> This is the million dollar we'll see answered in our lifetime. Software engineering exists to automate work, are we arrogant to think we are not destined to the same fate? Is this truly a job befitting of a human over an agent?
There is a fine distinction here that I believe is often glossed over, so the two things it's delineating get muddled together. One of those two things is coding—the rote, mechanical encoding of meaning into computer instructions. It can be argued the LLM is fit to take this out of hands hands almost entirely, and it's almost indisputable the LLM is better at this in at least a certain sizeable subset of coding tasks.
But the other thing is the choosing, determination, specification of the intended meaning itself. This I think is squarely the job of the human, because letting this fall through to the AI means it is no longer the human that is making the decisions. This then becomes not merely automating work but ceding control. This, ultimately, is a bad thing.
So if we accept the premise that the specification of the intended meaning is the job of the human, the question is how you do that. Today many of us do it somewhat half-assedly, by writing lots of natural language text at the LLM and hoping it sticks. It is our hope that the text, given that there is a lot of it, will drive the stochastic machine in a sufficiently correct direction. This works to a degree—meaning we've ceded some control but not the majority of it—not least because we still read (most) of the code but cannot work in the limit, if code reading ceases.
A more proper way to specify the intended meaning is to specify (or "model") your system formally in a system that is mechanically verifiable. Then the final artefact produced by the LLM can be validated by verifying that it aligns with the specification. However this type of high-assurance specification looks a lot like a certain type of programming. In my opinion, writing this kind of specification is the future of human software engineering.
I do not accept the approach of simply rolling the dice and hoping the machine knows better than us, though I'm sure that church is also going to have its acolytes.
What is also lower is your understanding of the change. So yes, if you are now essentially only doing the final mile of paper pushing for the LLM, then the mental burden is lower but so is the assurance of what has just transpired.
Whether this mode of working is going to be long-term viable is going to depend on how important it is for you to be aware of what has happened for the system in question, how viable the economics are for the LLM usage at this level of assurance and how much ownership you exert over the LLM used or another similarly powered one (because otherwise the LLM can be taken away from you, leaving you at the mercy of a third party with goals that do not align with your own).
> The almond thing is false, but I'd argue that "misleading" might be defensible if you were to accompany it with "the majority of almonds are grown in California, but not all of them".
The "majority" in this case meaning about 51%, according to Wikipedia[1]? How could 51% ever be considered to be close to "all", such that "misleading" would be a valid answer?
> I mean, "the pieces were already there" is true of everything? Einstein was synthesizing existing math and existing data is your point right?
If it's true of everything, then surely having an LLM work iteratively on the pieces, along with being provided additional physical data, will lead to the discovery of everything?
If the answer is "no", then surely something is still missing.
> And the "anyone who read all the right papers" thing - nobody actually reads all the papers. That's the bottleneck. LLMs don't have it. They will continue to not have it. Humans will continue to not be able to read faster than LLMs.
I agree with this. This is a definitive advantage of LLMs.
No, by saying this, I am not downplaying Einstein's sizeable achievements nor trying to imply everyone was wrong about him. His was an impressive breadth of knowledge and mathematical prowess and there's no denying this.
However, what I'm saying is not mere nitpicking either. It is precisely because of my belief in Einstein's extraordinary abilities that I find it unconvincing that an LLM being able to recombine the extant written physics-related building blocks of 1900, with its practically infinite reading speed, necessarily demonstrates comparable capabilities to Einstein.
The essence of the question is this: would Einstein, having been granted eternal youth and a neverending source of data on physical phenomena, be able to innovate forever? Would an LLM?
My position is that even if an LLM is able to synthesise special relativity given 1900 knowledge, this doesn't necessarily mean that a positive answer to the first question implies a positive answer to the second.
This alone still wouldn't be a clear demonstration that AGI is around the corner. It's quite possible a LLM could've done Einstein's job, if Einstein's job was truly just synthesising already available information into a coherent new whole. (I couldn't say, I don't know enough of the physics landscape of the day to claim either way.)
It's still unclear whether this process could be merely continued, seeded only with new physical data, in order to keep progressing beyond that point, "forever", or at least for as long as we imagine humans will continue to go on making scientific progress.
No, that's a completely different concept, because we have faultless machines which perfectly and deterministically translate high-level code into byte-level machine code. This is another case of (nearly) perfect abstraction.
On the other hand, the whole deal of the LLM is that it does so stochastically and unpredictably.
And yet the categorical concepts in Hask are undoubtedly practically useful, more so than an arbitrary sample of concepts, and compose extraordinarily well. Does that have nothing to do with those concepts deriving from (even more general concepts of) category theory?
> Of course. But to ensure that's valid for multiple purposes we need a secure boot chain, and the infrastructure for it.
>
> To get there we need an AI arms race. People trying to detect AI art with machine learning vs. increasing AI sophistication.
Or we can just recognize the lunacy of it and opt out of caring. You can't stop the flood, so you just learn to live with it. With the right view, the flood becomes unimportant.
The bank and the game are far less important than me retaining full control of a general-purpose computing device and sensor that I keep by my side for a majority of the time and trust in the most intimate parts of my home. This is also a fact.
If the bank and the game cannot function in this reality, then the only solution is for them to provide separate devices for me to interface with them.
That is partially my argument, but not entirely. I'm rather arguing that even if you're using upstream services, you still want to have full and total control and ownership of the device you're using the upstream service from.
In fact, I find it a total jump in logic and a fallacy to conclude that I don't want or need freedom on my own device just because I'm a heavy user of upstream services. How does that even remotely follow?
> The 'freedom' to inspect the code that runs on your computer is useless without both the freedom to see what happens upstream, and also some level of trust or confidence that the service you're using really isnt doing something nefarious.
How is such freedom useless? I keep hearing this argument, yet I still run a significant portion of software locally and have no plans of replacing that with services, given they are a far worse option, precisely due to the loss of freedom and autonomy for not much additional gain.
Sure, if you accept that all your software are belong to them, then clearly the freedom to run libre stuff is useless, tautologically. But maybe you shouldn't be ready to give away that freedom just yet?
That you cannot be sure what someone else is running "over there", on a machine you don't control, is a fact of nature. Trading away your freedom for a foolish attempt to control that is misguided and shortsighted.
zzstructures are both graphs where you can have many edges (of different types) between any two nodes and a method of visual presentation and navigation of that structure.
When I said "users", I was referring to their rationale for killing off this developer's account and applications. One of the cited policies was Violation of Deceptive Behavior, which referred to users.
> So yes, I advise that, if you don't like the rules of Google, don't go play with them. It's the only thing that can change the rules of Google. (and FB, Amazon, etc).
If you don't like the rules (or their behaviour when supposedly applying them), you can also:
1. Criticize, explain why the behaviour is bad and spread the word about it. This is what we are doing now.
2. Regulate this kind of behaviour out of existence.
> [...] to withhold information that would expose secret filters that you use?
It makes no sense to me that these filters are such a secret. Either you are doing something to deceive your users or you are not. Are you advising that we should just blindly trust an opaque set of rules that a giant corporation, whose interests are not aligned with our own, can use to ban anyone with no oversight at all?