3 ms·
LLMs are cool and will continue to change society in ways we cannot readily predict, but they are not quite that cool. GPT3 has been around for a little bit now
by flatline 3y ago
LLMs are cool and will continue to change society in ways we cannot readily predict, but they are not quite that cool. GPT3 has been around for a little bit now and the world has not ended or encountered a singularity. The models are expensive to run both in compute and expertise. They produce a lot of garbage.
I see the threat right now to low-paid writing gigs. I’m sure there’s a whole stratum of those they have wiped out, but I also know real live humans still doing that kind of work.
What developers may use in five years is a better version of Copilot trained on existing code bases. They will let developers do more in the time they have, not replace them. Open source software has not put us all out of jobs. I foresee the waning of Big Tech for other reasons.
- ben_w 3y ago> GPT3 has been around for a little bit now and the world has not ended or encountered a singularity. And they won't right up until they do. Reason why is that… > The models are expensive to run both in compute and expertise. …doesn't extend to the one cost that matters: money. Imagine a future AI that beats graduates and not just students. If it costs as much per line of code as 1000 gpt-4-1106-preview[0] tokens, the cost of rewriting all of Red Hat Linux 7.1 from scratch[1] is less than 1 million USD. [0] $0.03 / 1K tokens [1] https://dwheeler.com/sloc/ https://dwheeler.com/sloc/
- flatline 3y agoI like financial breakdowns like this. The thing an LLM cannot do is all the decision making that went into that. Framing the problem is harder to quantify, and is almost certainly an order of magnitude more work than writing and debugging the code. But a sufficiently good LLM should be able to produce code cheaper than humans. Maybe with time and outside sources of truth, better.