[enneff]

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.

[Felmioytfr]

I can do things as one software engineer what 10 years ago a whole team needed.

If chatgpt can do things you would have given an junior or assistant and it's now faster to just do it yourself it will have an impact and it might raise the bar.

I would neither under or overestimate what it can replace in a few years.

And surprisingly a lot of time and energy is used to teach people old things just because they also need to learn.

It just might be e easier to teach it once to chatgpt or whatever is next, than people.

[Existenceblinks]

What we have been developing are a lot of solid building blocks. Protocol, infra, frameworks. Not just some kind of heuristic engine.

[Felmioytfr]

I haven't.

Most of us haven't.

We are reusing combining etc.

[enneff]

ChatGPT can’t do the things I coach my junior teammates to do, though.

[Felmioytfr]

Depends on what (I didn't say it will replace everything tomorrow) and let's see in a few years.

And at least in my team it definitely feels like I teach every new hire/intern/young person the same old things.

I could also just starting to teach an ai those things.

And this multiplies. If everyone of us is only teaching the same ai everything once, than this is much more effective.

[qup]

We haven't really tried coaching it yet.

I don't think it has enough context to be a real coder yet, but it has some ability.

Having the token limit unlocked in the future might change a lot.

[Gigachad]

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.

[rohith2506]

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]

“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.

[rakkhi]

Not Bengaluru but would you take Shanghai for $500? https://youtu.be/PVMCjvsP6O8

[interstice]

Based on the standard of driving in most places I don’t think many drivers can safely navigate that kind of thing either.

[demetrius]

> Self driving cars work right now. The problem is the cost of failure.

Self-driving cars only work on some roads specifically adapted for self-driving cars, and even then they require a team of specialists constantly monitoring them (so it's not very self-driving, the driver just moved to another place).

If they require a specially designed roads, they don't replace cars, they replace trams. And trams are much more efficient, so they don't really replace even them.

You can't put a self-driving car on a random road and expect it to work.

[seanmcdirmid]

> Self-driving cars only work on some roads specifically adapted for self-driving cars

I don’t think that is actually a thing. The places self driving cars are being used right now do not have roads that were especially adapted to support self driving cars.

[newaccount74]

Not a single routing app that I've tried consistently manages to get you to the correct side of the building when you request a route to a location.

If the problem of figuring out where to drive isn't even solved yet, how can you claim that "self driving cars work right now". They don't, not for any useful definition of the term.

[UncleEntity]

That’s not really a problem with the ‘self driving’ but a lack of data.

Unless they send a human out to every building and mark out which door is the correct one the algorithm is just guessing. I use a “professional” GPS for my job and I don’t trust it at all to get me to the correct entrance, I have to study satellite images and type in the coordinates manually and even then it’ll decide to reroute to the wrong place on occasion because it doesn’t know there’s a gate in the way of its optimal path.

Bit of a hassle, really. If you ever see a big truck stuck on some random road with nowhere to turn around it’s probably the GPS’s fault. One of the first things new drivers need to learn is the GPS will actively try to kill you and can’t be trusted.

[enneff]

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.

[ben_w]

I certainly hope so self-driving cars are the accurate reference class for this, for several reasons.

Among them: I don't think I've ever demonstrated more creativity than chatGPT, only equalled it; and while it sure does make mistakes, when I look back at my old code (or even blog posts) I realise I sure did a lot of that too. I'm pretty surprised it's even as capable as it is, given my understanding of how it works and what it's "goals" are (the task "predicting tokens" doesn't seem like it should be able to do this much).

My fear is that the reference class for this is Go, where someone writing an AI for the game thought it was a decade away from beating humans less than two year before AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol: https://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-world-of-computer-go/

[wendyshu]

I would say they show at least "signs" of creativity and understanding.

[mdp2021]

Entrails of birds (used in old civilizations) could show «"signs"» of future events, but that can happen to be restricted to the perception of the reader.

[ben_w]

If it looks creative but is secretly formulaic, how is that going to avoid causing problems for the employment prospects in "creative" jobs?

It doesn't matter if the thing a submarine does is "swimming", after all.

[mdp2021]

> matter if the thing a submarine does is "swimming"

We are supposed to want the submarine to swim well.

[ben_w]

It's a reference to a famous quotation: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/32629-the-question-of-wheth...

[mdp2021]

Yes, of course it is Dijkstra. The image is part of the speech "The threats to computing science" in 1984 - https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/E...

In context: Dijkstra noted that IT discipline had strong regional tints, enabled by some "«malleability»" (over which the particularizing forces are applied). This "malleability" follows very fuzzy definitions of purpose, which he exemplified through a von Neumann that resembled medieval scholastic philosophers and an Alan Turing that proposed (to the judgement of Dijkstra) "irrelevant" perspectives in the same direction, such as "whether submarines swim" (for "whether computers think").

Now: the context instead of this branch of discussion is about those "signs" noted by OP, which I note are overwhelmed by evidence that those signs are doubtful. The point is not in the vague metaphors that Dijkstra found confusing, but in the opposite flat matter that "whether it swims or it "submarines" [as a verb], it has to do it properly". Which is not in Dijkstra, because he was speaking of something else.

[srackey]

Further out than we imagined? There are several cities with operating robotaxies right now. You can buy a Tesla that can drive itself (with supervision) right now.

We’re certainly behind where we expected to be, but the future is indeed here!

[lolinder]

Those robotaxi services are severely limited in scope, unprofitable, and still manage to screw things up so badly that even SF is getting sick of them:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/29/23576422/san-francisco-cr...

[flangola7]

Do they screw up per-mile worse than a human driver?

[lolinder]

From the article:

> Months later, a Cruise AV “ran over a fire hose that was in use at an active fire scene,” and another Cruise vehicle almost did the same at an active firefighting scene earlier this month. Firefighters say they could only stop the vehicle from running over the hose after “they shattered a front window” of the car.

I don't know about per-mile, but that's worse than a human for sure.

[flangola7]

That's not worse than humans have done. Especially an elderly or drunk human.