One thing people often don't realize or ignore: these LLMs are trained on the internet, the entire internet.
There's a shit-ton of bad and inefficient code on the internet. Lots of it. And it was used to train these LLMs as much as the good code.
In other words, the LLMs are great if you're OK with mediocrity at best. Mediocrity is occasionally good enough, but it can spell death for a company when key parts of it are mediocre.
I'm afraid a lot of the executives who fantasize about replacing humans with AI are going to have to learn this the hard way.
Maybe it's things like 4-year tenure, or shorter tenure, or something else.
But I think it's a matter of motivation, Bob.
> The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care. It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? ... my only real motivation is not to be hassled. That, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.
Depression isn't just feeling sad. It's not necessarily caused by anything external. You cannot necessarily just "figure out why" you feel bad; that's really not how it usually works.
I wouldn't go that far, but there was a now-famous study (Princeton?) that showed that doing aerobic exercise for maybe 30 mins every day, about five days per week, was equally effective at alleviating depression symptoms.
What would you propose? Donating money to blackhole political organizations? Taking to the streets? None of that, or much of anything else, will "do something about this". There is no doing anything about this. It's also just meaningless posturing, just another tantrum by a man-child.
Thanks! I didn't mention the following year, when I discovered that my high school's math club had built a Process Technology Sol-20 from a kit, and that the computer was available to anyone who wanted to use it (after school). I spent the next year using that, even hand-assembling machine language programs. Obviously the computer captured my imagination as a kid. Maybe as an adult, too. :-)
I grew up in a small-to-mid-sized town in California's central valley, east of the Bay Area and SV. We had an electronics class, and as a freshman, I took it.
If you needed parts for a homework assignment, the only store that had them was Radio Shack (yes, they actually sold lots of electronic parts back then). So one day, I meandered into The Shack to get a resistor I needed. Lo and behold, there was a new manager, a guy named Tony. This guy was much friendlier than the previous manager had been. That other manager just tried to get us in and out, apparently presuming we wanted to shoplift or something.
This new guy? Happy to show me the new TRS-80, and though my parents wouldn't pay for one, he scarcely complained as I went back to use it every day for more than a year. I taught myself how to code on that machine, and so I have that freshman electronics class to thank, in part, for my career.
There's a shit-ton of bad and inefficient code on the internet. Lots of it. And it was used to train these LLMs as much as the good code.
In other words, the LLMs are great if you're OK with mediocrity at best. Mediocrity is occasionally good enough, but it can spell death for a company when key parts of it are mediocre.
I'm afraid a lot of the executives who fantasize about replacing humans with AI are going to have to learn this the hard way.