I saw a bunch of people talking about how GPT helped them code stuff on Twitter, so I thought I'd give it a try. Right now I'm building a sort of simple, mock version of the type of software that integrates with my company's APIs. I've successfully managed to create a simple web application that creates a new object, hits my company's API endpoint to create a corresponding object on our software, allows me to upload a document locally and then allows me to upload that document to our software via API as well. It's all a little messy and clearly not production-ready, but it works. It would've taken me probably a few months on nights and weekends do this (mostly refreshing myself on JS and Python). Instead I've done it in <24h (would've been shorter except for GPT-4's message limit).

I'm sometimes able to spot and fix GPT's bugs, but even when I'm not, it walks me through adding more logging and successfully debugs issues. Sometimes it takes a few tries and a little direction as to what I suspect the issue is, but so far it's fixed everything that's come up. I don't think this would be doable for a totally non-technical person, but I do think it'll get there pretty soon.

I'm just absolutely blown away.

Yesterday I got a complex data structure out of it in 1h that we'd been talking about but not implementing because it would have taken a couple of days to get right.

In all cases it made mistakes and I had to rely on my experience as an engineer to ask the right questions and fix things. But god damn it made me insanely more productive.

Don't shrug this off and go back to work. You'll get left behind, and may not have a work to go back to.

I was discussing a bug with a colleague, so for curiosity's sake I decided to plug a similar question into ChatGPT. I was quite impressed with the solution it gave, and interestingly, it had the same subtle bug that our code had. What blew me away is that when I pointed out the bug, ChatGPT fixed the code by itself. On one hand I felt "phew, at least it needed me to point out the bug", but then I thought "I just (perhaps stupidly) provided training data so that down the road ChatGPT would get it right the first time."

The other day I was working with the Cisco Meraki API...I knew exactly what the script needed to do, but the calls were tedious and I didn't feel like learning the names of all the JSON columns, so I just had ChatGPT do it. I had to fix a couple mistakes, but the 20 minutes it took was better than having to read all the documentation.

This quote highlights the challenges of accepting new information or ideas when they might jeopardize one's livelihood or status quo.

Let's wait for "And now... long term memory is all you need" paper.

And afterwards it cleans the cup and puts it back in the cabinet.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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)

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.

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...

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.

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.

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".

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.

> 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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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 envy the people who are bottlenecked on their typing speed and benefit 10 times more from the chat bot than I do.

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.

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 don’t think convert it in and out of proprietary standard is that difficult?

There is little to no vendor lock-in effect

I don't see this

What insight!

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.

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.

Today.

What happens when it understands computational geometry and can calculate an optimal strategy to apply it to a dataset and end goal you provide?

https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1638971232443076609

As of right now, even if ChatGPT were to generate 99% accurate responses, it's quite a chore to communicate with it in full sentences. I don't want to have to explain my business in full painstaking detail and then upload tax documents to a system that can then output an answer in book form back to me.

It also can connect to your Notion, Slack or whatever

Why would analysts be harder to replace than devs?

The question is - how will competition influence the job market? if everyone has AI, everyone has the same powers. So how do you differentiate yourself? You put more humans in the loop, like "human plugins". You need humans to extract the most from AI.

[0]: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins#code-interpreter