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Wall Street is not a reliable proxy for ‘value’. For the people who judge these innovations by how well they can read their minds and how well it stands up to

Wall Street is not a reliable proxy for ‘value’. For the people who judge these innovations by how well they can read their minds and how well it stands up to what people feel they were promised by Star Trek, the last 24 months have been a disappointment. For those who are becoming far more productive than they previously were, learning new skills, and building the next generation of companies.. that same time has been life changing. I don’t spend too much time worrying about wall street and I also don’t deny the bottom could fall out, but I have no doubts about the ability of these technologies to dramatically improve lives and be foundational for future improvements.

lolinder 2y ago
> For those who are becoming far more productive than they previously were, learning new skills, and building the next generation of companies.. that same time has been life changing. As someone who is very much in this camp, I feel that life changing is a bit of an exaggeration for my own experience. GitHub Copilot is a really good autocomplete. Stable Diffusion and company were a fun toy for a while. Perplexity.ai is pretty good at doing what Google could do before the enormous wave of AI junk made search completely intractible. But otherwise... life goes on. I got a few better tools out of it, but the chat models have been reliably useless for my professional work and I therefore don't trust them much for learning something new (see Gell-Mann amnesia [0]). And I'm not someone with my head in the sand—I fine tuned GPT-2 back before anything LLM-based had hit the tech mainstream, much less the general public. I was one of the first to sign up for the Copilot Beta, and I run Ollama locally with a bunch of different models that I've tried out on several side projects. I have access to both Anthropic and OpenAI models at work and regularly break them out to try again... it just never actually helps. People have all these amazing stories of all the productivity they gain by using these models, but at their best I always come away feeling like I spent a few minutes coaching a junior developer through a problem without actually having taught anyone anything. I'm left wondering if I'm somehow doing it wrong or if all the stories of amazing results are coming from juniors who don't realize the model isn't very much better at this than they are. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmn...
- roenxi 2y ago
  Life changing seems fair, I'm making changes to my life assuming that programming jobs are about to get cutthroat competitive and then disappear. We've got something that is about as good as a junior developer in ChatGPT, much cheaper to employ for a month and it's competence is improving. It may not learn anything in a single session but at a higher level the rate of improvement of these models seems to be much faster than a human can manage. A human couldn't possibly learn as much as ChatGPT has in the time it has taken from founding OpenAI to now, and hardware improvement doesn't look like it'll cap out any time soon. We've got all these people in a state of delusion that somehow the job of a developer isn't glorified autocomplete of what someone else prompts them with. We can't be sure what the speed is that it will happen, but the writing is on the wall that AI will obsolete software development roles as they currently exist.
  - JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
    If ChatGPT becomes as good as a junior, it may replace this position and we will be stuck with a decreasing number of seniors. But right now it's bad, makes a lot of mistakes and hallucinates APIs which is unacceptable. > the job of a developer [is] glorified autocomplete of what someone else prompts them with Clients don't know what they want, need, or what machines are capable of. Managers can't properly translate that either to the developers. My job is to understand all this and propose solutions, or say no if it's impossible. Will AI do that in the future? Do you remember when Cobol was supposed to replace programmers? Same thing for me. I have yet to see a fully generated solution from the specs to the deployment that takes responsibilities for its mistakes. But not yet another ReactJS frontend that anyone can do in a few days, something real that is useful to me and that you can sell as a real product. We currently have a large number of business guys (look it up on LinkedIn) who learn "prompting" because they believe it will make them gods in the future even if they don't know what a programming language is. And a lot of scammers who sell their prompts to those people. It feels like cryptocurrencies all over again. Last but not least, who will create the new APIs, technologies, and languages that we use? Will we be stuck with C++2x forever? ChatGPT will need a few additional revolutions to do this and to be independent on the open-source that already exists.

lolinder 2y ago

> For those who are becoming far more productive than they previously were, learning new skills, and building the next generation of companies.. that same time has been life changing. As someone who is very much in this camp, I feel that life changing is a bit of an exaggeration for my own experience. GitHub Copilot is a really good autocomplete. Stable Diffusion and company were a fun toy for a while. Perplexity.ai is pretty good at doing what Google could do before the enormous wave of AI junk made search completely intractible. But otherwise... life goes on. I got a few better tools out of it, but the chat models have been reliably useless for my professional work and I therefore don't trust them much for learning something new (see Gell-Mann amnesia [0]). And I'm not someone with my head in the sand—I fine tuned GPT-2 back before anything LLM-based had hit the tech mainstream, much less the general public. I was one of the first to sign up for the Copilot Beta, and I run Ollama locally with a bunch of different models that I've tried out on several side projects. I have access to both Anthropic and OpenAI models at work and regularly break them out to try again... it just never actually helps. People have all these amazing stories of all the productivity they gain by using these models, but at their best I always come away feeling like I spent a few minutes coaching a junior developer through a problem without actually having taught anyone anything. I'm left wondering if I'm somehow doing it wrong or if all the stories of amazing results are coming from juniors who don't realize the model isn't very much better at this than they are. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmn...

roenxi 2y ago
Life changing seems fair, I'm making changes to my life assuming that programming jobs are about to get cutthroat competitive and then disappear. We've got something that is about as good as a junior developer in ChatGPT, much cheaper to employ for a month and it's competence is improving. It may not learn anything in a single session but at a higher level the rate of improvement of these models seems to be much faster than a human can manage. A human couldn't possibly learn as much as ChatGPT has in the time it has taken from founding OpenAI to now, and hardware improvement doesn't look like it'll cap out any time soon. We've got all these people in a state of delusion that somehow the job of a developer isn't glorified autocomplete of what someone else prompts them with. We can't be sure what the speed is that it will happen, but the writing is on the wall that AI will obsolete software development roles as they currently exist.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
  If ChatGPT becomes as good as a junior, it may replace this position and we will be stuck with a decreasing number of seniors. But right now it's bad, makes a lot of mistakes and hallucinates APIs which is unacceptable. > the job of a developer [is] glorified autocomplete of what someone else prompts them with Clients don't know what they want, need, or what machines are capable of. Managers can't properly translate that either to the developers. My job is to understand all this and propose solutions, or say no if it's impossible. Will AI do that in the future? Do you remember when Cobol was supposed to replace programmers? Same thing for me. I have yet to see a fully generated solution from the specs to the deployment that takes responsibilities for its mistakes. But not yet another ReactJS frontend that anyone can do in a few days, something real that is useful to me and that you can sell as a real product. We currently have a large number of business guys (look it up on LinkedIn) who learn "prompting" because they believe it will make them gods in the future even if they don't know what a programming language is. And a lot of scammers who sell their prompts to those people. It feels like cryptocurrencies all over again. Last but not least, who will create the new APIs, technologies, and languages that we use? Will we be stuck with C++2x forever? ChatGPT will need a few additional revolutions to do this and to be independent on the open-source that already exists.