32 ms·

Post-GPT Computing

• tapkolun 4y ago
  Just asking, which language model is capable of extracting 5s of a video automatically?
  • gradys 4y ago
    ChatGPT with plugins! https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1638971232443076609 https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1638971232443076609
• dakial1 4y ago
  I don't get some coders/devs/software engineers surprised that LLM can now pretty much create a whole code out of a prompt. Wasn't this the final objective of the programming languages abstraction evolution? From Binary/Assembly to Natural Language Programming? I think it is awesome that more people will be able to create software/products as this accelerates innovation cycles a lot. And, for now, I believe devs that don't rely solely on copy/paste coding from stack exchange don't need to worry about their job stability no?
  • gradys 4y ago
    Indeed, as I write, this is sorta what I have been working toward my whole career. And it's not like this was a giant leap from what ChatGPT already showed it was capable of. People have already been doing stuff like this with LangChain. Nonetheless, seeing that this was OpenAI's plan, that this is now here for real, was a weird experience for me.
  • Riverheart 4y ago
    Job stability is measured in years. Looking forward, assuming it improves, it’ll do more than just copy/paste code. It’ll be a senior dev capable of explaining the pros and cons of a solution, able to do code reviews and so on.
    • ChatGTP 4y ago
      It's time to build a business I guess? Others have said exactly what I'm thinking, welcome to the age of the micro-startup, 1-3 engineers, designers, product mangers building some very cool, albeit niche products.
      • margorczynski 4y ago
        And what that business will be worth when any random guy can create an identical one using a LLM? You remove the scarcity and the value plummets.
        • imtringued 4y ago
          More importantly, accountants, lawyers, sales people and other generic business expenses are now making up a bigger portion of your company expenses than the development process.
        • edgyquant 4y ago
          Any random guy can copy just about any startup already. It’s the domain expertise and insight into a potential market that builds companies not a few engineers throwing together a react app
          • margorczynski 4y ago
            Any random guy with a shitload of cash to spend on development. These "few engineers" can cost $1kk annually and if you think some random guy can just throw away such cash then well... "Domain expertise and insight into a potential market" won't get you a working product that you can sell.
            • edgyquant 4y ago
              Anyone driven can throw together an MVP for a CRUD app. Having the domain expertise to prove a market edge can get you funding. Most engineers can’t do that second part.
  • meghan_rain 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • IdiocyInAction 4y ago
      I've copied like 3 things from SO in the last year max. Speak for yourself.
    • inimino 4y ago
      Or maybe that's just at the places you've worked.
    • edgyquant 4y ago
      No it isn’t and this isn’t a funny joke. If you can’t write optimal algorithms and come up with data structures that allow for mapping out problems you aren’t solving anything and your job has always been one innovation away from disappearing.
      • dento 4y ago
        I'd guess 90% dev jobs don't involve any algo knowledge more complicated than "should I pick a list or hashmap" or "which columns need indices". They involve converting business logic into code and combining it with good UI/UX.
    • tjr 4y ago
      I have certainly gotten value out of Stack Exchange and the like, but pretty little overall. The answers to most of my software problems simply aren't there. Nor are they elsewhere on the web. Which leaves me feeling like it's unlikely that ChatGPT will have the answers either. Perhaps it will still be a useful tool toward arriving at the answers, but I am not presently anticipating that it is going to be churning out all of the code automatically.
  • imtringued 4y ago
    I am banging my head against a heisenbug. I wrote the code that works yesterday. I spent a lot of time rewriting it a dozen times. Now I am back to the original and it works for unexplainable reasons. I doubt that a chatbot could have sped this up. I envy the people who are bottlenecked on their typing speed and benefit 10 times more from the chat bot than I do.
    • sebzim4500 4y ago
      Have you tried? GPT-4 is pretty good at spotting bugs. It would probably also spot a bunch of other 'bugs' that don't exist, but that would still be better than rewriting it a dozen times.
• meghan_rain 4y ago
  > OpenAI made the extraordinary and IMO under-discussed decision to use an open API specification format, where every API provider hosts a text file on their website saying how to use their API. This means even this plugin ecosystem isn’t a walled garden that only the first mover controls. I don’t fully understand why they went this way, but I’m grateful they did. Did OpenAI just commit a trillion dollar mistake?
  • tough 4y ago
    That the use an standard OpenAPI, for parsing, doesn't mean than anyone can built into chatgpt without permission (it's a waitlist for now) I don't see this
  • karmasimida 4y ago
    Essentially a manifest of API call, documentation and parameters. I don’t think convert it in and out of proprietary standard is that difficult? There is little to no vendor lock-in effect
• bobse 4y ago
  OpenAI is not open-source, hence it's shit.
  • meghan_rain 4y ago
    Simple as
    • scottmf 4y ago
      This is the nuanced insightful discussion I come to HN for
• erdaniels 4y ago
  I can't wait for the positive feedback loop of statically trained LLMs being retrained on data that was generated from the N-1th generation of statically trained LLMs. There's so much of talk about what these models can generate, which is cool in relation to plugins, but there's still a lot of interesting code to write, companies to build, and ideas to formulate, that an LLM cannot do on its own. If you're terrified of your software engineering job becoming at risk, I urge you to just take a beat.
  • kakadzhun 4y ago
    If Reinforcement Learning is anything to go by, then a naive implementation of learning from past models will overfit to the previous model and start performing worse than even earlier models. There was a paper by someone @ Microsoft who tried to train a boardgame playing AI like this. The "best" models started losing to beginner level players from some point onwards.
• PaulWaldman 4y ago
  Current higher level programming languages are developed for humans to develop software closer to their natural language. If in the future humans will be writing and debugging little code, these LLMs will naturally evolve to directly writing Assembly. Scary to think about, but also makes me wonder how many non-technical people cope today with the "black box" of a computer. About twenty years ago, I had a professor explain to the class that Rational Rose would be replacing us all....yet here we still are.
  • imtringued 4y ago
    I don't understand why it would write in assembly. That is not portable and it makes verification difficult and also assembly has less grammatic structure which LLMs rely upon.
    • PaulWaldman 4y ago
      If there was never a need for humans to understand code, are higher level languages really the most efficient?
      • sebzim4500 4y ago
        Probably not but I doubt ASM is either. It's too low level, and it doesn't make sense for a LLM to have to do things like instruction selection which would can be done far better by existing tools (LLVM etc.). Maybe it could just be an alternative syntax for an existing language which is more optimized for input/output to an LLM.
        • TchoBeer 4y ago
          I am thinking that the latter might eventually emerge, probably as part of a bigger tool chain e.g. langchain. Something like java bytecode which is low level and portable, but optimized for the ways that LLMs (perhaps interfacing with other tools) work.
    • anon7725 4y ago
• DethNinja 4y ago
  I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field. If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days. Instead of worrying, learn to work with it. It will be harder for large companies/large teams to extract value from this compared to small companies/small teams. It means competition between companies will increase but it isn’t necessarily bad for existing software engineers, especially solo founders.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • Traubenfuchs 4y ago
    > Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital. You are overestimating the vast amount of "software engineers" in the world. The overwhelming majority of us are just programmers, we are just gluing together CRUD spaghetti in the random language we grew up with. We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want to get a decent salary for our boring work. And we certainly do not want to be "solo founders", build products of our dreams or increase our productivity. This way of living feels threatened now.
    • dopeboy 4y ago
      I mean this in the least snarky, most sympathetic way possible: it's time to level up. Countless roles have had to do this, it's now our turn.
      • thrown123098 4y ago
        [dead]
      • falcor84 4y ago
        This is easy to say, but I would argue that it's impossible to know what to level up in; the field is just moving too quickly now. At this stage, the best advice I could formulate would be to learn LangChain and prompt engineering, but these too are fast moving targets, and who knows what's going to be relevant in 2024?
• meghan_rain 4y ago
  We need to push the notion that "closed-source LLMs are super dangerous, an existential risk to humanity". Basically we need to equate "safety" in LLMs to mean "being open-source". OpenAI keeps talking about "safety" as the most important goal. If we define it to mean "open-source" then they will be pushed into a corner.
  • jackvezkovic 4y ago
    It's "Security Through AI Obscurity"
  • michaelmior 4y ago
    > Basically we need to equate "safety" in LLMs to mean "being open-source". I think open source is a reasonable component to safety, but I wouldn't want to make them equal. Open source may be necessary for safety, but I wouldn't call it sufficient. For example, assume the source code, the model, the training data, and all the model weights are open source. How do you know that the model was actually trained using that training data? Very few organizations have the capacity to train models at this scale themselves.
  • wseqyrku 4y ago
    > Basically we need to equate "safety" in LLMs to mean "being open-source". Another way to put it is to make it more accessible to everyone, right? The opposite of that is happening to nuclear power. They're actually trying to stop any more countries to have the technology at their disposal. So no, make it "open source" doesn't make it safe by any stretch of imagination.
    • blibble 4y ago
      "nuclear power" is open source, and this is one of the fundamental ideas behind the NPT reactor blueprints have been accessible to IAEA members for something like 50 years
  • tel 4y ago
    Why do you believe that "open source" would imply greater safety? Here, I'll loosely define "safety" to be "avoidance of harm to individuals or society that would have otherwise not occurred without the use of LLM technology". Feel free to modify that definition as you see fit, but I'm genuinely curious what the argument is that open source is necessary, sufficient, or even a major component of achieving safety.
• brushfoot 4y ago
  > I think over time, we’ll see that what many of us really liked about building software deep down wasn’t coding, but intricately imagining the things computers could do for us and then getting them to do it. Spot on. It's a good time for existential reflection: Who would you have been hundreds or thousands of years ago? Who will you be now that technology is radically changing again? There will always be interesting, creative challenges like programming, whatever form they take.
  • falcor84 4y ago
    >Who would you have been hundreds or thousands of years ago? I'll just use this opportunity to recommend the video game "Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey". It's a game where you start as an early hominid and have to gradually discover how to make and use rudimentary tools in order to take control of your environment, literally evolving in the process. It's weird and unforgiving, and it made me really think.
  • TeMPOraL 4y ago
    > Who would you have been hundreds or thousands of years ago? Given how I grew up ingesting science and science fiction alike, literally attributing half my personality to Star Trek: The Next Generation being on TV during my formative years? It's really hard to tell. I have very little connection to things which were possible before late 19th / early 20th century. In my mind, being thrown back centuries in time, I'd spend my life trying to use everything I remember from present day to give everyone a head start on science and technology. Being thrown back centuries in time, but without the memory of specific things I've learned in present day? That sounds like a particularly sadistic death sentence.
    • the_only_law 4y ago
      I was thinking less of “what if I went back in time” and more “what if I was my ancestor” Obviously you won’t be able to tell for sure, but I’d guess that 1000 years ago I’d probably be a serf, and 100 years ago, likely would have fought in a large war and likely doing some form of physical labor or subsistence farming afterwards, based on what my family was doing then.
• dsign 4y ago
  In the last few weeks, I've noted on myself how I've been going through several stages of the Chat-GPT "disease", or whatever it is. My first reaction was to be afraid for my money-making skills. My second reaction was fear about us ourselves making ourselves irrelevant--that fear still lingers. My third wave of fright, cemented by days burning my eyes looking at a screen parsing logs and trying to figure out bugs for my corporate master, was, "when did my imagination go for a vacation? Old boy, don't tell me now that you have run out of ideas of things to make, of things to have an AI army to help you build." And now I dread that all of this AI is just hype, that it will never be good enough to come for our jobs without also coming for our jugulars, or that we will make it too damn expensive to matter[^1]. ------- [^1]: Capitalism has a way of leveraging economies of scale to make certain goods cheaper. But there are physical limits--what if Moore's law with regard to power consumption is really dead, and we as a collective really decide to spare power?
  • Version467 4y ago
    > a collective really decide to spare power It's either my imagination that has gone for a vacation, or yours is running wild, but that is the one thing I really can't see at all. Reducing power consumption? I don't think that's happening any time soon, or ever really.
    • CatWChainsaw 4y ago
      It will be involuntary.
  • marcosdumay 4y ago
    > And now I dread that all of this AI is just hype, that it will never be good enough to come for our jobs Some day it will be. Not those ones, those ones are only hype. Also whether or not they'll come for our jugulars depends on what they are commanded to do. But we will get them eventually, and they will be as good as articles like this pretend the hyped ones are. The funny thing is that nobody will use the current panic to prepare. And everybody will use the current panic as an excuse to avoid preparing once the real AIs come. So they'll get us completely unprepared.
• breck 4y ago
  > OpenAI made the extraordinary and IMO under-discussed decision to use an open API specification format, where every API provider hosts a text file on their website saying how to use their API. Interesting! Somehow I missed this. https://spec.openapis.org/oas/latest.html https://spec.openapis.org/oas/latest.html
  • rdg42 4y ago
    Mixing up OpenAI with OpenAPI here ?
    • pimterry 4y ago
      No, OpenAI's plugin system uses OpenAPI: https://platform.openai.com/docs/plugins/introduction https://platform.openai.com/docs/plugins/introduction
    • breck 4y ago
      Ah, I think you're right!
  • TchoBeer 4y ago
    extracting 5s of a video feels pretty trivial. Not that this isn't extremely impressive, but it doesn't feel "come for your jobs" impressive.
• sebzim4500 4y ago
  > OpenAI made the extraordinary and IMO under-discussed decision to use an open API specification format, where every API provider hosts a text file on their website saying how to use their API. This means even this plugin ecosystem isn’t a walled garden that only the first mover controls. I don’t fully understand why they went this way, but I’m grateful they did. Why is this extraodinary? What would be the advantage of going through all the effort of defining a new format just to create busywork for people trying to integrate with you? It's not like there would be anything stopping Bard/Alpaca/etc. from reading the same format as OpenAI.
  • gradys 4y ago
    One could imagine an alternative where the API manifest was provided privately to OpenAI in the developer console or where the plugin developer had to implement an OpenAI-specific API structure. Doing it this way is more, dare I say, open than it might have been.
    • sebzim4500 4y ago
      There'd still be nothing stopping Bard from adopting an extremely similar API structure, and people would just upload the same manifests to both.
      • Version467 4y ago
        Yes and when you're google then that might work out for you, but that point is that anyone who creates an llm can now integrate a whole range of services without the services needing to provide their manifest to each of them individually. This increases competition between ai companies, which is why it is a surprising move.
• piokoch 4y ago
  Ok, so we have that software written by AI, AI is clever, it does not need good variable names or functions/methods/class names, some of the stuff it will call according to passed specification so it will be understandable, but the further it goes, everything will get more generic, taken from kirjillion of other code snippets on Github. And it all will be working. Until someone starts testing this and finds a bug. And then AI will say, hey, there is no bug, I don't make mistakes. So you need a human to look on the code, a huge pile of spaghetti code with cryptic names and conventions, code patterns that fell out of fashion years ago but, since there is a lot of code that uses them, AI thinks they are ok. How long it will take to fix anything, how long it will take to extend the code?
  • crop_rotation 4y ago
    You should try GPT4. It does use very reasonable variable, function, method class names. And if you point out that the code doesn't match your intent, it comes with new code fixing your issues. The code it generates is by no measure "a huge pile of spaghetti code with cryptic names and conventions". I was sceptical myself before trying GPT4. I asked it to change the Python C internals for a new feature, and googled to ensure the description doesn't exist anywhere. It came up with very good changes and explanations. And this is all not even mentioning the pace of improvements. It didn't take too long to go from GPT3 to GPT4. Even if the pace slows down, it is still huge.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • raincole 4y ago
    I believe you never use ChatGPT. I'm not claiming you never use GPT4, I'm claiming you never use even GPT3.5. If you did you will notice its problem is the opposite of what you describe. Especially: > it does not need good variable names or functions/methods/class names, It's the exact opposite. It's too good at naming things. It insists to use variable/function names that make sense in plain english, and often make mistakes when the API has inconsistent naming, or consistent but unusual naming. For example, it makes mistakes when writing code that use "Loop" in Blender API. And the reason is quite obvious to me: because Blender's "Loop" is not what loop means in plain english.
• metalrain 4y ago
  While chat is intuitive interface to start with. I think we'll see more integration of these NLP models in traditional tools, like we saw with Adobe Firefly and Unreal Engine. That way users retain the control for fine tuning and doing problem specific tasks, but also gain this superpower of doing many actions with few words. Key thing for adoption is to make models smaller and more context specific (to make them smaller), we've seen how LLaMA was downsized to run on commodity PCs, we've seen how Stable Diffusion can run on mobile phones. Even when we have to use larger models remotely, cost and ownership matters.
• KrugerDunnings 4y ago
  Working as a software engineer I often feels like I am living in the world of the Handmaidens Tale as a women with a functioning womb where the hole of society is organised around controlling everything I do. Hopefully LLM will change this but I do not underestimate the intellectual laziness of most "knowledge workers"
  • sirsinsalot 4y ago
    Highly paid middle class white male (statistically) compares his existence to the brutal oppression of women in a fictional book. What insight!
    • KrugerDunnings 4y ago
      You know very little about my life and I'd like to keep it this way. One would think that I live in a pure sellers market, but this is not true because of dynamics similar to that in the show. The comparison is clearly hyperbole evident by the use of an absurt fictional situation and not meant to express an equality relationship but one of equivalence (learn category theory bitch). It is very insightful, if you ask me, to recognise one's own predicament by empathising with the struggles of a fictional character, and this is what at the end of the day literary critique is all about. That there might be something hard about my life because of organised socially accepted structural abuse is all the more made evident by the briga-dooning and gasslighting I receive for dealing with my own issues in jest. I guess I must be one of the lucky girls.
      • sirsinsalot 4y ago
        Just like how waiting for 10 minutes in Starbucks during my morning commute ... made me feel like a persecuted Jewish prisoner awaiting execution! /s Your original point was ridiculous, tone deaf, offensive and completely without substance other than to wave the victim flag about _something_ I guess? Who knows.
        • KrugerDunnings 4y ago
• dopeboy 4y ago
  I appreciate this article and can sympathize with the disorientation the author and many here at HN feel. It can feel unnerving to know that parts of our jobs might become automated. I'm processing this news in realtime like many of you and forming a plan: 1. Understand how LLMs work. I've heard the Wolfram paper is good; open to more suggestions here. 2. Continue to practice using real implementations of LLMs including ChatGPT and co-pilot. 3. Finding painpoints within our company that AI can make more efficient and implementing solutions. If anyone feels the same way and wants to form a working group with me, give me a shout. Email is in my bio.
  • tjvc 4y ago
    I think this is a good take. I hope to do the same. For the understanding part, Andrej Karpathy has a YouTube playlist that explains neural networks. I made a start on it today and found it quite accessible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMj-3S1tku0&list=PLAqhIrjkxbuWI23v9cThsA9GvCAUhRvKZ&index=1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMj-3S1tku0&list=PLAqhIrjkxb...
• dougdonohoe 4y ago
  On the one hand, I think a lot of what ChatGPT can do is pretty amazing and a bit scary as a software engineer. On the other hand, I look at the projects I've done recently and throughout my career and find it hard to see how something that can solve bite-sized problems can tackle a software project that takes months to come to fruition. I'm currently working as an engineer doing a mix of kubernetes, cloud, Golang, bash scripting, git manipulation and other type of work. I recently upgraded 40+ repos to migrate to out latest build infrastructure and I had to reconcile 5+ years of folks doing things slightly differently. There was a constant process of running some script to make changes, finding outliers and one-offs, figuring out the fixes, running tests and figuring out the right way to ensure things were correct. I just don't see how ChatGPT can have done that project. Maybe it could have reduced the time it took me to write some supporting scripts, but I don't see it material improving the time it took to do this project. I suspect many large IT organizations are like this.
  • antibasilisk 4y ago
    Perhaps for brownfield work you're right, but I suspect greenfield will not suffer from the same issues, since they're usually an artefact of things done to accommodate human-limits on finances, time and integration with heteromorphic systems.
• barrkel 4y ago
  I don't think this is quite correct. If the LLM has seen lots of instances of usage of an API, it can write code to target the API. It can generalize to some degree, but things go off track the further your requirements are away from the training data. If your code is a lot of duct tape between well-documented, or at least well-named, APIs, that code can be automated. Which is great. That kind of code was always boring to write. I'm less convinced that LLMs will be great at inventing new abstractions to map to a problem domain, and wiring up these new abstractions in a large codebase. They'll need augmentation, fine-tuning, guidance, and it's not clear how well it'll all fit together, and where the limitations of the tech will show up as capability cliffs.
  • precompute 4y ago
    Yes. Outsourcing engineering to LLMs is like building bridges based on structural integrity in minecraft. The real product here is just a "language calculator", that also does "code generation" because it makes financial and PR sense. That people even believe these models can be novel makes one look to the way this thing is marketed. It's also a good time to really take our heads out of the sand and re-evaluate how we expect people to learn civil engineering if their only teacher is a minecraft world. You might get some people that are perfect in minecraft. The rest will be hopelessly stunted. Pretty soon it'll pivot to materials engineering to figure out how exactly a minecraft block adheres to a surface because we lost the original irl way to build a bridge.
• nunez 4y ago
  I agree that GPT will make creating software redundant. Writing is definitely on the wall for outsourcing and MVP-style work. GPT can create a landing page and a backend/frontend for a business _literally today_. You just have to ship it, but it won't be long until that isn't needed. There will still be a lot of value in understanding how systems work and interact with each other, at least until ML is able to build and maintain entire systems. Until that happens, there will still be a lot of value in being able to dive into codebases and refactor/optimize as needed, at least in the medium-term. Once platform engineering is mostly automated and running AI-generated binaries is de-risked, then code quality doesn't really matter. Hell, _code_ won't even matter at that point.
  • slfnflctd 4y ago
    > at least until ML is able to build and maintain entire systems To me, this sounds a lot like "at least until ML is able to reach level 5 self driving". We don't even know if this is possible yet without AGI (which we also don't know is possible). We can get close, but... that last 1% is a bitch, and it makes all the difference.
• _xnmw 4y ago
  > Yesterday, I watched someone upload a video file to a chat app, ask a language model “Can you extract the first 5 s of the video?”, and then wait as the language model wrote a few lines of code and then actually executed that code, resulting in a downloadable video file. I missed this. Can someone show me what he is talking about?
  • nicky0 4y ago
    https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1638971232443076609 https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1638971232443076609
• crop_rotation 4y ago
  What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world. Given that knowledge work (not just software) has been one big option for people to climb the social ladder. If the AI can reasonably do all knowledge work in future, the amount of social climbing opportunities will drastically decrease. And no, UBI will not create more opportunities for social mobility. It seems like more and more people will have to compete with the fewer and fewer social climbing opportunities. Also what happens to Europe? All these companies behind LLMs are from US, and Europe is nowhere to be found. This seems like it will dramatically accelerate the wealth different between the US and the EU.
  • tjr 4y ago
    What does GPT know beyond what we have (directly or indirectly) taught it? Could it have figured out how to extract five seconds of video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not been made available to it? Would it have invented the MPG format (or something comparable) on its own? Would it have developed the web and HTTP protocol on top of TCP/IP? And so on. Maybe the answer is in fact "yes", or even "yes, and it would have done these things even better than humans did". But so far it seems to be amazingly good at doing things that we showed it how to do. If we stop creating actually new things, will it do that for us also? Why would it care to do so? What interest does it have in creating new things on its own?
    • crop_rotation 4y ago
      The amount of people who create genuinely new things is so tiny that I am not sure it is even relevant to the discussion. And here I mean genuinely new things, not translating some C lib to java or similar stuff, or changing existing libraries to handle more stuff. If the amount of people that will have social mobility opportunities will be equivalent to the amount of people who could have invented the MPG format or something comparable, then my point is made.
      • intelVISA 4y ago
        > people who create genuinely new things is so tiny This is my insurance against LLMs, only works if the market demands new things...
• braindead_in 4y ago
  The Programmer is dead, long live the Programmer.
• andsoitis 4y ago
  > To be clear, it is also an end, or at least the beginning of an end, for a lot of the present day activities of software engineers. Or the end of the beginning (of software development)...
• carapace 4y ago
  Check out: "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework" SRI Summary Report AFOSR-3223 by Douglas C. Engelbart, October 1962 https://dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html https://dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html > Accepting the term "intelligence amplification" does not imply any attempt to increase native human intelligence. The term "intelligence amplification" seems applicable to our goal of augmenting the human intellect in that the entity to be produced will exhibit more of what can be called intelligence than an unaided human could; we will have amplified the intelligence of the human by organizing his intellectual capabilities into higher levels of synergistic structuring. Now that the computers can talk and think and program themselves, and we can expect them to become exponentially better at it (to some limit, presumed greater-than-human), there is approximately only one problem left: how to select from the options the machines can generate for us. It's still an open-ended challenge, it's just a new and different challenge from the ones faced by all previous generations. And again, just to repeat for emphasis: this is the only intellectual challenge left. All others are subsumed by it (because the machines can (soon) think better than we can.)
• janetacarr 4y ago
  I could just be rationalizing here, but I think AI will be illegal soon. The idea of banning AI to protect many well paid middle-class jobs will be a slam dunk for any politician. There will be no Post-GPT computing world, just the Turing police and console cowgirls.
  • antibasilisk 4y ago
    Given nascent geopolitical competition, I don't think the west can afford this.
  • anon7725 4y ago
    It couldn’t be a worldwide ban, so that would just be shooting yourself in the foot over even a short to medium term.
• angarg12 4y ago
  Last week I used ChatGPT for the first time for a real world task at work. It was a self-contained lambda function to perform some admin tasks, so it seemed like an ideal fit. Although the experience was good, it's far from the end of programmers. This was my experience: * Although ChatGPT is pretty good at generating code, it kept making simple mistakes such as calling non-existing APIs or introducing bugs. Some of them it could fix itself, some I had to fix. * The code provided worked well for the "happy path" but failed miserably for some corner cases. I had to fix that manually. * The code was working, but I wouldn't consider it production ready. It required some cleanup, unit tests, etc. Again, some of this with ChatGPT, some without. * Not to mention that I was the one with the knowledge about the domain, what problem to solve, a vague idea of how... Not to pick on OP but extracting a few seconds of video from a file is a pretty straightforward task, you can essentially do it with a bash one liner [1]. My biggest question is how ChatGPT performs with a large codebase, contributed over time by different authors, with complex domain logic and layers of abstraction. I also had a brief existential crisis, but I just shrugged it off and got back to work. [1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/59383/extract-part-of-a-video-with-a-one-line-command https://askubuntu.com/questions/59383/extract-part-of-a-vide...
  • bmitc 4y ago
    You made me think: it feels like ChatGPT is just a less accurate StackOverflow answer generator. The culture of needing to use StackOverflow is not a good one, so I'm not sure why people are considering ChatGPT to be.
    • otabdeveloper4 4y ago
      Yeah, it seems like a better search engine would be easier and more accurate to use in this case.
      • sharemywin 4y ago
        but it can usually answer your specific question. not loke close to your question.
    • 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
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• marstall 4y ago
  I tried to get chatgpt4 to generate a basic react app that had a public page and a private page. you get access to the private page by authenticating with a google auth popup. gpt valiantly generated code and instructions for google auth. the code was impressive but buggy (outdated api version), but successively pasting errors into chatgpt went most of the way toward fixing it. the instructions for configuring google auth were off. I tried a number of different ways to get gpt to give me the right instructions, but to no avail. so it was back to the old way, of spending a few hours reading google's documentation (which I'm doing today) to figure it out. once I'm there, I feel confident I could better coach chatgpt to instruct me. though I wouldn't necessarily need the help at that point. on the code side, staring at the google auth api code it had generated, I was faced with a hard truth. I didn't understand this code. to iterate with it, essentially to develop it, I would continue to be dependent on GPT. Even if there was a one liner needed, I wouldn't be able to come up with it on my own. I'd always have to rely on this outside "brain". How can that be more efficient than a tight REPL loop conducted by me, an evolving master of this API? And how will we humans even maintain knowledge of these API surfaces if we are not putting in our hours and hours of repetitive usage of them? We become ignorant of the evolving capabilities of the computing platform. And chatgpt becomes useless without humans who understand what's out there, what's needed.
  • ChatGTP 4y ago
    Stop being so practical and get wrapped up in the hype at once sir !
    • marstall 4y ago
      I'm trying my best to!
  • thewarrior 4y ago
    Have you tried getting it to explain the code to you
• tarruda 4y ago
  > Yesterday, I watched someone upload a video file to a chat app, ask a language model “Can you extract the first 5 s of the video?”, and then wait as the language model wrote a few lines of code and then actually executed that code Have we already solved AI safety problems? It seems like LLMs can now execute shell commands on our computers.
  • spudlyo 4y ago
    There is now a code interpreter[0] plugin for ChatGPT. It's not clear to me if it's available to folks who have been granted into the plugin alpha test or not, but it's running in a sandboxed execution environment somewhere -- not on our computers. [0]: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins#code-interpreter https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins#code-interpreter
  • crop_rotation 4y ago
    They don't execute it on user's computers. They execute it on OpenAI computers.
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• moomoo11 4y ago
  Are people asking it to generate code like “generate a random color hex code” or are they trying to use it to write code you’re going to put in production for users with access controls and various complexities? Because yeah it works fine for basic programming things but I believe you need to know wtf you’re doing when it comes to anything more complex, even something basic like some of our single endpoint services.
  • asdff 4y ago
    I am positive there are plenty of undergrads who are probably going to try to get chatgpt to write up an entire app they can sell so they don't have to try and find a job in a recession. I imagine you could get this entire process automated from the prompts to the app store submissions, maybe you could have 10,000 junk apps each giving you maybe a dollar a month in return before long, that would be a good take for passive work after you set up your automation environment.
    • saulpw 4y ago
      Even if you created 10 junk apps a day, it would still take you 3 years to create 10,000 junk apps. And each one requires more than $1 to list on the app store.
      • deleted 4y ago
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      • asdff 4y ago
        How about the play store? Plus once you have the pipeline set up the only limit for your rate of deployment is how much compute you throw at it, which is cheap these days.
• maherbeg 4y ago
  An easy way to solve some of the problems of employment are to start reducing what "full time hours" means. With this first wave of LLMs, we can start decreasing down to 35hours. With the next wave, maybe we move down to 30 hours. Once we can send LLMs to meetings with each other, we can move down to 15 hours of purely joyful work :-D
• seydor 4y ago
  It is interesting how history repeats itself here: When google started it was just a list of links to the websites that contained your answer. As tech advanced, it increasingly started giving out the answers in google's pages. OpenAI's plugins are equally temporary. Right now they will be generating actions through APIs, but GPT4 is probably already capable of performing the same actions on your browser. All it needs is a "control my browser" plugin that allows it to make that reservation on expedia, without expedia having any control in it. It will inevitably eat the world again
  • sharemywin 4y ago
    If they won't Don't see why Alpaca could be trained to do so.
• fendy3002 4y ago
  I'm not doubting that someday AI will able to do better than junior devs, even to lower-level of senior devs. But I doubt they'll able to replace those of higher level seniors, at least not in tens of years. Then I predict we'll get more business analysts than programmers, since managements will still need people to translate their needs to AI.
  • visarga 4y ago
    > Then I predict we'll get more business analysts than programmers Why would analysts be harder to replace than devs? The question is - how will competition influence the job market? if everyone has AI, everyone has the same powers. So how do you differentiate yourself? You put more humans in the loop, like "human plugins". You need humans to extract the most from AI.
    • sharemywin 4y ago
      even if you know company or industry jargon the thing can be fine tuned on that. or just build an embedding database the pulls the most semantically similar paragraphs and let it use that as a basis for the conversation.
    • fendy3002 4y ago
      Because managements aren't good at defining / understanding specifications, constraints and use cases. And I believe we don't want AI that can put constraints without our consent, so a middleman will still be required. The job market will still almost be the same, that capital and networks will net you businesses. The problem is how to regulate duplication, because IMO with power of AI patents are basically almost useless.
• nickmain 4y ago
  So I think the thing people aren’t getting is this: it doesn’t matter that AIs can write code. That’s not how it’s going to replace us. With a big enough AI, when we’re ready, we won’t have to write software. It will be the software. via https://fosstodon.org/@praeclarum/110070954879714216 https://fosstodon.org/@praeclarum/110070954879714216
  • jarjoura 4y ago
    I don't think this is a wrong take and I'm excited for some version of this future. However, I'm skeptical we'll get to this anytime in the next 30 years. As of right now, even if ChatGPT were to generate 99% accurate responses, it's quite a chore to communicate with it in full sentences. I don't want to have to explain my business in full painstaking detail and then upload tax documents to a system that can then output an answer in book form back to me.
• outside1234 4y ago
  GPT is "Drafts as a service" That the draft happened to work on the video clip is more luck than something you want to bet your engineering life on. You still need to go through an verify every character this statistical package spits out - it is not magic - it is just a probabilistic machine.
• bloppe 4y ago
  I love how all these AI researchers who write small code snippets in jupyter notebooks all day think LLM's are the end of software. Not disparaging AI research; it clearly takes a lot of expertise and work to do it well. But that's not software development.
• arbuge 4y ago
  > OpenAI made the extraordinary and IMO under-discussed decision to use an open API specification format, where every API provider hosts a text file on their website saying how to use their API. This means even this plugin ecosystem isn’t a walled garden that only the first mover controls. I don’t fully understand why they went this way, but I’m grateful they did. It's a good point and some have already got this to work: https://twitter.com/vaibhavk97/status/1639281937545150465 https://twitter.com/vaibhavk97/status/1639281937545150465 Given that there's no technical obstacles to drop-in compatibility here, I wonder if we'll soon start seeing exclusivity requirements and such.
• Madmallard 4y ago
  The devil is entirely in the details unfortunately, and it will make GPT basically unusable for anyone but existing software engineers for doing actual non-trivial programming tasks. At least how it is now.
• rektide 4y ago
  Not a ton of new material for me to think over, but did catch this random mention, which is super cool & I didn't know: > OpenAI made the extraordinary and IMO under-discussed decision to use an open API specification format, where every API provider hosts a text file on their website saying how to use their API. This means even this plugin ecosystem isn’t a walled garden that only the first mover controls. I don’t fully understand why they went this way, but I’m grateful they did.
• mcculley 4y ago
  I am currently doing some difficult work that involves figuring out the right computational geometry algorithms to apply to my dataset in order to get the answers my users need in a reasonable time. ChatGPT is of no use to me there. When I need to ask for boilerplate code for fetching a web resource or using a well-defined API, ChatGPT is great. ChatGPT has made the mundane plumbing a lot easier. It is a threat to plumbers at this point. Many of those plumbers are now freed up to do more valuable work. I am happy to have it, so I can focus on higher value work. If your only skill is at this kind of low level plumbing, you are in danger. But I doubt this is the case for most.
  • UncleEntity 4y ago
    > ChatGPT is of no use to me there. Today. What happens when it understands computational geometry and can calculate an optimal strategy to apply it to a dataset and end goal you provide?
    • mcculley 4y ago
      I will be happy to provide value higher up instead of dealing with this frustrating problem. I want the answer, not the code that generates the answer. I am writing that code now because it does not exist yet. So far, I have only had ChatGPT give me answers that can be derived from existing code. Regardless, I look forward to it being smarter. (My intuition is that ChatGPT, like all technologies before it, will end up making more wealth and more jobs possible.)
  • LouisSayers 4y ago
    Have you tried it with the Wolfram plugin?
    • mcculley 4y ago
      Yes, and Wolfram/Mathematic is great when I have figured out which algorithm to use. ChatGPT may even soon help me discover the potential algorithms. It is not helpful to me for that today.
  • 4y ago
• Hizonner 4y ago
  So, the parts where AI makes human labor irrelevant, and where that's a disaster for 99.999 percent of humans unless the whole economy is restructured, isn't exactly news. If ChatGPT doesn't do that, something else will. It wasn't going to be more than 50 years no matter what, and now I don't think it'll be more than 20. The part I'm finding is kind of a shock to me is the impact of the centralization on what you can even think about doing. If your application falls under their random definition of "unsafe", then you can't do it. Not even manually, probably, because the infrastructure for that will go away. If your one off question or task doesn't meet their approval, it doesn't happen. Basically not only do the owners of these things become the only really important people in the economy, but they also get a new kind of direct control over people's lives.
  • CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    Those who control the present control the past; those who control the past control the future.
• NHQ 4y ago
  I attempted to enter the venture capital Universe with designs on AI Operating Systems a few years ago.
• forty 4y ago
  My impression is that those AI code generators, if they end up working well enough that many people who don't know how to code can replace people who do, will be to coders what Monsanto is to farmers, ie we will have tons of devs who don't know how to do their jobs without those proprietary tools, who will struggle to earn enough money (they'll be easy to replace and cheaply paid) to pay for their code generator subscription. I'm not excited. I'm not too worried either though :)
• j3s 4y ago
  a mental exercise for the doomsayers: if stackoverflow + search engines were invented today, would you be saying the same stuff? it's clear to me that chatgpt is an programmer accelerator, not a replacement. it's just another tool - a very good one at that. 90% of programming is communicating with other people - chatgpt can't talk to people.
  • ipatec 4y ago
    people can talk to chatGPT
  • machiaweliczny 4y ago
    ChatGPT => speech synth => human => whisper It also can connect to your Notion, Slack or whatever
• zh3 4y ago
  Comparitively, GPT has definltely worked here for less-experienced engineers. A coworker (Mech. E.) last week got ChatGPT to create a python HTTP GET for him and today got it to write the code to drive a bunch of relays off a Pi using I2C. Once he had it working, he sent me a DM "Is 0xFF hex?". So accelerant, definitely. Beyond that, I'm on the sceptical side but accept there's quite a chance that's the wrong way to bet.
• Jeff_Brown 4y ago
  Some betting market needs to host bets on when AI will put programmers out of their jobs. I don't expect it to happen for decades. (Although I might bet that it will happen earlier, as insurance in case it does.)
• liampulles 4y ago
  I think as rather tech savvy people, we forget the degree to which most of the world population really struggles to use computers well[1]. The potential of this chat based AI technology to expand the market is massive. [1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
  • mock-possum 4y ago
    You do still need some kind of savvy to evaluate whether what the chat bot tells you is correct though.
• mftb 4y ago
  > Yesterday, I watched someone upload a video file to a chat app, ask a language model “Can you extract the first 5 s of the video?”, and then wait as the language model wrote a few lines of code and then actually executed that code, resulting in a downloadable video file. What chat app? Is this gpt-4? I haven't seen anything executing the code that is generated. So is the above quote a hypothetical or what?
  • ejstronge 4y ago
    Yes, this happened using GPT-4 and a coding plugin: https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1638971232443076609 https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1638971232443076609
    • mftb 4y ago
      Roger, ty for the info.
• Kon-Peki 4y ago
  ChatGPT will destroy GitHub and NPM long before it destroys programming. What do I need them for if I can get equivalent code written for me on-demand?
• nextlevelwizard 4y ago
  LLMs will be end for portion of programmers for sure. We all know people at our companies who aren't in this for passion, but for a pay check. And while so far it has been fine to code just for a pay check their time is up. We soon won't be needing code monkeys who just produce OK code, we will need people who actually know what they are doing and are passionate about what they do. We still need actual experts to vet the code LLMs produce and to choose the optimal solutions. This is what senior devs have done so far with junior and mid level devs always. There are people who can write code, but someone needs to review and approve what they have done. Obviously LLMs will also eat into that space, but before we come up with AGI LLMs alone won't be able to completely replace humans in software.
• pfdietz 4y ago
  I'm stoked by the idea that NL processing is suddenly becoming much more accessible and powerful. Old, boring static text documents are suddenly "coming alive". Imagine what this means not just for software engineering, but for all engineering, and even if not a single one of these documents is generated by a LLM.
• losvedir 4y ago
  One thing I don't understand well is how much computation using GPT-4 takes. Some of these discussion remind me of Bitcoin as a global payments processor: sure, it can work, but it's doing a tremendous amount of computation and the maximum rate of transactions it can sustain is pretty low. I know it used a huge amount of energy / GPU cycles / time to train, but now that the weights are computed, what's involved in running it? I know the model is huge and can't be run on an ordinary developer's machine, but I believe requests to it can be batched, and so I don't really know what the amortized cost is. Right now, this is all hidden behind OpenAI and its credits; is it running at a loss right now? How sustainable is using GPT-4 and beyond, as a day-to-day part of professional life?
  • ChatGTP 4y ago
    I’d say it’s a problem and a reason why they won’t tell us more information.
• m3kw9 4y ago
  There has never been a case where better tools mean less software developers, software will only get more complex and full featured as competitions raise because of it
• rlvk 4y ago
  Would you really really get on a plane if you knew that it's software was written and tested by chat gpt?
• deleted 4y ago
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• snickerbockers 4y ago
  For now ChatGPT will refuse to solve any bon-trivial programs, but i expect that getting behavior just right will require a prompt so specific that its actually hard than just writing the source code yourself. It's one thing to ask GPT to write a high level script to trim 5s off a video using ffmpeg. It's another thing to ask GPT to make ffmpeg, or even to make a specific modification to ffmpeg. It's hard to say how good GPT will be at real-world programming since we currently can't try it out. Maybe it can scale to the task, or maybe it can't, but i wouldn't say that programming is "finished".
• gmd63 4y ago
  Reducing coding to "deciding what to build" is not a pleasant endgame. In that endgame, anyone who can speak can command AI can do whatever they want it to do. Any kid with a louder mouth can outwish the wisest man on earth. That means shortsighted impulsive criminals can use it to learn how to steal. Shady politicians can use it to astroturf entire campaigns. Everyone knows the tropes but it bears repeating as we all march dumbly towards what's coming. It is far easier to destroy than it is to create. And humanity aside from China has not demonstrated any sort of sensible strategy to temper the tendency of destruction to outpace harmonious creation when it comes to AI. The more I see AI emerge and see people use it for exactly what people fear it shouldn't be used for, the more I feel China's centralized adoption of it, though maybe not "feel good", might be the DNA that survives in the natural selection of societies. I know of one person who pays for GPT, and I'm guessing they use it to astroturf demand for their own business's products, since that's what they were doing by hand when they were younger.
  • shostack 4y ago
    Reminds me of a book called The Wizbiz. Or, what happens when a coder from modern times gets transported to a fantasy world where magic is controlled by a wizards guild, and decides to democratize it.
• hintymad 4y ago
  ChatGPT is an amplifier of our skills. As Ben Thompson in a recent episode of the Podcast dithering said, something along the line that differentiable people will become more prominent. The existential threats are coming to current low-code/no code companies (some of them will thrive after integrating with ChatGPT or the like, though). They are also coming to entry-level engineers because there will be less demand of their time. Unfortunately, ChatGP will not be an existential threat to those who are good at only drawing boxes. Well, maybe asserting influence by drawing boxes is a rare skill.
• devnull255 4y ago
  Why don't more people see this capability as an accelerator and/or amplifier? To borrow from the book "Smarter Than You Think" by Clive Thompson, it can turn us into "centaurs", fusing the minds of humans with the computing power of AI. Doesn't this show that we can now use this technology to generate and execute code for modest problems that have already been solved, while we can spend more time on even more complex problems?