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It's better for society to get much wealthier, much faster, by opening up the possibility for anyone to do advanced programming, than for a small class of anoin

It's better for society to get much wealthier, much faster, by opening up the possibility for anyone to do advanced programming, than for a small class of anointed and studied elites to get rich via this exclusion. It's the opposite of sad. It's the best thing that ever happened for the productive use of a computer by a layperson since the invention of the search engine.

eqvinox 1y ago
Sure, but this isn't "anyone" doing advanced programming, it's the LLM doing it. The humans get skill in using LLM, not programming, and whether this new skill will make anyone wealthy is an open question. (Also, just by market logic, rare skills in demand are always paid more; I'm not sure why you're calling it an "exclusion". The education system in a lot of places might have that function, but that's a separate issue not helped by LLMs writing SQL?)
- hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
  I contest that. A human using an LLM to program, is a human programming. Gaining skill with the LLM is gaining skill in programming. And the things most people are both able and willing to now create with LLMs are of vastly greater complexity than whatever they were doing before - so yes, it's advanced programming. I also contest your definition of wealth. Society absolutely and obviously becomes wealthier when many more people are able to use computers for more advanced things. Just because that wealth doesn't directly appear as zeros in your financial statements doesn't mean the wealth hasn't been created.
  - eqvinox 1y ago
    I'm happy to accept your contest, but you should be aware that both of our opinions are only beliefs at this point and science will have an answer at some point in the future when the effects of LLMs on humans are understood better. I do have to ask though, who do you think will pay the electricity bill for disenfranchised groups lacking wealth the most strongly to use LLMs? Some things might be free right now, but what do you think will happen when some of e.g. OpenAI's $300bn valuation is being collected?
    - hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
      Electricity in the US currently hovers around 20 cents per kWh; 1 kWh gets you somewhere on the order of 1000 ChatGPT queries. So that's about 0.02 cents per query. At the current US federal minimum wage of $7.25, that means you would need to work for about 0.1 seconds to afford the electricity bill for one query. Maybe 1 full second for one of the really hard ones. So my serious answer to your question is, I'm pretty sure these disenfranchised groups can find room in their budget for a query or two if they think it's worth doing. In fact, they might even find ways to save more than 1 second by using that query, in which case they can produce more economic value... And so society gets richer.
      - eqvinox 1y ago
        I apologize for being excessively metaphorical and using "the electricity bill" to refer to the overall cost of using AI. That said, it should be clear to you that any future pricing of AI services after the currently ongoing honeymoon period will need to recover the initial investments that have happened in the past years, pay for silicon, and make some profit too.
        hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
        Actually, no, that's not clear to me either. While profit is certainly always what private enterprises aim for, it's also possible they will simply fail at it. Companies go bankrupt all the time. Those investments might simply be lost as other, better, cheaper options become available. Nowhere should give us more confidence in this outcome being not just possible but likely, over the next 5-10 years, than the rapid growth of locally runnable models. There the fixed cost really is market rate silicon and the ongoing variable costs simply market rate electricity. So I don't even think you were being excessively metaphorical with that. That is actually where the price will head.
prmph 1y ago
LLMs are not going to allow you to do advanced programming if you couldn't already do it by hand. The thing about LLMs is, they are a force multiplier, imperfectly, but I guess they are getting there. The overall vision (unless trivial), architecture, functionality-gaps-filling, revisions, etc. of an advanced project is not going to come from an LLM. I personally don't think we are ever going to get to that point where I can give a simple propnmt and have an LLM generate a complex app ready to run. Think about what that would require: 1. The LLM would have to read my mind and extrapolate all the minute decisions I would make to implement the app based on the prompt. 2. Assuming the LLM can get past (1), it would have to basically be AGI to be able to implement pretty much whatever I can dream up. 3. If 2 & 3 above is somehow achieved, it would be economically very valuable, and you can bet that functionality is not going to be casually enabled in LLMs, for just anyone to use.
- hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
  >LLMs are not going to allow you to do advanced programming if you couldn't already do it by hand. This is simply false. I have empirically already seen many people get LLMs to write code they couldn't do by hand in any reasonable time frame. ("Let me take a 3 month course on Python and then get back to writing this pandas script by hand" is not a reasonable time frame when your competition can pump it out for you in 30 seconds.) Some of these people go on to learn how to code themselves, but others are perfectly happy with treating the results they're currently getting as a black box. LLMs are a force multiplier on general productivity moreso than they are on programming ability specifically. >[I]t would be economically very valuable, and you can bet that functionality is not going to be casually enabled in LLMs But nothing else in the world works like this. An economically very valuable thing is, almost by definition, something with a lot of demand for it. That's like saying Excel would be so valuable if only it could do math, so of course Microsoft isn't going to put a calculator into its spreadsheet program.

eqvinox 1y ago

Sure, but this isn't "anyone" doing advanced programming, it's the LLM doing it. The humans get skill in using LLM, not programming, and whether this new skill will make anyone wealthy is an open question. (Also, just by market logic, rare skills in demand are always paid more; I'm not sure why you're calling it an "exclusion". The education system in a lot of places might have that function, but that's a separate issue not helped by LLMs writing SQL?)

hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
I contest that. A human using an LLM to program, is a human programming. Gaining skill with the LLM is gaining skill in programming. And the things most people are both able and willing to now create with LLMs are of vastly greater complexity than whatever they were doing before - so yes, it's advanced programming. I also contest your definition of wealth. Society absolutely and obviously becomes wealthier when many more people are able to use computers for more advanced things. Just because that wealth doesn't directly appear as zeros in your financial statements doesn't mean the wealth hasn't been created.
- eqvinox 1y ago
  I'm happy to accept your contest, but you should be aware that both of our opinions are only beliefs at this point and science will have an answer at some point in the future when the effects of LLMs on humans are understood better. I do have to ask though, who do you think will pay the electricity bill for disenfranchised groups lacking wealth the most strongly to use LLMs? Some things might be free right now, but what do you think will happen when some of e.g. OpenAI's $300bn valuation is being collected?
  - hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
    Electricity in the US currently hovers around 20 cents per kWh; 1 kWh gets you somewhere on the order of 1000 ChatGPT queries. So that's about 0.02 cents per query. At the current US federal minimum wage of $7.25, that means you would need to work for about 0.1 seconds to afford the electricity bill for one query. Maybe 1 full second for one of the really hard ones. So my serious answer to your question is, I'm pretty sure these disenfranchised groups can find room in their budget for a query or two if they think it's worth doing. In fact, they might even find ways to save more than 1 second by using that query, in which case they can produce more economic value... And so society gets richer.
    - eqvinox 1y ago
      I apologize for being excessively metaphorical and using "the electricity bill" to refer to the overall cost of using AI. That said, it should be clear to you that any future pricing of AI services after the currently ongoing honeymoon period will need to recover the initial investments that have happened in the past years, pay for silicon, and make some profit too.
      - hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
        Actually, no, that's not clear to me either. While profit is certainly always what private enterprises aim for, it's also possible they will simply fail at it. Companies go bankrupt all the time. Those investments might simply be lost as other, better, cheaper options become available. Nowhere should give us more confidence in this outcome being not just possible but likely, over the next 5-10 years, than the rapid growth of locally runnable models. There the fixed cost really is market rate silicon and the ongoing variable costs simply market rate electricity. So I don't even think you were being excessively metaphorical with that. That is actually where the price will head.

prmph 1y ago

LLMs are not going to allow you to do advanced programming if you couldn't already do it by hand. The thing about LLMs is, they are a force multiplier, imperfectly, but I guess they are getting there. The overall vision (unless trivial), architecture, functionality-gaps-filling, revisions, etc. of an advanced project is not going to come from an LLM. I personally don't think we are ever going to get to that point where I can give a simple propnmt and have an LLM generate a complex app ready to run. Think about what that would require: 1. The LLM would have to read my mind and extrapolate all the minute decisions I would make to implement the app based on the prompt. 2. Assuming the LLM can get past (1), it would have to basically be AGI to be able to implement pretty much whatever I can dream up. 3. If 2 & 3 above is somehow achieved, it would be economically very valuable, and you can bet that functionality is not going to be casually enabled in LLMs, for just anyone to use.

hiAndrewQuinn 1y ago
>LLMs are not going to allow you to do advanced programming if you couldn't already do it by hand. This is simply false. I have empirically already seen many people get LLMs to write code they couldn't do by hand in any reasonable time frame. ("Let me take a 3 month course on Python and then get back to writing this pandas script by hand" is not a reasonable time frame when your competition can pump it out for you in 30 seconds.) Some of these people go on to learn how to code themselves, but others are perfectly happy with treating the results they're currently getting as a black box. LLMs are a force multiplier on general productivity moreso than they are on programming ability specifically. >[I]t would be economically very valuable, and you can bet that functionality is not going to be casually enabled in LLMs But nothing else in the world works like this. An economically very valuable thing is, almost by definition, something with a lot of demand for it. That's like saying Excel would be so valuable if only it could do math, so of course Microsoft isn't going to put a calculator into its spreadsheet program.