8 ms·

I am definitely tired of the topic, but I’ll be perfectly honest as to the reason why: I am genuinely afraid of its impact on my career. My career has been sort

I am definitely tired of the topic, but I’ll be perfectly honest as to the reason why: I am genuinely afraid of its impact on my career. My career has been sort of a combination of tech and education, and this (admittedly impressive) creation threatens both. And more and more of these things will be coming online over the coming months and years. So, every time I see it mentioned I feel depressed and sick on the inside. I will say, however, that so far it has actually enhanced my productivity in my current projects, and that’s fine. I just don’t think that its impact will remain so limited for long. Of all the tech that’s been invented, this is the one I fear the most in terms of its negative impact on jobs. Hope I’m wrong!

Aperocky 4y ago
In tech and don't share your worries. If anything, since release it has proven that 1. it does not have ability to reason logically creatively. 2. it has strong ability to manipulate language to human readable form. If anything, I would say regular office workers are the most threatened, particularly if the jobs revolves around digesting and passing information.
- brap 4y ago
  Sure. But will that be the case 5-10 years from now? As a programmer, I gotta say if you're not at all concerned, then either you haven't been paying attention or you're in denial. Sooner or later it's coming.
  - Aperocky 4y ago
    As a programmer that had a year of data scientist under my belt, and some level of understanding of the current machine learning systems, I'm not worried. The newer research papers coming out are where I would focus if I'm really worried. ChatGPT is really the industrial grade implementation of ideas that aren't exactly new. And the idea itself (LLM) does not contain ability to generate novel logic or solve unlearned problems. In fact, I would go further and say that it does not see your prompt input as a logical problem, but rather a collection of words, and its output involves a transformation of words with its extensively training set. Which would contain logic that was in the training material but itself did not add anything to it, with no guarantee of correctness, only training weights. There are no guarantee that it didn't also train on the question part of stackoverflow... and you only get answers as good as its training material. Where I work we attempt to automate away repeatable problems with deterministic frameworks, which are imo far better. I would agree that ChatGPT will probably improve my writing if I were to use it on email and documents, but only in language, not in ideas.
    - terminal_d 4y ago
      > The newer research papers coming out are where I would focus if I'm really worried. Great reply, could you expand on this?
      - Aperocky 4y ago
        I wouldn't know until they come out, I don't think there are anything that smell like artificial general intelligence right now, pattern matching is much more dominant today.
  - ResearchCode 4y ago
    Shouldn't non-programming office workers be more concerned is what I'm thinking.
  - throwawaycopter 4y ago
    > Sure. But will that be the case 5-10 years from now? Not with language models. A language model can parse natural language, and with enough training data, give out what it thinks the answer is based on the data it was trained with. It is not General AI. It cannot reason a solution for a problem that had an unknown answer. It won't be able to reflect logically on a context to foresee problems within this context. It cannot have a meaningful conversation. It won't be able to understand that one of the things it "knows" was incomplete, untrue, or just plain wrong, and fix itself. It's a powerful tool, a game-changing tool. Perhaps as game-changing as the advent of computers, internet, or wireless communication. But it still won't replace humans. General AI for now is science fiction. Perhaps this is unfortunate. I wouldn't mind an AI that can replace humans, even if I too am made obsolete with it.
    - oceanplexian 4y ago
      > General AI for now is science fiction. Perhaps this is unfortunate. I wouldn't mind an AI that can replace humans, even if I too am made obsolete with it. Maybe I’m optimistic, but I feel like we need AGI to reach the next level of development as a civilization. If software engineering jobs are the price to pay so be it. World hunger, medical science, energy, space travel, if we can get all of these to take a ride on something resembling Moore’s Law we are in for a one hell of a fantastic future in our lifetimes.
      - throwawaycopter 4y ago
        I actually think AGI will bring about the collapse of civilization, and perhaps the end of humanity. I'm okay with it. I also think it will solve things such as energy and space travel. World hunger, medical science (among other human problems) will become meaningless. "Rejoice glory is ours / Our young men have not died in vain / Their graves need no flowers / The tapes have recorded their names"
      - roncesvalles 4y ago
        When ChatGPT was first released, I read a memorable comment on HN (paraphrasing from memory): It looks like AI is poised to take over all the things that I enjoyed doing as a human such as art, music, storytelling, teaching, programming. There only needs to be one intelligent species in any ecosystem. If AI becomes that species, humans will be relegated to the role of horses - only good for menial physical labor. That is, of course, only until the AI invents cars.
  - lolinder 4y ago
    Or you have been paying attention, understand the technology better than those who buy into the hype, and aren't worried because you know that incremental improvements to this tech cannot be a serious threat to your job security because the paradigm isn't capable of replacing you. When my job is at risk it will be because we have AGI, not a better language model, and at that point everyone is at risk. Worrying about job security in the face of AGI is like worrying about what you'll do after your city gets nuked: it's unlikely to happen and there's nothing you can do if it does.
    - thom 4y ago
      Yep, I subscribe to this viewpoint. I am not as smart as the creators of ChatGPT or whatever is to follow, so maybe we’ll get lucky that AGI is pretty smart but can’t improve itself. But I think in the general case, if we create AIs that can replace programmers, economic concerns aren’t going to matter.
      - qup 4y ago
        Yes. And we'll be in the true exponential times, because humans will be building wonderfully complex software in an instant, so we'll build huge, robust, open ecosystems in just a few moments. The programming job market going away will be the last thing on my mind at that time, I think it would be one of the biggest shifts in human history.
    - CuriousSkeptic 4y ago
      While I share your take on LLMs. I do add on the worry of may take a couple of years for the people who pay software engineers to figure out that they aren’t replaceable yet.
    - versteegen 4y ago
      Why think only about "incremental" improvement? People aren't just making slight tweaks, new papers are published at a remarkable rate where people try significantly different architectures, training methods, etc, and that steady progress leads to ever more impressive results. How can you assume this direction of research will lead nowhere? OK, ignore everyone who doesn't understand the technology. Of those of who do, I'm utterly amazed how pessimistic many are that this "isn't capable" of leading to AGI. Probably not Transformers specially, but LLMs show that intelligence is remarkably easy. You don't even need to put anything in the neural architecture designed to perform reasoning tasks, but they can be learnt regardless, because Transformers are flexible enough to learn to emulate computation (Turing machines) with bounded space and time, going beyond the famous result that 2-layer MLPs are universal function approximators.
  - nequo 4y ago
    My guess is that this will become a problem roughly around the time when automated theorem proving becomes viable. Until then, language models just regurgitate sentences. Anything that relies on the sentences being logically coherent cannot rely on these models. This includes engineering, finance, and journalism (ideally, although I am aware of CNET's experiment). After then, we salaried humans might be in a pickle. Edit: sentence.
  - joe_the_user 4y ago
    Another to consider is that increased programmer productivity for simple code may result in just more code. If any given music synthesizer company could produce it's own DAW (digital audio workstation) by employing a single programmer or a contractor, the demand for programmers could increase. Just speculating, it's hard to know.
  - minusf 4y ago
    when a program will be smart enough to write at least as usable code as me, i'll happily hang up my keyboard and take up gardening. until that happens what's the point of worrying? the year of the linux desktop joke got retired anyway so let's use self driving cars and "ai programmers" :)
  - roncesvalles 4y ago
    >Sure. But will that be the case 5-10 years from now? A big part of the failings of cryptocurrency and self-driving cars was that predictions of mass disruption were contingent upon the tech improving linearly from the current state. That didn't happen.
- echelon 4y ago
  I'm using it to cut my engineering time down. If you're not simultaneously elated and threatened, you're sleeping. The AI wave is going to be bigger than the internet in terms of societal impact. We're watching humanity's swan song in real time.
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    > swan song Swan song that started as the singers started regarding IQs of 0 as acceptable actors.
    - echelon 4y ago
      Most of the actions you and I do are "0 IQ". There's a little bit of intelligence in the in between.
      - mdp2021 4y ago
        When I wrote about «act[or|ion]s», I of course meant the relevant ones, and in general, actions are based - prescriptively - on concretions of layers of developed intelligence (wisdom), intelligence which is constantly applied and exercised (just with different occasional effort, for resource management). If somebody went sparingly, their own practice and our damage - if they are active. So, again: a "sub-bohemian" idea that "anything goes" is the swan song. Wait till you actually needed intelligent action, to prevent critical losses. -- I will rephrase coincisely: you are supposed to exercise intelligence at any action. If you do not do it, your vice.
  - sublinear 4y ago
    I don't understand this perspective at all. The hardest parts of software are nailing down requirements, scheduling work, and fitting square pegs into round holes for legacy systems at a conceptual level. No offense, but if writing the actual code is the part slowing you down there's something very wrong.
    - echelon 4y ago
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  Education faces the biggest problems of all. And it's self-inflicted. A large portion of what's required of students is listening to, regurgitating and producing half-coherent bullshit. And so teachers will have a hard verifying homework now. What should happen is teachers and students are required to up their skills to the point that student are required to produce things better than AI. But the likely result will be lots of futile surveillance.
  - juve1996 4y ago
    It was impossible to verify homework before ChatGPT. People just cheated off of the smart kid and copied the work. Fundamentally the same problem as ChatGPT.
  - pvaldes 4y ago
    I see several possible solutions. One could be the teacher typing the same question in the chatbot and finding some subtle but wrong results and then looking for the same errors in the students texts.
dougmwne 4y ago
I really think that’s behind a lot of the negativity I see on HN. This tech is threatening, to jobs as we know them and maybe eventually to our sense of self. I view it like the introduction of computers into the workplace. Many people were left behind and made obsolete, never having a chance to be as productive as younger colleagues. AI collaboration could be a huge force multiplier, but some people, maybe myself included, will never get fully on board and will be left in the dust.
enneff 4y ago
Don’t worry, the models do not show any signs of creativity or understanding. Your intellect still has value, and imo this technology is not the invention that will eventually devalue it. It’s kinda like self driving cars. 5-10 years ago we assumed we were just a few years away from never having to drive ourselves again. Turns out that’s way further out than we had imagined.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Self driving cars work right now. The problem is the cost of failure. If your self driving car works 99% of the time but it kills someone every hundredth trip on average, that's unusable. If your LLM works 99 out of 100 times, that's extremely useful.
  - enneff 4y ago
    I’m not making a direct comparison in terms of the technologies capabilities, but rather the way we perceive(d) them from being just a few years away from taking over.
  - rohith2506 4y ago
    Saying “work” is kind of a stretch. Until I see a self driving car navigating through the streets of Bengaluru in the peak traffic periods, I would say it’s still far far away. All self driving companies have this bias. If it works in US and Europe, it works everywhere. It’s like the same old saying of “it works on my computer. Looks good. Let’s put it on production”. We all know how the story ends ;)
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      “It’s useless until it works in every single scenario”. Sure that might be fair for self driving cars, but again, doesn’t apply much to LLMs. I don’t care if my chatbot can’t give me accurate answers for medical or physics questions. If it works for the stuff I want, at least most of the time, it’s very useful.
    - interstice 4y ago
sologoub 4y ago
This Gizmodo article is pretty insightful on the complexities and use cases: https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-gizmodo-artificial-intelligence-openai-media-1849876066 https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-gizmodo-artificial-intelligence-... The problems have been well documented, and the part where model makes up info and presents it as fact is a huge problem. Whether it’s solvable is up for debate until it is actually solved. What this article has shown is that the automation part can work well in somewhat limited circumstances, but in the end it is a form of automation and perhaps a novel user interface options. It is not creativity, it is not something genuinely new. Automation is powerful and it enables productivity goals, which is usually profitable.
wendyshu 4y ago
At the moment it's too error-prone to do anything without human interaction. Progress has been fast recently but will slow down because there's less new data to train on and scaling hardware will get too expensive.
WithinReason 4y ago
It won't threaten you job, it will do the opposite. It will make you 10x more productive and thus more valuable.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  Or… It will make 10% 10x more valuable and 90% obsolete.
  - WithinReason 4y ago
    That's the thing, the amount of programming work that needs to be done or can be done is probably 100x than the amount that is being done.
8note 4y ago
I'm finding it interesting in that whole I likely have little benefit from using as a tool in many respects, I will likely have to spend time working with/mentoring junior folks who rely heavily on it over time, and I will need to figure out what it's covering for them and what it leaves out... And whether I'm giving prompts to gpt or talking to a person so they can come up with gpt prompts
WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
Don't fear it. You need to understand it and use it in your career. The biggest fault it has is that it's not reliable and you can't tell if what you are getting is fact or fiction. So the biggest benefactor will be those that know how to get the BS out of the results so if you know your subject it will improve your productivity by a lot. A novice will get lost and have less good productivity. There will be attempts at improving reliability but at some point it becomes too expensive and ineffective to try to improve it. People that know how to use it will really thrive.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  > There will be attempts at improving reliability but at some point it becomes too expensive and ineffective to try to improve it. At some point it will be self improving. Either through humans telling it to quit spewing bullshit or by learning fact-checking is a good system of improvement.
roncesvalles 4y ago
I'd say if you're already working as a software engineer, you're one of the "safe" cohorts that made it through before the doors closed. Because, by the time AI is good enough to be replacing developer jobs (5-10 years), you will be an experienced engineer who would be negotiating requirements, inputting the prompts, reviewing the output, working on the architecture and process framework within which the AI operates, etc.

Aperocky 4y ago

In tech and don't share your worries. If anything, since release it has proven that 1. it does not have ability to reason logically creatively. 2. it has strong ability to manipulate language to human readable form. If anything, I would say regular office workers are the most threatened, particularly if the jobs revolves around digesting and passing information.

brap 4y ago
Sure. But will that be the case 5-10 years from now? As a programmer, I gotta say if you're not at all concerned, then either you haven't been paying attention or you're in denial. Sooner or later it's coming.
- Aperocky 4y ago
  As a programmer that had a year of data scientist under my belt, and some level of understanding of the current machine learning systems, I'm not worried. The newer research papers coming out are where I would focus if I'm really worried. ChatGPT is really the industrial grade implementation of ideas that aren't exactly new. And the idea itself (LLM) does not contain ability to generate novel logic or solve unlearned problems. In fact, I would go further and say that it does not see your prompt input as a logical problem, but rather a collection of words, and its output involves a transformation of words with its extensively training set. Which would contain logic that was in the training material but itself did not add anything to it, with no guarantee of correctness, only training weights. There are no guarantee that it didn't also train on the question part of stackoverflow... and you only get answers as good as its training material. Where I work we attempt to automate away repeatable problems with deterministic frameworks, which are imo far better. I would agree that ChatGPT will probably improve my writing if I were to use it on email and documents, but only in language, not in ideas.
  - terminal_d 4y ago
    > The newer research papers coming out are where I would focus if I'm really worried. Great reply, could you expand on this?
    - Aperocky 4y ago
      I wouldn't know until they come out, I don't think there are anything that smell like artificial general intelligence right now, pattern matching is much more dominant today.
- ResearchCode 4y ago
  Shouldn't non-programming office workers be more concerned is what I'm thinking.
- throwawaycopter 4y ago
  > Sure. But will that be the case 5-10 years from now? Not with language models. A language model can parse natural language, and with enough training data, give out what it thinks the answer is based on the data it was trained with. It is not General AI. It cannot reason a solution for a problem that had an unknown answer. It won't be able to reflect logically on a context to foresee problems within this context. It cannot have a meaningful conversation. It won't be able to understand that one of the things it "knows" was incomplete, untrue, or just plain wrong, and fix itself. It's a powerful tool, a game-changing tool. Perhaps as game-changing as the advent of computers, internet, or wireless communication. But it still won't replace humans. General AI for now is science fiction. Perhaps this is unfortunate. I wouldn't mind an AI that can replace humans, even if I too am made obsolete with it.
  - oceanplexian 4y ago
    > General AI for now is science fiction. Perhaps this is unfortunate. I wouldn't mind an AI that can replace humans, even if I too am made obsolete with it. Maybe I’m optimistic, but I feel like we need AGI to reach the next level of development as a civilization. If software engineering jobs are the price to pay so be it. World hunger, medical science, energy, space travel, if we can get all of these to take a ride on something resembling Moore’s Law we are in for a one hell of a fantastic future in our lifetimes.
    - throwawaycopter 4y ago
      I actually think AGI will bring about the collapse of civilization, and perhaps the end of humanity. I'm okay with it. I also think it will solve things such as energy and space travel. World hunger, medical science (among other human problems) will become meaningless. "Rejoice glory is ours / Our young men have not died in vain / Their graves need no flowers / The tapes have recorded their names"
    - roncesvalles 4y ago
      When ChatGPT was first released, I read a memorable comment on HN (paraphrasing from memory): It looks like AI is poised to take over all the things that I enjoyed doing as a human such as art, music, storytelling, teaching, programming. There only needs to be one intelligent species in any ecosystem. If AI becomes that species, humans will be relegated to the role of horses - only good for menial physical labor. That is, of course, only until the AI invents cars.
- lolinder 4y ago
  Or you have been paying attention, understand the technology better than those who buy into the hype, and aren't worried because you know that incremental improvements to this tech cannot be a serious threat to your job security because the paradigm isn't capable of replacing you. When my job is at risk it will be because we have AGI, not a better language model, and at that point everyone is at risk. Worrying about job security in the face of AGI is like worrying about what you'll do after your city gets nuked: it's unlikely to happen and there's nothing you can do if it does.
  - thom 4y ago
    Yep, I subscribe to this viewpoint. I am not as smart as the creators of ChatGPT or whatever is to follow, so maybe we’ll get lucky that AGI is pretty smart but can’t improve itself. But I think in the general case, if we create AIs that can replace programmers, economic concerns aren’t going to matter.
    - qup 4y ago
      Yes. And we'll be in the true exponential times, because humans will be building wonderfully complex software in an instant, so we'll build huge, robust, open ecosystems in just a few moments. The programming job market going away will be the last thing on my mind at that time, I think it would be one of the biggest shifts in human history.
  - CuriousSkeptic 4y ago
    While I share your take on LLMs. I do add on the worry of may take a couple of years for the people who pay software engineers to figure out that they aren’t replaceable yet.
  - versteegen 4y ago
    Why think only about "incremental" improvement? People aren't just making slight tweaks, new papers are published at a remarkable rate where people try significantly different architectures, training methods, etc, and that steady progress leads to ever more impressive results. How can you assume this direction of research will lead nowhere? OK, ignore everyone who doesn't understand the technology. Of those of who do, I'm utterly amazed how pessimistic many are that this "isn't capable" of leading to AGI. Probably not Transformers specially, but LLMs show that intelligence is remarkably easy. You don't even need to put anything in the neural architecture designed to perform reasoning tasks, but they can be learnt regardless, because Transformers are flexible enough to learn to emulate computation (Turing machines) with bounded space and time, going beyond the famous result that 2-layer MLPs are universal function approximators.
- nequo 4y ago
  My guess is that this will become a problem roughly around the time when automated theorem proving becomes viable. Until then, language models just regurgitate sentences. Anything that relies on the sentences being logically coherent cannot rely on these models. This includes engineering, finance, and journalism (ideally, although I am aware of CNET's experiment). After then, we salaried humans might be in a pickle. Edit: sentence.
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  Another to consider is that increased programmer productivity for simple code may result in just more code. If any given music synthesizer company could produce it's own DAW (digital audio workstation) by employing a single programmer or a contractor, the demand for programmers could increase. Just speculating, it's hard to know.
- minusf 4y ago
  when a program will be smart enough to write at least as usable code as me, i'll happily hang up my keyboard and take up gardening. until that happens what's the point of worrying? the year of the linux desktop joke got retired anyway so let's use self driving cars and "ai programmers" :)
- roncesvalles 4y ago
  >Sure. But will that be the case 5-10 years from now? A big part of the failings of cryptocurrency and self-driving cars was that predictions of mass disruption were contingent upon the tech improving linearly from the current state. That didn't happen.
echelon 4y ago
I'm using it to cut my engineering time down. If you're not simultaneously elated and threatened, you're sleeping. The AI wave is going to be bigger than the internet in terms of societal impact. We're watching humanity's swan song in real time.
- mdp2021 4y ago
  > swan song Swan song that started as the singers started regarding IQs of 0 as acceptable actors.
  - echelon 4y ago
    Most of the actions you and I do are "0 IQ". There's a little bit of intelligence in the in between.
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      When I wrote about «act[or|ion]s», I of course meant the relevant ones, and in general, actions are based - prescriptively - on concretions of layers of developed intelligence (wisdom), intelligence which is constantly applied and exercised (just with different occasional effort, for resource management). If somebody went sparingly, their own practice and our damage - if they are active. So, again: a "sub-bohemian" idea that "anything goes" is the swan song. Wait till you actually needed intelligent action, to prevent critical losses. -- I will rephrase coincisely: you are supposed to exercise intelligence at any action. If you do not do it, your vice.
- sublinear 4y ago
  I don't understand this perspective at all. The hardest parts of software are nailing down requirements, scheduling work, and fitting square pegs into round holes for legacy systems at a conceptual level. No offense, but if writing the actual code is the part slowing you down there's something very wrong.
  - echelon 4y ago
joe_the_user 4y ago
Education faces the biggest problems of all. And it's self-inflicted. A large portion of what's required of students is listening to, regurgitating and producing half-coherent bullshit. And so teachers will have a hard verifying homework now. What should happen is teachers and students are required to up their skills to the point that student are required to produce things better than AI. But the likely result will be lots of futile surveillance.
- juve1996 4y ago
  It was impossible to verify homework before ChatGPT. People just cheated off of the smart kid and copied the work. Fundamentally the same problem as ChatGPT.
- pvaldes 4y ago
  I see several possible solutions. One could be the teacher typing the same question in the chatbot and finding some subtle but wrong results and then looking for the same errors in the students texts.

dougmwne 4y ago

I really think that’s behind a lot of the negativity I see on HN. This tech is threatening, to jobs as we know them and maybe eventually to our sense of self. I view it like the introduction of computers into the workplace. Many people were left behind and made obsolete, never having a chance to be as productive as younger colleagues. AI collaboration could be a huge force multiplier, but some people, maybe myself included, will never get fully on board and will be left in the dust.

enneff 4y ago

Don’t worry, the models do not show any signs of creativity or understanding. Your intellect still has value, and imo this technology is not the invention that will eventually devalue it. It’s kinda like self driving cars. 5-10 years ago we assumed we were just a few years away from never having to drive ourselves again. Turns out that’s way further out than we had imagined.

Gigachad 4y ago
Self driving cars work right now. The problem is the cost of failure. If your self driving car works 99% of the time but it kills someone every hundredth trip on average, that's unusable. If your LLM works 99 out of 100 times, that's extremely useful.
- enneff 4y ago
  I’m not making a direct comparison in terms of the technologies capabilities, but rather the way we perceive(d) them from being just a few years away from taking over.
- rohith2506 4y ago
  Saying “work” is kind of a stretch. Until I see a self driving car navigating through the streets of Bengaluru in the peak traffic periods, I would say it’s still far far away. All self driving companies have this bias. If it works in US and Europe, it works everywhere. It’s like the same old saying of “it works on my computer. Looks good. Let’s put it on production”. We all know how the story ends ;)
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    “It’s useless until it works in every single scenario”. Sure that might be fair for self driving cars, but again, doesn’t apply much to LLMs. I don’t care if my chatbot can’t give me accurate answers for medical or physics questions. If it works for the stuff I want, at least most of the time, it’s very useful.
  - interstice 4y ago

sologoub 4y ago

This Gizmodo article is pretty insightful on the complexities and use cases: https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-gizmodo-artificial-intelligence-openai-media-1849876066 https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-gizmodo-artificial-intelligence-... The problems have been well documented, and the part where model makes up info and presents it as fact is a huge problem. Whether it’s solvable is up for debate until it is actually solved. What this article has shown is that the automation part can work well in somewhat limited circumstances, but in the end it is a form of automation and perhaps a novel user interface options. It is not creativity, it is not something genuinely new. Automation is powerful and it enables productivity goals, which is usually profitable.

wendyshu 4y ago

At the moment it's too error-prone to do anything without human interaction. Progress has been fast recently but will slow down because there's less new data to train on and scaling hardware will get too expensive.

WithinReason 4y ago

It won't threaten you job, it will do the opposite. It will make you 10x more productive and thus more valuable.

UncleEntity 4y ago
Or… It will make 10% 10x more valuable and 90% obsolete.
- WithinReason 4y ago
  That's the thing, the amount of programming work that needs to be done or can be done is probably 100x than the amount that is being done.

8note 4y ago

I'm finding it interesting in that whole I likely have little benefit from using as a tool in many respects, I will likely have to spend time working with/mentoring junior folks who rely heavily on it over time, and I will need to figure out what it's covering for them and what it leaves out... And whether I'm giving prompts to gpt or talking to a person so they can come up with gpt prompts

WheelsAtLarge 4y ago

Don't fear it. You need to understand it and use it in your career. The biggest fault it has is that it's not reliable and you can't tell if what you are getting is fact or fiction. So the biggest benefactor will be those that know how to get the BS out of the results so if you know your subject it will improve your productivity by a lot. A novice will get lost and have less good productivity. There will be attempts at improving reliability but at some point it becomes too expensive and ineffective to try to improve it. People that know how to use it will really thrive.

UncleEntity 4y ago
> There will be attempts at improving reliability but at some point it becomes too expensive and ineffective to try to improve it. At some point it will be self improving. Either through humans telling it to quit spewing bullshit or by learning fact-checking is a good system of improvement.

roncesvalles 4y ago

I'd say if you're already working as a software engineer, you're one of the "safe" cohorts that made it through before the doors closed. Because, by the time AI is good enough to be replacing developer jobs (5-10 years), you will be an experienced engineer who would be negotiating requirements, inputting the prompts, reviewing the output, working on the architecture and process framework within which the AI operates, etc.