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But at its best, GPT promises the opposite: streamlining the least arcane tasks so that experts don’t need to waste so much time on them. The immediate threat

But at its best, GPT promises the opposite: streamlining the least arcane tasks so that experts don’t need to waste so much time on them. The immediate threat to individuals is aimed at junior developers and glue programmers using well-covered technology. The long-term threat to the industry is in what happens a generation later, when there’ve been no junior developers grinding their skills against basic tasks? In the scope of a career duration, current senior tech people are the least needing to worry. Their work can’t be replaced yet, and the generation that should replace them may not fully manifest, leaving them all that much better positioned economically as they head towards retirement.

atleastoptimal 3y ago
Why do you think juniors are replaceable but seniors won't be in the near future? Is there some limit where AI just can't get better? That's like seeing the first prototype car ever built, which can go 20 miles per hour, and saying "Cars will never replace horses that can go 21 miles per hour"
- fzeroracer 3y ago
  Do you believe individuals will drive flying cars in the next 10 years? How about 20? 40? People were predicting we'd have flying cars for over 50 years now, why don't we have them yet?
  - atleastoptimal 3y ago
    Land based cars -> flying cars is less reasonable of an extrapolation than current SOTA AI -> skilled human level AI. Flying cars already exist anyway, they're called helicopters.
    - pdimitar 3y ago
      What you say is less reasonable looks like an assumption to me. What makes you think so?
  - dekhn 3y ago
    Flying cars. You mean, like personal aircraft? That's already a thing. Or cars that can drive on a highway but also fly? Besides being impractical from an engineering standpoint, I don't think there's an actual market large enough to sustain the development and marketing costs.
    - Groxx 3y ago
      We can probably assume they didn't mean personal aircraft since that has been around since the dawn of flight, and hasn't gone away at any point along the way. It's rather different from a new tech entrant to an existing field.
    - auxi 3y ago
      Regarding the size of the market, given a low enough energy price, the potential market size would be bigger. I guess that for any desired market size there exist a energy price to enable that market size :)
- nemo 3y ago
  >Is there some limit where AI just can't get better? Yes, without question. There must be, in fact. Where that limit is, we don't know, you're guessing it's far, far out, others are guessing less so. At this point the details of that future are unknowable.
  - tymscar 3y ago
    I agree with you, but I wonder if that “must” you mention there is based on a maximum limit, where every atom in the universe is used to compute something, or if it’s based on something else.
    - nemo 3y ago
      I just meant that there's real hard physical limits to computation, though those are both tied to the finite resources available to people, and also the willingness of society to invest finite resources and energy on computational work and infrastructure.
- swatcoder 3y ago
  LLM’s synthesize new material that looks most like material they’ve been trained on. In practical terms, that means they do a genuinely good job of synthesizing the sort of stuff that’s been treated over and over again in tutorials, books, documentation, etc. The more times something’s been covered. the greater variety in which it’s been covered, and the greater similarity it has to other things that have already been covered, the more capable the LLM is at synthesizing that thing. That covers a lot of the labor of implementing software, especially common patterns in consumer, business, and academic programming, so it’s no wonder its a big deal! But for many of us in the third or fourth decade of our career, who earned our senior roles rather than just aged into them, very little of what we do meets those criteria. Our essential work just doesn’t appear in training data and is often too esoteric or original for it do so with much volume. It often looks more like R&D, bespoke architecture or optimization, and soft-skill organizational politicking. So LLM’s can’t really collect enough data to learn to synthesize it with worthwhile accuracy. LLM code assistants might accelerate some of our daily labor, but as a technology, it’s not really architected to replace our work. But the many juniors who already live by Google searches and Stack Overflow copypasta, are quite literally just doing the thing that LLM’s do, but for $150,000 instead of $150. It’s their jobs that are in immediate jeopardy.
  - bdangubic 3y ago
    Every senior person thinks just like you do... The fact that you "earned (y)our senior roles rather than just aged into them" has nothing to do whether or not your skills can be replaced technology like LLM's. Chances are that you most likely earned your senior role in a specific company / field and your seniority has less to do with your technical skills but more with domain knowledge. Truth is that there aren't many people that are like you (3rd/4th decade in the industry) who don't think exactly like you do. And truth is that most of you are very wrong ;)
    - pdimitar 3y ago
      Care to clarify why is your parent wrong? They said that LLMs can't be trained on what's not publicly available, and a lot of it is deeper knowledge. What's your retort?
- Groxx 3y ago
  I mean, robots haven't stopped people from being in loads of fields, I don't really see why this one would be particularly different. What they do mostly-consistently do is lower the cost floor. Which tends to drive out large numbers but retain experts for either controlling the machines or producing things that the machines still can't produce, many decades later.
thomaslord 3y ago
Honestly in my brief dabbling with ChatGPT, it hasn't really felt like it's good at the stuff that I'd want taken off my plate. At work I tend to build stuff that you'd describe as "CRUD plus business logic", so there are a decent number of mundane tasks. ChatGPT can probably fill in some validation logic if I tell it the names of the fields, but that doesn't speed things up much. I work primarily in Laravel, so there's not a huge amount of boilerplate required for most of the stuff I do. The one thing I was really hoping ChatGPT could do is help me convert a frontend from one component library to another. The major issue I ran into was that the token limit was too small for even a modestly sized page.
- ilaksh 3y ago
  ChatGPT 3.5 is about 20-30 IQ points dumber than GPT-4. There is no comparison. It is not very similar. GPT-4 now also has 128,000 context tokens. They could charge $2000 per month for GPT-4 and it would be more than fair.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    They could charge $2000 per month for GPT-4 and it would be more than fair. Well, it's hard to argue with that.

atleastoptimal 3y ago

Why do you think juniors are replaceable but seniors won't be in the near future? Is there some limit where AI just can't get better? That's like seeing the first prototype car ever built, which can go 20 miles per hour, and saying "Cars will never replace horses that can go 21 miles per hour"

fzeroracer 3y ago
Do you believe individuals will drive flying cars in the next 10 years? How about 20? 40? People were predicting we'd have flying cars for over 50 years now, why don't we have them yet?
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  Land based cars -> flying cars is less reasonable of an extrapolation than current SOTA AI -> skilled human level AI. Flying cars already exist anyway, they're called helicopters.
  - pdimitar 3y ago
    What you say is less reasonable looks like an assumption to me. What makes you think so?
- dekhn 3y ago
  Flying cars. You mean, like personal aircraft? That's already a thing. Or cars that can drive on a highway but also fly? Besides being impractical from an engineering standpoint, I don't think there's an actual market large enough to sustain the development and marketing costs.
  - Groxx 3y ago
    We can probably assume they didn't mean personal aircraft since that has been around since the dawn of flight, and hasn't gone away at any point along the way. It's rather different from a new tech entrant to an existing field.
  - auxi 3y ago
    Regarding the size of the market, given a low enough energy price, the potential market size would be bigger. I guess that for any desired market size there exist a energy price to enable that market size :)
nemo 3y ago
>Is there some limit where AI just can't get better? Yes, without question. There must be, in fact. Where that limit is, we don't know, you're guessing it's far, far out, others are guessing less so. At this point the details of that future are unknowable.
- tymscar 3y ago
  I agree with you, but I wonder if that “must” you mention there is based on a maximum limit, where every atom in the universe is used to compute something, or if it’s based on something else.
  - nemo 3y ago
    I just meant that there's real hard physical limits to computation, though those are both tied to the finite resources available to people, and also the willingness of society to invest finite resources and energy on computational work and infrastructure.
swatcoder 3y ago
LLM’s synthesize new material that looks most like material they’ve been trained on. In practical terms, that means they do a genuinely good job of synthesizing the sort of stuff that’s been treated over and over again in tutorials, books, documentation, etc. The more times something’s been covered. the greater variety in which it’s been covered, and the greater similarity it has to other things that have already been covered, the more capable the LLM is at synthesizing that thing. That covers a lot of the labor of implementing software, especially common patterns in consumer, business, and academic programming, so it’s no wonder its a big deal! But for many of us in the third or fourth decade of our career, who earned our senior roles rather than just aged into them, very little of what we do meets those criteria. Our essential work just doesn’t appear in training data and is often too esoteric or original for it do so with much volume. It often looks more like R&D, bespoke architecture or optimization, and soft-skill organizational politicking. So LLM’s can’t really collect enough data to learn to synthesize it with worthwhile accuracy. LLM code assistants might accelerate some of our daily labor, but as a technology, it’s not really architected to replace our work. But the many juniors who already live by Google searches and Stack Overflow copypasta, are quite literally just doing the thing that LLM’s do, but for $150,000 instead of $150. It’s their jobs that are in immediate jeopardy.
- bdangubic 3y ago
  Every senior person thinks just like you do... The fact that you "earned (y)our senior roles rather than just aged into them" has nothing to do whether or not your skills can be replaced technology like LLM's. Chances are that you most likely earned your senior role in a specific company / field and your seniority has less to do with your technical skills but more with domain knowledge. Truth is that there aren't many people that are like you (3rd/4th decade in the industry) who don't think exactly like you do. And truth is that most of you are very wrong ;)
  - pdimitar 3y ago
    Care to clarify why is your parent wrong? They said that LLMs can't be trained on what's not publicly available, and a lot of it is deeper knowledge. What's your retort?
Groxx 3y ago
I mean, robots haven't stopped people from being in loads of fields, I don't really see why this one would be particularly different. What they do mostly-consistently do is lower the cost floor. Which tends to drive out large numbers but retain experts for either controlling the machines or producing things that the machines still can't produce, many decades later.

thomaslord 3y ago

Honestly in my brief dabbling with ChatGPT, it hasn't really felt like it's good at the stuff that I'd want taken off my plate. At work I tend to build stuff that you'd describe as "CRUD plus business logic", so there are a decent number of mundane tasks. ChatGPT can probably fill in some validation logic if I tell it the names of the fields, but that doesn't speed things up much. I work primarily in Laravel, so there's not a huge amount of boilerplate required for most of the stuff I do. The one thing I was really hoping ChatGPT could do is help me convert a frontend from one component library to another. The major issue I ran into was that the token limit was too small for even a modestly sized page.

ilaksh 3y ago
ChatGPT 3.5 is about 20-30 IQ points dumber than GPT-4. There is no comparison. It is not very similar. GPT-4 now also has 128,000 context tokens. They could charge $2000 per month for GPT-4 and it would be more than fair.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  They could charge $2000 per month for GPT-4 and it would be more than fair. Well, it's hard to argue with that.