24 ms·

Most of my skills are now worth nothing, but 10% are worth 1000x

444 points by gHeadphone 4y ago

T-zex 4y ago
I wonder when is the right time for the governments to start protecting local jobs the way they protect farmers from the cheaper produce grown abroad.
anthlax 4y ago
The other day, I was configuring fluxbox WM. I decided to use chatGPT because I didn’t really feel like parsing the wall of text that was the spec. I asked it how to add default names to the workspaces. It gave me an answer that looked so plausible I didn’t question it. 15-20 reloads later, I went over to the spec to verify chatGPTs work. It lied through it’s teeth. Entirely made up the API. Typically we see the “ChatGPT made stuff up” though the lens of an expert - they can immediately tell that the AI is lying. I finally felt it though the lens of a beginner - I fully believed it and it ended up wasting around an hour of mine. If a co-worker did this to me (straight up lied about an API) I’d be pretty upset - I have no problems with people saying “I don’t know” but pretending isn’t cool. I can’t be mad at openAI because it’s just a tool, but a tool I won’t be going back to to learn things.
aw9f70gae 4y ago
I hope that we can all stop denying that our skills are obviated so that we can get to the more important fact that it’s supposed to be a good thing, because humans have to do less work.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > I hope that we can all stop denying that our skills are obviated so that we can get to the more important fact that it’s supposed to be a good thing, because humans have to do less work. But this is false. Humans don’t need to do a particular amount of work because there is X amount of work to be done and it has to be distributed, so that new non-human systems replacing human work reduce the amount of work each human has to do. Humans have to do a particular amount of work because they need each, individually, to net (or be gifted) a certain amount of market value to acquire the needs of survival and desired lifestyle, so if the value of the work they do is decreased in the market, they don’t need to do less, they need to do more. There is no labor saving from automation, unless there is additional redistribution of the capital gains enabled by automation shifting returns from labor to capital.
  - aw9f70gae 4y ago
    I was implying that the additional redistribution is a necessity for an ethical society.
gymbeaux 4y ago
I’ve been using ChatGPT to do my job for a couple of months now. You have to be very specific with requirements you give it, and you do have to test the code of course, but at worst it gets me 90% of the way there in seconds instead of the hours or days it would take me to write that code by hand. Eventually, everyone is going to know how effective it is at writing code, and I think companies will expect ~10x the output from developers for the same salary and same 40-hour workweek. It’s disheartening.
colesantiago 4y ago
> ...but the other 10% are worth 1000x Until AI takes the last 10% with its next iteration with ease. Given the exponential pace of change of AI, this won't be long.
- humanrebar 4y ago
  How does AI talk my boss and team into doing the obvious things they're not paying attention to? Having the right answer is a big help, but it's a fraction of the job.
  - windowsrookie 4y ago
    In the future there won't be any team for the AI to talk to.
    - RedCondor 4y ago
      Just like crypto.
    - chongli 4y ago
      If you mean to imply that in the future it'll just be the boss sitting alone at his computer, interacting with the AI, then couldn't he still be more efficient by hiring a team of people to interact with the computer? After all, no matter how advanced the AI gets, the productivity of the company will still be limited by the speed at which the AI "operators" can interface with the machine. This is true regardless of the input choice: keyboard/mouse, voice input, or neural link.
      - Version467 4y ago
        Your argument defeats itself. If your AI is so good, that its productive output is bottlenecked by the speed of your supposed operators than you should just replace those with another instance of your ai, as well as the boss. Which is exactly the same scenario that your parent comment is presenting.
tr33house 4y ago
you really got me there
everyone 4y ago
Imo ChapGPT atm is like having a personal undergraduate student, who will write a large amount of crap they copied from various places, without ever making a point. It's great at writing crap that ideally shouldn't be written in the 1st place.
- derwiki 4y ago
  I think many have realized just how much “crap that shouldn’t be written” we have to write for our jobs, hobbies, socializing, etc
  - Damogran6 4y ago
    I know that 98% of the documentation I've written over my career never got read after it was committed.
- xpe 4y ago
  Tell us more. Why is it crap that should never have been written?
- shmoogy 4y ago
  You can direct it (or at least via api with a prompt) to be more concise or write for a specific audience
okr 4y ago
Was this written by ChatGPT? I felt i read the same thing over and over again. Hm?
- teh_klev 4y ago
  In "Bonus" section he asked ChatGPT to write two different essays based on two slightly different prompts: "write a 500 word blog post in the style of kent beck expanding on "I’ve been reluctant to try ChatGPT. Today I got over that reluctance. Now I understand why I was reluctant. The value of 90% of my skills just dropped to $0. The leverage for the remaining 10% went up 1000x. I need to recalibrate." and "write a 500 word blog post in the style of kent beck disagreeing with "I’ve been reluctant to try ChatGPT. Today I got over that reluctance. Now I understand why I was reluctant. The value of 90% of my skills just dropped to $0. The leverage for the remaining 10% went up 1000x. I need to recalibrate." That's probably why.
- dswalter 4y ago
  You might have missed a key element from the article itself. There are three versions of the same argument: the first by the author, the second by ChatGPT as an argument in support of the statement: "I’ve been reluctant to try ChatGPT. Today I got over that reluctance. Now I understand why I was reluctant. The value of 90% of my skills just dropped to $0. The leverage for the remaining 10% went up 1000x. I need to recalibrate." and the third is ChatGPT arguing against that same statement. As present, it's pretty clear which of the three is the most fun to read.
- nmlrx 4y ago
  Looks like it. If a blogger gleefully tells you that they will be replaced but embraces that fact, it is a commercial. If an academic tells you that ChatGPT is great, probably they have some connections to the AI industry.
  - samsolomon 4y ago
    I don't know about that. It's pretty amazing technology. Like it or not, it's impossible not to be impressed by LLMs. Sure some people are out there trying to sell you a course, but I think it's unfair to say the most bloggers or academics are in that camp.
quonn 4y ago
We need to admit that we don‘t know what‘s happening. Nobody can reasonably predict the future. For the next two years nothing is worthless. That‘s for sure. Probably for longer. Nobody knows.
- booleandilemma 4y ago
  So do I take out the 30-year mortgage or...?
  - quonn 4y ago
    This is a valid point. I‘m in a similar position and try to pay it off faster. However my point stands. We don‘t know. This kind of uncertainty is uncomfortable but it‘s best to ignore it. Forget about ChatGPT until you have seen the industry change. edit: I would also argue to keep investing in yourself. What else is there to do? If AI gets to the point of replacing developers it will equally affect most office jobs. If you want to be a builder you can become that later. Everyone else would and the economy would likely collapse. We‘ll see when we get there. Imagine an uber or taxi driver reading about self-driving cars in 2010 and dropping everything. Yet, a decade later uber is the same. Most likely it will be the same in 5 years. Even if self-driving cars arrive it will take until 2030 or 2035 for them to be widely used.
  - bdcravens 4y ago
    I did, at age 45. Will I be around when I'm 75? Will I be working in 10 years? No idea.
  - coldpie 4y ago
    Sure. The advice is the same as it ever was: spend well below your means, build up a savings buffer (>= 6 months of expenses), eliminate debt ASAP. The advice is what it is, exactly for situations like the ones you're imagining. No need to put your life on hold.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
13years 4y ago
Rather than seeing the rise of AI as a threat to my career, I now view it as an opportunity to augment my skills and deliver even greater value to my clients. By embracing AI tools like ChatGPT, I can automate routine tasks and focus my efforts on the areas where my expertise and creativity can truly shine. It is the only option available in the immediate term and I would argue is the correct short term perspective. However, if AI continues on its path of exponential technological acceleration, then this is going to be very problematic. You can't sprint ahead of an accelerating technological curve forever. We are replacing the old monotonous task rat race with the new rat race attempting to remain relevant against inescapable advancements. I've described this in more detail writing as "Climbing the skill ladder is going to look more like running on a treadmill at the gym. No matter how fast you run, you aren’t moving, AI is still right behind you learning everything that you can do." https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things
- orwin 4y ago
  I'm not so sure about it. Neural networks and their models are built on theories made 50 years ago. The breakthrough happened in 2011 and we were able to build a lot on it, but we are close to our limits unless a company made another discovery and didn't publish it. I'm sure we have room for improvements but the acceleration stopped at GPT3.5, and imho the last version proved that the next increment will be specific but not as impressive as GPT3 was. I could be wrong, but imho our engineering caught up to our theory, or is close to, and while we'll be less stale than the aerospace sector, as our experiments are less materially expensive, I can see the field diversify but stop growing as fast.
  - 13years 4y ago
    I don't disagree. However, those who believe we are still on the accelerating curve also believe that somehow we will remain relevant. It doesn't make logical sense. So, the only counter to my argument is that we hit a wall. This is very possible, but AI development thus far is certainly increasing the unpredictability of future events. As we move forward we are in some sense understanding it less. The disparity over the definition of AGI is only increasing.
chasing 4y ago
> The differential value of being better at putting words in a row just dropped to nothing. Anyone can now put words in a row pretty much as well as I can. This seems like a wild misrepresentation of what being a writer is. Writers communicate ideas. Their ideas. Clearly. They can use a pencil, a typewriter, write in French, use pictographs, use a spell checker, use ChatGPT, hire a ghostwriter. If you’re really a writer, all that matters is the end result and I can guarantee you that people who use ChatGPT thinking it will put words in a row will be able to generate a million stupid articles a day, but those people won’t be “writers.” Also, I still maintain that I can communicate ideas significantly faster by just typing them than by using a tool like ChatGPT. When the ideas are clear, the writing is easy. It’s one of the fundamental powers of writing: It can almost move at the speed of thought.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  There’s the difference between being a writer and managing writers. If you are writing yourself it is at the speed of thought, if you are hiring somebody else to write you can possibly free yourself up to increase your throughput but you are going to spend time communicating expectations and reading/editing the results. If you develop a good relationship with the writer the effort to do all that can be small but if you don’t it sure can be tiring. (e.g. the New York Times has a strong and consistent style enforced in editing, people who write regularly for that paper learn to write in that style to make the editor’s job easier, people who write occasionally for that paper get their work seriously mangled by the editor)
- sremani 4y ago
  You are ignoring the fact that most of the writers are bullshit vendors regurgitating books, quotes, themes and things they read from somewhere else. If anything ChatGPT will basically filter out these sophists because it is a Chad-Sophist. The important thing now, is "depth" of knowledge. Of course, good generalists with wide array of mental models have their jiggle, but in the world of LLMs an individual's depth of knowledge trumps.
  - Swizec 4y ago
mlatu 4y ago
all chatgpt and similar tech does is undermine our trust in "what we perceive has actual value because some human took the time to make it in the first place". first sponsored ads, now this shit. it's the tragedy of the commons, again and again with our attention as the abused common good
- krona 4y ago
  Software is driven entirely by utility value, not production value. I don't care whether the app was written on stone tablets in hand-rolled assembly, or by an AI, so long as the plane lands safely.
  - metalliqaz 4y ago
    the value of the plane landing safely comes from two things. (1) that it is actually capable of landing correctly, and (2) that we have reason to expect that #1 is true before we get on. #2 comes from rigor in the production process.
- Radim 4y ago
  > it's the tragedy of the commons, again and again with our attention as the abused common good Don't worry, your attention is abused only as long as it is of value. I.e. only to the degree said attention triggers an action that ultimately brings about profit. The days when human attention was of paramount value, because the human activity it triggered was uniquely valuable, are coming to an end. So on the contrary, rejoice! You may see fewer sponsored ads. In fact the whole "ads" discipline as we know it might disappear, as its economical foundation crumbles.
tlogan 4y ago
A significant issue for some individuals is their inability to identify or articulate the necessary steps to achieve the desired outcome. They may have a general sense of the desired outcome but lack the clarity to outline the specific actions required to reach it. This challenge could be attributed to the difference between analytical thinking and intuitive or holistic thinking. However, I think that the crux of the matter may lie in the "thinking" aspect itself. Some people have been conditioned not to think, either through training or external influences, but this does not mean they lack intelligence (nobody is stupid). With ChatGPT, the paradigm shifts dramatically. The demand for thought and engagement is ever-present, as repetitive and mindless tasks become obsolete. So mindless tasks hit $0, thinking 1000x!
- blackbear_ 4y ago
  > With ChatGPT, the paradigm shifts dramatically. The demand for thought and engagement is ever-present, as repetitive and mindless tasks become obsolete. I see what you mean, but > Some people have been conditioned not to think, either through training or external influences I believe that chatgpt & co. are going to make this much worse for the majority of people, at least in the medium term. A large part of this conditioning happens in schools and universities, and in general, students always look for the path of least resistance towards a passing grade (in this case, chatgpt all the way).
jl6 4y ago
It's worth reflecting that the world's bottom billion already have skills worth very close to $0, giving them no leverage at anything and no prospect of competing for higher level employment. If we enter a scenario where AI guts the middle class, I hope one upside might be a critical mass of people comes to understand how to value people independently of their economic output.
- 11101010001100 4y ago
  So we should just hope? Sounds like a good plan.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  > I hope one upside might be a critical mass of people comes to understand how to value people independently of their economic output They are valued independently of that. E.g. in a democracy someone who is super productive will get paid a lot, but will have exactly the same number of votes as someone with nothing. If you think their wage should be valued independently of their economic output, then I think that is a misunderstanding: money is only useful as a measure of economic value.
  - YellOh 4y ago
    Money is also useful for other measures, such as access to food & housing. I'd prefer a person with no economic value still be able to access commodities that do have economic value.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      Access to food and housing have economic value; that's why they cost money. That doesn't mean you can't give people money or housing; again, you'd just be valuing them on something other than their economic output.
  - goawaythrwaway 4y ago
    > If you think their wage should be valued independently of their economic output, then I think that is a misunderstanding: money is only useful as a measure of economic value. Yes exactly, and to all those whiners complaining about not being able to put food on the table whilst I and my schoolmates at Shortridge Academy each have trusts worth more than their expected lifetime earnings I say: Though your life might have "value" to a select few (like your parents) it unfortunately doesn't have much economic value to those who actually measure such things (like my parents.) It would behoove you to take some personal responsibility for your station in life. I certainly take responsibility for mine, and that, in my clearly valuable opinion, makes all the difference between us.
gizmo 4y ago
ChatGPT can automate the most basic programming tasks. It will help you find the right command line parameters or the right API calls, or help you with simple code manipulation. But when you're doing actual programming what use is ChatGPT? I hear programmers despair about how their skills have become commoditized, but ChatGPT can't do anything I consider programming. Yes it can help write or summarize documentation. It's a useful tool. But it can't program. What am I missing here, what is it that makes ChatGPT such a game-changer for software engineers?
- gymbeaux 4y ago
  If you’re specific enough, it is excellent at writing not just simple stuff but complex programs. Entire programs. Usually they work, but if they don’t, it’s a matter of swapping out usually a word or two in a single line of code. It is excellent at writing code.
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  You're missing that in as recently as 2019 LLM's could barely form a coherent sentence.
  - surgical_fire 4y ago
    ... so? That happens to every new technology. It is mostly useless until some development makes it viable or useful. Getting a time cut from 2019 to 2023 and extrapolating that now it will advance at an exponential pace every few years is as stupid as getting a time cut from 1980 to 2020 and predicting it will have a glacial pace of advancement in the future. Truth is that there were some interesting advancements in LLM research, but it's difficult to tell what will happen. Will it plateau for a while? Will it keep advancing at a fast pace? Will it have frequent minor improvements but never really get to the point of AGI (basically growing asymptotically)?
  - switch007 4y ago
    So extrapoloating from that progress, it'll soon be able to do: requirement gathering, documentation, dependency management, unit tests, integration tests, configuration of infrastructure, cost management, alerting, monitoring, metrics, logging, secrets management, outage responses, discussions with stakeholders, A/B testing, security compliance etc?
throwaway8689 4y ago
I tried chat gpt for the first time today. I asked it to write me a script to fetch some data from an API. It didn't succeed, and this kind of common task from a well-documented API should (I thought) be a slam dunk.
- vajrabum 4y ago
  Prompt engineering is a thing for sure. Might want to search the news here for some clues on ycombinator to get better at it. And some tasks are beyond it.
- Kranar 4y ago
  I tried driving a car for the first time today. I just wanted to drive from my house to the end of the block. I crashed into a fire hydrant and almost killed three people. This should be a very simple and common task, going from your house to the end of the block, and yet the car failed miserably. Sarcasm aside, at my company I've noticed a very disturbing split among my co-workers. One group of co-workers hold the above attitude, that they should be able to just use a tool on day one and it should be able to solve problems that even just a couple of months ago would have been unimaginable. That group of co-workers looks at ChatGPT and thinks it's basically underwhelming and a big nothingburger. The other group of co-workers are learning how to use ChatGPT to solve their problems. They're learning clever ways of prompting ChatGPT, how to give it a proper system message, how to take large tasks and break it down into smaller tasks to offload a lot of the grunt work onto ChatGPT while they focus more on the overall architecture. That group of co-workers is seeing excellent gains in productivity. The idea that you would just use a tool on day one, probably don't really know much about it or understand it that well, and expect it to magically solve your problems is about as foolish as driving a car for the first time, not really knowing anything about cars, and expecting nothing bad to happen. ChatGPT is a tool, the people who take the time to learn that tool and understand how it works will become much more productive software developers, and those who don't will get left behind.
  - Workaccount2 4y ago
    A big one for me is being able to decide when to use GPT3.5 and when to use GPT4 for a given prompt. Perhaps it will be short term that this is a "skill", sooner or later they will lift the GPT4 cap and speed it up, but for right now I can stretch out a GPT4 session indefinitely if I know what gpt3.5 can and can't handle. Besides that though, chatGPT has been nothing short of a huge product....I don't even want to say a "huge productivity boost", that implies like good sleep or drinking coffee, its been like an augmentation that allows be to bat above my league. Like a free (well $20/mo) co-worker who knows a lot about programming.
deleted 4y ago
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greenthrow 4y ago
ChatGPT is amazing at creating the TGI Fridays or Chili's or Applebee's level of copy. If you want Michelin star, or hole in the wall, or 70 year old street vendor level copy, you still need a human. In my opinion this is intrinsic to the way LLMs work and won't change until we have AGI. A great writer's writing is informed by all kinds of experience, taste and knowledge that an LLM simply cannot posess. It can only imitate.
- krona 4y ago
  > It can only imitate. That already eclipses (at a guess) 75% of humanity, then.
  - georgeecollins 4y ago
    Yes, but 75% of humanity can't make a living wage writing or making art. So really at this point you are replacing an intern or a fiverr contractor.
bushido 4y ago
I have been using ChatGPT pretty consistently for various summarization type of tasks for a bit. But this weekend I tried using it to learn a technical concept I've struggled with. Previously, I could have spoken about the topic intelligently, but could not have put it to any practical use. In a few quick prompts and < 1 hr of synthesis, I was able to get to practical knowledge to understand it enough to try and build something from scratch. And building something in another 2-3 hours. I think this would have taken me 1-2 months of dedicate hitting my head on the wall time to learn previously. In that moment, I had a realization similar to the author. Basic flow of the prompt went something like: 1. Tell me about this thing that's part of the concept that I don't understand? 2. Explain this new term you threw at me? Do it in the context on an industry I understand well. 3. Explain yet another concept you mentioned in the same industry concept? 4. This sounds a lot like this other concept I know. How do these differ in practical use? 5. Write me some sample code in a language I understand very well, that does X use case the you mentioned? 6. What are these other concepts you used? 7. How can I do this new concept to do something I've implemented before. Essentially, my knowledge of other concepts, industries and being able to draw parallels allowed me to learn much much faster.
- Cyberthal 4y ago
  Bullshido blitzkrieg
- quonn 4y ago
  I find these stories strange. If it would be like that, wouldn‘t you learn from an expert friend just as fast? My experience is that for anything worth learning it takes a long time of thinking about it from various angles.
  - mdrzn 4y ago
    Is there an endless amount of "expert friend" available somewhere that I don't know about? How can I learn something none of my friends know about?
    - 4y ago
thenerdhead 4y ago
Every AI blogpost recently reads like a bad parable of the old engineer and the hammer.
oxfordmale 4y ago
This is hype curve speak. I have used ChatGPT 4.0 to generate code. It is brilliant at templating. However, it still makes glaring errors. My main bugbear is that ChatGPT has the confidence of a psychopath. It will never say it doesn't quite know how to program something, and it starts making up things to answer your question. For example, I asked it to write code to load data from MySQL to Snowflake. The template looked fine until I discovered it made up a method that doesn't exist on Pandas data frames. Finally, when I asked it to chunk, it did a decent job...other than truncating the destination table every time it loaded a chunk of data. Yes, it did a fantastic job templating the code, picking consistent variable names, etc. However, I could have gotten as far by Googling/StackOverflowing. The advantage of Googled code is that you know it will likely work, give or take a few bugs. Most humans don't dream up methods that simply don't exist.
commandlinefan 4y ago
Yikes, both of the ChatGPT essays were actually more pleasant to read than the one that he actually wrote - and this is Kent Beck.
georgeecollins 4y ago
I think we are in a 3D Printing/ Block Chain/ VR hype cycle where something important is happening but everybody is over reacting. I really doubt 90% of anyone's skills have become worthless. Mediocre art and mediocre writing weren't valuable or expensive last year. People have been having programs write articles for a long time now. In the long run, yeah things are going to change a lot. But we knew that didn't we? I wouldn't invest into this now, because there is too much is being promised too soon.
- Turing_Machine 4y ago
  > Mediocre art and mediocre writing weren't valuable or expensive last year. At one point every town had a blacksmith, even the smallest villages. You could go there to get your horse shod, buy a pair of fireplace tongs, get a new latch for your door, and so on. In the nature of things, most of these blacksmiths were mediocre, but still, they made a living. Now, there are certainly still a few people who make a living by being blacksmiths, but you sure won't find one at every wide spot in the road.
  - ghiculescu 4y ago
    ok, but has there ever been a time when mediocre artists or writers made a living?
    - the_only_law 4y ago
      I don’t know, do TV writers make a living?
      - mjr00 4y ago
        Writers working on network TV represent the most successful 1% of all writers.
        the_only_law 4y ago
        Yeah I’d say most of that is pretty mediocre.
eloisant 4y ago
> If I’m big & you’re small & you’re growing faster, then it’s a matter of time before you surpass me. This is true: my son went from 50cm to 150cm in 13 years, so when he turns 26 he should be roughly 250cm, then 350cm when he approaches 40.
- wing-_-nuts 4y ago
  So, you're suggesting the tech is on an S curve, and you might be right, but I think the top of that S curve is going to be much higher than you expect.
  - croes 4y ago
    The same seemed to be true for self driving cars, still not in sight. Same could happen with GPTs. Could be boring if all companies suddenly have the same texts because the asked the same model the same questions. GPTs can write like somebody but they can't be somebody new.
    - zamnos 4y ago
      Sure they can. http://sumplete.com http://sumplete.com is a new puzzle game, which its author says was invented by ChatGPT. If ChatGPT couldn't do anything new, then how did that game come to be? Outside of a very limited test area and test market, self-driving cars have yet to even be used by the general public. Meanwhile ChatGPT's been adopted by en estimated 100 million people, many of which are using even just the free version to deliver value to the companies they work for. Maybe if ChatGPT was all hyped and unavailable to try by the masses it would sound like a lot more hot air, but it's open to anyone with an account, who can verify claims on their own. Not everyone will or has to walk away impressed, but when it does in a couple minutes what would have taken you a few hours, it's hard not to be.
      - croes 4y ago
        That's the problem. ChatGPT claimed and the user believed but it's wrong. GPTs remix, so they may create new variations but nothing really new.
photochemsyn 4y ago
The most important skill in a rapidly changing world is the ability to learn new skills - and skills build on other skills. If you don't understand the fundamentals of some area of technology, ChatGPT isn't going to be of much use in helping you build anything that looks at all professional. On the other hand, refusing to learn how to write effective LLM prompts makes little sense. Another important reality is that if you buy into what's being advertised as good for you, you may be setting yourself up for a long-term dependency, which if taken away, will leave you with less than nothing (rather like drug or alcohol addiction.) For example, how many people, if transported to a pre-industrial society, could play any meaningful role in recreating modern industrial civilization? How would those conversations go? "We had these wonderful things, the Internet and devices to communicate across long distances and we had fine textiles woven by machines controlled by computers and airplanes and..." "Oh, and how do you make such things?" "Ummmm.... well, first we're going to need some silicon ore..." Skills are only valuable in the context of economic activity in a society if other people see them as valuable. As far as ChatGPT, anyone becoming absolutely dependent on LLM models to do their job may find themselves in a world of hurt if those models suddenly become unavailable for some reason.
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  > some silicon ore It's called "sand", btw. And you'd actually also need boron and phosphorus, to dope it with... hmm. In any case, one shouldn't try to jump over the steps. Black metallurgy first, parts standartization second, then coal chemistry, then toy-scale electricty, then steamworks, etc. Not to mention radical changes in the structure of human societies! Good luck with that.
- 13years 4y ago
  > The most important skill in a rapidly changing world is the ability to learn new skills This is what AI is. It is a skill learning machine that can outpace your ability to learn given enough training data. The answer of just learning a new skill will not hold up forever. That window will continue to shrink. > anyone becoming absolutely dependent on LLM models to do their job may find themselves in a world of hurt if those models suddenly become unavailable for some reason. This can be said of every technology.
kykeonaut 4y ago
In my opinion, those 90% of skills were always worth $0, yet we need them to enable the 10% of skills that are worth 1000x. In fact even with AI, you still need the $0 skills to ensure that whatever model you are using is giving you the answer you need. There is a deep connection between our different skills that enable us to create value. Bundling them into separate bins based on how much value they provide individually feels like the wrong approach.
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kodah 4y ago
> Anyone can now put words in a row pretty much as well as I can. This suffers the same fallacy that people who think ChatGPT is somehow going to upend coding suffer from. Can GPT-4 write code and sentences? Yes, it can, but it makes a lot of subtle mistakes. Good programmers are often good at: - decomposition - thoroughness - identifying important components My hypothesis is that AI will make those things summarily more obvious if a programmer doesn't have them. A programmer that's not thorough will not have the inclination or drive to review and understand all output, so the output will harm their work whether that's writing or code. AI can't decompose anything sufficiently complex as a function. It can kind of get close, but again, it misses the objective of decomposition because decomposition isn't a language function, it's a higher order abstract function. Last, AI isn't going to recognize importance or priority, especially if it's on-going. Try giving it a rules system and see if it follows the rules to a T. IME, it does not. AI will make good programmers better, and some okay programmers better, but I have a feeling it will also make bad programmers worse.
- seba_dos1 4y ago
  I agree. Trying to get some non-trivial code out of GPT that isn't a mindless boilerplate feels like helping a clueless schoolmate in an IT class write their code for the teacher's assignment when, sure, they do try their best, but it's clear that they don't really grasp it and just want to finish the assignment and forget about it as soon as possible. You can get a good result, but you need to try really hard. It only seems useful for when you know exactly what to do, but you don't feel like typing it all out - which happens, but in my experience the most valuable part of programmer's job is when you figure things out that nobody around knows how to do.
  - peterangular 4y ago
    > Trying to get some non-trivial code out of GPT that isn't a mindless boilerplate For some of us, the boilerplate code generated by ChatGPT is incredibly valuable. I have been utilizing it to create snippets of code for languages that I am not familiar with in terms of syntax. I understand that I may be criticized for this, however, I am not an expert in all of the languages I am required to support. Thus, I often find myself struggling with the syntax while understanding the overall concept I am attempting to accomplish. Example prompt: "Write me a proof of concept in language X that serializes JSON then POSTS to a HTTP API endpoint."
gavinhoward 4y ago
I am a programmer and a blogger, like the author. Unlike the author, I do not monetize my blog in any way (or I assume he does on Substack). The author is both right and wrong, just about different things. First, he assumes GPT will get exponentially better. If that were true, all cars would be full self-driving already. GPT will have an S curve or Sigmoid function. Second, he assumes that GPT will always be able to produce things from differing voices well. However, as more data is used, these bots will only become more homogenous. You can see clues of this when it managed to make a Biggie Smalls rap, but did not with Woody Gunthrie, whose data is probably closer to the mainstream than Biggie's. (This is a gut feeling; could be wrong.) Third, as things become more of the same bot-like feeling, even from people, those who have their own voice and touch will stand out more. You can see this in his essay, versus the two written by the bot. The voice of the bot ones feels more stilted to me. His feels more natural. What people need to do is to develop their own voice and touch. In writing, develop your voice. Write without help. Write a lot. Create a blog. Put random stupid stuff there. Let yourself rant. That random stupid stuff and those rants will not be mainstream, and if it's stupid and ranty, you won't have to care about quality. That lack of care will let you have fun, and that fun will become your voice. This is how I developed my voice with my blog. In code, develop your touch. Don't just code; design. Think about concepts. Think about UX and workflows. Iterate until everything is great. Then design the implementation and iterate until everything fits. Then, and only then, code. But as you code, iterate the design to remove things that no longer fit and add things that do. Dogfood your software. Use it for everything you can, even things that don't fit well. Iterate and change some more to make your dogfooding easier. The end result will be software that is easy-to-use and fits the users' needs well. That fit will be your touch. This is how I developed my touch with my most well-known project: `bc`. [1] But you don't even need to stop there. With my `bc`, I spent time supporting users and implementing things for them. Obviously, I still designed changes before implementing them, but I listened to my users and gave them what they wanted within the constraints I had. The end result is a `bc` that can act like the GNU `bc` or the BSD `bc`, whichever you want. It can also be its own thing with extra features. Listening to users is another human touch. Make use of it. In fact, that's where I will make a living from my current project: my support for it will be best-in-class [2], and that's something GPT can never replicate because it cannot replicate my brain, my voice, and my touch, even when trained on my writing. In other words, the author is write that the 90% is useless, but those 90% were the ones where you were at least partially imitating a bot anyway. Those 10% are the human traits. If you want to have useful skills, be a human, not a fleshy bot. Footnote: I feel bad for anyone that gets my code or writing as output from GPT. My code fits my head and no one else's. It also uses custom API's that don't exist anywhere else, which means such output would be useless. The same goes for my writing, though to a lesser extent. [1]: https://github.com/gavinhoward/bc https://github.com/gavinhoward/bc [2]: https://github.com/gavinhoward/bc/issues/66 https://github.com/gavinhoward/bc/issues/66
tudorw 4y ago
Just rebrand with a made up title, most people are average, it's average to expect average.
giantg2 4y ago
That's OK. 100% of my skills have no commercial value.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nottorp 4y ago
> Then I replaced a weak verb with a stronger one—”would like to” became “crave”. I agree. ChatGPT should be very good at writing clickbait.
poulpy123 4y ago
I mean 1000 x nothing is still nothing
bccdee 4y ago
> My skills continue to improve, but ChatGPT’s are improving faster. It’s a matter of time. Nah, I don't think there's any way that LLMs can totally circumvent the problems of pervasive hallucination and low-quality output. There's a fundamental divide between the things LLMs would have to do to replace us (think critically, problem-solve) and the things they're designed to do (produce "realistic" text based on the data they were trained on). Sure, they can engage in a basic level of critical thinking and problem-solving, but I'd expect to see diminishing returns long before they can actually compete with humans. After all, we're not training them to produce smarter or more correct answers—just more verisimilitudinous ones. The local maximum is bland and uninsightful yet very plausibly human writing. I'll worry when we come up with an architecture & training scheme that directly optimizes for problem-solving.
- vervez 4y ago
  min{d(problem)/d(theta)} is essentially what LLMs are doing with a prompt. Every session that a chatgpt user has leads to either a resolution or not, which is the loss function given the prompt used to reach that point. It's getting better at not hallucinating in my experience over just the past 4 months.
seu 4y ago
> The differential value of being better at putting words in a row just dropped to nothing. Anyone can now put words in a row pretty much as well as I can. People seem to overvalue "putting words in a row" and undervalue "saying something interesting or new" these days.
drewcoo 4y ago
So ChatGPT allows Beck to pretend to be a creative and totally devalues creatives? That's not a great look. Honestly, I'm more comfortable with the notion of it making everyone code monkey for a day.
freedude 4y ago
Is Kent Beck a liar? ChatGPT is a liar. A proven liar. What happens when a machines lies to a person enough? Eventually that person dies. Sooo, unplug the lying machine. https://jonathanturley.org/2023/04/06/defamed-by-chatgpt-my-own-bizarre-experience-with-artificiality-of-artificial-intelligence/ https://jonathanturley.org/2023/04/06/defamed-by-chatgpt-my-...
- freedude 4y ago
  Another example of a lying machine killing someone. Recently posted in YC. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35628485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35628485 https://www.asktog.com/columns/027InterfacesThatKill.html https://www.asktog.com/columns/027InterfacesThatKill.html
al_be_back 4y ago
>> 90% of My Skills are now worth $0 yes, it's an oversimplification; but i do think AI hype will pipe-down (just as many other shiny promises: self-driving cars, swimming pools on Mars, crypto for everyone etc). writing software, like writing books/essays/poetry, it's a highly creative and analytical process; tiny variations in content could potentially lead to massive consequences that may only be noticeable when released into the wild. most issues these industries face are not on Quantity or Speed these days, but on Quality, Proofing and Integration.
makach 4y ago
Douglas Adams got it right. It’s not about the answers, it’s all about the questions. It is truly amazing what GPT can produce - but not after long you start noticing a pattern in the answers it is providing. There still is room for human intervention in order to transform and refine the information in the correct context.
- SheinhardtWigCo 4y ago
  Ironically, the pattern you're describing is likely due to RLHF.
coupdejarnac 4y ago
What's going to happen when AI's are trained on data produced by AI's? I would guess that AI generated writing is going to converge to some banal, widely accessible style.
pklausler 4y ago
Writing that conveys original ideas will have nothing to worry about.
precompute 4y ago
Wow, that article's a really badly written mish-mash of paragraphs that end up saying nothing at all.
RecycledEle 4y ago
I appreciate the excellent article. It sums up ChatGPT better than anything else I have seen. My first goal is to improve my skills by using AI as a personal tutor. My second goal is to improve my productivity by integrating AI into my work flow. My third goal is to never getting so lazy that I ever trust the output of an AI without proofreading it first. I try to imagine the output of the AI coming from a Reddit user with a suspicious-sounding handle. This is a lot like when I learned to use spell-checkers correctly. Some people always went with the first option, and wrote a lot of odd school papers. Some people use the spell checkers to correct their spelling in their school papers, but never learned to be a better speller. I learned correct spellings from spell checkers while correcting my spelling. There is also a metaphor for calculators. Students should use calculators to check their work, but never become dependent on them.
rsrsrs86 4y ago
I’ve been having ridiculously good code generation results. I mean projects that took months delivered under one hour.
- anthlax 4y ago
  Any examples?
franze 4y ago
I have a pretty ok Google spreadsheet foo, bit over the last 3 years it stagnated as I knew everything I needed to know to do what I need to do. Some improvement here and there with some Googling here and there. Last week I had a slight new challenge, and I started googling but realised, there must be a better way to solve this new challenge. In the next 2 hours I learned more about Google Spreadsheets than in the last 3 years combined. Thx to ChatGPT (4!!!) I now have a multifunctional dashboard I can use and reuse for this and future projects. Googling stuff really seems like such a bad investment of my time and brain. Google really has become a lazy monopoly.
- AH4oFVbPT4f8 4y ago
  I did something very similar where I taught myself obsidian markdown and advanced slides. It took a few hours but now that I know how it works and have a few templates I can knock out great looking slides in a matter of minutes. Hell I can write sql that builds the markdown for me and use mermaid to render the flow charts. It’s all about being able to learn and figure things out on your own. Spending that day learning is going to save me so much time doing tedious work of making slides for presentations.
croes 4y ago
>If I’m big & you’re small & you’re growing faster, then it’s a matter of time before you surpass me Yeah, because grow rates are constant and don't change over time.
janeway 4y ago
10% of remaining skills are worth 1000x ? Yeah, the reminds me of the AT&T switchboard operators who agree that the new automated systems work but they will never fully replace humans because the customer wants to talk to a human operator when they call on the phone. How many millions of jobs today entail manual work that could be simply automated already but the employer doesn’t understand the the tech or feel the need? I sympathise with those who can’t keep up but perhaps lots of jobs will remain which could easily be automated - at least for a generation. I look forward to the Star Trek-like future of passion-based motivation.
davesque 4y ago
Am I the only one who has not been able to get ChatGPT to produce what I consider to be passable writing? I've only succeeded in getting ChatGPT to output completely predictable, unoriginal, disengaging prose. For example, try getting ChatGPT to re-write a story in the style of Franz Kafka. What you'll get is a completely flat agglomeration of tropes that sound like the first jottings of a high-minded middle schooler. People keep acting like the arrival of ChatGPT is a death knell for writers but I'm just not seeing it. I can only conclude that most people don't give many shits about the quality of what they read. Maybe that's the real insight here.
- cyanydeez 4y ago
  See, the issue is you. ChatGPT is the smartest guy in the room when that room is too stupid to question him. Basically, it's the George Carlin joke: imagine the average person and realize half the people are dumber than that.
- chillacy 4y ago
  In my observation the people most excited aren’t writing top tier fiction, they’re writing marketing copy, SEO blog spam, and business emails. But who knows, if this technology improves as fast as AlphaGo did, it may start taking on the best of the best one day?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ducharmdev 4y ago
> Fourth, to everyone say, “Yeah, but ChatGPT isn’t very good,” I would remind you that technological revolutions aren’t about absolute values but rather growth rates. If I’m big & you’re small & you’re growing faster, then it’s a matter of time before you surpass me. Assuming the growth rates are static, then sure. But in reality they're fluctuating too, and we can't know how they'll change in the future. Plenty of technologies have had fast early growth, only to peter out long-term.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
voidhorse 4y ago
Eh, I'm still confident that the biggest effect these tools will have is to increase the sheer amount of noise per capita, which was the trajectory the world has been headed down since the internet and particularly since the advent of social media. LLMs will be wonderful noise generators. They can produce volumes of (probably largely useless) information at rates most people could hardly fathom and can do so with basically a nonexistent barrier to entry. They do not understand concepts, mathematics, logical relationships. They are good at emulating sentences, and maybe ok at helping creatives get new ideas, but at the end of the day, they're just a multiplier over the metric tons of pointless data we already produce on a daily basis. Furthermore, they only work in a specific zone of the utilitarian, capitalistic flattening of value that modern hyper-capitalism perpetuates. The experience of art generated by an AI is only of interest and valuable due to the gradual erosion of human value under the gears of capitalism. Money has ensured everything has its price (equivalence). It's pretty easy to imagine a monetary-free society in which the human side of any product (the experience that went into it, the human hands that fashioned it) would out-value the utilitarian ends of the product (there are already strands of this in small maker movements). LLMs are only prescribed value in a system that has already fully embraced mass-production and the standardization and flattening of human experience down to common denominations. A society that placed no stock in mass-produced goods would have no interest in LLMs. They are quite literally just an imitation game.

444 points by gHeadphone 4y ago

I wonder when is the right time for the governments to start protecting local jobs the way they protect farmers from the cheaper produce grown abroad.

anthlax 4y ago

The other day, I was configuring fluxbox WM. I decided to use chatGPT because I didn’t really feel like parsing the wall of text that was the spec. I asked it how to add default names to the workspaces. It gave me an answer that looked so plausible I didn’t question it. 15-20 reloads later, I went over to the spec to verify chatGPTs work. It lied through it’s teeth. Entirely made up the API. Typically we see the “ChatGPT made stuff up” though the lens of an expert - they can immediately tell that the AI is lying. I finally felt it though the lens of a beginner - I fully believed it and it ended up wasting around an hour of mine. If a co-worker did this to me (straight up lied about an API) I’d be pretty upset - I have no problems with people saying “I don’t know” but pretending isn’t cool. I can’t be mad at openAI because it’s just a tool, but a tool I won’t be going back to to learn things.

aw9f70gae 4y ago

I hope that we can all stop denying that our skills are obviated so that we can get to the more important fact that it’s supposed to be a good thing, because humans have to do less work.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> I hope that we can all stop denying that our skills are obviated so that we can get to the more important fact that it’s supposed to be a good thing, because humans have to do less work. But this is false. Humans don’t need to do a particular amount of work because there is X amount of work to be done and it has to be distributed, so that new non-human systems replacing human work reduce the amount of work each human has to do. Humans have to do a particular amount of work because they need each, individually, to net (or be gifted) a certain amount of market value to acquire the needs of survival and desired lifestyle, so if the value of the work they do is decreased in the market, they don’t need to do less, they need to do more. There is no labor saving from automation, unless there is additional redistribution of the capital gains enabled by automation shifting returns from labor to capital.
- aw9f70gae 4y ago
  I was implying that the additional redistribution is a necessity for an ethical society.

gymbeaux 4y ago

I’ve been using ChatGPT to do my job for a couple of months now. You have to be very specific with requirements you give it, and you do have to test the code of course, but at worst it gets me 90% of the way there in seconds instead of the hours or days it would take me to write that code by hand. Eventually, everyone is going to know how effective it is at writing code, and I think companies will expect ~10x the output from developers for the same salary and same 40-hour workweek. It’s disheartening.

colesantiago 4y ago

> ...but the other 10% are worth 1000x Until AI takes the last 10% with its next iteration with ease. Given the exponential pace of change of AI, this won't be long.

humanrebar 4y ago
How does AI talk my boss and team into doing the obvious things they're not paying attention to? Having the right answer is a big help, but it's a fraction of the job.
- windowsrookie 4y ago
  In the future there won't be any team for the AI to talk to.
  - RedCondor 4y ago
    Just like crypto.
  - chongli 4y ago
    If you mean to imply that in the future it'll just be the boss sitting alone at his computer, interacting with the AI, then couldn't he still be more efficient by hiring a team of people to interact with the computer? After all, no matter how advanced the AI gets, the productivity of the company will still be limited by the speed at which the AI "operators" can interface with the machine. This is true regardless of the input choice: keyboard/mouse, voice input, or neural link.
    - Version467 4y ago
      Your argument defeats itself. If your AI is so good, that its productive output is bottlenecked by the speed of your supposed operators than you should just replace those with another instance of your ai, as well as the boss. Which is exactly the same scenario that your parent comment is presenting.

tr33house 4y ago

you really got me there

everyone 4y ago

Imo ChapGPT atm is like having a personal undergraduate student, who will write a large amount of crap they copied from various places, without ever making a point. It's great at writing crap that ideally shouldn't be written in the 1st place.

derwiki 4y ago
I think many have realized just how much “crap that shouldn’t be written” we have to write for our jobs, hobbies, socializing, etc
- Damogran6 4y ago
  I know that 98% of the documentation I've written over my career never got read after it was committed.
xpe 4y ago
Tell us more. Why is it crap that should never have been written?
shmoogy 4y ago
You can direct it (or at least via api with a prompt) to be more concise or write for a specific audience

okr 4y ago

Was this written by ChatGPT? I felt i read the same thing over and over again. Hm?

teh_klev 4y ago
In "Bonus" section he asked ChatGPT to write two different essays based on two slightly different prompts: "write a 500 word blog post in the style of kent beck expanding on "I’ve been reluctant to try ChatGPT. Today I got over that reluctance. Now I understand why I was reluctant. The value of 90% of my skills just dropped to $0. The leverage for the remaining 10% went up 1000x. I need to recalibrate." and "write a 500 word blog post in the style of kent beck disagreeing with "I’ve been reluctant to try ChatGPT. Today I got over that reluctance. Now I understand why I was reluctant. The value of 90% of my skills just dropped to $0. The leverage for the remaining 10% went up 1000x. I need to recalibrate." That's probably why.
dswalter 4y ago
You might have missed a key element from the article itself. There are three versions of the same argument: the first by the author, the second by ChatGPT as an argument in support of the statement: "I’ve been reluctant to try ChatGPT. Today I got over that reluctance. Now I understand why I was reluctant. The value of 90% of my skills just dropped to $0. The leverage for the remaining 10% went up 1000x. I need to recalibrate." and the third is ChatGPT arguing against that same statement. As present, it's pretty clear which of the three is the most fun to read.
nmlrx 4y ago
Looks like it. If a blogger gleefully tells you that they will be replaced but embraces that fact, it is a commercial. If an academic tells you that ChatGPT is great, probably they have some connections to the AI industry.
- samsolomon 4y ago
  I don't know about that. It's pretty amazing technology. Like it or not, it's impossible not to be impressed by LLMs. Sure some people are out there trying to sell you a course, but I think it's unfair to say the most bloggers or academics are in that camp.

quonn 4y ago

We need to admit that we don‘t know what‘s happening. Nobody can reasonably predict the future. For the next two years nothing is worthless. That‘s for sure. Probably for longer. Nobody knows.

booleandilemma 4y ago
So do I take out the 30-year mortgage or...?
- quonn 4y ago
  This is a valid point. I‘m in a similar position and try to pay it off faster. However my point stands. We don‘t know. This kind of uncertainty is uncomfortable but it‘s best to ignore it. Forget about ChatGPT until you have seen the industry change. edit: I would also argue to keep investing in yourself. What else is there to do? If AI gets to the point of replacing developers it will equally affect most office jobs. If you want to be a builder you can become that later. Everyone else would and the economy would likely collapse. We‘ll see when we get there. Imagine an uber or taxi driver reading about self-driving cars in 2010 and dropping everything. Yet, a decade later uber is the same. Most likely it will be the same in 5 years. Even if self-driving cars arrive it will take until 2030 or 2035 for them to be widely used.
- bdcravens 4y ago
  I did, at age 45. Will I be around when I'm 75? Will I be working in 10 years? No idea.
- coldpie 4y ago
  Sure. The advice is the same as it ever was: spend well below your means, build up a savings buffer (>= 6 months of expenses), eliminate debt ASAP. The advice is what it is, exactly for situations like the ones you're imagining. No need to put your life on hold.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

13years 4y ago

Rather than seeing the rise of AI as a threat to my career, I now view it as an opportunity to augment my skills and deliver even greater value to my clients. By embracing AI tools like ChatGPT, I can automate routine tasks and focus my efforts on the areas where my expertise and creativity can truly shine. It is the only option available in the immediate term and I would argue is the correct short term perspective. However, if AI continues on its path of exponential technological acceleration, then this is going to be very problematic. You can't sprint ahead of an accelerating technological curve forever. We are replacing the old monotonous task rat race with the new rat race attempting to remain relevant against inescapable advancements. I've described this in more detail writing as "Climbing the skill ladder is going to look more like running on a treadmill at the gym. No matter how fast you run, you aren’t moving, AI is still right behind you learning everything that you can do." https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things https://dakara.substack.com/p/ai-and-the-end-to-all-things

orwin 4y ago
I'm not so sure about it. Neural networks and their models are built on theories made 50 years ago. The breakthrough happened in 2011 and we were able to build a lot on it, but we are close to our limits unless a company made another discovery and didn't publish it. I'm sure we have room for improvements but the acceleration stopped at GPT3.5, and imho the last version proved that the next increment will be specific but not as impressive as GPT3 was. I could be wrong, but imho our engineering caught up to our theory, or is close to, and while we'll be less stale than the aerospace sector, as our experiments are less materially expensive, I can see the field diversify but stop growing as fast.
- 13years 4y ago
  I don't disagree. However, those who believe we are still on the accelerating curve also believe that somehow we will remain relevant. It doesn't make logical sense. So, the only counter to my argument is that we hit a wall. This is very possible, but AI development thus far is certainly increasing the unpredictability of future events. As we move forward we are in some sense understanding it less. The disparity over the definition of AGI is only increasing.

chasing 4y ago

> The differential value of being better at putting words in a row just dropped to nothing. Anyone can now put words in a row pretty much as well as I can. This seems like a wild misrepresentation of what being a writer is. Writers communicate ideas. Their ideas. Clearly. They can use a pencil, a typewriter, write in French, use pictographs, use a spell checker, use ChatGPT, hire a ghostwriter. If you’re really a writer, all that matters is the end result and I can guarantee you that people who use ChatGPT thinking it will put words in a row will be able to generate a million stupid articles a day, but those people won’t be “writers.” Also, I still maintain that I can communicate ideas significantly faster by just typing them than by using a tool like ChatGPT. When the ideas are clear, the writing is easy. It’s one of the fundamental powers of writing: It can almost move at the speed of thought.

PaulHoule 4y ago
There’s the difference between being a writer and managing writers. If you are writing yourself it is at the speed of thought, if you are hiring somebody else to write you can possibly free yourself up to increase your throughput but you are going to spend time communicating expectations and reading/editing the results. If you develop a good relationship with the writer the effort to do all that can be small but if you don’t it sure can be tiring. (e.g. the New York Times has a strong and consistent style enforced in editing, people who write regularly for that paper learn to write in that style to make the editor’s job easier, people who write occasionally for that paper get their work seriously mangled by the editor)
sremani 4y ago
You are ignoring the fact that most of the writers are bullshit vendors regurgitating books, quotes, themes and things they read from somewhere else. If anything ChatGPT will basically filter out these sophists because it is a Chad-Sophist. The important thing now, is "depth" of knowledge. Of course, good generalists with wide array of mental models have their jiggle, but in the world of LLMs an individual's depth of knowledge trumps.
- Swizec 4y ago

mlatu 4y ago

all chatgpt and similar tech does is undermine our trust in "what we perceive has actual value because some human took the time to make it in the first place". first sponsored ads, now this shit. it's the tragedy of the commons, again and again with our attention as the abused common good

krona 4y ago
Software is driven entirely by utility value, not production value. I don't care whether the app was written on stone tablets in hand-rolled assembly, or by an AI, so long as the plane lands safely.
- metalliqaz 4y ago
  the value of the plane landing safely comes from two things. (1) that it is actually capable of landing correctly, and (2) that we have reason to expect that #1 is true before we get on. #2 comes from rigor in the production process.
Radim 4y ago
> it's the tragedy of the commons, again and again with our attention as the abused common good Don't worry, your attention is abused only as long as it is of value. I.e. only to the degree said attention triggers an action that ultimately brings about profit. The days when human attention was of paramount value, because the human activity it triggered was uniquely valuable, are coming to an end. So on the contrary, rejoice! You may see fewer sponsored ads. In fact the whole "ads" discipline as we know it might disappear, as its economical foundation crumbles.

tlogan 4y ago

A significant issue for some individuals is their inability to identify or articulate the necessary steps to achieve the desired outcome. They may have a general sense of the desired outcome but lack the clarity to outline the specific actions required to reach it. This challenge could be attributed to the difference between analytical thinking and intuitive or holistic thinking. However, I think that the crux of the matter may lie in the "thinking" aspect itself. Some people have been conditioned not to think, either through training or external influences, but this does not mean they lack intelligence (nobody is stupid). With ChatGPT, the paradigm shifts dramatically. The demand for thought and engagement is ever-present, as repetitive and mindless tasks become obsolete. So mindless tasks hit $0, thinking 1000x!

blackbear_ 4y ago
> With ChatGPT, the paradigm shifts dramatically. The demand for thought and engagement is ever-present, as repetitive and mindless tasks become obsolete. I see what you mean, but > Some people have been conditioned not to think, either through training or external influences I believe that chatgpt & co. are going to make this much worse for the majority of people, at least in the medium term. A large part of this conditioning happens in schools and universities, and in general, students always look for the path of least resistance towards a passing grade (in this case, chatgpt all the way).

jl6 4y ago

It's worth reflecting that the world's bottom billion already have skills worth very close to $0, giving them no leverage at anything and no prospect of competing for higher level employment. If we enter a scenario where AI guts the middle class, I hope one upside might be a critical mass of people comes to understand how to value people independently of their economic output.

11101010001100 4y ago
So we should just hope? Sounds like a good plan.
robertlagrant 4y ago
> I hope one upside might be a critical mass of people comes to understand how to value people independently of their economic output They are valued independently of that. E.g. in a democracy someone who is super productive will get paid a lot, but will have exactly the same number of votes as someone with nothing. If you think their wage should be valued independently of their economic output, then I think that is a misunderstanding: money is only useful as a measure of economic value.
- YellOh 4y ago
  Money is also useful for other measures, such as access to food & housing. I'd prefer a person with no economic value still be able to access commodities that do have economic value.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Access to food and housing have economic value; that's why they cost money. That doesn't mean you can't give people money or housing; again, you'd just be valuing them on something other than their economic output.
- goawaythrwaway 4y ago
  > If you think their wage should be valued independently of their economic output, then I think that is a misunderstanding: money is only useful as a measure of economic value. Yes exactly, and to all those whiners complaining about not being able to put food on the table whilst I and my schoolmates at Shortridge Academy each have trusts worth more than their expected lifetime earnings I say: Though your life might have "value" to a select few (like your parents) it unfortunately doesn't have much economic value to those who actually measure such things (like my parents.) It would behoove you to take some personal responsibility for your station in life. I certainly take responsibility for mine, and that, in my clearly valuable opinion, makes all the difference between us.

gizmo 4y ago

ChatGPT can automate the most basic programming tasks. It will help you find the right command line parameters or the right API calls, or help you with simple code manipulation. But when you're doing actual programming what use is ChatGPT? I hear programmers despair about how their skills have become commoditized, but ChatGPT can't do anything I consider programming. Yes it can help write or summarize documentation. It's a useful tool. But it can't program. What am I missing here, what is it that makes ChatGPT such a game-changer for software engineers?

gymbeaux 4y ago
If you’re specific enough, it is excellent at writing not just simple stuff but complex programs. Entire programs. Usually they work, but if they don’t, it’s a matter of swapping out usually a word or two in a single line of code. It is excellent at writing code.
Workaccount2 4y ago
You're missing that in as recently as 2019 LLM's could barely form a coherent sentence.
- surgical_fire 4y ago
  ... so? That happens to every new technology. It is mostly useless until some development makes it viable or useful. Getting a time cut from 2019 to 2023 and extrapolating that now it will advance at an exponential pace every few years is as stupid as getting a time cut from 1980 to 2020 and predicting it will have a glacial pace of advancement in the future. Truth is that there were some interesting advancements in LLM research, but it's difficult to tell what will happen. Will it plateau for a while? Will it keep advancing at a fast pace? Will it have frequent minor improvements but never really get to the point of AGI (basically growing asymptotically)?
- switch007 4y ago
  So extrapoloating from that progress, it'll soon be able to do: requirement gathering, documentation, dependency management, unit tests, integration tests, configuration of infrastructure, cost management, alerting, monitoring, metrics, logging, secrets management, outage responses, discussions with stakeholders, A/B testing, security compliance etc?

throwaway8689 4y ago

I tried chat gpt for the first time today. I asked it to write me a script to fetch some data from an API. It didn't succeed, and this kind of common task from a well-documented API should (I thought) be a slam dunk.

vajrabum 4y ago
Prompt engineering is a thing for sure. Might want to search the news here for some clues on ycombinator to get better at it. And some tasks are beyond it.
Kranar 4y ago
I tried driving a car for the first time today. I just wanted to drive from my house to the end of the block. I crashed into a fire hydrant and almost killed three people. This should be a very simple and common task, going from your house to the end of the block, and yet the car failed miserably. Sarcasm aside, at my company I've noticed a very disturbing split among my co-workers. One group of co-workers hold the above attitude, that they should be able to just use a tool on day one and it should be able to solve problems that even just a couple of months ago would have been unimaginable. That group of co-workers looks at ChatGPT and thinks it's basically underwhelming and a big nothingburger. The other group of co-workers are learning how to use ChatGPT to solve their problems. They're learning clever ways of prompting ChatGPT, how to give it a proper system message, how to take large tasks and break it down into smaller tasks to offload a lot of the grunt work onto ChatGPT while they focus more on the overall architecture. That group of co-workers is seeing excellent gains in productivity. The idea that you would just use a tool on day one, probably don't really know much about it or understand it that well, and expect it to magically solve your problems is about as foolish as driving a car for the first time, not really knowing anything about cars, and expecting nothing bad to happen. ChatGPT is a tool, the people who take the time to learn that tool and understand how it works will become much more productive software developers, and those who don't will get left behind.
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  A big one for me is being able to decide when to use GPT3.5 and when to use GPT4 for a given prompt. Perhaps it will be short term that this is a "skill", sooner or later they will lift the GPT4 cap and speed it up, but for right now I can stretch out a GPT4 session indefinitely if I know what gpt3.5 can and can't handle. Besides that though, chatGPT has been nothing short of a huge product....I don't even want to say a "huge productivity boost", that implies like good sleep or drinking coffee, its been like an augmentation that allows be to bat above my league. Like a free (well $20/mo) co-worker who knows a lot about programming.

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greenthrow 4y ago

ChatGPT is amazing at creating the TGI Fridays or Chili's or Applebee's level of copy. If you want Michelin star, or hole in the wall, or 70 year old street vendor level copy, you still need a human. In my opinion this is intrinsic to the way LLMs work and won't change until we have AGI. A great writer's writing is informed by all kinds of experience, taste and knowledge that an LLM simply cannot posess. It can only imitate.

krona 4y ago
> It can only imitate. That already eclipses (at a guess) 75% of humanity, then.
- georgeecollins 4y ago
  Yes, but 75% of humanity can't make a living wage writing or making art. So really at this point you are replacing an intern or a fiverr contractor.

bushido 4y ago

I have been using ChatGPT pretty consistently for various summarization type of tasks for a bit. But this weekend I tried using it to learn a technical concept I've struggled with. Previously, I could have spoken about the topic intelligently, but could not have put it to any practical use. In a few quick prompts and < 1 hr of synthesis, I was able to get to practical knowledge to understand it enough to try and build something from scratch. And building something in another 2-3 hours. I think this would have taken me 1-2 months of dedicate hitting my head on the wall time to learn previously. In that moment, I had a realization similar to the author. Basic flow of the prompt went something like: 1. Tell me about this thing that's part of the concept that I don't understand? 2. Explain this new term you threw at me? Do it in the context on an industry I understand well. 3. Explain yet another concept you mentioned in the same industry concept? 4. This sounds a lot like this other concept I know. How do these differ in practical use? 5. Write me some sample code in a language I understand very well, that does X use case the you mentioned? 6. What are these other concepts you used? 7. How can I do this new concept to do something I've implemented before. Essentially, my knowledge of other concepts, industries and being able to draw parallels allowed me to learn much much faster.

Cyberthal 4y ago
Bullshido blitzkrieg
quonn 4y ago
I find these stories strange. If it would be like that, wouldn‘t you learn from an expert friend just as fast? My experience is that for anything worth learning it takes a long time of thinking about it from various angles.
- mdrzn 4y ago
  Is there an endless amount of "expert friend" available somewhere that I don't know about? How can I learn something none of my friends know about?
  - 4y ago

thenerdhead 4y ago

Every AI blogpost recently reads like a bad parable of the old engineer and the hammer.

oxfordmale 4y ago

This is hype curve speak. I have used ChatGPT 4.0 to generate code. It is brilliant at templating. However, it still makes glaring errors. My main bugbear is that ChatGPT has the confidence of a psychopath. It will never say it doesn't quite know how to program something, and it starts making up things to answer your question. For example, I asked it to write code to load data from MySQL to Snowflake. The template looked fine until I discovered it made up a method that doesn't exist on Pandas data frames. Finally, when I asked it to chunk, it did a decent job...other than truncating the destination table every time it loaded a chunk of data. Yes, it did a fantastic job templating the code, picking consistent variable names, etc. However, I could have gotten as far by Googling/StackOverflowing. The advantage of Googled code is that you know it will likely work, give or take a few bugs. Most humans don't dream up methods that simply don't exist.

commandlinefan 4y ago

Yikes, both of the ChatGPT essays were actually more pleasant to read than the one that he actually wrote - and this is Kent Beck.

georgeecollins 4y ago

I think we are in a 3D Printing/ Block Chain/ VR hype cycle where something important is happening but everybody is over reacting. I really doubt 90% of anyone's skills have become worthless. Mediocre art and mediocre writing weren't valuable or expensive last year. People have been having programs write articles for a long time now. In the long run, yeah things are going to change a lot. But we knew that didn't we? I wouldn't invest into this now, because there is too much is being promised too soon.

Turing_Machine 4y ago
> Mediocre art and mediocre writing weren't valuable or expensive last year. At one point every town had a blacksmith, even the smallest villages. You could go there to get your horse shod, buy a pair of fireplace tongs, get a new latch for your door, and so on. In the nature of things, most of these blacksmiths were mediocre, but still, they made a living. Now, there are certainly still a few people who make a living by being blacksmiths, but you sure won't find one at every wide spot in the road.
- ghiculescu 4y ago
  ok, but has there ever been a time when mediocre artists or writers made a living?
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    I don’t know, do TV writers make a living?
    - mjr00 4y ago
      Writers working on network TV represent the most successful 1% of all writers.
      - the_only_law 4y ago
        Yeah I’d say most of that is pretty mediocre.

eloisant 4y ago

> If I’m big & you’re small & you’re growing faster, then it’s a matter of time before you surpass me. This is true: my son went from 50cm to 150cm in 13 years, so when he turns 26 he should be roughly 250cm, then 350cm when he approaches 40.

wing-_-nuts 4y ago
So, you're suggesting the tech is on an S curve, and you might be right, but I think the top of that S curve is going to be much higher than you expect.
- croes 4y ago
  The same seemed to be true for self driving cars, still not in sight. Same could happen with GPTs. Could be boring if all companies suddenly have the same texts because the asked the same model the same questions. GPTs can write like somebody but they can't be somebody new.
  - zamnos 4y ago
    Sure they can. http://sumplete.com http://sumplete.com is a new puzzle game, which its author says was invented by ChatGPT. If ChatGPT couldn't do anything new, then how did that game come to be? Outside of a very limited test area and test market, self-driving cars have yet to even be used by the general public. Meanwhile ChatGPT's been adopted by en estimated 100 million people, many of which are using even just the free version to deliver value to the companies they work for. Maybe if ChatGPT was all hyped and unavailable to try by the masses it would sound like a lot more hot air, but it's open to anyone with an account, who can verify claims on their own. Not everyone will or has to walk away impressed, but when it does in a couple minutes what would have taken you a few hours, it's hard not to be.
    - croes 4y ago
      That's the problem. ChatGPT claimed and the user believed but it's wrong. GPTs remix, so they may create new variations but nothing really new.

photochemsyn 4y ago

The most important skill in a rapidly changing world is the ability to learn new skills - and skills build on other skills. If you don't understand the fundamentals of some area of technology, ChatGPT isn't going to be of much use in helping you build anything that looks at all professional. On the other hand, refusing to learn how to write effective LLM prompts makes little sense. Another important reality is that if you buy into what's being advertised as good for you, you may be setting yourself up for a long-term dependency, which if taken away, will leave you with less than nothing (rather like drug or alcohol addiction.) For example, how many people, if transported to a pre-industrial society, could play any meaningful role in recreating modern industrial civilization? How would those conversations go? "We had these wonderful things, the Internet and devices to communicate across long distances and we had fine textiles woven by machines controlled by computers and airplanes and..." "Oh, and how do you make such things?" "Ummmm.... well, first we're going to need some silicon ore..." Skills are only valuable in the context of economic activity in a society if other people see them as valuable. As far as ChatGPT, anyone becoming absolutely dependent on LLM models to do their job may find themselves in a world of hurt if those models suddenly become unavailable for some reason.

Joker_vD 4y ago
> some silicon ore It's called "sand", btw. And you'd actually also need boron and phosphorus, to dope it with... hmm. In any case, one shouldn't try to jump over the steps. Black metallurgy first, parts standartization second, then coal chemistry, then toy-scale electricty, then steamworks, etc. Not to mention radical changes in the structure of human societies! Good luck with that.
13years 4y ago
> The most important skill in a rapidly changing world is the ability to learn new skills This is what AI is. It is a skill learning machine that can outpace your ability to learn given enough training data. The answer of just learning a new skill will not hold up forever. That window will continue to shrink. > anyone becoming absolutely dependent on LLM models to do their job may find themselves in a world of hurt if those models suddenly become unavailable for some reason. This can be said of every technology.

kykeonaut 4y ago

In my opinion, those 90% of skills were always worth $0, yet we need them to enable the 10% of skills that are worth 1000x. In fact even with AI, you still need the $0 skills to ensure that whatever model you are using is giving you the answer you need. There is a deep connection between our different skills that enable us to create value. Bundling them into separate bins based on how much value they provide individually feels like the wrong approach.

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kodah 4y ago

> Anyone can now put words in a row pretty much as well as I can. This suffers the same fallacy that people who think ChatGPT is somehow going to upend coding suffer from. Can GPT-4 write code and sentences? Yes, it can, but it makes a lot of subtle mistakes. Good programmers are often good at: - decomposition - thoroughness - identifying important components My hypothesis is that AI will make those things summarily more obvious if a programmer doesn't have them. A programmer that's not thorough will not have the inclination or drive to review and understand all output, so the output will harm their work whether that's writing or code. AI can't decompose anything sufficiently complex as a function. It can kind of get close, but again, it misses the objective of decomposition because decomposition isn't a language function, it's a higher order abstract function. Last, AI isn't going to recognize importance or priority, especially if it's on-going. Try giving it a rules system and see if it follows the rules to a T. IME, it does not. AI will make good programmers better, and some okay programmers better, but I have a feeling it will also make bad programmers worse.

seba_dos1 4y ago
I agree. Trying to get some non-trivial code out of GPT that isn't a mindless boilerplate feels like helping a clueless schoolmate in an IT class write their code for the teacher's assignment when, sure, they do try their best, but it's clear that they don't really grasp it and just want to finish the assignment and forget about it as soon as possible. You can get a good result, but you need to try really hard. It only seems useful for when you know exactly what to do, but you don't feel like typing it all out - which happens, but in my experience the most valuable part of programmer's job is when you figure things out that nobody around knows how to do.
- peterangular 4y ago
  > Trying to get some non-trivial code out of GPT that isn't a mindless boilerplate For some of us, the boilerplate code generated by ChatGPT is incredibly valuable. I have been utilizing it to create snippets of code for languages that I am not familiar with in terms of syntax. I understand that I may be criticized for this, however, I am not an expert in all of the languages I am required to support. Thus, I often find myself struggling with the syntax while understanding the overall concept I am attempting to accomplish. Example prompt: "Write me a proof of concept in language X that serializes JSON then POSTS to a HTTP API endpoint."

gavinhoward 4y ago

I am a programmer and a blogger, like the author. Unlike the author, I do not monetize my blog in any way (or I assume he does on Substack). The author is both right and wrong, just about different things. First, he assumes GPT will get exponentially better. If that were true, all cars would be full self-driving already. GPT will have an S curve or Sigmoid function. Second, he assumes that GPT will always be able to produce things from differing voices well. However, as more data is used, these bots will only become more homogenous. You can see clues of this when it managed to make a Biggie Smalls rap, but did not with Woody Gunthrie, whose data is probably closer to the mainstream than Biggie's. (This is a gut feeling; could be wrong.) Third, as things become more of the same bot-like feeling, even from people, those who have their own voice and touch will stand out more. You can see this in his essay, versus the two written by the bot. The voice of the bot ones feels more stilted to me. His feels more natural. What people need to do is to develop their own voice and touch. In writing, develop your voice. Write without help. Write a lot. Create a blog. Put random stupid stuff there. Let yourself rant. That random stupid stuff and those rants will not be mainstream, and if it's stupid and ranty, you won't have to care about quality. That lack of care will let you have fun, and that fun will become your voice. This is how I developed my voice with my blog. In code, develop your touch. Don't just code; design. Think about concepts. Think about UX and workflows. Iterate until everything is great. Then design the implementation and iterate until everything fits. Then, and only then, code. But as you code, iterate the design to remove things that no longer fit and add things that do. Dogfood your software. Use it for everything you can, even things that don't fit well. Iterate and change some more to make your dogfooding easier. The end result will be software that is easy-to-use and fits the users' needs well. That fit will be your touch. This is how I developed my touch with my most well-known project: `bc`. [1] But you don't even need to stop there. With my `bc`, I spent time supporting users and implementing things for them. Obviously, I still designed changes before implementing them, but I listened to my users and gave them what they wanted within the constraints I had. The end result is a `bc` that can act like the GNU `bc` or the BSD `bc`, whichever you want. It can also be its own thing with extra features. Listening to users is another human touch. Make use of it. In fact, that's where I will make a living from my current project: my support for it will be best-in-class [2], and that's something GPT can never replicate because it cannot replicate my brain, my voice, and my touch, even when trained on my writing. In other words, the author is write that the 90% is useless, but those 90% were the ones where you were at least partially imitating a bot anyway. Those 10% are the human traits. If you want to have useful skills, be a human, not a fleshy bot. Footnote: I feel bad for anyone that gets my code or writing as output from GPT. My code fits my head and no one else's. It also uses custom API's that don't exist anywhere else, which means such output would be useless. The same goes for my writing, though to a lesser extent. [1]: https://github.com/gavinhoward/bc https://github.com/gavinhoward/bc [2]: https://github.com/gavinhoward/bc/issues/66 https://github.com/gavinhoward/bc/issues/66

tudorw 4y ago

Just rebrand with a made up title, most people are average, it's average to expect average.

giantg2 4y ago

That's OK. 100% of my skills have no commercial value.

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nottorp 4y ago

> Then I replaced a weak verb with a stronger one—”would like to” became “crave”. I agree. ChatGPT should be very good at writing clickbait.

poulpy123 4y ago

I mean 1000 x nothing is still nothing

bccdee 4y ago

> My skills continue to improve, but ChatGPT’s are improving faster. It’s a matter of time. Nah, I don't think there's any way that LLMs can totally circumvent the problems of pervasive hallucination and low-quality output. There's a fundamental divide between the things LLMs would have to do to replace us (think critically, problem-solve) and the things they're designed to do (produce "realistic" text based on the data they were trained on). Sure, they can engage in a basic level of critical thinking and problem-solving, but I'd expect to see diminishing returns long before they can actually compete with humans. After all, we're not training them to produce smarter or more correct answers—just more verisimilitudinous ones. The local maximum is bland and uninsightful yet very plausibly human writing. I'll worry when we come up with an architecture & training scheme that directly optimizes for problem-solving.

vervez 4y ago
min{d(problem)/d(theta)} is essentially what LLMs are doing with a prompt. Every session that a chatgpt user has leads to either a resolution or not, which is the loss function given the prompt used to reach that point. It's getting better at not hallucinating in my experience over just the past 4 months.

seu 4y ago

> The differential value of being better at putting words in a row just dropped to nothing. Anyone can now put words in a row pretty much as well as I can. People seem to overvalue "putting words in a row" and undervalue "saying something interesting or new" these days.

drewcoo 4y ago

So ChatGPT allows Beck to pretend to be a creative and totally devalues creatives? That's not a great look. Honestly, I'm more comfortable with the notion of it making everyone code monkey for a day.

freedude 4y ago

Is Kent Beck a liar? ChatGPT is a liar. A proven liar. What happens when a machines lies to a person enough? Eventually that person dies. Sooo, unplug the lying machine. https://jonathanturley.org/2023/04/06/defamed-by-chatgpt-my-own-bizarre-experience-with-artificiality-of-artificial-intelligence/ https://jonathanturley.org/2023/04/06/defamed-by-chatgpt-my-...

freedude 4y ago
Another example of a lying machine killing someone. Recently posted in YC. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35628485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35628485 https://www.asktog.com/columns/027InterfacesThatKill.html https://www.asktog.com/columns/027InterfacesThatKill.html

al_be_back 4y ago

>> 90% of My Skills are now worth $0 yes, it's an oversimplification; but i do think AI hype will pipe-down (just as many other shiny promises: self-driving cars, swimming pools on Mars, crypto for everyone etc). writing software, like writing books/essays/poetry, it's a highly creative and analytical process; tiny variations in content could potentially lead to massive consequences that may only be noticeable when released into the wild. most issues these industries face are not on Quantity or Speed these days, but on Quality, Proofing and Integration.

makach 4y ago

Douglas Adams got it right. It’s not about the answers, it’s all about the questions. It is truly amazing what GPT can produce - but not after long you start noticing a pattern in the answers it is providing. There still is room for human intervention in order to transform and refine the information in the correct context.

SheinhardtWigCo 4y ago
Ironically, the pattern you're describing is likely due to RLHF.

coupdejarnac 4y ago

What's going to happen when AI's are trained on data produced by AI's? I would guess that AI generated writing is going to converge to some banal, widely accessible style.

pklausler 4y ago

Writing that conveys original ideas will have nothing to worry about.

precompute 4y ago

Wow, that article's a really badly written mish-mash of paragraphs that end up saying nothing at all.

RecycledEle 4y ago

I appreciate the excellent article. It sums up ChatGPT better than anything else I have seen. My first goal is to improve my skills by using AI as a personal tutor. My second goal is to improve my productivity by integrating AI into my work flow. My third goal is to never getting so lazy that I ever trust the output of an AI without proofreading it first. I try to imagine the output of the AI coming from a Reddit user with a suspicious-sounding handle. This is a lot like when I learned to use spell-checkers correctly. Some people always went with the first option, and wrote a lot of odd school papers. Some people use the spell checkers to correct their spelling in their school papers, but never learned to be a better speller. I learned correct spellings from spell checkers while correcting my spelling. There is also a metaphor for calculators. Students should use calculators to check their work, but never become dependent on them.

rsrsrs86 4y ago

I’ve been having ridiculously good code generation results. I mean projects that took months delivered under one hour.

anthlax 4y ago
Any examples?

franze 4y ago

I have a pretty ok Google spreadsheet foo, bit over the last 3 years it stagnated as I knew everything I needed to know to do what I need to do. Some improvement here and there with some Googling here and there. Last week I had a slight new challenge, and I started googling but realised, there must be a better way to solve this new challenge. In the next 2 hours I learned more about Google Spreadsheets than in the last 3 years combined. Thx to ChatGPT (4!!!) I now have a multifunctional dashboard I can use and reuse for this and future projects. Googling stuff really seems like such a bad investment of my time and brain. Google really has become a lazy monopoly.

AH4oFVbPT4f8 4y ago
I did something very similar where I taught myself obsidian markdown and advanced slides. It took a few hours but now that I know how it works and have a few templates I can knock out great looking slides in a matter of minutes. Hell I can write sql that builds the markdown for me and use mermaid to render the flow charts. It’s all about being able to learn and figure things out on your own. Spending that day learning is going to save me so much time doing tedious work of making slides for presentations.

croes 4y ago

>If I’m big & you’re small & you’re growing faster, then it’s a matter of time before you surpass me Yeah, because grow rates are constant and don't change over time.

janeway 4y ago

10% of remaining skills are worth 1000x ? Yeah, the reminds me of the AT&T switchboard operators who agree that the new automated systems work but they will never fully replace humans because the customer wants to talk to a human operator when they call on the phone. How many millions of jobs today entail manual work that could be simply automated already but the employer doesn’t understand the the tech or feel the need? I sympathise with those who can’t keep up but perhaps lots of jobs will remain which could easily be automated - at least for a generation. I look forward to the Star Trek-like future of passion-based motivation.

davesque 4y ago

Am I the only one who has not been able to get ChatGPT to produce what I consider to be passable writing? I've only succeeded in getting ChatGPT to output completely predictable, unoriginal, disengaging prose. For example, try getting ChatGPT to re-write a story in the style of Franz Kafka. What you'll get is a completely flat agglomeration of tropes that sound like the first jottings of a high-minded middle schooler. People keep acting like the arrival of ChatGPT is a death knell for writers but I'm just not seeing it. I can only conclude that most people don't give many shits about the quality of what they read. Maybe that's the real insight here.

cyanydeez 4y ago
See, the issue is you. ChatGPT is the smartest guy in the room when that room is too stupid to question him. Basically, it's the George Carlin joke: imagine the average person and realize half the people are dumber than that.
chillacy 4y ago
In my observation the people most excited aren’t writing top tier fiction, they’re writing marketing copy, SEO blog spam, and business emails. But who knows, if this technology improves as fast as AlphaGo did, it may start taking on the best of the best one day?
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ducharmdev 4y ago

> Fourth, to everyone say, “Yeah, but ChatGPT isn’t very good,” I would remind you that technological revolutions aren’t about absolute values but rather growth rates. If I’m big & you’re small & you’re growing faster, then it’s a matter of time before you surpass me. Assuming the growth rates are static, then sure. But in reality they're fluctuating too, and we can't know how they'll change in the future. Plenty of technologies have had fast early growth, only to peter out long-term.

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voidhorse 4y ago

Eh, I'm still confident that the biggest effect these tools will have is to increase the sheer amount of noise per capita, which was the trajectory the world has been headed down since the internet and particularly since the advent of social media. LLMs will be wonderful noise generators. They can produce volumes of (probably largely useless) information at rates most people could hardly fathom and can do so with basically a nonexistent barrier to entry. They do not understand concepts, mathematics, logical relationships. They are good at emulating sentences, and maybe ok at helping creatives get new ideas, but at the end of the day, they're just a multiplier over the metric tons of pointless data we already produce on a daily basis. Furthermore, they only work in a specific zone of the utilitarian, capitalistic flattening of value that modern hyper-capitalism perpetuates. The experience of art generated by an AI is only of interest and valuable due to the gradual erosion of human value under the gears of capitalism. Money has ensured everything has its price (equivalence). It's pretty easy to imagine a monetary-free society in which the human side of any product (the experience that went into it, the human hands that fashioned it) would out-value the utilitarian ends of the product (there are already strands of this in small maker movements). LLMs are only prescribed value in a system that has already fully embraced mass-production and the standardization and flattening of human experience down to common denominations. A society that placed no stock in mass-produced goods would have no interest in LLMs. They are quite literally just an imitation game.