5 ms·

I'm not going to claim I know where this is going right now with LLMs, but: throughout history, I don't think anyone really saw automation coming for their own

I'm not going to claim I know where this is going right now with LLMs, but: throughout history, I don't think anyone really saw automation coming for their own jobs until it happened. I think people tend to think of their craft as an 'art' rather than a product. They miss that other people would MUCH prefer it to be automated, and that people will be willing to put up with slightly inferior output if it's practically free in comparison.

lancesells 4y ago
But it's not free. They keyholders might be making it cheap right now but once the quarterly reports aren't showing enough growth it'll all go up.
- sweezyjeezy 4y ago
  I don't buy that at all - you should look at what happened in the past, not to what's happening in the present. Over time, prices will go DOWN not up, due to improvements in hardware, engineering and probably smaller, more specialised models. A lot of investment will go into making that happen, like any other automation. If OpenAI did want to try and price gouge, then they'd just make a gap in the market for someone else to fill. Also - just consider how absurdly high SWE salaries are - it would have to get orders of magnitude more expensive than GPT 3.5 (say) for it not to be 'basically free' in comparison.
throwaway4aday 4y ago
This is already a meme but I'll repeat it here "hard pills to swallow: if you're afraid of ChatGPT taking your job then maybe you're not very good at your job" What this means to me is that if you see the parts of your job that are basically drudgery as being what you're good at then you should worry. If instead you see them as a necessary evil that you have to do in order to accomplish the bigger goals you're aiming for then you should be happy.
- sweezyjeezy 4y ago
  That's the kind of take that I was referring to. Yes, if GPT could replace you now, your job is not very skilled. But if investors see a signal that software might be automatable, they are going to throw mountains of cash at that and they'll be gunning for your job as much as anyone else's. I've seen a lot of comments on here like "well LLMs are good at writing snippets, but could never write or maintain large codebases to accomplish a larger goal" - but are you SURE about that 'never' given the current generation is already doing things people suspected they could never do? "But they'll never be able to manage / interpret stakeholders", Are you SURE that LLMs will have to adapt to fit stakeholders, and not the other way round? I don't know for sure, and even if this is coming, I've no idea on the timelines. But I'm not completely writing it off as a possibility anymore either.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    I think there's a good chance that the next version of GPT will be better at writing code than a junior level dev. I don't think this is going to result in a net loss of jobs. As software development becomes less expensive per unit volume I think demand will increase so much that both the total number of jobs and average salaries are going to increase.
    - visarga 4y ago
      Yes, because our entitlement expands even faster than GPT's capabilities.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - akiselev 4y ago
    > I've seen a lot of comments on here like "well LLMs are good at writing snippets, but could never write or maintain large codebases to accomplish a larger goal" - but are you SURE about that 'never' given the current generation is already doing things people suspected they could never do? "But they'll never be able to manage / interpret stakeholders", Are you SURE that LLMs will have to adapt to fit stakeholders, and not the other way round? That sounds a lot like the self driving cheerleaders five or ten years ago. That work so far has resulted in some awesome features like adaptive cruise control and parking assist but it fell far short of what the hype was promising to deliver by now. Five or ten years later Mercedes is the only company getting ready to ship level three self driving. Level four and five are still a pipe dream, practically restricted to a few companies like Waymo in a few controlled environments like Phoenix and San Francisco. GPT4 is great and I can't wait to see what 32K or even 100K/1M token models can do, but I fear we're about to hit the point where progress grinds to a halt because going further requires something closer to AGI than what we have now.

lancesells 4y ago

But it's not free. They keyholders might be making it cheap right now but once the quarterly reports aren't showing enough growth it'll all go up.

sweezyjeezy 4y ago
I don't buy that at all - you should look at what happened in the past, not to what's happening in the present. Over time, prices will go DOWN not up, due to improvements in hardware, engineering and probably smaller, more specialised models. A lot of investment will go into making that happen, like any other automation. If OpenAI did want to try and price gouge, then they'd just make a gap in the market for someone else to fill. Also - just consider how absurdly high SWE salaries are - it would have to get orders of magnitude more expensive than GPT 3.5 (say) for it not to be 'basically free' in comparison.

throwaway4aday 4y ago

This is already a meme but I'll repeat it here "hard pills to swallow: if you're afraid of ChatGPT taking your job then maybe you're not very good at your job" What this means to me is that if you see the parts of your job that are basically drudgery as being what you're good at then you should worry. If instead you see them as a necessary evil that you have to do in order to accomplish the bigger goals you're aiming for then you should be happy.

sweezyjeezy 4y ago
That's the kind of take that I was referring to. Yes, if GPT could replace you now, your job is not very skilled. But if investors see a signal that software might be automatable, they are going to throw mountains of cash at that and they'll be gunning for your job as much as anyone else's. I've seen a lot of comments on here like "well LLMs are good at writing snippets, but could never write or maintain large codebases to accomplish a larger goal" - but are you SURE about that 'never' given the current generation is already doing things people suspected they could never do? "But they'll never be able to manage / interpret stakeholders", Are you SURE that LLMs will have to adapt to fit stakeholders, and not the other way round? I don't know for sure, and even if this is coming, I've no idea on the timelines. But I'm not completely writing it off as a possibility anymore either.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  I think there's a good chance that the next version of GPT will be better at writing code than a junior level dev. I don't think this is going to result in a net loss of jobs. As software development becomes less expensive per unit volume I think demand will increase so much that both the total number of jobs and average salaries are going to increase.
  - visarga 4y ago
    Yes, because our entitlement expands even faster than GPT's capabilities.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- akiselev 4y ago
  > I've seen a lot of comments on here like "well LLMs are good at writing snippets, but could never write or maintain large codebases to accomplish a larger goal" - but are you SURE about that 'never' given the current generation is already doing things people suspected they could never do? "But they'll never be able to manage / interpret stakeholders", Are you SURE that LLMs will have to adapt to fit stakeholders, and not the other way round? That sounds a lot like the self driving cheerleaders five or ten years ago. That work so far has resulted in some awesome features like adaptive cruise control and parking assist but it fell far short of what the hype was promising to deliver by now. Five or ten years later Mercedes is the only company getting ready to ship level three self driving. Level four and five are still a pipe dream, practically restricted to a few companies like Waymo in a few controlled environments like Phoenix and San Francisco. GPT4 is great and I can't wait to see what 32K or even 100K/1M token models can do, but I fear we're about to hit the point where progress grinds to a halt because going further requires something closer to AGI than what we have now.