progression going to level off soon?” And I think the answer is no. The second question is, “how are we going to deal?” And the answer to that question can only be addressed once we answer the question: “what kind of world do we want to live in?”
      - brookst 4y ago
        I think you just declared radio, television, the internet, the macaroon, and mobile phones to be singularities. People generally use the term to mean the point at which progress is automatic, unbounded, and instant. E.g. AIs that can produce smarter AIs themselves, in short order.
        SuoDuanDao 4y ago
        'step change' sounds less exciting than 'singularity' but in terms of the original definition there's very little distinction.
        brookst 4y ago
        Hmm. I see the singularity as a recursive step change; the last step where the average slope becomes vertical. I’m not a singularity believer (singularitist?); from the perspective of 1000 years ago we’re already at the point of infinite progress in zero time. I think individuals, the culture, and the species adapt to accelerating progress, and I intuit, maybe wrongly, that Gödel‘s theorem means that technology will never become runaway and recursive. But I think that’s what people mean, more than just a step/paradigm change like the internet.
theK 4y ago
I think everywhere except HN the expectations on Watson’s and Wolfram’s second seasons where even more inflated
travisjungroth 4y ago
Who? Crying wolf makes sense to discredit an individual but not a whole argument. Almost everything is being predicted by someone at any given time. If your criteria for predictions is “no one can have made a similar prediction and been wrong in the past”, then you’ll disbelieve all predictions. And seriously, how many people were actually saying “WolframAlpha will destroy a huge amount of programming jobs”?
dr_dshiv 4y ago
Except Watson and Alpha weren’t useful out of the box to everyone. They weren’t the fastest growing app of all time and couldn’t even remotely play that way. ChatGPT isn’t hype because it is so useful — it’s already on the “Plateau of Productivity”. But it looks like an exponentially steep climb from here. indefinitely
- photonbeam 4y ago
  They said the same thing about transistor scaling
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Being that you and I are talking to each other by forming thoughts in meat that us causing other meat to move around tells me that digital thought still has a lot of scaling room ahead of it. Maybe superintelligence isn't possible for some reason, but the fact we exist should tell you that general intelligence is not magic.
    - swexbe 4y ago
      Your brain is analog. Trying to emulate this with a digital computer is bound to come with some computational cost.
      - Filligree 4y ago
        Good thing we aren’t trying, then. GPT works in a completely different fashion.
      - pixl97 4y ago
        The world created by human thought has given us such excess means of power production that we have literal gigawatts of electricity we can use in a trade off where it doesn't take us 4 billion years to make efficient circuits.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> I think most people see where the puck is going Overinflated hype about “where the puck is going” being wrong is…not a new phenomenon. And the non-tech media (traditional and social, and particularly a whole lot of the elite commentariat that spans both more than the “hard” news side of traditional media, though that is influenced too) perspective on this is driven quite disproportionately by the marketing message of the narrow set of people with the most financial stake in promoting the hype. Even the cautionary notes being sounded there are exactly the ones that are being used by the same people to promote narrow control.

caddemon 4y ago
You know the shoeshine boy indicator story [1]? That's the vibe I've been getting with ChatGPT lately, I have multiple old high school teachers with 0 computational background who hardly ever spoke about ML before posting regularly on LinkedIn about ChatGPT the last couple months. The part that gets me is they aren't just aimlessly making posts, they're getting involved with webinars targeted at educators in their respective topics, speaking at regional events about the future with ChatGPT, etc. One of them was a really excellent teacher but like this dude absolutely does not have any qualifications to be speaking on ChatGPT, and I hope it hasn't actually changed his teaching style too much because I'm having trouble imagining how ChatGPT could've fit in well with the way he used to teach. Don't get me wrong, hype often surrounds something legitimately good, but I think ChatGPT is being taken way out of context in both the ML achievement it is and in what things the tool is actually useful for. I guess it is easy for a layperson to make mistaken assumptions about where the puck is going when they see what ChatGPT can do. [1] "The story took place in 1929: Joseph Patrick Kennedy Sr., JFK's father, claimed that he knew it was time to get out of the stock market when he got investment tips from a shoeshine boy."
- sumtechguy 4y ago
  I can see why educators are getting involved. They are seeing it change how their students do work in real time. I grew up and using a pocket calculator was verboten. You just did not do it. You better learn and memorize all of that stuff. Spin on 10 years after me and all kids have them now. If you have the right app on your phone the thing will OCR the problem and auto solve it and show you the steps. ChatGPT and its ilk are here, now. How we learn and create things has dramatically changed in under a year. It is not clear how much though. Teachers are trying to get ahold of what does it mean to teach if you can just ask some device to summarize something as complex as the interactions of the 6 major countries in WWII and what caused it. Then the thing thinks for 2 seconds and spits out a 1000 word essay on exactly that. Then depending on which one you use it will footnote it all and everything. This style of learning is going to take some getting used to. This tool is in their classrooms right now. Right or wrong. It will be there. The teachers are going to have to figure out what this means to their class planning. Not 5 years from now, today.

noitpmeder 4y ago

Personally I think it's 99% hype. The current iteration and architecture of these systems means they will never be at the level where they can actually replace a programmer. The best they will ever get is barfing up snippets for a programmer (who still needs the industry-specific knowledge to VERIFY the snippets). Additionally, "the rate of increase in capabilities" is very much a false flag. Past performance (especially for second-order things like 'rate of improvement') is an absolute batshit insane metric for predicting future success. https://russellinvestments.com/us/blog/past-performance-no-guarantee-future-results https://russellinvestments.com/us/blog/past-performance-no-g... The advancements have eaten low hanging fruit. Once all the low hanging fruit is gone, we'll all realize GPT will never be tall enough to reach the good stuff.

jacobedawson 4y ago
That's why I said it was unpredictable, in both directions.
malborodog 4y ago
But obviously increasing avg and sr programmer productivity by many x implies many fewer jobs for programmers. That’s the point we’re interested in.
- mattnewport 4y ago
  Is that obvious? The history of programming has been full of things that have at least claimed to increase programmer productivity, everything from high level languages to smart refactoring IDEs, debuggers, PaaS, etc and in all that time the trend has been towards more jobs for programmers not fewer.
  - redox99 4y ago
    Productivity with modern tools (SPAs, microservices) is often a lot lower than oldschool stuff (django/rails, maybe even Visual Basic, Delphi)
- brookst 4y ago

davemp 4y ago

> The things you mentioned (taking on board feedback, testing across devices, iterating on solutions) doesn't seem very far away at all. This is a very bold claim IMO. Modeling/understanding interactions in a complex system of potential black boxes is much, much more computationally difficult problem that source code to source code operations.