4 ms·

In the hands of an expert… right. So is it not incredibly irresponsible to release these tools into the wild, and expose it those who are not experts? They wil

by teeeew 9mo ago

In the hands of an expert… right. So is it not incredibly irresponsible to release these tools into the wild, and expose it those who are not experts? They will actually become incredibly worse off. Ironically this does not ‘democratise’ intelligence at all - the gap widens between experts and the rest.

simonw 9mo ago
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if OpenAI had built GPT3 and then GPT-4 and NOT released them to the world, on the basis that they were too dangerous for regular people to use. That nearly happened - it's why OpenAI didn't release open weight models past GPT2, and it's why Google didn't release anything useful built on Transformers despite having invented the architecture. If we lived in the world today, LLMs would be available only to a small, elite and impossibly well funded class of people. Google and OpenAI would solely get to decide who could explore this new world with them. I think that would suck.
- teeeew 9mo ago
  So… what? With all due respect I don’t care about an acceleration in writing code - I’m more interested in incremental positive economic impact. To date I haven’t seen anything convince me that this technology will yield this. Producing more code doesn’t overcome the lack of imagination, creativity and so on to figure out what projects resources should be invested in. This has always been an issue that will compound at firms like Google who have an expansive graveyard of projects laid to rest. In fact, in a perverse way, all this ‘intelligence’ can exist. At the same time humans can get worse in their ability to make judgments in investment decisions. So broadly where is the net benefit here?
  - simonw 9mo ago
    You mean the net benefit in widespread access to LLMs? I get the impression there's no answer here that would satisfy you, but personally I'm excited about regular people being able to automate tedious things in their lives without having to spend 6+ months learning to program first. And being able to enrich their lives with access to as much world knowledge as possible via a system that can translate that knowledge into whatever language and terminology makes the most sense to them.
    - teeeew 9mo ago
      “I'm excited about regular people being able to automate tedious things in their lives without having to spend 6+ months learning to program first.” Bring the implicit and explicit costs to date into your analysis and you should quickly realise none of this makes sense from a societal standpoint. Also you seem to be living in a bubble - the average person doesn’t care about automating anything!
      - bathtub365 9mo ago
        The average person already automates a lot of things in their day to day lives. They spend far less time doing the dishes, laundry, and cleaning because parts of those tasks have been mechanized and automated. I think LLMs probably automate the wrong thing for the average person (i.e., I still have to load the laundry machine and fold the laundry after) but automation has saved the average person a lot of time
        zahlman 9mo ago
        What sorts of things will the average, non-technical person think of automating on a computer that are actually quality-of-life-improving?
        simonw 9mo ago
        My favorite anecdotal story here is that a couple of years ago I was attending a training session at a fire station and the fire chief happened to mention that he had spent the past two days manually migrating contact details from one CRM to another. I do not want the chief of a fire station losing two days of work to something that could be scripted!
        gjadi 9mo ago
        I don't want my doctor to vibe script some conversion only to realize weeks or months later it made a subtle error in my prescription. I want both of them to have enough fund to hire someone to do it properly. But wanting is not enough unfortunately...
closewith 9mo ago
You can apply the same logic to all technologies, including programming languages, HTTP, cryptography, cameras, etc. Who should decide what's a responsible use?
phicoh 9mo ago
I'm curious about the economic aspects of this. If only experts can use such tools effectively, how big will the total market be and does that warrant the investments? For companies, if these tools make experts even more special, then experts may get more power certainly when it comes to salary. So the productively benefits of AI have to be pretty high to overcome this. Does AI make an expert twice as productive?
- paodealho 9mo ago
  I have been thinking about this in the last few weeks. First time I see someone commenting about it here. - If the number of programmers will be drastically reduced, how big of a price increase companies like Anthropic would need to be profitable? - If you are a manager, you now have a much higher bus factor to deal with. One person leaving means a greater blow on the team's knowledge. - If the number of programmers will be drastically reduced, the need for managers and middle managers will also decline, no? Hmm...

by teeeew 9mo ago

simonw 9mo ago

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if OpenAI had built GPT3 and then GPT-4 and NOT released them to the world, on the basis that they were too dangerous for regular people to use. That nearly happened - it's why OpenAI didn't release open weight models past GPT2, and it's why Google didn't release anything useful built on Transformers despite having invented the architecture. If we lived in the world today, LLMs would be available only to a small, elite and impossibly well funded class of people. Google and OpenAI would solely get to decide who could explore this new world with them. I think that would suck.

teeeew 9mo ago
So… what? With all due respect I don’t care about an acceleration in writing code - I’m more interested in incremental positive economic impact. To date I haven’t seen anything convince me that this technology will yield this. Producing more code doesn’t overcome the lack of imagination, creativity and so on to figure out what projects resources should be invested in. This has always been an issue that will compound at firms like Google who have an expansive graveyard of projects laid to rest. In fact, in a perverse way, all this ‘intelligence’ can exist. At the same time humans can get worse in their ability to make judgments in investment decisions. So broadly where is the net benefit here?
- simonw 9mo ago
  You mean the net benefit in widespread access to LLMs? I get the impression there's no answer here that would satisfy you, but personally I'm excited about regular people being able to automate tedious things in their lives without having to spend 6+ months learning to program first. And being able to enrich their lives with access to as much world knowledge as possible via a system that can translate that knowledge into whatever language and terminology makes the most sense to them.
  - teeeew 9mo ago
    “I'm excited about regular people being able to automate tedious things in their lives without having to spend 6+ months learning to program first.” Bring the implicit and explicit costs to date into your analysis and you should quickly realise none of this makes sense from a societal standpoint. Also you seem to be living in a bubble - the average person doesn’t care about automating anything!
    - bathtub365 9mo ago
      The average person already automates a lot of things in their day to day lives. They spend far less time doing the dishes, laundry, and cleaning because parts of those tasks have been mechanized and automated. I think LLMs probably automate the wrong thing for the average person (i.e., I still have to load the laundry machine and fold the laundry after) but automation has saved the average person a lot of time
      - zahlman 9mo ago
        What sorts of things will the average, non-technical person think of automating on a computer that are actually quality-of-life-improving?
        simonw 9mo ago
        My favorite anecdotal story here is that a couple of years ago I was attending a training session at a fire station and the fire chief happened to mention that he had spent the past two days manually migrating contact details from one CRM to another. I do not want the chief of a fire station losing two days of work to something that could be scripted!
        gjadi 9mo ago
        I don't want my doctor to vibe script some conversion only to realize weeks or months later it made a subtle error in my prescription. I want both of them to have enough fund to hire someone to do it properly. But wanting is not enough unfortunately...

closewith 9mo ago

You can apply the same logic to all technologies, including programming languages, HTTP, cryptography, cameras, etc. Who should decide what's a responsible use?

phicoh 9mo ago

I'm curious about the economic aspects of this. If only experts can use such tools effectively, how big will the total market be and does that warrant the investments? For companies, if these tools make experts even more special, then experts may get more power certainly when it comes to salary. So the productively benefits of AI have to be pretty high to overcome this. Does AI make an expert twice as productive?

paodealho 9mo ago
I have been thinking about this in the last few weeks. First time I see someone commenting about it here. - If the number of programmers will be drastically reduced, how big of a price increase companies like Anthropic would need to be profitable? - If you are a manager, you now have a much higher bus factor to deal with. One person leaving means a greater blow on the team's knowledge. - If the number of programmers will be drastically reduced, the need for managers and middle managers will also decline, no? Hmm...