2 ms·

who wants to pay for weird interns? even good ones are free. and might even grow to good hires.

ben_w 3y ago
Paid internships are common, and LLMs are so much cheaper than humans they might as well be free. The prices on OpenAI's website are listed per million tokens, the cheaper model can read a typical book for less than the cost of that book in paperback, second hand, during a closing down discount sale, and even the fancy model is still in range of a cheap second-hand paperback (just not during a closing-down sale) for reading and just about the price of a new cheap paperback for writing — cheap enough it might as well be free. Plus, they're an intern at everything all at once. You don't get to hire someone who has a late-degree-level grasp of programming (in every major programming language at the same time) and genetics and law and physics and medicine and who has a business-level grasp of all the most common written languages on Earth — there is no such human. (If and when we can make an AI, be it an LLM or otherwise, which can act at the level of a senior in whichever field it was trained on, even if that training takes a gigawatt-year to compute per field, and even if inference costs 100 kW just to reach human output speed, it's going to seriously mess up the whole world economy; right now it's mainly messing up the economic incentives to hire people fresh from university while boosting the amount of simple stuff that actually gets done because normal people and not just business can now also afford to hire the weird intern). > and might even grow to good hires. Even if they do, will you be the one to hire them? Also, ChatGPT has so far existed for about as long as I spent on my (paid) year in industry that formed part of my degree. It wasn't called an internship, but it basically was. In that time, the models have grown and improved significantly, suggesting (but not proving, because induction doesn't do that) that they will continue to grow and improve.

Paid internships are common, and LLMs are so much cheaper than humans they might as well be free. The prices on OpenAI's website are listed per million tokens, the cheaper model can read a typical book for less than the cost of that book in paperback, second hand, during a closing down discount sale, and even the fancy model is still in range of a cheap second-hand paperback (just not during a closing-down sale) for reading and just about the price of a new cheap paperback for writing — cheap enough it might as well be free. Plus, they're an intern at everything all at once. You don't get to hire someone who has a late-degree-level grasp of programming (in every major programming language at the same time) and genetics and law and physics and medicine and who has a business-level grasp of all the most common written languages on Earth — there is no such human. (If and when we can make an AI, be it an LLM or otherwise, which can act at the level of a senior in whichever field it was trained on, even if that training takes a gigawatt-year to compute per field, and even if inference costs 100 kW just to reach human output speed, it's going to seriously mess up the whole world economy; right now it's mainly messing up the economic incentives to hire people fresh from university while boosting the amount of simple stuff that actually gets done because normal people and not just business can now also afford to hire the weird intern). > and might even grow to good hires. Even if they do, will you be the one to hire them? Also, ChatGPT has so far existed for about as long as I spent on my (paid) year in industry that formed part of my degree. It wasn't called an internship, but it basically was. In that time, the models have grown and improved significantly, suggesting (but not proving, because induction doesn't do that) that they will continue to grow and improve.