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by MathYouF 1821 days ago
Says the person who likely owns a washing machine, sink connected to plumbing, microwave, stove, lighters, clothes made with a sewing machine, ect. ect.

GPT-3 will take way less time to make a good substitute that costs the power of compute than other historical time saving technologies. Unlike other historic technologies, they pretty much spell out exactly how to do it, and own no patents related to its creation. I have trouble seeing the downside.
1 comments
leotaku 1821 days ago
I see your point, but aren't you making me into a bit of a straw man? When did I say that I was some open-access Luddite who won't use any technology that they can't build themselves. I just like the current state of programming, where I can productively build new and exciting things without having to rely on a lot of proprietary libraries or tools. Nothing more, nothing less.
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MathYouF 1820 days ago
Luddite: a person opposed to new technology or ways of working.

Seems like you came up with the perfect word to describe your view on this. :P

I defintiely do think there is reason to worry about the future you're imagining happening, but as someone who has read through the papers on gpt, this is in no way going to end up being an exclusive proprietary API, so it'll very soon have open source and likely free or at compute cost options.

And well, if it doesn't make us better, no one will use it. If it does, you'll have to adjust to remain competitive, just like millions of professionals for going back millenia who encounter new technology in their chose and vocation. Ultimately, if it makes us better, and doesn't enslave us to the whims of a monopolistic holder (which the point of my post was to conjecture that it likely wouldn't) then it'll probably (though not defintiely) be better for us long term.

Hopefully it doesn't erode programmers abilities like spell check seems to have eroded people's spelling abilities but I fear that's a likely side effect.

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leotaku 1820 days ago
Fair enough, it seems like we mostly agree on how technology generally affects the world. I can't say I currently possess the domain knowledge to confirm your views on GPT, so I'll just have to hope you are right.
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