>Because AI represents the distillation of the very best human knowledge and expertise. AI is compression of human capabilities, the very best ones.
I'm confused if this is satire, sarcasm, or genuine belief. If this was the case, then AI companies should absolutely remove the "it may make mistakes", because doing mistakes would imply that "the very best human knowledge and expertise" is what actually fails, and not the AI.
With that being said, I'll still urge people to visit a professional therapist for health problems and I generally still trust human knowledge workers for critical scenarios. I will reconsider your claim when chatGPT can effectively play Yu-Gi-Oh! (or at the very least respond with the correct rules appropriately), which is a significantly lower stakes scenario than betting your entire company on its aptitude.
Surprising to see you endorsing seeing past the tools as a maker of games whose audience simply cares more about the problem being solved than what gets actually made.
Of course I cannot vouch that there aren't people who played games like Shenzhen I/O because they cared about building signs for a fictional corporation.
I used to feel the same but, with the LLM mandates made me have more fun playing Shenzhen I/O than actually programming at work. I'm one of "those people".
The skilled seniors better stop downplaying what actually led them to be skilled in the first place, and realize that the conditions to develop that skill has been gone and almost deemed unproductive in today's workplace.
Not disagreeing that LLM's are a force multiplier, but I highly doubt whatever value will end up finding multiplying in the next generation of seniors, at this rate. It's surreal to me that I have to point out that recognition AND recalling are both necessary components of skill acquisition, because humans largely knew this since the dawn of education.
>It's possible these companies will become everyone's boss, and will dictate to everyone what everyone is allowed to work on, think, say, do, believe, etc.
I'd argue that they already are to some extend, given that well-educated people have no saying on the matter when it comes to extensive use (and by extend reinforcement training) of their models. Well, they have a saying, but exercising that means they're willing to end up without a job.
Now, as far as "what is truth" is concerned, the models are already biased towards notions and opinions that are accepted to some degree by Western values. I had an argument with Claude (why would the tool even argue?) that started by asking it what makes a man attractive, which sent it on a yap on how beauty is subjective, there's no objective way to measure beauty (which implies there's no objective way to improve it), and at some point I was just fed up with how dogged it was to convince me of a value judgement that I don't hold.
It's not about how true or false that value is, it's about what we're going to do the moment someone else dictates the values that exist within the models? What happens when what is trained isn't what you agree? Who's to decide what gets to be reinforced and what's not?
The HN crowd is too deep into productivity rampage to discuss the ethical and moral implications of having a machine so powerful that it spreads worldviews as facts, by whichever government/entity happens to be behind the wheel. At least in the case of extremist forums I can just visit different communities. But what happens when there's only a few winners in the AI race, and the cost of just walking away is too high to pay?
Remember: Google started with "do no evil" and where is that now?
Besides the obvious examples of living our power fantasy of "finally writing Rust without knowing Rust, thanks to AI", I noticed the same exact thing in video games, and it has so many layers of bull that I could easily come up with a blog post about it.
What made it so obvious in video games is the that, while video games are already artificial, some decide to simply extract the things that give you dopamine hits and pleasure and shove them into a colorful bucket and call it a day. Yes, I'm talking about Vampire Survivors and Vampire Crawlers. We went from games that are mechanically complicated and a joy to explore and master, to games that are mechanically simple and exist just to give you dopamine hits.
And just like many comments already said, there are in many people who will opt to play that kind of games, so they do make money. But for me, a "game" isn't just mentally stimulating but also mentally engaging, either with the storytelling or with the game mechanics.
Furthermore, the mass appeal of gaming after 2000's did constrained creativity and made the games that are really expensive to make effectively same-y, so you can see that the concept that I grew up loving was reduced to the necessary parts that will make it sell, and reproduced over and over and over to the point where it's rare for me to find an AAA game that care about. However, that's because I've been playing video games since the Atari era, and I developed my taste towards a specific way, so you can make a case that I'm not like those who grew up eating the artificial flavor of strawberries and preferring it to the real thing.
My non-tech savvy mother started reading the stuff the Google Search AI answers to for some searches, and she's already fed up with it saying whatever. To her it doesn't matter that the "AI can make mistakes" because (in her own wording) "if it's faulty, don't answer".
There's a difference between "linking to a source that may be incorrect" and "you providing the text that's blatantly wrong", and Google seems too big to care about it.
The crowd who came for the love of computers either left or switched to be the ones who were fed up with building things out of thin air, and are fine with swiping their credit cards to have someone else do the work for them while they're micromanaging that someone else (AI).
Odd not to see my main concern, which is gathering large amounts of human knowledge in a machine that is ultimately tweaked by the "selected" few not just for profiting off of it, but to also (ultimately) have a big influence on what is appropriate and what isn't.
>I never understand why software engineers are so excited about AI as a whole.
Dictating what to exist and what not to to the machine is a power fantasy that's not going to stick around for long, because we'll inevitably reach the point where no human is needed in the loop (or at least not as often as they needed today).
Most people finally feel how they would've felt like if they actually put deliberate practice for hours to work on something. That's why you see comments going "wow, I rewrote this in Rust, and I don't even know Rust". You get to feel like someone who outputs Rust.
I've been strictly using LLM's to either push stuff that I've done plenty times before and are mostly boilerplate or have zero value for writing them by hand (not even educational), and I always ENSURE that they work on stuff that are easily verifiable and proven incorrect with my existing knowledge or a few minutes of googling.
I use chatGPT to track my nutrition goals, and adjust exercises. I also let it code review my personal projects to (at worst) gain exposure to new patterns.
I wouldn't buy a deeply-ingrained AI laptop even if you paid me, and even then I'd install Linux on it in a heartbeat.
>AI development doesn't involve luck to any appreciable degree
Reading this while I'm prompting for the third time to fix a 100+ line function is amusing, to say the least. I don't care about the definition of "appreciable", but I definitely have to repeat myself to get stuff done, sometimes even to undo things I never told it to touch.
There's still personal skill expression in driving cars and using a pencil for drawing, that makes the difference between drivers and artists visible enough to justify hiring one over another.
So far I can't say the same for leveraging LLM's and, in the off-chance that there is, we have an entire software development industry that doesn't even know how to filter for "it".
I think it's intellectually dishonest to dismiss the absolute accumulation of human's knowledge under very specific brands for profitability using false equivalencies. When I build something using chatGPT, especially if I was unable to build it before, I arrive at a result that I could have previously arrived with "hard work" by skipping the "hard work" part.
Now, many will argue that you wouldn't have poured in time and energy in that endeavour anyways, so it's fine. But the crucial part missing here is the effort. We're about to witness the side effects of societal-wide reliance on LLM's, the same way we're still paying the price for the social media boom, misinformation, propaganda, echo-chambers and algorithmic bubbles.
Notice that none of the above actually invented misinformation, etc. they just magnified an existing problem. LLM's magnify the need to "get it done, fast" but I don't see the engineering excellence everyone promised me that I'll see at any level.
As much as I enjoy the novelty of asking anime pictures from chatGPT I do not, for a single moment, consider myself a doer of anime pictures.
And a fair aside, the result will be "good enough" approximation of what I conjured in my head, but never the thing itself. For me to do the exact thing I conjured in my head it will require to pick up the mouse and draw the rest of the owl. I don't know if that's more telling of my imagination being demanding or my standards.
I tried using it last week to make a simple Yu-Gi-Oh! website, that shows decks, lets you rate them, register users, etc. kinda like masterduelmeta.com and I enjoyed using it, but definitely did not enjoyed making it. I didn't felt a sense of ownership or dopamine from nailing the styles just right, or making the cards shimmer when you hover them.
All jobs can generate income. What led me follow this one job in particular was the joy of turning nothing into something, and it now feels that the most effective way to do that is for only $99.99/month, and that price needle is only going to move further upwards as capabilities increase.
I'm confused if this is satire, sarcasm, or genuine belief. If this was the case, then AI companies should absolutely remove the "it may make mistakes", because doing mistakes would imply that "the very best human knowledge and expertise" is what actually fails, and not the AI.
With that being said, I'll still urge people to visit a professional therapist for health problems and I generally still trust human knowledge workers for critical scenarios. I will reconsider your claim when chatGPT can effectively play Yu-Gi-Oh! (or at the very least respond with the correct rules appropriately), which is a significantly lower stakes scenario than betting your entire company on its aptitude.