Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by trebor 1185 days ago
I think that GPT4 (and all others) are overhyped, and overblown.

ML/LLM does not fundamentally understand the code. It has to be trained based upon contextual information as to what the code is doing. There are already researchers experimenting with "poisoning" ML models.

For the industry, it just means that a lot of people who _cannot_ code (IE, they haven't the skill, training, or experience to do it) will "start coding" and launch products. Then, when it breaks they'll have to rely upon someone who actually understands why the edge-case bug happened.

ML/LLM are awesome foot-cannons. They have their place, but like a firearm — their 90% use-case will be to cause harm to other individuals (directly, or indirectly).
2 comments
snowe2010 1185 days ago
Also the hard part of being a software engineer has nothing to do with code lol. It's understanding requirements and building a system that works.
link
realusername 1185 days ago
That's also my reaction to all of this, we already have a no-code platform which can do pretty much anything you can imagine and it's called WordPress.
link
jstx1 1185 days ago
> ML/LLM does not fundamentally understand the code.

It doesn't need to understand it, it needs to have correct output often enough. At some point it gets so good at producing code, and so good at explaining code too, that the behaviour is indistinguishable from understanding and that's good enough.

link
rvz 1185 days ago
> It doesn't need to understand it, it needs to have correct output often enough.

Which explains the bullshit output it generates often enough. A software engineer would be able to detect this rather than a normal user trying to code. That is the point of the parent comment. It is the same with lawyers, doctors, investment bankers and bankers.

There is no fundamental 'breakthrough' in GPT-4 other than training it on more data and super computers. It is still a black-box neural network 'AI' not able to understand its output and give a transparent explanation about its choice of words.

OpenAI (Microsoft) has just gotten better at marketing stunts like this. What they say publicly about their own products turns out to be a different reality.

link