5 ms·

It does seem somewhat hard to imagine being employed as a SWE in 5 years without being proficient in incorporating some sort of generative AI into your work. E

It does seem somewhat hard to imagine being employed as a SWE in 5 years without being proficient in incorporating some sort of generative AI into your work. Edited to include “in 5 years”

dpkirchner 3y ago
Especially when tools like ChatGPT replace StackOverflow. Or augment SO, if Stack Exchange is IMO forward-thinking enough.
- morkalork 3y ago
  Small things like passing new questions into the AI to check for novelty would be nice. Now, if they could find a way to flag and de-rank obviously out-of-date solutions, that would be cool.
- zumu 3y ago
  If ChatGPT is trained on StackOverflow and people are using ChatGPT instead of StackOverflow, it seems pretty clear ChatGPT's use of StackOverflow's data is not protected under fair use.
blibble 3y ago
the lawsuit against github/microsoft scraping the entire internet for code wins and kills the practice entirely there, that was easy to imagine
- kaesar14 3y ago
  Another tool will just take it's place. It's too useful
  - blibble 3y ago
    if fair use doesn't apply to training... what would it be trained on? Microsoft's code base? who the hell would pay for that?
    - lagrange77 3y ago
      Right, trashy ads would randomly pop up in your program.
      - tcmart14 3y ago
        Or heaven for bid the AI decides to add one of Microsoft's famous "please wait while we try to fix the problem" dialogs in your project. Especially since I am pretty sure that code looks something like this at a high level double sleep = random time between now and heat death of the universe thread.sleep(sleep) throw prompt that problem couldn't be solved
    - NoZZz 3y ago
      There were ads for payed sample code work a while back... so, I guess at least some players are sourcing royalty free stuff.
- MrDresden 3y ago
  This will linger in the courts for years if not a decade, all the while the tech and industry will move on. Think Oracle vs Google case involving Java on Android. Was finally settled but didn't have any impact. And if it sinks one model, there will be others. Like has been said, the genie is out of the bottle.
ilaksh 3y ago
It's questionable that there will be many jobs that are very similar at all to SWE of today in five years. There is no reason to believe that the large (language/multimodal) models will stop progressing. In six months the IQ of ChatGPT increased by 30-40 points. If we pretend that these things are linear, (so far they are actually exponential) then that's a 430 IQ in five years. Assuming the acceleration of progress entirely stops and just increases linearly from here on out. There are quite a few people that think this stuff can easily become millions of times smarter. I am doubtful of that in the short term, because I think there are practical limits to compression, but you have to admit that multiple orders of magnitude increases in speed, data size, and efficiency are very plausible. Especially as new compute-in-memory systems start to roll out which is feasible in five years. The non-conservative and increasingly popular belief is that these systems will be hundreds of times faster than humans and fully autonomous within a few years. Which seems extremely foolhardy but also the most likely path due to the inability of society to recognize and adapt to the real danger with enough nuance. So I am wondering if there will be any jobs for any people at that point unless the AI is deeply integrated into their brain.
- anuragsoni 3y ago
  [flagged]
- kaesar14 3y ago
  The only counterpoint I have is that it seems the gpt models have trained on most available information on the Internet. So what’s the future progress there exactly.
  - ilaksh 3y ago
    Let's suppose that the datasets don't increase in size. Look at the difference in speed between the old ChatGPT and turbo ChatGPT. Suppose within 6-8 months they can do that again with GPT4. I think that would be about five times faster than a human. But there is more data. Do you really think they have ingested every single YouTube video or movie? Video and video+transcription is the next thing. Another source of data could be to have the models study and reprocess information into more concise language (possibly new vocabulary) or diagrams with the goal of increasing levels of abstraction or information density.

It does seem somewhat hard to imagine being employed as a SWE in 5 years without being proficient in incorporating some sort of generative AI into your work. Edited to include “in 5 years”

dpkirchner 3y ago

Especially when tools like ChatGPT replace StackOverflow. Or augment SO, if Stack Exchange is IMO forward-thinking enough.

morkalork 3y ago
Small things like passing new questions into the AI to check for novelty would be nice. Now, if they could find a way to flag and de-rank obviously out-of-date solutions, that would be cool.
zumu 3y ago
If ChatGPT is trained on StackOverflow and people are using ChatGPT instead of StackOverflow, it seems pretty clear ChatGPT's use of StackOverflow's data is not protected under fair use.

blibble 3y ago

the lawsuit against github/microsoft scraping the entire internet for code wins and kills the practice entirely there, that was easy to imagine

kaesar14 3y ago
Another tool will just take it's place. It's too useful
- blibble 3y ago
  if fair use doesn't apply to training... what would it be trained on? Microsoft's code base? who the hell would pay for that?
  - lagrange77 3y ago
    Right, trashy ads would randomly pop up in your program.
    - tcmart14 3y ago
      Or heaven for bid the AI decides to add one of Microsoft's famous "please wait while we try to fix the problem" dialogs in your project. Especially since I am pretty sure that code looks something like this at a high level double sleep = random time between now and heat death of the universe thread.sleep(sleep) throw prompt that problem couldn't be solved
  - NoZZz 3y ago
    There were ads for payed sample code work a while back... so, I guess at least some players are sourcing royalty free stuff.
MrDresden 3y ago
This will linger in the courts for years if not a decade, all the while the tech and industry will move on. Think Oracle vs Google case involving Java on Android. Was finally settled but didn't have any impact. And if it sinks one model, there will be others. Like has been said, the genie is out of the bottle.

ilaksh 3y ago

It's questionable that there will be many jobs that are very similar at all to SWE of today in five years. There is no reason to believe that the large (language/multimodal) models will stop progressing. In six months the IQ of ChatGPT increased by 30-40 points. If we pretend that these things are linear, (so far they are actually exponential) then that's a 430 IQ in five years. Assuming the acceleration of progress entirely stops and just increases linearly from here on out. There are quite a few people that think this stuff can easily become millions of times smarter. I am doubtful of that in the short term, because I think there are practical limits to compression, but you have to admit that multiple orders of magnitude increases in speed, data size, and efficiency are very plausible. Especially as new compute-in-memory systems start to roll out which is feasible in five years. The non-conservative and increasingly popular belief is that these systems will be hundreds of times faster than humans and fully autonomous within a few years. Which seems extremely foolhardy but also the most likely path due to the inability of society to recognize and adapt to the real danger with enough nuance. So I am wondering if there will be any jobs for any people at that point unless the AI is deeply integrated into their brain.

anuragsoni 3y ago
[flagged]
kaesar14 3y ago
The only counterpoint I have is that it seems the gpt models have trained on most available information on the Internet. So what’s the future progress there exactly.
- ilaksh 3y ago
  Let's suppose that the datasets don't increase in size. Look at the difference in speed between the old ChatGPT and turbo ChatGPT. Suppose within 6-8 months they can do that again with GPT4. I think that would be about five times faster than a human. But there is more data. Do you really think they have ingested every single YouTube video or movie? Video and video+transcription is the next thing. Another source of data could be to have the models study and reprocess information into more concise language (possibly new vocabulary) or diagrams with the goal of increasing levels of abstraction or information density.