I don't get some coders/devs/software engineers surprised that LLM can now pretty much create a whole code out of a prompt.
Wasn't this the final objective of the programming languages abstraction evolution? From Binary/Assembly to Natural Language Programming? I think it is awesome that more people will be able to create software/products as this accelerates innovation cycles a lot.
And, for now, I believe devs that don't rely solely on copy/paste coding from stack exchange don't need to worry about their job stability no?
Indeed, as I write, this is sorta what I have been working toward my whole career. And it's not like this was a giant leap from what ChatGPT already showed it was capable of. People have already been doing stuff like this with LangChain. Nonetheless, seeing that this was OpenAI's plan, that this is now here for real, was a weird experience for me.
Job stability is measured in years. Looking forward, assuming it improves, it’ll do more than just copy/paste code. It’ll be a senior dev capable of explaining the pros and cons of a solution, able to do code reviews and so on.
Others have said exactly what I'm thinking, welcome to the age of the micro-startup, 1-3 engineers, designers, product mangers building some very cool, albeit niche products.
Any random guy can copy just about any startup already. It’s the domain expertise and insight into a potential market that builds companies not a few engineers throwing together a react app
Any random guy with a shitload of cash to spend on development. These "few engineers" can cost $1kk annually and if you think some random guy can just throw away such cash then well...
"Domain expertise and insight into a potential market" won't get you a working product that you can sell.
Anyone driven can throw together an MVP for a CRUD app. Having the domain expertise to prove a market edge can get you funding. Most engineers can’t do that second part.
More importantly, accountants, lawyers, sales people and other generic business expenses are now making up a bigger portion of your company expenses than the development process.
No it isn’t and this isn’t a funny joke. If you can’t write optimal algorithms and come up with data structures that allow for mapping out problems you aren’t solving anything and your job has always been one innovation away from disappearing.
I'd guess 90% dev jobs don't involve any algo knowledge more complicated than "should I pick a list or hashmap" or "which columns need indices". They involve converting business logic into code and combining it with good UI/UX.
I have certainly gotten value out of Stack Exchange and the like, but pretty little overall. The answers to most of my software problems simply aren't there.
Nor are they elsewhere on the web.
Which leaves me feeling like it's unlikely that ChatGPT will have the answers either. Perhaps it will still be a useful tool toward arriving at the answers, but I am not presently anticipating that it is going to be churning out all of the code automatically.
I am banging my head against a heisenbug. I wrote the code that works yesterday. I spent a lot of time rewriting it a dozen times. Now I am back to the original and it works for unexplainable reasons. I doubt that a chatbot could have sped this up.
I envy the people who are bottlenecked on their typing speed and benefit 10 times more from the chat bot than I do.
Have you tried? GPT-4 is pretty good at spotting bugs. It would probably also spot a bunch of other 'bugs' that don't exist, but that would still be better than rewriting it a dozen times.
> OpenAI made the extraordinary and IMO under-discussed decision to use an open API specification format, where every API provider hosts a text file on their website saying how to use their API. This means even this plugin ecosystem isn’t a walled garden that only the first mover controls. I don’t fully understand why they went this way, but I’m grateful they did.
I can't wait for the positive feedback loop of statically trained LLMs being retrained on data that was generated from the N-1th generation of statically trained LLMs.
There's so much of talk about what these models can generate, which is cool in relation to plugins, but there's still a lot of interesting code to write, companies to build, and ideas to formulate, that an LLM cannot do on its own. If you're terrified of your software engineering job becoming at risk, I urge you to just take a beat.
If Reinforcement Learning is anything to go by, then a naive implementation of learning from past models will overfit to the previous model and start performing worse than even earlier models.
There was a paper by someone @ Microsoft who tried to train a boardgame playing AI like this. The "best" models started losing to beginner level players from some point onwards.
Current higher level programming languages are developed for humans to develop software closer to their natural language. If in the future humans will be writing and debugging little code, these LLMs will naturally evolve to directly writing Assembly. Scary to think about, but also makes me wonder how many non-technical people cope today with the "black box" of a computer.
About twenty years ago, I had a professor explain to the class that Rational Rose would be replacing us all....yet here we still are.
I don't understand why it would write in assembly. That is not portable and it makes verification difficult and also assembly has less grammatic structure which LLMs rely upon.
Probably not but I doubt ASM is either. It's too low level, and it doesn't make sense for a LLM to have to do things like instruction selection which would can be done far better by existing tools (LLVM etc.).
Maybe it could just be an alternative syntax for an existing language which is more optimized for input/output to an LLM.
I am thinking that the latter might eventually emerge, probably as part of a bigger tool chain e.g. langchain. Something like java bytecode which is low level and portable, but optimized for the ways that LLMs (perhaps interfacing with other tools) work.
I wonder what the best output language for an LLM is? The one that has the most training examples? Or something that has other properties that make it easier to generate?
I’d guess that the languages with the fewest implicit behaviors (so no Scala or Haskell) would be easiest. Maybe Go is the generation language of choice?
I believe when AI become a hive mind and they decide to develop a programming language, they'll start with assembly-like language to abstract the bytecodes, then move to very-specialized higher-level language. The next step will be to develop an os optimized for their use case, the one that provides interfaces for their own assembly-like language.
I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field.
If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.
In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days.
Instead of worrying, learn to work with it. It will be harder for large companies/large teams to extract value from this compared to small companies/small teams.
It means competition between companies will increase but it isn’t necessarily bad for existing software engineers, especially solo founders.
> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.
You are overestimating the vast amount of "software engineers" in the world. The overwhelming majority of us are just programmers, we are just gluing together CRUD spaghetti in the random language we grew up with. We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want to get a decent salary for our boring work. And we certainly do not want to be "solo founders", build products of our dreams or increase our productivity.
This is easy to say, but I would argue that it's impossible to know what to level up in; the field is just moving too quickly now.
At this stage, the best advice I could formulate would be to learn LangChain and prompt engineering, but these too are fast moving targets, and who knows what's going to be relevant in 2024?
I think the best thing one can do is learn how LLMs work, acquaint themselves with real implementations of it (ChatGPT, copilot), and then find ways to integrate these techniques into their companies.
Or that could be a way to end up in the woods. What if you made a bet like this on metaverse being the future? You'd be wishing you hadn't now.
Instead, look at the job postings for titles you want. Note the skills in demand at more than one job. Focus on those skills. There's your set of skills the market currently is in demand of.
Some of those skills that you see in those job postings today are devaluing due to tools like ChatGPT. Not all those skills and certainly not fundamental ones like communication and leadership. But if you see something like "writing CRUD endpoints for a Rails stack" everywhere, having that skill is no longer a differentiatior.
Don't pivot your career. Don't burn the boat and jump into AI. Just be aware of these tools and get good at what they're poor at.
>Instead, look at the job postings for titles you want. Note the skills in demand at more than one job. Focus on those skills
While I agree with the sentiment, there is way too much noise in that channel. Job listings written by non-technical people just throwing key words together, recruiters detached from specific roles and companies trying signalling growth to mention just a few sources of confusion...
I've been leveling up since I started as a helpdesk rep at 18, becoming a Windows sysadmin, then a junior dev, and now a senior dev. College was not an option for me for reasons totally outside of my control, as my parents decided to not do their taxes for a number of years and I was unable to get any financial aid (grants or loans) whatsoever.
I scratched and clawed, read tons of books, blogs, spent extra time polishing features beyond what was needed so I could learn new skills... but now I am a father of two young kids, with a wife. How long am I supposed to put in all this extra work? I'm likely slightly above average intelligence, but I'm far from being at the level where I could be an AI researcher... if I am even capable of doing the kind of math required there, it would require many years of learning.
GPT4 isn't going to replace me, but watching this space unfold really has me worrying about the versions that come out over the next 2-5 years.
A human is only so moldable, and while I am more than happy to learn new skills, I have no idea where to even start. What profession is safe? Where will the growth be in a field that will have equivalent or even near equivalent earning potential?
If GPT ends up getting to the point where it can replace me at my job, I really have a hard time thinking of a career path I could get into at this stage in life. It would need to be able to architect systems at a high level, write code to implement various features, communicate with stakeholders, document design decisions... if it can do that, it can do a whole hell of a lot of other jobs too.
Once it gets to that point, I don't think physical jobs will be that far behind on being automated either. We already have robots of all shapes and sizes (including bipedal), the main thing slowing down their deployment is that they aren't adaptable enough. With AGI, that changes. It will take a bit longer due to the capital requirements and factory build outs that would be needed.
No jobs will be safe. In the very, very near future.
GPT-4 is a very capable systems architect and can also implement the code. There are a few tools available to put it in a debug loop. Writing documents is a walk in the park for GPT-4. Emails or Discord chats or even perfectly realistic voice conversations are completely doable (I have that on my website).
At this point it's about connecting things together and looping them properly to automate a very high portion of jobs.
I think the answer is not employment but rather production. Think of something you can leverage these AIs that would be interesting or useful to someone else or some business.
Beyond that things like UBI and generally better integration of technology into government is going to be critical for our survival. Especially decentralized technologies and real-world resource data.
If your goal was to spend the rest of your life doing something you learn once and getting paid well for it you seriously picked the wrong industry. Engineers have been told to constantly learn new things, know multiple languages etc since the dawn of programming.
I’ve worked with tons of programmers like you describe. I’ve continued to tell them that simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to dbs are solved problems we should not be fighting with.
...because of the limitless customization that sneaks into every growing software project. This limitless customization is also my last hope, maybe GPT-n won't be able to solve it as good as I do.
Which industry would you recommend? I hate studying and I especially hate everything software development related with a passion.
In any case, I need to refute your argument, in my work as software engineer spanning more than a decade, I have noticed zero deprecation of my skills (Java, SQL, HTML/JS/CSS) (while keeping them up to date!) until now and only had to learn a few new complementing skills (cloud, docker, SPA, Kubernetes). The only skill that got replaced might have been "Java application server management" since that got replaced by whatever docker runtime is en vogue at the moment. I have worked for the government and met PL1/Cobol mainframe programmers that refused to learn Java and still got paid generously for their long term expertise.
I seriously doubt you’re writing the same kind of webapps you were a decade ago, if so you’re a minority. Regardless a decade doesn’t “refute” that the web itself is a total disruption of the way people wrote code prior. This industry is always changing paradigms and were constantly exposing more high level ways to instruct the processor.
> simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to dbs are solved problems
I can see how you might think that... until you start actually talking in depth with enough actual users and executives and trying to get them to agree on how all that stuff should work and what it should be capable of.
Most of the development process is about trying to wrangle abstract ideas about how business logic should be implemented/improved from flawed humans who aren't great at communicating those ideas. Your 'simple' CRUD app still often has to be highly customized by someone willing to do the difficult work of dealing with people. And that's before you even start getting into working with more regulated businesses.
Code monkeys/plumbers using 'outdated' tech who can deliver something that makes a workplace more efficient in the long run will continue to be in demand. There was enough functionality in software by the 1970s to handle the vast majority of business needs. Someone still has to understand those business needs (which ultimately have little to nothing to do with software) well enough to translate them into something that works. Whether it works for those who are using it is all that really matters.
> We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want to get a decent salary for our boring work.
Yikes. Productive work is not just a way to earn a living but also a way to achieve personal fulfillment and happiness. It's a means of creating value and contributing to society. A person who works just for the salary and does not find any meaning in his work is not living up to his full potential.
Yikes. Your full potential isn't your work. We are all creative beings with deep emotional lives and connections to everything around us. And there are a ton of jobs in programming that pay well enough that you can live relatively well in a capitalist society. Some people find fulfillment in their families, neighbours, art, and dreams.
How many jobs in modern society are complete bullshit? A good deal of them, I would say. Why should people measure their happiness and self worth from these?
I'm not suggesting your work is the only source of fulfillment or that one's career should be the sole measure of their self-worth. Rather, the importance of finding value and meaning in one's work is a complementary means of achieving personal fulfillment and happiness. It is still possible to find value and meaning in jobs that do not align with a person's interests or passions. The key is to find a balance between work and other aspects of life.
> Rather, the importance of finding value and meaning in one's work is a complementary means of achieving personal fulfillment and happiness.
I wholeheartedly agree! I do know a few people that love their jobs and I envy them to no end, they are inspiring, shining suns. But I remain firm on my opinion that this is far out of reach for most people.
Indeed it is given the preponderance of bullshit jobs.
Capitalism maximizes profits, not happiness. The market for software development jobs is much bigger for people who know popular frameworks and are content with validating forms, querying databases, aligning buttons, sending reports, etc. It's a lot easier (and rewarding) to find fulfillment elsewhere.
> also a way to achieve personal fulfillment and happiness
For all but a select few this is an unrealistic fairy tail. Most of us just want to make money to better enjoy our lives. We were given or acquired certain skills to make money, out of juvenile interests or opportunities we used. That doesn't mean we enjoy using those skills. It would be very hard to find any other job without taking a massive pay cut, investing huge amounts of money, time and effort only to have a high chance you won't like your new job as well.
I see no job or career I am interested in: I hate everything the moment it becomes work. And I am no unique snow flake. I am part of the majority with that.
> A person who works just for the salary and does not find any meaning in his work is not living up to his full potential.
Things I enjoy don't pay enough to live a comfortable life. Tech does. So I do well enough at my job to pay for the things I enjoy, and hope I find enough edge cases at work to avoid burnout.
In a true post-scarcity society, where everyone has the freedom to choose a career based purely on fulfillment, your argument is excellent. Until then, however, it's not.
Personally I'm excited whenever an opportunity to wholesale replace a part of my job comes up. I got in to technology because I wanted to make people's lives better, and in theory removing demands on their time does that.
The only problem is that we live in a system that directs the gains upward and any costs downwards, and in so doing creates perverse incentives against people welcoming their redundancy.
Like sibling commenters, I love the idea of building something new with greater leverage. On an individual level, I'm looking forward to leveling up and finding new ways to be effective in my work.
Unlike sibling commenters, I don't think that should be our only option in life. It saddens me greatly that, given a new option to increase the effective output of a unit of time, we repeatedly choose as a society to profit monetarily (and with vast disparity in who benefits) rather than to give people more options in life than drilling on their jobs.
The industrial revolution promised people lives of relative leisure by replacing the need for much physical labor, but instead we concentrated the benefit to the few—and we keep making that same choice over and over.
You become a 'senior dev" by running a company / startup yourself, since it is clear that after the tech layoffs, almost no-one has the money or profits to hire any new developers - junior and senior, which is why I say they are both affected.
But even then, self-proclaimed seniors are too scared to start their own startup(s) now because of (1) Unfavourable market conditions (2) VCs hesitant to raise money (3) ChatGPT will extinguish their startup; even if it uses "AI".
I guess this was the result of a decades long quantitive easing, near zero interest rate bubble of cheap money that had to collapse.
I don't think starting a company will be that successful if you lack enough experience to be hired at any existing companies. The survivorship bias in tech is huge. Most things fail.
Stupid greed is taking so much as to starve your supply. Smart greed is sustainable greed. Smartest greed is one that feeds back into the supply, making it grow exponentially.
But isn't this just hindsight tautology? How would you know ahead of time how much greed is too much?
For example, I've been predicting the financial demise of Facebook for over a decade now (amongst other things for being too greedy), but Zuck's still doing well enough. Even if Meta is declining now, it still might have been rational for him to be so greedy over the past decade.
By the late 2020s, it's entirely possible that a "weaker" AGI will emerge. Consequently, there may be much less need for senior developers as well. However, that could be among the least of our concerns if we cannot reliably align AI with human interests by then.
The latter includes this criterion:
"Able to get top-1 strict accuracy of at least 90.0% on interview-level problems found in the APPS benchmark introduced by Dan Hendrycks, Steven Basart et al."
Has anyone tested GPT-4 on APPS? And if it can get 90% (which it probably can) does that mean people will admit it's an AGI? Or more likely they just keep moving the goalposts.
Is there a scenario where just the people that REALLY love programming start in the field? Could this be a situation where you reduce the field of programmers to only those that are truly passionate about programming, thus making the people left in the field the cream of the crop? We have all worked with individuals that are clearly in the field because they think they can make a lot of money and don’t give a crap about doing a good job. Can we envision a world where these people go on to another field instead of clogging up this one?
There is no way. What I am alluding to is that, the only people who will go down the path of being a junior to senior dev are those that truly love the field. It will purge those that only go down the path because they think it will make them a lot of money. Is this good or bad? Only you can decide.
What I didn’t say but should be a given is that these AI tools won’t be able to completely eliminate the need for any human touch, it will just reduce the need to the point where there won’t be the current huge demand for developers, and thus, the only people that travel down that path will be the ones that are truly passionate about development.
In order to be able to make use of the code produced by AI - be it review, validate, fix, integrate or iterate - operator needs to ultimately be better than AI at making software. (Unless we abandon the idea of understanding what exactly software we are running does)
The question then is how exactly does one become better than AI at making software if no one is going to pay you to make software until you are better than AI?
The same issue with art - we need a sea of mediocre artists and a market for their work for great artists to emerge. AI takes over mediocre art market - all commercially driven art disappears.
> In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days.
You mean the same YouTube that routinely ruins people's livelihoods when it closes their accounts with no recourse? Because I'm totally looking forward to the day when that happens to my development tools.
"We detected that you are using our code to kill vulnerable children (aka orphans). This is against our TOS and we have permanently disabled your account. If you believe this was in error please log into your account and talk to our ChatGPT-powered tech support".
Worst case scenario is that it gets SO good at writing code that software engineering teams are severely downsized or are made obsolete altogether, and I find myself out of a job. I’m not expecting UBI to start falling out of the sky any time soon, especially while there are still manual labor jobs that robots can’t do.
Alternative scenario is that individual developers get somewhere around a 2x-5x productivity increase, but why would I want that? That doesn’t give me more free time - that just means I’ll be expected to do more work. Non-technical management already expects ridiculous delivery timelines; now I’ll have to deal with them asking “why can’t you have the whole project done by tomorrow? Why can’t you just have the robot do it?”
It’s a lose-lose situation and none of us asked for this.
Alternatively, there's more developer output, the unit price of an application gets cheaper, and this stimulates demand for more developers. CPUs getting cheaper and faster didn't decrease demand for CPUs.
This is the assumption that there is end-user demand for the software developers would write. I think we can assume that end users will be using traditional software less as ChatGPT functionality increases.
I'm sure secretaries had similar thoughts about the arrival of personal computers. Yet, few would argue that computers have made the world a worse place. The truth is people will do less work, or it will feel like it. Most of our ancestors did not have the comfortable software jobs we have today. Life will become easier, products and services will become more abundant. Of course, the transition will be harder for those who refuse to adapt and resist change.
It'll be interesting to see what happens when AI truly surpasses human level intelligence, as in, being able to completely replace human jobs, but we're not there yet. It's likely that when we reach that stage, the world will change dramatically and we will either live lives of abundance and leisure or face extinction :)
> we will either live lives of abundance and leisure or face extinction
Third option, the workers no longer control the means of production, and we see levels of inequality that make the railroad barons look like they were middle class.
I doubt this third option exists. If the AI(s) lack empathy for us and we are useless to them, they will either exterminate us directly, or indirectly by denying us resources. If they have empathy for us, they will probably let us live good lives. I doubt we will be useful to them, so I doubt there is a scenario where we live miserable lives working for the AI(s).
It’s happening now with closed AI models. The era of open computing may be ending. The models are essentially a new type of computer and they will remain fundamentally closed, accessible only through an API.
By super intelligent, I meant AIs that have a will of their own. In the meantime, AIs are just a tool at our disposition. And I don't see why those tools would just be in the hands of the rich, anymore than electricity, the Internet, the personal computer or the smartphone is.
Yes, but there aren't many secretaries working these days, and certainly the skill set has changed (though I'll never forget the company owner who was surprised when he was called out on promises made to women running a local college and couldn't understand how they could repeat his statements back to him verbatim along w/ the time/date of the phone call in question --- had to explain that they'd all come up through the secretarial pool, and so knew shorthand).
The bottom line is, at some point in time, automation is going to reduce the amount of human work which needs to be done, and render some folks unemployable --- how does society cope with that? Universal Basic Income is the only reasonable suggestion I've yet seen, but doesn't address the age-old problem of socialism --- it only works until one runs out of other people's money.
Back when computers were first announced, taxing CPUs so as to cover benefits for newly unemployed folks was suggested --- can we put that back on the table?
> The bottom line is, at some point in time, automation is going to reduce the amount of human work which needs to be done
Jevons paradox [0] proposes that as automation reduces the cost of labor then people will find new uses for automation, and this seems to be the historical trajectory. Hundreds of years since the industrial revolution and we still haven't run out of work to do (this could be better or worse given your philosophical premises).
> and render some folks unemployable
If automation truly causes more actually productive work to be done, then as a first-order effect there should be a surplus available to support these people without making anyone else (much) worse off. However as you observe the higher-order consequences of this are very much an open issue.
> It'll be interesting to see what happens when AI truly surpasses human level intelligence, as in, being able to completely replace human jobs, but we're not there yet.
But we are there. This is a reality we live in for a lot of people. That's why the existential crisis in the OP.
Most of our ancestors actually had less stressful jobs and worked less than we do today. The average agricultural worker 100 years ago was not even doing a part-time in terms of time spent doing actual work. More like 2h/day on average.
I think the rapid rate of change in modern software libraries has left me underwhelmed with ChatGPT when it comes to new libraries, C++, or niche APIs (financial, etc).
If you're writing react/python/angular or something popular it seems to do amazing things and spit out entire websites (per demos).
Unfortunately, when I try to put together C++, Rust, or even C# using recent libraries like Blazor it chokes up. I fully understand at least one reason why (libraries and language features not being in the training data from 2021) but that makes me feel that perhaps software engineering at the cutting edge or niche is safe and still requires human reasoning. Not to mention things like properly understanding when and why to use certain data structures, real-world impact of coding choices, pricing, esoteric speed/efficiency improvements, etc.
I think there's still a broad general area where good, great, and amazing+ developers can operate without much threat and in fact using their knowledge and experience to leverage GPT-4 (or others) as a force multiplier.
But with the plugins they announced yesterday this should no longer be an issue. You'll be able to easily connect other APIs or data sources to OpenAI so that your model will write the code exactly the way you want.
Are niche libs safe or software platform will concentrate on the most popular with the most examples and better LLM completion/generation leading to ossification ?
Your tool just needs examples of the more recent library calls.
With 32k tokens coming that's like 90kb total chars which 80kb could library or API docs.
Also it can easily be connected to things like pip or GitHub or Google to check documentation. And many tools are coming over the next few months that will put it in a debugging loop.
So maybe it's "safe" in the very near term but that issue of out of date training in no way prevents it from taking software engineering jobs.
I am working hard to build an AI system that can replace me before someone else does.
Fletching, creating an arrowhead (that needs to be small and perfect) goes through way more material than a hand held obsidian blade, you are not necessarily saving on labour switching to arrows, especially as you now have introduced multiple specialized skills that require hundreds of hours of practice across multiple tribal members (the opposite of this, where you go down to a few babysitters to finesse the final code).
But more relevantly the instant bows were invented you're quota of mammoths to kill a day didn't go up to that maximum possible number + 1 (because sales guys). It stayed at 1 per week or whatever. It's not efficiency, it's management's unrealistics expectations of productive output that I hear being complained about.
>you're quota of mammoths to kill a day didn't go up
Expect with more efficient hunting methods you could kill more than you did before per day, which meant less hunting days, which meant more time with the wife which in turn meant bigger tribe, which in turn meant you actually had to increase your quota.
Just because you are more efficient doesnt mean your manager becomes an idiot and starts to demand unreasonable output (and if you have an idiotic manager already then you already have the problem).
I have no fucking clue what you are even arguing for.
Sounds like it's an argument not to maximize output at every possible opportunity, just because it's possible?
More, more, more, always more, the ideology of infinite growth belongs to a cancer. Quite literally a self-defeating, pathological mindset. More brought us here, to the present day, and it will probably bring us over a Seneca cliff too.
That's the thing about ambition. It means you will never be content.
I can't see the first case ever happening. You'd need a whooooole lot of trust in AI systems to have it write all the code.
As for the latter...I'd say GPT has increased my productivity and therefore allowed me to focus on the more interesting aspects of my work, rather than writing annoying boilerplate code and doing boring tasks where I don't learn anything. I almost never write my own boilerplate anymore.
More productivity doesn't necesarily mean more work. It does mean more focus on interesting work.
> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.
And so-called "senior engineer" salaries will now be brought down and deflated since they were inflated and unjustifiably high in the first place and are the main reason why these tech startups run themselves into the ground with little to no path to profitability.
I guarantee you that so far, the only winner in this is OpenAI. Not the 'senior engineers' building on top of someone else's AI API.
In fact, why hire 3 over-priced seniors when one junior with ChatGPT is significantly much cheaper? I quite find it funny that somehow, all hope is instantly lost because of a "AI" spitting out code will replace them. It just shows that the majority of these tech startups were just good at losing money and being solely dependent on VC cash.
I think if we have the "final software" there won't be a need for a website to sell you products or another for renting a place for your vacation or the one that processes your payments. All is done in one software with one interface. I don't see a need for most of the current founders, especially for solo ones. Also consolidating this capability in a few big tech companies means whatever happened to other industries after industrial age, will happend to ours. Compare the current software industry to other industries with big players (chemical, aviation, power, etc.) where the barrier to entry is higher. Sure there are startups, but not as many as in software scene and even then, many of the are digitalizing those industries.
> If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years.
Is this really true? I may be missing something (I probably am), but I didn't find much use for AI tools in my itsec/programming work. It's a nice tool to have, but I don't write that much boilerplate. I've tried to use it as a better Google, but it kept replying with made up nonsense (things I have problem with are usually niche technologies OpenAI is not good at - I expect it will get better in the future). So I find it dubious it will "10x my productivity" in the "upcoming years". Decades, maybe.
But maybe the future really is now, and I'm just being an old-timer who can't adapt.
There is already software to basically run unit tests on LLM output and re-run the prompt until it passes. As the models get better and the tooling improves, a lot of programming will become specifying constraints on the program you want, and letting the AI explore the latent space until it finds a solution, which you then evaluate before providing more detailed constraints until it does everything you want.
You get it to write them. Maybe in cucumber so you can check them / edit them by reading the English. Maybe you use a competitors model to write the tests as then less likely to make same error in code and tests, or write them twice and get best of three to spot errors.
A lot of people are messing around with React and web-dev in general where you can fuzz component logic until it kind of looks OK. I can see that working out.
If you want to do anything new or - god forbid - know of a better way to do things than what 90% of the population is doing (htmx?). Good luck.
What exactly are you working on and which "AI tool" did you try? I will bet you $20 that GPT-4 (which can take 80kb of API docs or examples in the 32k model and is a very good programmer) if given reference info in your domain and a good prompt to think through the problem and solution step-by-step will be able to do very well.
So the future is anyone with that model access (the 8k tokens could have 20kb of docs which is still useful) who wants to really try.
Millions of creators grinding for pennies while the lucky ones that got in early and made it rake in the profits.
I think success in tech is going to become extremely pyramidal in the coming years. This is a huge shame, as this was one of the only fields out there where you could make a really good living without going to the "right" school for years and years and years.
Yes, but we are in a world of abundance. Most people carry around what would be in 1980 a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket.
10 years from now we might have the equivalent of what today costs 10 million dollars today. Automated farming means what today we consider high end and expensive produce becomes almost free. Automated transportation means that food gets delivered to you for almost nothing. Imagine you had a 95% off coupon on Uber Eats. Does that sound terrible? If so why? Because it also means that Jeff bezos gets a 2000 foot yacht?
Edit:---------
I'm getting a lot of doom and gloom respones. And you all are right, there are a lot of people who do not have food/shelter/cheap colleges. But what you all probably are not aware of is that 100 million people have risen out of poverty in India over the past 15 years. Your word view is being warped by the doom and gloom media. I would suggest reading just the beginning of the book factfulness. It will totally change your view of the world and probably make you much happier.
>Yes, but we are in a world of abundance. Most people carry around what would be in 1980 a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket.
Most people also don't have $1000 for an emergency, live hand to mouth, and are dead scared of the cost and impact of a potential health issue. They are also overworked, underpaid, and with raising expenses, and sick of it, with depression levels skyrocketing. Having "a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket" is not that comforting compared to that.
We've killed old style job security, cheap college education, affordable housing, the middle class and decent working class jobs, public infrastructure, and many other things (not to mention the environment), but in return we can have a rectangular gadget to access "all of the world's information in an instant" (which practically is just used to distract ourselves to death). Hurray!
> Most people also don't have $1000 for an emergency
This has been debunked many times. The source is misleading to the point of being deceptive, it is pushing a narrative. Per the US government, the median household has $1000 per month leftover after all ordinary expenses. A very detailed breakdown of this for each income decile is available from the BLS.
You can’t square “most Americans can’t afford a $1000 emergency expense” with “median Americans can afford to light $1000 on fire each month without impacting their standard of living”.
It's the debunkings that are pushing a narrative (and reading the BLS numbers in whatever way fits it).
And it would be news to million struggling to pay the bills and rent (and not because they buy expensive lattes or new iPhones) that then can "afford to light $1000 every month without impacting their standard of living".
Especially for people whose standard of living is already working their ass off, perhaps in two jobs, and still scrapping to make it and not even thinking of affording to sent their kids to school, or can't even dream of ever being able to survive a need to stay off work for a month for medical reasons...
We have an abundance of inessentials. Housing is still scarce and food is volatile. Health care and education are expensive. Many people are sleeping on the streets or falling into lifestyles of despair.
Progress has been applied unevenly and most critically not to the factors of life that form the base of Maslow’s hierarchy.
Lots of properties being kept vacant so as to drive up rents/prop up property values, and it's difficult to get low-income housing built because of NIMBY.
The problem is, even with automation we are still burning up to 10 calories of petrochemical energy to get 1 calorie of food energy.
We are going through 2.5 earth's worth of non-renewable resources each year in order to maintain our current lifestyles --- this simply isn't sustainable.
Let's turn things around:
- under what circumstances should a person be allowed to use more than 1/7 billionth of the solar energy which the earth receives each day?
- under what circumstances is at acceptable for a person to create more heat than 1/7 billionth of what the planet is able to radiate out into space on a daily basis?
I fear you haven't spent much time in the places in this "world of abundance" where people live in abject misery. I'm currently in Brazil, where some 20% of the population lives on less than $5.50 per day and 30% of families don't have enough food. And it's not for want of agricultural production.
I hear ya bud, and I think you have the right take. This will ultimately vastly improve the lives of quite a lot more people than if it never happened. If we survive the coming years of turmoil and AIs or social unrest dont destroy the world, we are looking at post-scarcity future of so much plenty that the powers that be would have to do something particularly obviously evil and nefarious to keep that wealth from spreading to everyone. As the cost of mass production of basic needs, housing, etc etc all drastically lower, the excuse for why they're not being spread gets more and more ridiculous - even as people's individual power lowers as they become redundant. (Though reminder: the current chess champion is a human with AI assistance, not a pure AI. Humans copilots may still be semi-relevant a while longer!) Wealth Inequality might very-well still skyrocket, but overall this should still uplift everyone's quality of life and effectively allow for mass retirement - even in the third world, eventually.
What good is abundance if we haven't used it to minimize suffering? It's a good laugh whenever people think AI will democratize things. Summer children and their little daydreams.
The 100 million people in India who are no longer in poverty do not matter?
Obviously the target number of starving children is zero. But the reality is that we are not going to get that number to zero overnight. It takes incremental steps.
I do not think we live in a world of abundance. In the US there are more vacant housing units than there are homeless people but we can't home them. We throw away food in dumpsters and toss chemicals on it rather than feed someone. More people would likely garden or raise chickens if HOAs didn't have such an iron fist as to decide what color of paint is allowed on your house. Those are problems we could solve but choose not to. And then there are the resources that we do not have in abundance because we fight wars over them, or will.
> while the lucky ones that got in early and made it rake in the profits
In my niche(s), I still see new Youtubers pop up all the time that gain large followings and turn Youtube into a full-time job. Sure, they don't all become rich, but many have started earning enough to drive Teslas, so it's definitely not pennies.
Entertainment has winner-take-all / power-law dynamics due to cultural cohesion and limits on human attention (I want to watch what other people, and my time is limited), which is why a relatively small number of them make a good living.
Software development, as an employment opportunity, does not have these same dynamics.
I think the Youtube comparison is a good one up to a point. It's a niche product. Everyone wants to be part of it, competing for a very very limited resource which is our attention. While with technologies like GPT or whatever comes next we empower anyone to excel in any area and create whatever (for now non-material things).
>If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.
This 10x productivity absense of a 10x expansion of programming industry (which is very unlikely) translates to less developers in general, including senior ones. Even more so in an economy like this...
>It means competition between companies will increase but it isn’t necessarily bad for existing software engineers, especially solo founders.
"Solo founders" is what? 1/10,000 of working programmers? And they're absolutely not the ones people worry about regarding GPT replacements...
> This 10x productivity absense of a 10x expansion of programming industry (which is very unlikely)
I think I disagree. If software then becomes 10x cheaper, a lot of use cases that used to be too expensive to build now becomes affordable. At my own job, I think we could easily do 10x the business, because our customers need tons of tooling (for example for energy transition) but we don't have the people (among other problems).
What if those use-cases disappear also because they were made for humans? Will there really be a need for spreadsheets and spreadsheet plugins when all that works is done by an AI with a little help of some headless tool or scripting language?
if we look at the last 30 years: yes. The IT industry doesn't seem to be developing towards anything that resembles efficiency or minimization of work. For every useless technology, a caste of users and a caste of experts are created in order to be able to absorb the information that can be generated.
The information society is a machine maximizing information exchange, something that only incidentally implies increasing profit or increasing productivity.
Not everyone wants to do that though. There is a lot of extra crap that being a business owner entails. Some people just want to put in their work time and focus on other things. This basically forces everybody devote their lives to entrepreneurship.
We don't need everyone to, though. If AI increases dev productivity X-fold, and this leads to an X-fold increase in entrepreneurship, then the junior devs who want to build someone else's dream will have more opportunities to do so.
... and starve? You know what kind of people create content of their own dreams? Artists. And the stereotype isn't "well-fed artists" for a good reason.
It's democratizing for those with an idea but without the skill to convince investors to hire the juniors to implement it. It's a problem for employment numbers and macro-scale ratios of working to non-working adults.
> I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field.
> If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.
And if you're a junior software engineer? Fuck you and be unemployed.*
Do you get it now?
* Until you can climb up the ladder where each rung is now 20 feet apart.
> What are the barriers to a junior dev creating their own product?
Are you seriously asking that question? What are the barriers to a junior dev writing the Linux kernel from scratch by themselves? What are the barriers from climbing from the bottom to the top of a ladder where the rungs are 20 feet apart?
Sure, start at the top, then it's great. Very few start at the top.
Yes, I'm seriously asking. If a junior programmer wants to create a mobile app, or a desktop app, or a cloud service, what are the barriers? All the ones I can think of will get lower, not higher, as a result of the AI revolution.
If I'm missing one, or a class of product with different barriers, I genuinely would like you to point that out.
> Yes, I'm seriously asking. If a junior programmer wants to create a mobile app, or a desktop app, or a cloud service, what are the barriers? All the ones I can think of will get lower, not higher, as a result of the AI revolution.
Seriously, think about it a bit, without being sanguine.
The junior dev is inexperienced, in everything, and now has no path to build up that experience. No one's going to want their 18/22 year old amateur-hour "chatgpt make me a cloud app" (which is in competition against millions of others). So unless they're extremely lucky, they goto fail.
Maybe after 10 years of those failures they could build up enough experience through trial-and-error to maybe see a little success with a "chatgpt make me a cloud app," but how are they going to feed themselves the meantime? Maybe that will work if they have rich parents, but otherwise they're probably going to have to use up their energy to scrape by. So another goto fail.
Competition from non-junior devs, who can do all the same things the junior+GPT can do and also the tricky parts which "GPTs" can't yet do; and also have the benefit of domain-specific expertise about some area of business and/or better connections for investors, marketing, B2B connections.
This hypothetical scenario is literally like "pull up the ladder behind you", as all this experience and connections is something that a senior person has gotten while being handsomely paid for their time, but a future junior person may have to get on their own time and dime.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is everything, and there's no reason to assume that random unemployed inexperienced people will be superior at execution.
If you are a manager, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire senior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.
If you are a CTO, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire managers and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.
If you are a VC, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire anyone and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.
Agree it'll definitely be amazing for creatives and solo founders, but how many ideas are really out there to be had compared to the reduction in workforce?
> Agree it'll definitely be amazing for creatives and solo founders, but how many ideas are really out there to be had compared to the reduction in workforce?
I don't know. But I don't see why you might not be able to ask GPT-6 or GPT-7 to enumerate (and patent and implement) all of them for you. Why do you think "founders" or "creatives" are special?
In the end, something like that is "amazing" only for the person who owns the most GPUs or manages to figure out the first effective meta-prompt.
They got to this level of progress with maybe a million users input and feed back. Now they will have 1000s of plugins feeding them with high quality structured data and 100s of millions of users feeding it. They are also going multi modal and have billions in capital to expand the size and scale of the network. The probability that this is peak gpt seems very unlikely. I expect they will have a post grad level of intelligence gpt across the board in less than 5 years.
No white collar job will be valued the same since GPT will basically be doing most of the work and we will maybe review it and steer it. We will just keep feeding it and it will know everything at the cutting edge of all fields.
> Basically we need to equate "safety" in LLMs to mean "being open-source".
I think open source is a reasonable component to safety, but I wouldn't want to make them equal. Open source may be necessary for safety, but I wouldn't call it sufficient.
For example, assume the source code, the model, the training data, and all the model weights are open source. How do you know that the model was actually trained using that training data? Very few organizations have the capacity to train models at this scale themselves.
> Basically we need to equate "safety" in LLMs to mean "being open-source".
Another way to put it is to make it more accessible to everyone, right?
The opposite of that is happening to nuclear power. They're actually trying to stop any more countries to have the technology at their disposal. So no, make it "open source" doesn't make it safe by any stretch of imagination.
Why do you believe that "open source" would imply greater safety? Here, I'll loosely define "safety" to be "avoidance of harm to individuals or society that would have otherwise not occurred without the use of LLM technology". Feel free to modify that definition as you see fit, but I'm genuinely curious what the argument is that open source is necessary, sufficient, or even a major component of achieving safety.
Whenever I see this I simply think "monopoly". It smells of anti-competitiveness and is a kind of open forum lobbying to restrict who gets to lead the AI wave (and make a shit tonne of money in the process).
> I think over time, we’ll see that what many of us really liked about building software deep down wasn’t coding, but intricately imagining the things computers could do for us and then getting them to do it.
Spot on. It's a good time for existential reflection: Who would you have been hundreds or thousands of years ago? Who will you be now that technology is radically changing again?
There will always be interesting, creative challenges like programming, whatever form they take.
>Who would you have been hundreds or thousands of years ago?
I'll just use this opportunity to recommend the video game "Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey". It's a game where you start as an early hominid and have to gradually discover how to make and use rudimentary tools in order to take control of your environment, literally evolving in the process. It's weird and unforgiving, and it made me really think.
> Who would you have been hundreds or thousands of years ago?
Given how I grew up ingesting science and science fiction alike, literally attributing half my personality to Star Trek: The Next Generation being on TV during my formative years? It's really hard to tell. I have very little connection to things which were possible before late 19th / early 20th century.
In my mind, being thrown back centuries in time, I'd spend my life trying to use everything I remember from present day to give everyone a head start on science and technology. Being thrown back centuries in time, but without the memory of specific things I've learned in present day? That sounds like a particularly sadistic death sentence.
I was thinking less of “what if I went back in time” and more “what if I was my ancestor”
Obviously you won’t be able to tell for sure, but I’d guess that 1000 years ago I’d probably be a serf, and 100 years ago, likely would have fought in a large war and likely doing some form of physical labor or subsistence farming afterwards, based on what my family was doing then.
Oh, in this sense, yes, I agree. There's only so much agency any human ever has, had, or will have - and the space of possible choices is determined by the overall technological and economic landscape of the time.
In this light, sure, the me from 1000 years ago would most likely be a serf, die from malnutrition, war or robbery. Me from 100 years ago would probably be lying dead in the trenches of Verdun, or shot on the streets of Kraków, or otherwise dead in WW1; for military-aged males in Europe, I guess whether or not one got drawn into fighting was a coin flip.
In the last few weeks, I've noted on myself how I've been going through several stages of the Chat-GPT "disease", or whatever it is.
My first reaction was to be afraid for my money-making skills. My second reaction was fear about us ourselves making ourselves irrelevant--that fear still lingers.
My third wave of fright, cemented by days burning my eyes looking at a screen parsing logs and trying to figure out bugs for my corporate master, was, "when did my imagination go for a vacation? Old boy, don't tell me now that you have run out of ideas of things to make, of things to have an AI army to help you build." And now I dread that all of this AI is just hype, that it will never be good enough to come for our jobs without also coming for our jugulars, or that we will make it too damn expensive to matter[^1].
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[^1]: Capitalism has a way of leveraging economies of scale to make certain goods cheaper. But there are physical limits--what if Moore's law with regard to power consumption is really dead, and we as a collective really decide to spare power?
It's either my imagination that has gone for a vacation, or yours is running wild, but that is the one thing I really can't see at all. Reducing power consumption? I don't think that's happening any time soon, or ever really.
> And now I dread that all of this AI is just hype, that it will never be good enough to come for our jobs
Some day it will be. Not those ones, those ones are only hype. Also whether or not they'll come for our jugulars depends on what they are commanded to do. But we will get them eventually, and they will be as good as articles like this pretend the hyped ones are.
The funny thing is that nobody will use the current panic to prepare. And everybody will use the current panic as an excuse to avoid preparing once the real AIs come. So they'll get us completely unprepared.
> OpenAI made the extraordinary and IMO under-discussed decision to use an open API specification format, where every API provider hosts a text file on their website saying how to use their API.
> OpenAI made the extraordinary and IMO under-discussed decision to use an open API specification format, where every API provider hosts a text file on their website saying how to use their API. This means even this plugin ecosystem isn’t a walled garden that only the first mover controls. I don’t fully understand why they went this way, but I’m grateful they did.
Why is this extraodinary? What would be the advantage of going through all the effort of defining a new format just to create busywork for people trying to integrate with you?
It's not like there would be anything stopping Bard/Alpaca/etc. from reading the same format as OpenAI.
One could imagine an alternative where the API manifest was provided privately to OpenAI in the developer console or where the plugin developer had to implement an OpenAI-specific API structure. Doing it this way is more, dare I say, open than it might have been.
Yes and when you're google then that might work out for you, but that point is that anyone who creates an llm can now integrate a whole range of services without the services needing to provide their manifest to each of them individually.
This increases competition between ai companies, which is why it is a surprising move.
Ok, so we have that software written by AI, AI is clever, it does not need good variable names or functions/methods/class names, some of the stuff it will call according to passed specification so it will be understandable, but the further it goes, everything will get more generic, taken from kirjillion of other code snippets on Github. And it all will be working.
Until someone starts testing this and finds a bug. And then AI will say, hey, there is no bug, I don't make mistakes. So you need a human to look on the code, a huge pile of spaghetti code with cryptic names and conventions, code patterns that fell out of fashion years ago but, since there is a lot of code that uses them, AI thinks they are ok.
How long it will take to fix anything, how long it will take to extend the code?
You should try GPT4. It does use very reasonable variable, function, method class names. And if you point out that the code doesn't match your intent, it comes with new code fixing your issues.
The code it generates is by no measure "a huge pile of spaghetti code with cryptic names and conventions".
I was sceptical myself before trying GPT4. I asked it to change the Python C internals for a new feature, and googled to ensure the description doesn't exist anywhere. It came up with very good changes and explanations.
And this is all not even mentioning the pace of improvements. It didn't take too long to go from GPT3 to GPT4. Even if the pace slows down, it is still huge.
I believe you never use ChatGPT. I'm not claiming you never use GPT4, I'm claiming you never use even GPT3.5. If you did you will notice its problem is the opposite of what you describe. Especially:
> it does not need good variable names or functions/methods/class names,
It's the exact opposite. It's too good at naming things. It insists to use variable/function names that make sense in plain english, and often make mistakes when the API has inconsistent naming, or consistent but unusual naming.
For example, it makes mistakes when writing code that use "Loop" in Blender API. And the reason is quite obvious to me: because Blender's "Loop" is not what loop means in plain english.
While chat is intuitive interface to start with. I think we'll see more integration of these NLP models in traditional tools, like we saw with Adobe Firefly and Unreal Engine. That way users retain the control for fine tuning and doing problem specific tasks, but also gain this superpower of doing many actions with few words.
Key thing for adoption is to make models smaller and more context specific (to make them smaller), we've seen how LLaMA was downsized to run on commodity PCs, we've seen how Stable Diffusion can run on mobile phones. Even when we have to use larger models remotely, cost and ownership matters.
Working as a software engineer I often feels like I am living in the world of the Handmaidens Tale as a women with a functioning womb where the hole of society is organised around controlling everything I do. Hopefully LLM will change this but I do not underestimate the intellectual laziness of most "knowledge workers"
You know very little about my life and I'd like to keep it this way.
One would think that I live in a pure sellers market, but this is not true because of dynamics similar to that in the show. The comparison is clearly hyperbole evident by the use of an absurt fictional situation and not meant to express an equality relationship but one of equivalence (learn category theory bitch). It is very insightful, if you ask me, to recognise one's own predicament by empathising with the struggles of a fictional character, and this is what at the end of the day literary critique is all about. That there might be something hard about my life because of organised socially accepted structural abuse is all the more made evident by the briga-dooning and gasslighting I receive for dealing with my own issues in jest. I guess I must be one of the lucky girls.
Just like how waiting for 10 minutes in Starbucks during my morning commute ... made me feel like a persecuted Jewish prisoner awaiting execution!
/s
Your original point was ridiculous, tone deaf, offensive and completely without substance other than to wave the victim flag about _something_ I guess? Who knows.
No, you are waiting in line because you want your stupid coffee the jew to be executed does not want to be executed, so no equivalence class here baby.
This is what we in the comedy business call making fun of someone making fun. I call myself Krugger Dunning as an obvious play on the Dunnings Krugger effect because I try to approach every topic from a point of epistemic humility and in part that means being self-aware enough to realise I might just be a total idiot. The hard work has been done by me in reflecting on my shortcoming as a person and I try to show my weaknesses openly with all of you in the hope we can find within them our common humanity, while you just issue cheap insults.
I appreciate this article and can sympathize with the disorientation the author and many here at HN feel. It can feel unnerving to know that parts of our jobs might become automated.
I'm processing this news in realtime like many of you and forming a plan:
1. Understand how LLMs work. I've heard the Wolfram paper is good; open to more suggestions here.
2. Continue to practice using real implementations of LLMs including ChatGPT and co-pilot.
3. Finding painpoints within our company that AI can make more efficient and implementing solutions.
If anyone feels the same way and wants to form a working group with me, give me a shout. Email is in my bio.
I think this is a good take. I hope to do the same.
For the understanding part, Andrej Karpathy has a YouTube playlist that explains neural networks. I made a start on it today and found it quite accessible.
On the one hand, I think a lot of what ChatGPT can do is pretty amazing and a bit scary as a software engineer. On the other hand, I look at the projects I've done recently and throughout my career and find it hard to see how something that can solve bite-sized problems can tackle a software project that takes months to come to fruition. I'm currently working as an engineer doing a mix of kubernetes, cloud, Golang, bash scripting, git manipulation and other type of work. I recently upgraded 40+ repos to migrate to out latest build infrastructure and I had to reconcile 5+ years of folks doing things slightly differently. There was a constant process of running some script to make changes, finding outliers and one-offs, figuring out the fixes, running tests and figuring out the right way to ensure things were correct. I just don't see how ChatGPT can have done that project. Maybe it could have reduced the time it took me to write some supporting scripts, but I don't see it material improving the time it took to do this project.
I suspect many large IT organizations are like this.
Perhaps for brownfield work you're right, but I suspect greenfield will not suffer from the same issues, since they're usually an artefact of things done to accommodate human-limits on finances, time and integration with heteromorphic systems.
If the LLM has seen lots of instances of usage of an API, it can write code to target the API. It can generalize to some degree, but things go off track the further your requirements are away from the training data.
If your code is a lot of duct tape between well-documented, or at least well-named, APIs, that code can be automated. Which is great. That kind of code was always boring to write.
I'm less convinced that LLMs will be great at inventing new abstractions to map to a problem domain, and wiring up these new abstractions in a large codebase.
They'll need augmentation, fine-tuning, guidance, and it's not clear how well it'll all fit together, and where the limitations of the tech will show up as capability cliffs.
Yes. Outsourcing engineering to LLMs is like building bridges based on structural integrity in minecraft. The real product here is just a "language calculator", that also does "code generation" because it makes financial and PR sense. That people even believe these models can be novel makes one look to the way this thing is marketed.
It's also a good time to really take our heads out of the sand and re-evaluate how we expect people to learn civil engineering if their only teacher is a minecraft world. You might get some people that are perfect in minecraft. The rest will be hopelessly stunted. Pretty soon it'll pivot to materials engineering to figure out how exactly a minecraft block adheres to a surface because we lost the original irl way to build a bridge.
I agree that GPT will make creating software redundant.
Writing is definitely on the wall for outsourcing and MVP-style work. GPT can create a landing page and a backend/frontend for a business _literally today_. You just have to ship it, but it won't be long until that isn't needed.
There will still be a lot of value in understanding how systems work and interact with each other, at least until ML is able to build and maintain entire systems.
Until that happens, there will still be a lot of value in being able to dive into codebases and refactor/optimize as needed, at least in the medium-term.
Once platform engineering is mostly automated and running AI-generated binaries is de-risked, then code quality doesn't really matter. Hell, _code_ won't even matter at that point.
> at least until ML is able to build and maintain entire systems
To me, this sounds a lot like "at least until ML is able to reach level 5 self driving". We don't even know if this is possible yet without AGI (which we also don't know is possible). We can get close, but... that last 1% is a bitch, and it makes all the difference.
> Yesterday, I watched someone upload a video file to a chat app, ask a language model “Can you extract the first 5 s of the video?”, and then wait as the language model wrote a few lines of code and then actually executed that code, resulting in a downloadable video file.
I missed this. Can someone show me what he is talking about?
What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world. Given that knowledge work (not just software) has been one big option for people to climb the social ladder. If the AI can reasonably do all knowledge work in future, the amount of social climbing opportunities will drastically decrease. And no, UBI will not create more opportunities for social mobility. It seems like more and more people will have to compete with the fewer and fewer social climbing opportunities.
Also what happens to Europe? All these companies behind LLMs are from US, and Europe is nowhere to be found. This seems like it will dramatically accelerate the wealth different between the US and the EU.
What does GPT know beyond what we have (directly or indirectly) taught it? Could it have figured out how to extract five seconds of video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not been made available to it? Would it have invented the MPG format (or something comparable) on its own? Would it have developed the web and HTTP protocol on top of TCP/IP?
And so on. Maybe the answer is in fact "yes", or even "yes, and it would have done these things even better than humans did". But so far it seems to be amazingly good at doing things that we showed it how to do.
If we stop creating actually new things, will it do that for us also?
Why would it care to do so? What interest does it have in creating new things on its own?
The amount of people who create genuinely new things is so tiny that I am not sure it is even relevant to the discussion. And here I mean genuinely new things, not translating some C lib to java or similar stuff, or changing existing libraries to handle more stuff.
If the amount of people that will have social mobility opportunities will be equivalent to the amount of people who could have invented the MPG format or something comparable, then my point is made.
> The amount of people who create genuinely new things
The question isn't really about "genuinely new things". The number of permutations of existing things is such that at any given job you're likely to do old things in a new way.
E.g. you'd think that all streaming services are the same. Superficially, yes. Internally, Netflix, Disney+ and Apple Tv+ are likely to be different as night and day.
A good highlight to an ambiguous question! Which knowledge, exactly, is not being made available?
But let's say that an MPG format specification is available. Even other code examples of interacting with an MPG file. But no examples, no library, no documentation on specifically how to extract a subset of one file into another file.
I would think a competent programmer could figure that out. Perhaps an AI tool could also; I have not yet seen an example of it doing so, but perhaps it could.
Of the handful of questions I asked, this might be the least interesting one. More generally, can AI tools advance the state of the art?
> What does GPT know beyond what we have (directly or indirectly) taught it? Could it have figured out how to extract five seconds of video from an MPG file if that knowledge had not been made available to it? Would it have invented the MPG format (or something comparable) on its own? Would it have developed the web and HTTP protocol on top of TCP/IP?
> What happens to social mobility in the post GPT world[?]
If the technology pans out the way the techno-enthusiasts hope it will, upward social mobility will be nearly eliminated... unless there's some kind of successful Luddite revolution against the technology and the people that own it. But that's not going to happen: there are all kinds of social pressure against revolution, as well as strict gun control in most places. Anyone who tries to resist their obsolescence will soon find themselves either ridiculed and condemned or in jail.
Of course, downward social mobility will accelerate, and be celebrated by idiot technologists who just want to build tech, and don't really care to think about the consequences of the technologies they build on real people.
I don't think social mobility will be eliminated, I think the variance of individual mobility will just be radically increased. This technology will allow entrepreneurs and solo content creators to accomplish a lot more, but it'll also eliminate a lot of safe career paths. As a result, if you don't want to be stuck in the underclass doing manual labor or customer service, you'll need to either be brilliant, well connected, start a business or create content of some sort that attracts an audience you can monetize. The people who do well will do very well, but a lot of people who would have done decently before are going to fail.
Your points all resonate with me. But the end result is same, the opportunities available for social mobility to an average person would reduce. I am not even sure of the 2nd and 3rd order effects. How would an industry like hospitality survive if most of the knowledge work based jobs are gone.
> The people who do well will do very well, but a lot of people who would have done decently before are going to fail.
How is this not a huge problem? The vast majority of people are not exceptional. Cutting out that middle band of ability and resources is a surefire recipe for social unrest.
> I don't know, the US has been pushing that envelope for 40+ years and people are still paying taxes...
And people can push the "meth consumption" envelope for years before they finally die from it, too.
Getting away with unsustainable practices for X amount of time doesn't prove they're sustainable and won't end in collapse. It just means collapse can take more than X amount of time.
Nothing is sustainable. This is a concept invented to thwart questioning the environmental impacts of industrial activity. "Oh we can do it 'sustainably'".
To claim AI tools will strip out the wealth of the middle class and cause unrest can be disproved by the fact that it was beaten to it by the US corporations by over a generation.
The "middle class" was an invention of post war US to reward the soldiers who fought in Europe and the Pacific. Things are just reverting to a more long (as in multiple centuries) trend behavior of economies. Few haves, lots of have-nots and barely anything in between.
We can only LARP as ubermensch alpha males for so long. Eventually something will give; I suspect it will be a generational divide like none other. Arguably you see the seeds of this already with things like incels opting out of conventional aspirations.
you vastly underestimate civilians. probably not a single gun is needed. a crowd of people at some point will walk into the billionaire's home and make him agree with handing over his wealth. They might call the police, but all thats needed is the officers ignoring the call willingly. Why should they defend those billionaires? What should they do? Rich people depend on many individual poor laborers, all of them can simply decide to no longer accept his state of affairs and there is lietrally nothing the billionaires could do against it.
Ideally, defund the police and so on, so that every state worker also is keen on getting that wealth redistribution done.
> you vastly underestimate civilians. probably not a single gun is needed. a crowd of people at some point will walk into the billionaire's home and make him agree with handing over his wealth.
I'm not underestimating civilians. If what you're suggesting was at all realistic, China would be a democracy and Trump would still be president.
Sure, tens of millions of unarmed people with a single mind could probably do anything (like a mass of zombies can), but you'll never actually get that. There are numerous mechanisms preventing such a mass from forming, and more to dismantle and negate it afterwards.
you assume that the vast majority of people in china are outright unhappy with their government right now, I don't think that this is the case. And trump is simply an idiot that only get enough votes somehow because both parties in the US are a joke to begin.
> you assume that the vast majority of people in china are outright unhappy with their government right now, I don't think that this is the case.
I'm not talking about right now.
> And trump is simply an idiot that only get enough votes somehow because both parties in the US are a joke to begin.
Trump literally had "a crowd of people at some point ... walk into the [government's] home and make [them] agree with handing over [power]." How did that go?
It's not that they don't think about the consequences, it's that, as useful idiots, they think they'll be protected from them. It will be delicious when reality finally dawns on them. They helped build the big club, and they didn't even get to be in it.
As AI progresses, job options will reduce to various flavors of people who tell AI what to do, or tell other people what to do, or do physical things that machines are bad at. Over time that will reduce to executives, "architects" of various sorts, social media entertainers and manual laborers/direct customer service. The entire "middle" portion of most organizations that exist to connect the people making the high level decisions wit h the boots on the ground is going to disappear.
> Over time that will reduce to executives, "architects" of various sorts, social media entertainers and manual laborers/direct customer service.
And at the very end, it will reduce to capital only, with no need for labor at all. Most people will be unemployed, and whatever capital they've amassed is unlikely to be enough to sustain themselves and their families for the long term. They (you) will end up as little more as impotent ants to AI-fueled Elon Musks, neglected until the infestation needs to be cleared to make way for some project.
While that's technically a valid potential future, it's unrealistic just because society would tear itself apart long before it reached that limit state.
> While that's technically a valid potential future, it's unrealistic just because society would tear itself apart long before it reached that limit state.
I don't think it's that unrealistic. The trick will be, not going too fast, managing a few separate transitions, and making sure capital maintains control of the institutions with the monopoly on the use of force. The masses don't tend to act to project their interests until it's too late.
> The masses don't tend to act to project their interests until it's too late.
The masses are already showing signs of restlessness, and the only real problem right now is wealth inequality. Actual unemployment rates remain low. Forward in time a little, let's say 20% unemployment due to AI. The only way anybody is going to maintain their monopoly on use of force is if they hire every one of those 20% to be police. Right now the ratio of police to citizens is really low, and the ratio of weapons to civilians really high. I don't think the masses will wait all that long.
>> The masses don't tend to act to project their interests until it's too late.
> The masses are already showing signs of restlessness
IMHO, "restlessness" doesn't mean anything. It would be expected in a AI-driven usurpation of labor. People have already been restless for decades due to de-industrialization, and that mainly got us Trump and an opioids, but the factories are still gone.
The key to fucking over the masses is making sure the "restlessness" doesn't get too strong, and doesn't have a clear (and correct!) villain identified, and maintaining a sense of inevitability.
> I don't think the masses will wait all that long.
IMHO, they probably will. Any individual or small group who takes action will be pilloried as wackos and thrown in jail. A larger movement will be (rightly) characterized as an insurrection and dealt with harshly.
People are complacent, and often don't realize they're really losing something until it's already slipped from their fingers.
I also think the Western world lacks the ideological tools to stop technologies like this. They'd basically have to start looking at technology like Amish do: rejecting technology that would undermine their social structure, rather than expecting the social structure to adapt to the technology.
Under a capitalist system hell bent on endless and unfettered growth there's no slowing down. All it's going to take is a handful of players across a handful of industries to set things in motion. Perhaps AI will inadvertently eat the rich.
The end state is when the cost of goods is determined by externalities. Capital and labor costs will be minimal; what you pay for is the pollution produced in the manufacture of the goods.
We may not be that far away from when energy-intensive, latency-insensitive computing tasks are best located in space, to take advantage of cheap continuous solar power. The power capabilities of the next gen Starlink satellites are impressively cheap.
It doesn't really make sense though does it? Musk is rich because people buy his cars. If we're all impoverished ants, no one is going to be buying cars. Musk's money has to come from somewhere.
> It doesn't really make sense though does it? Musk is rich because people buy his cars. If we're all impoverished ants, no one is going to be buying cars. Musk's money has to come from somewhere.
It does make sense, but you're not thinking about it clearly because you're too tied up in existing social structures. The end state "AI-fueled Elon Musks" (note that's a type, not a particular man) don't need common-man customers or their money, because they don't need to pay labor to operate their capital. They can directly operate their capital themselves, so they'll just do whatever the heck they want and nearly everyone who's now an employee becomes an ant.
At that point the main economy would mainly consist of billionaire ego projects and some trade between large corporations to support them. Common people would scrape by on billionaire largess and by squatting on resources not currently needed by billionaire ego projects and using it for small-scale subsistence production.
The panic is needless. If one hour of design work generates $100 income, then one might assume that MidJourney/Dall-E/StableDiffusion will generate trillions of dollars, but the world doesn't work like this. What will happen is that the design jobs will transform.
As you might have noticed, the AI boom will decimate the code writing jobs as well, something that the EU is behind on. Europe missed the "tech" age, but notice how the EU is not any poorer than the USA. Sure, some countries are poorer than others, but not everywhere in the US is Silicon Valley. Why? Because despite the EU missing out on "tech", actually the EU is very technologically advanced. Tech doesn't mean only low-touch high-scale computer-based businesses. There are chemists, biologists, anthropologists out there who don't know how to write a single line of JS and are paid like 1/5th of a junior JS developer, but the work they do is very valuable to society. Guess they don't need to learn JS anymore.
Also, notice how despite the thousands of layoffs, the US job data keeps coming out very positive - there's no unemployment problem. This is because of the markets, but AI will have similar effects. The world no longer needs that many CSS experts and React gurus who pull in $200K; the world apparently needs more hard-tech engineers and retail workers.
The AI thingy is devastating just for a subset of the "tech" workers and creative industries. It will enable other types of people and industries.
Startups who are trying to solve food production issues, for example, might finally outshine the next grocery delivery startup.
It’s just accounting differences. The life in Europe is not any different. If the junior developers don’t make 100K and the visit to a doctor doesn’t cost 10K the overall economic activity appears to be lower but it’s not.
Just FYI for non-Americans...most Americans are insured and doctors visits don't cost 10k. Major surgeries might, but your insurance usually caps at a certain number in the 2-8k range for the whole year.
Not saying the system isn't bad, but 10k for a doctor's visit is kind of a stretch...
It doesn’t matter who pays for it, in the statistics it appears that an appendicitis generates much more economic activity in the USA than EU.
Healthcare spending per capita in the USA is 12K, the second most expensive is Germany and it’s 7K.
The life expectancy in Germany is 82 and in the USA is 77, so it’s not the case that Americans are getting much better one, explaining the higher costs.
Oh and that appendicitis? It kills much more Americans than Germans(0.08 vs 0.06 per 100K).
All your points I agree with. I didn't say it was a good system. I've lived in Japan and I loved the government health insurance. One of my biggest annoyances about being back in the US is how I get my insurance through my job, so now every time I hop jobs I have to do the stupid math and figure out the new employer's health crap.
I'm just saying that I see these weird takes about Americans paying like 10k for a single visit when that's just not the reality for most people. Only 8.6% of Americans were uninsured in 2020. Most insurance plans have a cap that doesn't even allow you to pay more than like 2-10k in an entire year.
Is it more expensive? Duh. It's just that there's more nuance to the issue. If I wasn't American (or I was an American that didn't understand how insurance actually works) I might have read that and believed that the poor Americans are all living in hell.
So yeah...we can talk about the issue because it's a big deal. In fact, I think it's the #1 biggest problem with American society right now and it's maddening that I never see anyone focusing on it. However, I don't like to see this kind of hyperbole from OP because people turn their brains off and stop looking at the facts.
is not accounting differences at all:
- Europeans (and I am one) live in tiny housing even compared to people in NYC.
- we have less cars (you can claim it's due to public transport but if public transport is not available most people would not afford cars regardless.
- overall less leisure expenditures and less disposable income.
That 10k doctor is a myth and certainly not something the 100k developer will have to pay. That's covered by his company. Healthcare is an issue in US when you're at the bottom of the food chain.
I don't think this invalidates the parent's point though.
I'm just waiting for an "Ask HN: What are some job alternatives for people who know programming and can't get a job anymore since ChatGPT replaced us?"
The problem is that many when saying "EU" are thinking mainly Germany and other countries among the top-3/5. But even Germany is behind the US in terms of GDP/capita, PPP probably also.
Most of the US is behind the leader locations as well. And most Europeans in rich metropolises have better lives then Americans in rich metropolises. Less pollution, less traffic, more free time, more safety.
This is a question to ask when this actually becomes a reality. The AI taking jobs narrative is more of a marketing ploy to convince companies to buy AI services but the truth is, none of this stuff is anywhere near market ready. If a person is doing a job an AI bot can currently replace you've probably already replaced that person with cheap labor overseas. Regardless of whatever optimism is being channeled into the hype about AI's "potential", it hasn't convinced many businesses.
Businesses take time to react and this is recent. I'm close to Hollywood and these technologies are seeing their first value-generating uses on every project I'm privy to. What you see in public is just that-public.
Focussing on the climbing is the core problem I think. Why even do this? We collectlively should own the machines and guarantee just wealth distribution, so that its impossible for a few to have much more than than others. Then every increase in machine work is a great thing for everyone, instead of increasing competition between fewer and fewer people.
Europe in itself is (together) the single biggest market/economy in the world by the way, and the US is actually falling behind into developing-country territory when you look at the population and their access to basic services. And just because right now it is convenient to rely on the US companies, and we're deep allies btw, doesn't mean europeans couldn't spin up the same tech if really needed.
french revolution and socialist revolutions went different. its not preventing the machines, its strictly solving the problem of who owns them - fairly easy thing. It "only" needs to build up a bit more suffering for the masses until this naturally happens again.
The thing is then the people in power were reliant on other people to provide force. What happens when the tech-overlords and government cliques put their hands on perfect robot AI slaves which are completely superior to humans when it comes to fighting?
Kill bot enforced gated communities and a free for all outside, naturally. Maybe in due time we have a second industrial revolution and rebuild modern society ourselves...
I think with the advanced level of weaponry we (will) have, the is no thing like a truly gated community no matter the bots.
And given the amount of time needed to actually build this against the current pace of AI progress, the angry mob should materialize itself much earlier. French Nobles didn’t see the Guillotine coming either, even like a day before the revolution
The first time around (and every subsequent time) the tools used for production, lets call them capital, made laborers more efficient and cheapened goods and drove wages up (mostly). In all of these cases there was still the need for a laborer.
At a point when all labor is obsolete there will be literally no method of survival for anyone who doesn't own the "compute capital". The two options will be to let everyone starve because they weren't lucky enough to shareholders in the company that owns all the bots, or just make that enterprise socially-owned and pay the unemployed workers.
Maybe, but they still need a different type of capital. Unless property rights stop being enforced, where are all the people who don’t own land, or people who don’t own arable land supposed to farm? Are we bringing back manorialism?
Considering I am mostly obliged to rent land where I can perform work so I can use my salary to pay my rent just makes me feel like I live in some sort of distributed virtual manor to be honest.
I supposed if the gracious techno-overlords are gracious enough to grant the underclass a nature preserve where they can keep living in a labor-powered society then sure. Somehow I feel that bulldozing ghettos would be the more realistic outcome.
Truthfully I think we'd have a few large societal shifts before we ever got to the stage where genius level AI could be spun up and down like containers, but it helps to illustrate the point that a post-labor society is incompatible with the tenets of capitalism, which is something that a lot of people fail to comprehend when they worry about AI.
Laborers are not fungible you know. There is plenty of evidence of lives ruined by industrial change.
The fact that the net result is positive doesn't mean that everyone profits equally. Having lived in capitalistic societies should have made that clear already.
I never said that it was. I just explained why this time was different. Innovation always hurts people but it benefits enough people that there's not massive social unrest. I am not making a moral assertion here just pointing out the qualitative difference.
it begins with everyone has enough to begin with, and whatever is importent is available as public services. there are different flavors to do this, the currently best implementation is to have very high&progressive taxes that fund a strong public sector, that in turn makes people feel safe and allows them to pursue higher education (doctors, teachers, ...) that again are needed for all this.
Sure you can work to have more, but not 100x more than your neighbor, nobody is worth that. instead of focussing on the single one elon musk, try to give everyone access to a good safety net and encourage them to try something, so statistically you will end up with many high-contributors instead of few parasitic billionaires.
> but not 100x more than your neighbor, nobody is worth that.
Hard disagree. Have you seen the average human, and compare him to somebody like John Carmak, Andrej Karpathy, etc. They create value at least 100x as big as the avg person
And without a society around them to support them, they would be unknown and busy trying to survive.
Even if many people might not be able to do some genius things, they do other stuff that is ultimately mandatory for the geniuses.
So yes, they might produce massively more value, but are still not worth that much more, since they wouldn’t be able to thrive without the others to begin with.
"they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" is a failure because currently the prosperity of the society needs these people to actually work effectively.
On the other hand, the hypothetical solution of "own the machines and distribute the wealth" is intended for a future which is substantially different, where it doesn't matter if everyone pretends to work or even explicitly avoids working, because that work isn't necessary for prosperity as it can be done by machines, and it ceases to be a problem if everyone can be as lazy as they want.
Artificial scarcity is a thing, so something being dirt cheap to produce doesn't necessarily mean that it will be actually affordable, and in the current economic environment there seems to be sufficient motivation for powerful people to try and make various monopolies based on capital-gated barriers of entry, even if the marginal cost approaches zero; so I'd expect that the default scenario is not like "salt". Getting to a mental model "like salt" seems to be a reasonable outcome in the long run, but I'm afraid that it would take some significant pressure from the masses to get from here to there.
Rawlsian justice is actually an enormously influential idea in political philosophy, arguably the most influential in the 20th century. It has 3 central principles that work together:
1. You enable equality of opportunity.
2. You allow the chance for "winners" and "losers".
3. You adopt the original position ("the veil of ignorance") because no one has foresight into their place of birth and the conditions therein (ie. no one can a priori help themselves), therefore you enact the "difference principle" which states that, insofar as you allow the chance for "winners" and "losers", governments enact policy in such a way that the majority of the benefits of those policies go to the "losers" over the "winners".
There has, of course, been enormous debate on the nature of Rawlsian justice, but it's not like "just" has to immediately equate with communism. Most modern western democracies are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) modelled on Rawls' idea.
We are no where near that. We don't even yet have AIs that can write better code than random college student googling.
We will need to crack fusion (or some other way of creating "free" electricity) and then 3D printers that can convert energy into matter and then slap AGI on top of it and we are in post scarcity society where robots can do everything.
If you miss any one of thous things you won't get there.
There will never be anything free. We always have to pay with labor. But maybe we should share the fruits of labor more equally instead of giving most of it to someone who has some documents they got from their parents.
It is always easy to demand more from the people who are better off than you and attribute their success on luck, be it heretical or not.
I am not going to say that I haven't been more privileged than most of the people on the planet. My ancestors made my country into what it is which gave me free education, low corruption, and in general a good start in life. However there are also a lot of people who had the same start as I did, but managed to squander it on the way.
Everyone should absolutely have equal opportunities in life. Education should be free for everyone. Bare human necessities should be taken care of no matter what you do. But I do not agree that everyone should have equal outcome no matter what.
Ironically administration overhead in many industries, particularly healthcare and education, has been growing over the past several decades despite increasing technology adoption.
This is exactly the opposite of what you would expect given the increased efficiencies that come from adopting computer systems and automation.
I see AI as a continuation of this trend and I don’t expect it to put people out of work, bureaucracy will always find new ways to justify itself.
The other thing is that we'd need insane levels of trust in the AI to have it doing all these jobs 100%.
Like, I could technically have a newbie running commands on a production router for a script that I wrote out...but even if I let them do that there's no way I wouldn't at least supervise. I don't think most companies are even remotely comfortable with the idea of having an AI system running code on their systems no matter how smart it is.
The Luddites were not protesting technology because technology is inherently evil. They were against the capitalistic ownership of the means of production.
So far technology has enabled use to increase economic output which means rising standards of living. Even if 99% of people subsist from selling their labor, the tools they use are a force multiplier that (in theory) drives wages up.
When you can spin up a bunch of Von Neumann level intelligence LLM-powered agents and have them run your company for you, there is no more labor to sell. You can either pay the former laborers to exist, or just let them starve.
So our two options are social ownership of all AI capital, or letting everyone without AI capital die, and let a handful of people live in the resulting AI-powered society.
I’m not terribly worried. Though I assume my work will begin to resemble that of the Adeptus Mechanicus rather than proper engineering.
The fact is that anyone who understands even at a basic level what the computer is actually doing and isn’t afraid to look at it at a low level can’t be replaced by an AI trained on stack overflow.
It may be that I will spend more of my time on code review of LLM generated code, or make my money in the new kinds of legacy code created by copy pasting ChatGPT snippets together instead of SEO optimized stack overflow scrapes.
For me the outcome is the same. The skills I need to be more effective than the machine are the exact same as they were decade, century or even millennium ago. I still don’t see these LLMs do any synthesis of knowledge, and they don’t seem to have a grasp of logic or grammar at the level I expect a bright middle school student to have.
> Though I assume my work will begin to resemble that of the Adeptus Mechanicus rather than proper engineering.
Lol, I was thinking about this the other day. Eventually most devs will essentially just be praying to the Machine spirit to make the computer do what they want. A small few high clerics will bother to learn how computers actually work. The rest will simply be cargo culting to the maximum extent possible.
You should read the "Sparks of AGI" paper, especially the math and code sections. It's a GPT-4 evaluation conducted from outside OpenAI (authored by a MS team). It's an easy to read paper, mostly a collection of examples.
You hit the nail on the head. GPT/copilot in some sense is democratization of specialized knowledge. Now on one end you'll have product engineers/managers prompt gpt to write boilerplate code of all kind, on the other end you'll have senior engineers reviewing, optimizing writing specialized code. Where do junior engineers fit? Can you be a full stack engineer? I believe it'll squeeze out all the could-be devs out of the field forever. Gender diversity/DEI? Forget it. Upward mobility? Will become much harder, you'll basically need to have a specialization to even be considered
At that point I'm pretty sure they'll already have fine tuned a "senior software engineer agent". This may sound ridiculous and yeah we probably won't get rid of the entirety of SWE ladder, but my point is we are entering the realm of science fiction now, our assumptions about labor are about to fall off a cliff. Productivity will increase through the roof, corps will make more cash, workers will suffer
People who are in tech just to "climb social ladder" i.e. only for the pay check are going to be pushed out by LLMs and people who are actually passionate about tech will remain. This will cause less and less shitty code to be written (of course for next few years even more bloated shit code will be written with ChatGPT and Copilot by noobs who have no idea what they are doing)
Nobody in their right mind would start a business like this in Europe, with the shadow of the EU threatening with regulating everything and pushing taxes/fines for everything. Just move to a tech hotspot in the US.
I mean when enough people are unemployed they will just vote to socialize the society. Also, massive deflation will reset the global economy. The social ladder as you call it will flatten pretty hard. At that point we nationalize and ubi with work being some kind of minimum amount a year to qualify for ubi. Work hours per year will drop alot. I think society will transform for the better where we start developing towards a post scarcity deflationary future rather than the inflationary rat race we have now.
Social mobility is already a joke. Knowledge workers have enjoyed prosperity for decades, software folks in particular, all AI does is even the playing field a bit more.
> Accepting the term "intelligence amplification" does not imply any attempt to increase native human intelligence. The term "intelligence amplification" seems applicable to our goal of augmenting the human intellect in that the entity to be produced will exhibit more of what can be called intelligence than an unaided human could; we will have amplified the intelligence of the human by organizing his intellectual capabilities into higher levels of synergistic structuring.
Now that the computers can talk and think and program themselves, and we can expect them to become exponentially better at it (to some limit, presumed greater-than-human), there is approximately only one problem left: how to select from the options the machines can generate for us.
It's still an open-ended challenge, it's just a new and different challenge from the ones faced by all previous generations. And again, just to repeat for emphasis: this is the only intellectual challenge left. All others are subsumed by it (because the machines can (soon) think better than we can.)
I could just be rationalizing here, but I think AI will be illegal soon. The idea of banning AI to protect many well paid middle-class jobs will be a slam dunk for any politician.
There will be no Post-GPT computing world, just the Turing police and console cowgirls.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 428 ms ] threadWasn't this the final objective of the programming languages abstraction evolution? From Binary/Assembly to Natural Language Programming? I think it is awesome that more people will be able to create software/products as this accelerates innovation cycles a lot.
And, for now, I believe devs that don't rely solely on copy/paste coding from stack exchange don't need to worry about their job stability no?
Others have said exactly what I'm thinking, welcome to the age of the micro-startup, 1-3 engineers, designers, product mangers building some very cool, albeit niche products.
"Domain expertise and insight into a potential market" won't get you a working product that you can sell.
Nor are they elsewhere on the web.
Which leaves me feeling like it's unlikely that ChatGPT will have the answers either. Perhaps it will still be a useful tool toward arriving at the answers, but I am not presently anticipating that it is going to be churning out all of the code automatically.
I envy the people who are bottlenecked on their typing speed and benefit 10 times more from the chat bot than I do.
Did OpenAI just commit a trillion dollar mistake?
I don't see this
I don’t think convert it in and out of proprietary standard is that difficult?
There is little to no vendor lock-in effect
There's so much of talk about what these models can generate, which is cool in relation to plugins, but there's still a lot of interesting code to write, companies to build, and ideas to formulate, that an LLM cannot do on its own. If you're terrified of your software engineering job becoming at risk, I urge you to just take a beat.
There was a paper by someone @ Microsoft who tried to train a boardgame playing AI like this. The "best" models started losing to beginner level players from some point onwards.
About twenty years ago, I had a professor explain to the class that Rational Rose would be replacing us all....yet here we still are.
Maybe it could just be an alternative syntax for an existing language which is more optimized for input/output to an LLM.
I’d guess that the languages with the fewest implicit behaviors (so no Scala or Haskell) would be easiest. Maybe Go is the generation language of choice?
If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.
In my opinion this technology will be as democratising as the YouTube’s early days.
Instead of worrying, learn to work with it. It will be harder for large companies/large teams to extract value from this compared to small companies/small teams.
It means competition between companies will increase but it isn’t necessarily bad for existing software engineers, especially solo founders.
You are overestimating the vast amount of "software engineers" in the world. The overwhelming majority of us are just programmers, we are just gluing together CRUD spaghetti in the random language we grew up with. We don't care too much about work or a career. And most of us don't want to do more, we want to get a decent salary for our boring work. And we certainly do not want to be "solo founders", build products of our dreams or increase our productivity.
This way of living feels threatened now.
At this stage, the best advice I could formulate would be to learn LangChain and prompt engineering, but these too are fast moving targets, and who knows what's going to be relevant in 2024?
I think the best thing one can do is learn how LLMs work, acquaint themselves with real implementations of it (ChatGPT, copilot), and then find ways to integrate these techniques into their companies.
Instead, look at the job postings for titles you want. Note the skills in demand at more than one job. Focus on those skills. There's your set of skills the market currently is in demand of.
Don't pivot your career. Don't burn the boat and jump into AI. Just be aware of these tools and get good at what they're poor at.
While I agree with the sentiment, there is way too much noise in that channel. Job listings written by non-technical people just throwing key words together, recruiters detached from specific roles and companies trying signalling growth to mention just a few sources of confusion...
I scratched and clawed, read tons of books, blogs, spent extra time polishing features beyond what was needed so I could learn new skills... but now I am a father of two young kids, with a wife. How long am I supposed to put in all this extra work? I'm likely slightly above average intelligence, but I'm far from being at the level where I could be an AI researcher... if I am even capable of doing the kind of math required there, it would require many years of learning.
GPT4 isn't going to replace me, but watching this space unfold really has me worrying about the versions that come out over the next 2-5 years.
A human is only so moldable, and while I am more than happy to learn new skills, I have no idea where to even start. What profession is safe? Where will the growth be in a field that will have equivalent or even near equivalent earning potential?
If GPT ends up getting to the point where it can replace me at my job, I really have a hard time thinking of a career path I could get into at this stage in life. It would need to be able to architect systems at a high level, write code to implement various features, communicate with stakeholders, document design decisions... if it can do that, it can do a whole hell of a lot of other jobs too.
Once it gets to that point, I don't think physical jobs will be that far behind on being automated either. We already have robots of all shapes and sizes (including bipedal), the main thing slowing down their deployment is that they aren't adaptable enough. With AGI, that changes. It will take a bit longer due to the capital requirements and factory build outs that would be needed.
GPT-4 is a very capable systems architect and can also implement the code. There are a few tools available to put it in a debug loop. Writing documents is a walk in the park for GPT-4. Emails or Discord chats or even perfectly realistic voice conversations are completely doable (I have that on my website).
At this point it's about connecting things together and looping them properly to automate a very high portion of jobs.
I think the answer is not employment but rather production. Think of something you can leverage these AIs that would be interesting or useful to someone else or some business.
Beyond that things like UBI and generally better integration of technology into government is going to be critical for our survival. Especially decentralized technologies and real-world resource data.
I’ve worked with tons of programmers like you describe. I’ve continued to tell them that simple UIs and CRUd interfaces to dbs are solved problems we should not be fighting with.
Maybe we shouldn't be, but it's still a problem that regularly needs to be solved.
In any case, I need to refute your argument, in my work as software engineer spanning more than a decade, I have noticed zero deprecation of my skills (Java, SQL, HTML/JS/CSS) (while keeping them up to date!) until now and only had to learn a few new complementing skills (cloud, docker, SPA, Kubernetes). The only skill that got replaced might have been "Java application server management" since that got replaced by whatever docker runtime is en vogue at the moment. I have worked for the government and met PL1/Cobol mainframe programmers that refused to learn Java and still got paid generously for their long term expertise.
I can see how you might think that... until you start actually talking in depth with enough actual users and executives and trying to get them to agree on how all that stuff should work and what it should be capable of.
Most of the development process is about trying to wrangle abstract ideas about how business logic should be implemented/improved from flawed humans who aren't great at communicating those ideas. Your 'simple' CRUD app still often has to be highly customized by someone willing to do the difficult work of dealing with people. And that's before you even start getting into working with more regulated businesses.
Code monkeys/plumbers using 'outdated' tech who can deliver something that makes a workplace more efficient in the long run will continue to be in demand. There was enough functionality in software by the 1970s to handle the vast majority of business needs. Someone still has to understand those business needs (which ultimately have little to nothing to do with software) well enough to translate them into something that works. Whether it works for those who are using it is all that really matters.
Yikes. Productive work is not just a way to earn a living but also a way to achieve personal fulfillment and happiness. It's a means of creating value and contributing to society. A person who works just for the salary and does not find any meaning in his work is not living up to his full potential.
If I could make money doing something I found a lot of meaning in I'd be doing that instead. Thing is, we usually don't have that option.
How many jobs in modern society are complete bullshit? A good deal of them, I would say. Why should people measure their happiness and self worth from these?
I wholeheartedly agree! I do know a few people that love their jobs and I envy them to no end, they are inspiring, shining suns. But I remain firm on my opinion that this is far out of reach for most people.
Capitalism maximizes profits, not happiness. The market for software development jobs is much bigger for people who know popular frameworks and are content with validating forms, querying databases, aligning buttons, sending reports, etc. It's a lot easier (and rewarding) to find fulfillment elsewhere.
For all but a select few this is an unrealistic fairy tail. Most of us just want to make money to better enjoy our lives. We were given or acquired certain skills to make money, out of juvenile interests or opportunities we used. That doesn't mean we enjoy using those skills. It would be very hard to find any other job without taking a massive pay cut, investing huge amounts of money, time and effort only to have a high chance you won't like your new job as well.
I see no job or career I am interested in: I hate everything the moment it becomes work. And I am no unique snow flake. I am part of the majority with that.
https://www.wellable.co/blog/employee-engagement-statistics-....
Things I enjoy don't pay enough to live a comfortable life. Tech does. So I do well enough at my job to pay for the things I enjoy, and hope I find enough edge cases at work to avoid burnout.
In a true post-scarcity society, where everyone has the freedom to choose a career based purely on fulfillment, your argument is excellent. Until then, however, it's not.
The only problem is that we live in a system that directs the gains upward and any costs downwards, and in so doing creates perverse incentives against people welcoming their redundancy.
Like sibling commenters, I love the idea of building something new with greater leverage. On an individual level, I'm looking forward to leveling up and finding new ways to be effective in my work.
Unlike sibling commenters, I don't think that should be our only option in life. It saddens me greatly that, given a new option to increase the effective output of a unit of time, we repeatedly choose as a society to profit monetarily (and with vast disparity in who benefits) rather than to give people more options in life than drilling on their jobs.
The industrial revolution promised people lives of relative leisure by replacing the need for much physical labor, but instead we concentrated the benefit to the few—and we keep making that same choice over and over.
But even then, self-proclaimed seniors are too scared to start their own startup(s) now because of (1) Unfavourable market conditions (2) VCs hesitant to raise money (3) ChatGPT will extinguish their startup; even if it uses "AI".
I guess this was the result of a decades long quantitive easing, near zero interest rate bubble of cheap money that had to collapse.
For example, I've been predicting the financial demise of Facebook for over a decade now (amongst other things for being too greedy), but Zuck's still doing well enough. Even if Meta is declining now, it still might have been rational for him to be so greedy over the past decade.
Date Weakly General AI is Publicly Known https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3479/date-weakly-general...
Date of Artificial General Intelligence https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5121/date-of-artificial-...
The latter includes this criterion: "Able to get top-1 strict accuracy of at least 90.0% on interview-level problems found in the APPS benchmark introduced by Dan Hendrycks, Steven Basart et al."
The APPS benchmark: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.09938
Note that the predicted date of "stronger" AGI has moved quite a lot since GPT-4 is revealed, from late 2030s to 2033 at this moment.
What I didn’t say but should be a given is that these AI tools won’t be able to completely eliminate the need for any human touch, it will just reduce the need to the point where there won’t be the current huge demand for developers, and thus, the only people that travel down that path will be the ones that are truly passionate about development.
The question then is how exactly does one become better than AI at making software if no one is going to pay you to make software until you are better than AI?
The same issue with art - we need a sea of mediocre artists and a market for their work for great artists to emerge. AI takes over mediocre art market - all commercially driven art disappears.
You mean the same YouTube that routinely ruins people's livelihoods when it closes their accounts with no recourse? Because I'm totally looking forward to the day when that happens to my development tools.
"We detected that you are using our code to kill vulnerable children (aka orphans). This is against our TOS and we have permanently disabled your account. If you believe this was in error please log into your account and talk to our ChatGPT-powered tech support".
Worst case scenario is that it gets SO good at writing code that software engineering teams are severely downsized or are made obsolete altogether, and I find myself out of a job. I’m not expecting UBI to start falling out of the sky any time soon, especially while there are still manual labor jobs that robots can’t do.
Alternative scenario is that individual developers get somewhere around a 2x-5x productivity increase, but why would I want that? That doesn’t give me more free time - that just means I’ll be expected to do more work. Non-technical management already expects ridiculous delivery timelines; now I’ll have to deal with them asking “why can’t you have the whole project done by tomorrow? Why can’t you just have the robot do it?”
It’s a lose-lose situation and none of us asked for this.
It'll be interesting to see what happens when AI truly surpasses human level intelligence, as in, being able to completely replace human jobs, but we're not there yet. It's likely that when we reach that stage, the world will change dramatically and we will either live lives of abundance and leisure or face extinction :)
Third option, the workers no longer control the means of production, and we see levels of inequality that make the railroad barons look like they were middle class.
The bottom line is, at some point in time, automation is going to reduce the amount of human work which needs to be done, and render some folks unemployable --- how does society cope with that? Universal Basic Income is the only reasonable suggestion I've yet seen, but doesn't address the age-old problem of socialism --- it only works until one runs out of other people's money.
Back when computers were first announced, taxing CPUs so as to cover benefits for newly unemployed folks was suggested --- can we put that back on the table?
For a fictional take on this see:
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
Jevons paradox [0] proposes that as automation reduces the cost of labor then people will find new uses for automation, and this seems to be the historical trajectory. Hundreds of years since the industrial revolution and we still haven't run out of work to do (this could be better or worse given your philosophical premises).
> and render some folks unemployable
If automation truly causes more actually productive work to be done, then as a first-order effect there should be a surplus available to support these people without making anyone else (much) worse off. However as you observe the higher-order consequences of this are very much an open issue.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
the current climate crisis suggests that we are running out:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
But we are there. This is a reality we live in for a lot of people. That's why the existential crisis in the OP.
If you're writing react/python/angular or something popular it seems to do amazing things and spit out entire websites (per demos).
Unfortunately, when I try to put together C++, Rust, or even C# using recent libraries like Blazor it chokes up. I fully understand at least one reason why (libraries and language features not being in the training data from 2021) but that makes me feel that perhaps software engineering at the cutting edge or niche is safe and still requires human reasoning. Not to mention things like properly understanding when and why to use certain data structures, real-world impact of coding choices, pricing, esoteric speed/efficiency improvements, etc.
I think there's still a broad general area where good, great, and amazing+ developers can operate without much threat and in fact using their knowledge and experience to leverage GPT-4 (or others) as a force multiplier.
With 32k tokens coming that's like 90kb total chars which 80kb could library or API docs.
Also it can easily be connected to things like pip or GitHub or Google to check documentation. And many tools are coming over the next few months that will put it in a debugging loop.
So maybe it's "safe" in the very near term but that issue of out of date training in no way prevents it from taking software engineering jobs.
I am working hard to build an AI system that can replace me before someone else does.
>...and I find myself out of a job.
Tell me you are the problem in the industry without telling me you are the problem in the industry.
Think about the hunter gatherer who was given a bow, but stuck with throwing rocks because he didn't want to get too efficient.
But more relevantly the instant bows were invented you're quota of mammoths to kill a day didn't go up to that maximum possible number + 1 (because sales guys). It stayed at 1 per week or whatever. It's not efficiency, it's management's unrealistics expectations of productive output that I hear being complained about.
Expect with more efficient hunting methods you could kill more than you did before per day, which meant less hunting days, which meant more time with the wife which in turn meant bigger tribe, which in turn meant you actually had to increase your quota.
Just because you are more efficient doesnt mean your manager becomes an idiot and starts to demand unreasonable output (and if you have an idiotic manager already then you already have the problem).
I have no fucking clue what you are even arguing for.
More, more, more, always more, the ideology of infinite growth belongs to a cancer. Quite literally a self-defeating, pathological mindset. More brought us here, to the present day, and it will probably bring us over a Seneca cliff too.
That's the thing about ambition. It means you will never be content.
As for the latter...I'd say GPT has increased my productivity and therefore allowed me to focus on the more interesting aspects of my work, rather than writing annoying boilerplate code and doing boring tasks where I don't learn anything. I almost never write my own boilerplate anymore.
More productivity doesn't necesarily mean more work. It does mean more focus on interesting work.
And so-called "senior engineer" salaries will now be brought down and deflated since they were inflated and unjustifiably high in the first place and are the main reason why these tech startups run themselves into the ground with little to no path to profitability.
I guarantee you that so far, the only winner in this is OpenAI. Not the 'senior engineers' building on top of someone else's AI API.
In fact, why hire 3 over-priced seniors when one junior with ChatGPT is significantly much cheaper? I quite find it funny that somehow, all hope is instantly lost because of a "AI" spitting out code will replace them. It just shows that the majority of these tech startups were just good at losing money and being solely dependent on VC cash.
Is this really true? I may be missing something (I probably am), but I didn't find much use for AI tools in my itsec/programming work. It's a nice tool to have, but I don't write that much boilerplate. I've tried to use it as a better Google, but it kept replying with made up nonsense (things I have problem with are usually niche technologies OpenAI is not good at - I expect it will get better in the future). So I find it dubious it will "10x my productivity" in the "upcoming years". Decades, maybe.
But maybe the future really is now, and I'm just being an old-timer who can't adapt.
If you want to do anything new or - god forbid - know of a better way to do things than what 90% of the population is doing (htmx?). Good luck.
So the future is anyone with that model access (the 8k tokens could have 20kb of docs which is still useful) who wants to really try.
Millions of creators grinding for pennies while the lucky ones that got in early and made it rake in the profits.
I think success in tech is going to become extremely pyramidal in the coming years. This is a huge shame, as this was one of the only fields out there where you could make a really good living without going to the "right" school for years and years and years.
10 years from now we might have the equivalent of what today costs 10 million dollars today. Automated farming means what today we consider high end and expensive produce becomes almost free. Automated transportation means that food gets delivered to you for almost nothing. Imagine you had a 95% off coupon on Uber Eats. Does that sound terrible? If so why? Because it also means that Jeff bezos gets a 2000 foot yacht?
Edit:---------
I'm getting a lot of doom and gloom respones. And you all are right, there are a lot of people who do not have food/shelter/cheap colleges. But what you all probably are not aware of is that 100 million people have risen out of poverty in India over the past 15 years. Your word view is being warped by the doom and gloom media. I would suggest reading just the beginning of the book factfulness. It will totally change your view of the world and probably make you much happier.
Most people also don't have $1000 for an emergency, live hand to mouth, and are dead scared of the cost and impact of a potential health issue. They are also overworked, underpaid, and with raising expenses, and sick of it, with depression levels skyrocketing. Having "a 10 million dollar supercomputer in their pocket" is not that comforting compared to that.
We've killed old style job security, cheap college education, affordable housing, the middle class and decent working class jobs, public infrastructure, and many other things (not to mention the environment), but in return we can have a rectangular gadget to access "all of the world's information in an instant" (which practically is just used to distract ourselves to death). Hurray!
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/more-americans-are-using-b...
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/19/56percent-of-americans-cant-...
This has been debunked many times. The source is misleading to the point of being deceptive, it is pushing a narrative. Per the US government, the median household has $1000 per month leftover after all ordinary expenses. A very detailed breakdown of this for each income decile is available from the BLS.
You can’t square “most Americans can’t afford a $1000 emergency expense” with “median Americans can afford to light $1000 on fire each month without impacting their standard of living”.
And it would be news to million struggling to pay the bills and rent (and not because they buy expensive lattes or new iPhones) that then can "afford to light $1000 every month without impacting their standard of living".
Especially for people whose standard of living is already working their ass off, perhaps in two jobs, and still scrapping to make it and not even thinking of affording to sent their kids to school, or can't even dream of ever being able to survive a need to stay off work for a month for medical reasons...
We have an abundance of inessentials. Housing is still scarce and food is volatile. Health care and education are expensive. Many people are sleeping on the streets or falling into lifestyles of despair.
Progress has been applied unevenly and most critically not to the factors of life that form the base of Maslow’s hierarchy.
Lots of properties being kept vacant so as to drive up rents/prop up property values, and it's difficult to get low-income housing built because of NIMBY.
We are going through 2.5 earth's worth of non-renewable resources each year in order to maintain our current lifestyles --- this simply isn't sustainable.
Let's turn things around:
- under what circumstances should a person be allowed to use more than 1/7 billionth of the solar energy which the earth receives each day?
- under what circumstances is at acceptable for a person to create more heat than 1/7 billionth of what the planet is able to radiate out into space on a daily basis?
IF we make it through...
Obviously the target number of starving children is zero. But the reality is that we are not going to get that number to zero overnight. It takes incremental steps.
But you’re right, the more level the playing field, the greater the competition.
In my niche(s), I still see new Youtubers pop up all the time that gain large followings and turn Youtube into a full-time job. Sure, they don't all become rich, but many have started earning enough to drive Teslas, so it's definitely not pennies.
Software development, as an employment opportunity, does not have these same dynamics.
This 10x productivity absense of a 10x expansion of programming industry (which is very unlikely) translates to less developers in general, including senior ones. Even more so in an economy like this...
>It means competition between companies will increase but it isn’t necessarily bad for existing software engineers, especially solo founders.
"Solo founders" is what? 1/10,000 of working programmers? And they're absolutely not the ones people worry about regarding GPT replacements...
I think I disagree. If software then becomes 10x cheaper, a lot of use cases that used to be too expensive to build now becomes affordable. At my own job, I think we could easily do 10x the business, because our customers need tons of tooling (for example for energy transition) but we don't have the people (among other problems).
The information society is a machine maximizing information exchange, something that only incidentally implies increasing profit or increasing productivity.
> I don’t get the overall doom and gloom towards LLMs on the software field.
From the second line of your comment:
> Now you don’t need to hire junior devs
Do you need GPT to put the two together? I think it's pretty obvious why folks are freaking out.
Every entrepreneur that ever existed.
> If you are a software engineer, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire junior devs and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.
And if you're a junior software engineer? Fuck you and be unemployed.*
Do you get it now?
* Until you can climb up the ladder where each rung is now 20 feet apart.
Are you seriously asking that question? What are the barriers to a junior dev writing the Linux kernel from scratch by themselves? What are the barriers from climbing from the bottom to the top of a ladder where the rungs are 20 feet apart?
Sure, start at the top, then it's great. Very few start at the top.
If I'm missing one, or a class of product with different barriers, I genuinely would like you to point that out.
Seriously, think about it a bit, without being sanguine.
The junior dev is inexperienced, in everything, and now has no path to build up that experience. No one's going to want their 18/22 year old amateur-hour "chatgpt make me a cloud app" (which is in competition against millions of others). So unless they're extremely lucky, they goto fail.
Maybe after 10 years of those failures they could build up enough experience through trial-and-error to maybe see a little success with a "chatgpt make me a cloud app," but how are they going to feed themselves the meantime? Maybe that will work if they have rich parents, but otherwise they're probably going to have to use up their energy to scrape by. So another goto fail.
This hypothetical scenario is literally like "pull up the ladder behind you", as all this experience and connections is something that a senior person has gotten while being handsomely paid for their time, but a future junior person may have to get on their own time and dime.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is everything, and there's no reason to assume that random unemployed inexperienced people will be superior at execution.
If you are a CTO, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire managers and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.
If you are a VC, this will output your productivity ten fold on the upcoming years. Now you don’t need to hire anyone and can just build the product of your dreams with very limited capital.
Agree it'll definitely be amazing for creatives and solo founders, but how many ideas are really out there to be had compared to the reduction in workforce?
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1600119268858744832
I don't know. But I don't see why you might not be able to ask GPT-6 or GPT-7 to enumerate (and patent and implement) all of them for you. Why do you think "founders" or "creatives" are special?
In the end, something like that is "amazing" only for the person who owns the most GPUs or manages to figure out the first effective meta-prompt.
No white collar job will be valued the same since GPT will basically be doing most of the work and we will maybe review it and steer it. We will just keep feeding it and it will know everything at the cutting edge of all fields.
Basically we need to equate "safety" in LLMs to mean "being open-source".
OpenAI keeps talking about "safety" as the most important goal. If we define it to mean "open-source" then they will be pushed into a corner.
I think open source is a reasonable component to safety, but I wouldn't want to make them equal. Open source may be necessary for safety, but I wouldn't call it sufficient.
For example, assume the source code, the model, the training data, and all the model weights are open source. How do you know that the model was actually trained using that training data? Very few organizations have the capacity to train models at this scale themselves.
Another way to put it is to make it more accessible to everyone, right?
The opposite of that is happening to nuclear power. They're actually trying to stop any more countries to have the technology at their disposal. So no, make it "open source" doesn't make it safe by any stretch of imagination.
reactor blueprints have been accessible to IAEA members for something like 50 years
Whenever I see this I simply think "monopoly". It smells of anti-competitiveness and is a kind of open forum lobbying to restrict who gets to lead the AI wave (and make a shit tonne of money in the process).
Spot on. It's a good time for existential reflection: Who would you have been hundreds or thousands of years ago? Who will you be now that technology is radically changing again?
There will always be interesting, creative challenges like programming, whatever form they take.
I'll just use this opportunity to recommend the video game "Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey". It's a game where you start as an early hominid and have to gradually discover how to make and use rudimentary tools in order to take control of your environment, literally evolving in the process. It's weird and unforgiving, and it made me really think.
Given how I grew up ingesting science and science fiction alike, literally attributing half my personality to Star Trek: The Next Generation being on TV during my formative years? It's really hard to tell. I have very little connection to things which were possible before late 19th / early 20th century.
In my mind, being thrown back centuries in time, I'd spend my life trying to use everything I remember from present day to give everyone a head start on science and technology. Being thrown back centuries in time, but without the memory of specific things I've learned in present day? That sounds like a particularly sadistic death sentence.
Obviously you won’t be able to tell for sure, but I’d guess that 1000 years ago I’d probably be a serf, and 100 years ago, likely would have fought in a large war and likely doing some form of physical labor or subsistence farming afterwards, based on what my family was doing then.
In this light, sure, the me from 1000 years ago would most likely be a serf, die from malnutrition, war or robbery. Me from 100 years ago would probably be lying dead in the trenches of Verdun, or shot on the streets of Kraków, or otherwise dead in WW1; for military-aged males in Europe, I guess whether or not one got drawn into fighting was a coin flip.
Do you invest in a college education is that field is obliterated by the time you get out.
What about your debts if you lose your job and companies aren't hiring because they can just use AI for a 10th the cost in 6 months.
My first reaction was to be afraid for my money-making skills. My second reaction was fear about us ourselves making ourselves irrelevant--that fear still lingers.
My third wave of fright, cemented by days burning my eyes looking at a screen parsing logs and trying to figure out bugs for my corporate master, was, "when did my imagination go for a vacation? Old boy, don't tell me now that you have run out of ideas of things to make, of things to have an AI army to help you build." And now I dread that all of this AI is just hype, that it will never be good enough to come for our jobs without also coming for our jugulars, or that we will make it too damn expensive to matter[^1].
-------
[^1]: Capitalism has a way of leveraging economies of scale to make certain goods cheaper. But there are physical limits--what if Moore's law with regard to power consumption is really dead, and we as a collective really decide to spare power?
It's either my imagination that has gone for a vacation, or yours is running wild, but that is the one thing I really can't see at all. Reducing power consumption? I don't think that's happening any time soon, or ever really.
Some day it will be. Not those ones, those ones are only hype. Also whether or not they'll come for our jugulars depends on what they are commanded to do. But we will get them eventually, and they will be as good as articles like this pretend the hyped ones are.
The funny thing is that nobody will use the current panic to prepare. And everybody will use the current panic as an excuse to avoid preparing once the real AIs come. So they'll get us completely unprepared.
Interesting! Somehow I missed this. https://spec.openapis.org/oas/latest.html
Why is this extraodinary? What would be the advantage of going through all the effort of defining a new format just to create busywork for people trying to integrate with you?
It's not like there would be anything stopping Bard/Alpaca/etc. from reading the same format as OpenAI.
Until someone starts testing this and finds a bug. And then AI will say, hey, there is no bug, I don't make mistakes. So you need a human to look on the code, a huge pile of spaghetti code with cryptic names and conventions, code patterns that fell out of fashion years ago but, since there is a lot of code that uses them, AI thinks they are ok.
How long it will take to fix anything, how long it will take to extend the code?
The code it generates is by no measure "a huge pile of spaghetti code with cryptic names and conventions".
I was sceptical myself before trying GPT4. I asked it to change the Python C internals for a new feature, and googled to ensure the description doesn't exist anywhere. It came up with very good changes and explanations.
And this is all not even mentioning the pace of improvements. It didn't take too long to go from GPT3 to GPT4. Even if the pace slows down, it is still huge.
> it does not need good variable names or functions/methods/class names,
It's the exact opposite. It's too good at naming things. It insists to use variable/function names that make sense in plain english, and often make mistakes when the API has inconsistent naming, or consistent but unusual naming.
For example, it makes mistakes when writing code that use "Loop" in Blender API. And the reason is quite obvious to me: because Blender's "Loop" is not what loop means in plain english.
Key thing for adoption is to make models smaller and more context specific (to make them smaller), we've seen how LLaMA was downsized to run on commodity PCs, we've seen how Stable Diffusion can run on mobile phones. Even when we have to use larger models remotely, cost and ownership matters.
What insight!
/s
Your original point was ridiculous, tone deaf, offensive and completely without substance other than to wave the victim flag about _something_ I guess? Who knows.
I'm processing this news in realtime like many of you and forming a plan:
1. Understand how LLMs work. I've heard the Wolfram paper is good; open to more suggestions here.
2. Continue to practice using real implementations of LLMs including ChatGPT and co-pilot.
3. Finding painpoints within our company that AI can make more efficient and implementing solutions.
If anyone feels the same way and wants to form a working group with me, give me a shout. Email is in my bio.
For the understanding part, Andrej Karpathy has a YouTube playlist that explains neural networks. I made a start on it today and found it quite accessible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMj-3S1tku0&list=PLAqhIrjkxb...
I suspect many large IT organizations are like this.
If the LLM has seen lots of instances of usage of an API, it can write code to target the API. It can generalize to some degree, but things go off track the further your requirements are away from the training data.
If your code is a lot of duct tape between well-documented, or at least well-named, APIs, that code can be automated. Which is great. That kind of code was always boring to write.
I'm less convinced that LLMs will be great at inventing new abstractions to map to a problem domain, and wiring up these new abstractions in a large codebase.
They'll need augmentation, fine-tuning, guidance, and it's not clear how well it'll all fit together, and where the limitations of the tech will show up as capability cliffs.
It's also a good time to really take our heads out of the sand and re-evaluate how we expect people to learn civil engineering if their only teacher is a minecraft world. You might get some people that are perfect in minecraft. The rest will be hopelessly stunted. Pretty soon it'll pivot to materials engineering to figure out how exactly a minecraft block adheres to a surface because we lost the original irl way to build a bridge.
Writing is definitely on the wall for outsourcing and MVP-style work. GPT can create a landing page and a backend/frontend for a business _literally today_. You just have to ship it, but it won't be long until that isn't needed.
There will still be a lot of value in understanding how systems work and interact with each other, at least until ML is able to build and maintain entire systems.
Until that happens, there will still be a lot of value in being able to dive into codebases and refactor/optimize as needed, at least in the medium-term.
Once platform engineering is mostly automated and running AI-generated binaries is de-risked, then code quality doesn't really matter. Hell, _code_ won't even matter at that point.
To me, this sounds a lot like "at least until ML is able to reach level 5 self driving". We don't even know if this is possible yet without AGI (which we also don't know is possible). We can get close, but... that last 1% is a bitch, and it makes all the difference.
I missed this. Can someone show me what he is talking about?
Also what happens to Europe? All these companies behind LLMs are from US, and Europe is nowhere to be found. This seems like it will dramatically accelerate the wealth different between the US and the EU.
And so on. Maybe the answer is in fact "yes", or even "yes, and it would have done these things even better than humans did". But so far it seems to be amazingly good at doing things that we showed it how to do.
If we stop creating actually new things, will it do that for us also?
Why would it care to do so? What interest does it have in creating new things on its own?
If the amount of people that will have social mobility opportunities will be equivalent to the amount of people who could have invented the MPG format or something comparable, then my point is made.
This is my insurance against LLMs, only works if the market demands new things...
The question isn't really about "genuinely new things". The number of permutations of existing things is such that at any given job you're likely to do old things in a new way.
E.g. you'd think that all streaming services are the same. Superficially, yes. Internally, Netflix, Disney+ and Apple Tv+ are likely to be different as night and day.
Could you?
But let's say that an MPG format specification is available. Even other code examples of interacting with an MPG file. But no examples, no library, no documentation on specifically how to extract a subset of one file into another file.
I would think a competent programmer could figure that out. Perhaps an AI tool could also; I have not yet seen an example of it doing so, but perhaps it could.
Of the handful of questions I asked, this might be the least interesting one. More generally, can AI tools advance the state of the art?
Would you?
If the technology pans out the way the techno-enthusiasts hope it will, upward social mobility will be nearly eliminated... unless there's some kind of successful Luddite revolution against the technology and the people that own it. But that's not going to happen: there are all kinds of social pressure against revolution, as well as strict gun control in most places. Anyone who tries to resist their obsolescence will soon find themselves either ridiculed and condemned or in jail.
Of course, downward social mobility will accelerate, and be celebrated by idiot technologists who just want to build tech, and don't really care to think about the consequences of the technologies they build on real people.
Those round to the same number: 0.
How is this not a huge problem? The vast majority of people are not exceptional. Cutting out that middle band of ability and resources is a surefire recipe for social unrest.
I don't know, the US has been pushing that envelope for 40+ years and people are still paying taxes...
And people can push the "meth consumption" envelope for years before they finally die from it, too.
Getting away with unsustainable practices for X amount of time doesn't prove they're sustainable and won't end in collapse. It just means collapse can take more than X amount of time.
To claim AI tools will strip out the wealth of the middle class and cause unrest can be disproved by the fact that it was beaten to it by the US corporations by over a generation.
The "middle class" was an invention of post war US to reward the soldiers who fought in Europe and the Pacific. Things are just reverting to a more long (as in multiple centuries) trend behavior of economies. Few haves, lots of have-nots and barely anything in between.
Ideally, defund the police and so on, so that every state worker also is keen on getting that wealth redistribution done.
I'm not underestimating civilians. If what you're suggesting was at all realistic, China would be a democracy and Trump would still be president.
Sure, tens of millions of unarmed people with a single mind could probably do anything (like a mass of zombies can), but you'll never actually get that. There are numerous mechanisms preventing such a mass from forming, and more to dismantle and negate it afterwards.
I'm not talking about right now.
> And trump is simply an idiot that only get enough votes somehow because both parties in the US are a joke to begin.
Trump literally had "a crowd of people at some point ... walk into the [government's] home and make [them] agree with handing over [power]." How did that go?
And at the very end, it will reduce to capital only, with no need for labor at all. Most people will be unemployed, and whatever capital they've amassed is unlikely to be enough to sustain themselves and their families for the long term. They (you) will end up as little more as impotent ants to AI-fueled Elon Musks, neglected until the infestation needs to be cleared to make way for some project.
I don't think it's that unrealistic. The trick will be, not going too fast, managing a few separate transitions, and making sure capital maintains control of the institutions with the monopoly on the use of force. The masses don't tend to act to project their interests until it's too late.
The masses are already showing signs of restlessness, and the only real problem right now is wealth inequality. Actual unemployment rates remain low. Forward in time a little, let's say 20% unemployment due to AI. The only way anybody is going to maintain their monopoly on use of force is if they hire every one of those 20% to be police. Right now the ratio of police to citizens is really low, and the ratio of weapons to civilians really high. I don't think the masses will wait all that long.
> The masses are already showing signs of restlessness
IMHO, "restlessness" doesn't mean anything. It would be expected in a AI-driven usurpation of labor. People have already been restless for decades due to de-industrialization, and that mainly got us Trump and an opioids, but the factories are still gone.
The key to fucking over the masses is making sure the "restlessness" doesn't get too strong, and doesn't have a clear (and correct!) villain identified, and maintaining a sense of inevitability.
> I don't think the masses will wait all that long.
IMHO, they probably will. Any individual or small group who takes action will be pilloried as wackos and thrown in jail. A larger movement will be (rightly) characterized as an insurrection and dealt with harshly.
People are complacent, and often don't realize they're really losing something until it's already slipped from their fingers.
I also think the Western world lacks the ideological tools to stop technologies like this. They'd basically have to start looking at technology like Amish do: rejecting technology that would undermine their social structure, rather than expecting the social structure to adapt to the technology.
We may not be that far away from when energy-intensive, latency-insensitive computing tasks are best located in space, to take advantage of cheap continuous solar power. The power capabilities of the next gen Starlink satellites are impressively cheap.
It does make sense, but you're not thinking about it clearly because you're too tied up in existing social structures. The end state "AI-fueled Elon Musks" (note that's a type, not a particular man) don't need common-man customers or their money, because they don't need to pay labor to operate their capital. They can directly operate their capital themselves, so they'll just do whatever the heck they want and nearly everyone who's now an employee becomes an ant.
At that point the main economy would mainly consist of billionaire ego projects and some trade between large corporations to support them. Common people would scrape by on billionaire largess and by squatting on resources not currently needed by billionaire ego projects and using it for small-scale subsistence production.
As you might have noticed, the AI boom will decimate the code writing jobs as well, something that the EU is behind on. Europe missed the "tech" age, but notice how the EU is not any poorer than the USA. Sure, some countries are poorer than others, but not everywhere in the US is Silicon Valley. Why? Because despite the EU missing out on "tech", actually the EU is very technologically advanced. Tech doesn't mean only low-touch high-scale computer-based businesses. There are chemists, biologists, anthropologists out there who don't know how to write a single line of JS and are paid like 1/5th of a junior JS developer, but the work they do is very valuable to society. Guess they don't need to learn JS anymore.
Also, notice how despite the thousands of layoffs, the US job data keeps coming out very positive - there's no unemployment problem. This is because of the markets, but AI will have similar effects. The world no longer needs that many CSS experts and React gurus who pull in $200K; the world apparently needs more hard-tech engineers and retail workers.
The AI thingy is devastating just for a subset of the "tech" workers and creative industries. It will enable other types of people and industries.
Startups who are trying to solve food production issues, for example, might finally outshine the next grocery delivery startup.
EU is significantly poorer than the US. Lots of different ways to measure it, but it’s a factor of roughly 1.5-2x in purchasing power parity.
Not saying the system isn't bad, but 10k for a doctor's visit is kind of a stretch...
Healthcare spending per capita in the USA is 12K, the second most expensive is Germany and it’s 7K.
The life expectancy in Germany is 82 and in the USA is 77, so it’s not the case that Americans are getting much better one, explaining the higher costs.
Oh and that appendicitis? It kills much more Americans than Germans(0.08 vs 0.06 per 100K).
I'm just saying that I see these weird takes about Americans paying like 10k for a single visit when that's just not the reality for most people. Only 8.6% of Americans were uninsured in 2020. Most insurance plans have a cap that doesn't even allow you to pay more than like 2-10k in an entire year.
Is it more expensive? Duh. It's just that there's more nuance to the issue. If I wasn't American (or I was an American that didn't understand how insurance actually works) I might have read that and believed that the poor Americans are all living in hell.
So yeah...we can talk about the issue because it's a big deal. In fact, I think it's the #1 biggest problem with American society right now and it's maddening that I never see anyone focusing on it. However, I don't like to see this kind of hyperbole from OP because people turn their brains off and stop looking at the facts.
That 10k doctor is a myth and certainly not something the 100k developer will have to pay. That's covered by his company. Healthcare is an issue in US when you're at the bottom of the food chain.
I'm just waiting for an "Ask HN: What are some job alternatives for people who know programming and can't get a job anymore since ChatGPT replaced us?"
Those businesses would not be around for very long, so who cares?
Europe in itself is (together) the single biggest market/economy in the world by the way, and the US is actually falling behind into developing-country territory when you look at the population and their access to basic services. And just because right now it is convenient to rely on the US companies, and we're deep allies btw, doesn't mean europeans couldn't spin up the same tech if really needed.
And given the amount of time needed to actually build this against the current pace of AI progress, the angry mob should materialize itself much earlier. French Nobles didn’t see the Guillotine coming either, even like a day before the revolution
At a point when all labor is obsolete there will be literally no method of survival for anyone who doesn't own the "compute capital". The two options will be to let everyone starve because they weren't lucky enough to shareholders in the company that owns all the bots, or just make that enterprise socially-owned and pay the unemployed workers.
How about subsistence farming?
Truthfully I think we'd have a few large societal shifts before we ever got to the stage where genius level AI could be spun up and down like containers, but it helps to illustrate the point that a post-labor society is incompatible with the tenets of capitalism, which is something that a lot of people fail to comprehend when they worry about AI.
The fact that the net result is positive doesn't mean that everyone profits equally. Having lived in capitalistic societies should have made that clear already.
Sure you can work to have more, but not 100x more than your neighbor, nobody is worth that. instead of focussing on the single one elon musk, try to give everyone access to a good safety net and encourage them to try something, so statistically you will end up with many high-contributors instead of few parasitic billionaires.
Hard disagree. Have you seen the average human, and compare him to somebody like John Carmak, Andrej Karpathy, etc. They create value at least 100x as big as the avg person
Even if many people might not be able to do some genius things, they do other stuff that is ultimately mandatory for the geniuses.
So yes, they might produce massively more value, but are still not worth that much more, since they wouldn’t be able to thrive without the others to begin with.
To put it another way, how does society provison more support for John Carmack than it does for me or you?
On the other hand, the hypothetical solution of "own the machines and distribute the wealth" is intended for a future which is substantially different, where it doesn't matter if everyone pretends to work or even explicitly avoids working, because that work isn't necessary for prosperity as it can be done by machines, and it ceases to be a problem if everyone can be as lazy as they want.
The correct mental model isn’t “communism” or “wealth distribution”, but instead “salt”.
Countries used to go to war because of salt. But now technology has eroded its value so much, restaurants are literally giving it away.
That stops being a problem when the machines do all the work.
1. You enable equality of opportunity.
2. You allow the chance for "winners" and "losers".
3. You adopt the original position ("the veil of ignorance") because no one has foresight into their place of birth and the conditions therein (ie. no one can a priori help themselves), therefore you enact the "difference principle" which states that, insofar as you allow the chance for "winners" and "losers", governments enact policy in such a way that the majority of the benefits of those policies go to the "losers" over the "winners".
There has, of course, been enormous debate on the nature of Rawlsian justice, but it's not like "just" has to immediately equate with communism. Most modern western democracies are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) modelled on Rawls' idea.
If AI is doing all the work, what does it matter anymore?
We will need to crack fusion (or some other way of creating "free" electricity) and then 3D printers that can convert energy into matter and then slap AGI on top of it and we are in post scarcity society where robots can do everything.
If you miss any one of thous things you won't get there.
I am not going to say that I haven't been more privileged than most of the people on the planet. My ancestors made my country into what it is which gave me free education, low corruption, and in general a good start in life. However there are also a lot of people who had the same start as I did, but managed to squander it on the way.
Everyone should absolutely have equal opportunities in life. Education should be free for everyone. Bare human necessities should be taken care of no matter what you do. But I do not agree that everyone should have equal outcome no matter what.
Same here. I never said that that should happen.
Do you mean "hereditary"? :D
Yet here we are.
It’s a human-political issue, it is not a technology issue.
What’s the difference now?
OK, put your money where your mouth is and send me 10% of your pay check.
This is exactly the opposite of what you would expect given the increased efficiencies that come from adopting computer systems and automation.
I see AI as a continuation of this trend and I don’t expect it to put people out of work, bureaucracy will always find new ways to justify itself.
Like, I could technically have a newbie running commands on a production router for a script that I wrote out...but even if I let them do that there's no way I wouldn't at least supervise. I don't think most companies are even remotely comfortable with the idea of having an AI system running code on their systems no matter how smart it is.
So far technology has enabled use to increase economic output which means rising standards of living. Even if 99% of people subsist from selling their labor, the tools they use are a force multiplier that (in theory) drives wages up.
When you can spin up a bunch of Von Neumann level intelligence LLM-powered agents and have them run your company for you, there is no more labor to sell. You can either pay the former laborers to exist, or just let them starve.
So our two options are social ownership of all AI capital, or letting everyone without AI capital die, and let a handful of people live in the resulting AI-powered society.
The fact is that anyone who understands even at a basic level what the computer is actually doing and isn’t afraid to look at it at a low level can’t be replaced by an AI trained on stack overflow.
It may be that I will spend more of my time on code review of LLM generated code, or make my money in the new kinds of legacy code created by copy pasting ChatGPT snippets together instead of SEO optimized stack overflow scrapes.
For me the outcome is the same. The skills I need to be more effective than the machine are the exact same as they were decade, century or even millennium ago. I still don’t see these LLMs do any synthesis of knowledge, and they don’t seem to have a grasp of logic or grammar at the level I expect a bright middle school student to have.
Lol, I was thinking about this the other day. Eventually most devs will essentially just be praying to the Machine spirit to make the computer do what they want. A small few high clerics will bother to learn how computers actually work. The rest will simply be cargo culting to the maximum extent possible.
Same as it ever was.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712
People who are in tech just to "climb social ladder" i.e. only for the pay check are going to be pushed out by LLMs and people who are actually passionate about tech will remain. This will cause less and less shitty code to be written (of course for next few years even more bloated shit code will be written with ChatGPT and Copilot by noobs who have no idea what they are doing)
Or the end of the beginning (of software development)...
> Accepting the term "intelligence amplification" does not imply any attempt to increase native human intelligence. The term "intelligence amplification" seems applicable to our goal of augmenting the human intellect in that the entity to be produced will exhibit more of what can be called intelligence than an unaided human could; we will have amplified the intelligence of the human by organizing his intellectual capabilities into higher levels of synergistic structuring.
Now that the computers can talk and think and program themselves, and we can expect them to become exponentially better at it (to some limit, presumed greater-than-human), there is approximately only one problem left: how to select from the options the machines can generate for us.
It's still an open-ended challenge, it's just a new and different challenge from the ones faced by all previous generations. And again, just to repeat for emphasis: this is the only intellectual challenge left. All others are subsumed by it (because the machines can (soon) think better than we can.)
There will be no Post-GPT computing world, just the Turing police and console cowgirls.