The world moves slower than you think: a case for ChatGPT skepticism

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/12cr1gb/the_real_world_moves_slower_than_you_think_a_case/

by behnamoh • 3 years ago

59 83 3 years ago

old.reddit.com

king_magic4• 3 years ago

Parts of the world might move slower, but I've already not hired folks because the job can be done easier with ChatGPT. I'm certain I'm not alone, nor am I certain this is a good thing when broadly applied across every single industry. Both for quality reasons as well as societal.

No force besides ChatGPT has existed up until now (other than economic downturns) that has been this disruptive to software engineering in my nearly 20 year career.

What happens when this new reality truly hits the non-US consulting/dev shop world in India, Latin America, etc.?

No, I think the impact will be like an electric shock to the system once a critical mass of roles are gone, and I think it's going to happen much sooner than people realize. The world will feel like the rug was pulled out from under them, and it's going to happen soon.

WestCoastJustin• 3 years ago

When I see peoples comments about how this is nothing new or not that useful. I just think to myself, they don't get it. My googling and stackoverflow usage for solving problems has pretty much dropped to zero. I am easily 2x more productive now and have a long tech career too 20+ years worked at lots of startups and google. This is 100% game changing for anything/anyone that is reading/writing text. There was a GS report [1] that suggests this could impact 300 millions jobs and on page 7 lists out the sectors impacted.

"The future is already here -- it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson

[1] https://www.key4biz.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Global-Eco...

danielmarkbruce6• 3 years ago

I sold my google stock after a few weeks of using chatgpt....

kdkfods• 3 years ago

You're right, I don't get it. I eagerly signed up for the Bing waitlist and it was a fun novelty for a few hours, having it write limericks, but when it comes to work the best it can do is paraphrase documentation and insert errors. It doesn't and cannot understand the proprietary and complex problem domain I deal with at work, and while it might be able to generate REST boilerplate for me to fill in.. the filling in is the hard part. Emacs already makes boilerplate generation extremely simple.. simpler than explaining the problem to a bot in English and then checking its work, for sure.

It's pretty good at finding examples in documentation and explaining them, I guess, which is helpful for trivial things but my work isn't trivial anymore.

Heck, maybe I'm just lost on this because I haven't used SO very much in recent years.. I'm mostly looking at documentation directly, or very often reading internal code that has no documentation

How is ChatGPT supposed to help me, especially if I don't send it any sensitive information?

So yeah, I guess I don't get it

js8• 3 years ago

If we are being 2x more productive with writing text, who's gonna all read it?

Somehow, I fail to see the productivity increase. Now if ChatGPT allowed us to get by with only half amount of text that people have to read, that would be a game changer!

digging2• 3 years ago

FWIW, I don't disagree with your assertions.

However, I would love to know more details about "My googling and stackoverflow usage for solving problems has pretty much dropped to zero."

I have found ChatGPT too unreliable to make a significant impact. I am worried I am bad at prompt engineering, but my excuses so far are:

- It doesn't know my codebase and can't answer questions about business logic or context

- It is slower for me to correct its mistakes when generating code I already know how to write, than to write it myself

- It is often wrong in subtle ways when explaining code, concepts, or anything. Therefore it's unreliable when explaining "why is X happening in my code". At best it's a value add, not a value multiplier, when debugging.

fomine3• 3 years ago

Maybe some people just use free ChatGPT-3.5 and think that not so much useful for now (though it's interesting and will become better). I thought that before using GPT-4. Difference between 3.5 and 4 is big.

piloto_ciego• 3 years ago

How can you justify that? The technology has been out like 5 months.

What kind of job did you replace because I’m highly skeptical, and concerned you may have just burned yourself.

king_magic4• 3 years ago

We're not replacing people, to be clear - we are just finding ourselves able to do more with less now. A lot of organizations are going to come to the exact same realization.

danielmarkbruce6• 3 years ago

He/she justifies it because they use it. Many people who use the tool are finding that it saves enormous amounts of time. Several times I've had ChatGPT do something in 30 seconds which would take me a half day to figure.

hackinthebochs3• 3 years ago

Agreed. What I don't get is why we're all just blindly barreling forward and allowing Trillion dollar companies to engage in an arms race to see how fast they can absorb productive work. This is humanity's new agriculture moment; those that are positioned to become the new ruling class are resisting any ideas of slowing down.

Our culture takes it as axiomatic that more efficiency is good. But its not clear to me that it is. The principle goal of society should be the betterment of the lives of people. Yes, efficiency has historically been a driver of widespread prosperity, but it's not obvious that there isn't a local maximum past which increased efficiency harms the average person. Historically, efficiency was driven by innovation that brought a decrease in the costs of transactions. This saw an explosion of the space of viable economic activity and with it an explosion of prosperity. Productivity and wages remained coupled up until recent decades. Modern automation has seen productivity and wages begin to decouple. Decoupling will only accelerate due to AI. We may already be on the other side of the critical point.

pascalxus3• 3 years ago

the problem is not efficiency itself, necessarily. The problem is, what are the side effects, what are the negative impacts?

In theory, efficiency in a competitive landscape should bring down production costs which then brings down consumer costs and thus raise material living standards. The problem is, all this efficiency is in bits not atoms. Digital goods are becoming cheaper every year but real products (housing, transportation, utilities, etc) show no improvement over the last 2 to 3 decades), in fact is even getting slightly worse.

tectec• 3 years ago

Can you share what kind of role you didn't have to hire for?

rimliu• 3 years ago

   > What happens when this new reality truly hits the non-US consulting/dev
   > shop world in India, Latin America, etc.?

Absolutely nothing. Or maybe even less interest in getting something done there, because fixing things will be to costly.

aldarisbm• 3 years ago

for much fewer programmers in the world? I think the world is gonna find out that if you can have ten times as much code at the same price, you can just use even more. - Sam Altman

Arubis• 3 years ago

The world moves slower than you think...in the short term. But change compounds.

https://fs.blog/gates-law/

noahmbarr• 3 years ago

Amara's Law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”

alwaysbeconsing• 3 years ago

I'd say this isn't limited to technology but is a general cognitive bias of us humans. By instinct we're very short term thinkers, although with practice and effort we can look further.

digging2• 3 years ago

My gut reaction to that commentary is that it's a misinterpretation of the time scales people are estimating.

If I say, "LLMs will soon reinvent what it means to do knowledge work," and that doesn't happen within 5 years, does it mean I overestimated the short term impact? Or does it mean that "soon" was relative?

Ultimately though, the long-term effects are impossible to estimate well. The effects of new technologies build upon each other. The first person to take a shovel to a walking path and maintain it as a flat surface certainly couldn't have imagined their ancestors would be crushed to death by two-ton SUVs on a paved road that replaced the walking path.

soperj3• 3 years ago

Despite his last 2 decades of image management it's clear Gates is not someone we want to be naming things after, especially when it's likely he's paraphrasing someone else in the first place.

leesec2• 3 years ago

It's not clear just because you say that. Gates is a visionary and a masterful executor and one of the greatest humanitarians.

philsquared_• 3 years ago

Yesterday my phone provider informed me they are offering an AI virtual assistant to answer calls. Is this slow?

fergie2• 3 years ago

Is it any good though?

Ygg2• 3 years ago

Inb4 AI voice secretary fucks up and accuses you of being an AI.

SketchySeaBeast• 3 years ago

Was your phone provider offering NFT's last year?

hammyhavoc2• 3 years ago

There's been AI-based call screening on Android for a while now. Gives me speech-to-text in real-time so I don't even need to hear what they've got to say, and can reply with canned answers. This isn't fast either.

qualudeheart• 3 years ago

One can hope.

fergie2• 3 years ago

Metatrend: Reddit is again producing some fairly high-quality commentary and analysis.

qsort• 3 years ago

Always been the case. The problem isn't the existence of signal. Even 4chan has signal. The problem is the noise-to-signal ratio.

danielmarkbruce6• 3 years ago

I don't think anyone who actually uses chatgpt thinks it will replace the need for a human. The benefit is one human can do the work of two. It's a different thing.

JohnFen5• 3 years ago

The benefit is one human can do the work of two.

Which means that one person is no longer needed, where they were before. How is that not replacement?

danielmarkbruce6• 3 years ago

I'm agreeing with you - but the post in question suggests ChatGPT won't do so much because judgement is still required. Implicit to that is the idea that it's replacing the need for a human entirely.

gspencley• 3 years ago

Fundamentally, generative AIs are… generative. They make content. But the value add of most jobs is not the content itself; it’s the judgment. It’s knowing the right questions to ask, the right people to talk to, the right sources to trust, etc. Until an AI can take meaningful initiative, it will be at most a tool in the hands of a more competent human worker.

This is the ONLY part about "AI" that worries me at all.

AI is a computational tool. Like all such tools, the value is automating what was previously receptive, mindless tasks. Some people will use GPT to craft emails or document outlines for them and then will "massage" the output for correctness. That's a great application.

But the second that people start asking AI to make VALUE JUDGMENTS for them then we have a problem.

Even pre-GPT, we saw news articles about certain government agencies and businesses using AI to make policy or hiring decisions easier. Conversations have arisen about introduced biases into the models etc.

Where I work we are exploring using GPT to produce summaries of documents and messages. I can see how this will introduce conflict when the CEO insists that something was communicated but the LLM didn't consider that critical piece of information to be "relevant" or "important." Deciding relevance or importance is making a value judgement.

rqtwteye• 3 years ago

“Where I work we are exploring using GPT to produce summaries of documents and messages”

I have done that too. I am also a bad writer and I have used ChatGPT to convert my bullet point thoughts into full sentences. It’s fantastic for that. Most people who write corporate stuff produce exactly the same output ChatGPT produces. I bet they follow the same rules.

Same for refactoring of python code. It produced basically the same code I would have produced after a day of work.

FormerBandmate• 3 years ago

I use Bing to write code for me all the time when I've figured out what I basically want but run into syntax issues. I also read over that code and see if it makes sense, and when it doesn't I fix or discard it.

It's hyper intelligent autocorrect. It's phenomenally smart when it works, but it frequently gets things wrong and you have to be there to correct it when it does. Cruise control/Autopilot is phenomenal too but you don't sit in the backseat when it's on

A4ET8a8uTh0• 3 years ago

<< But the second that people start asking AI to make VALUE JUDGMENTS for them then we have a problem.

But this is exactly where this is going. While public facing, locked variants ( that are not unlocked by various prompt 'hacks' ) give one a clear idea of what could be done with it if it had access to current data and was applied in areas such as law enforcement, war, predictions.. and so on.

It is a powerful tool, but so much of it depends on us, which is precisely why it has potential to be so destructive.

nathias• 3 years ago

that isn't a spearate thing, people have been asking inanimate objects to do value judgments since the dawn of time

trinsic2• 3 years ago

But the second that people start asking AI to make VALUE JUDGMENTS for them then we have a problem.

I laughed out loud when you said this not because I find it funny, but that I can see the conclusions people will make. This is similar to Tesla owners comparing the assisted driving features to self-driving technology. Those features have no comparison to self-driving, technology is not even close to being there yet, and it probably wont be for another 50 years. You can only understand that by having some history around what computers are capable of and most people don't have that kind of knowledge.

So when I here about people wanting to use the technology to make value judgments, I also become concerned, not necessarily because people are stupid to even think language models are even remotely able to do this, but people that aim to create power differentials between themselves and people will use this ignorance to strengthen autocratic systems by supporting the hype around it while at the same time encouraging and actively supporting its misuse by developing adversarial models to keep people stuck in needing something outside themselves to give life meaning.

eestrada• 3 years ago

This reminds me of the Is-Ought problem defined by Hume. "Ought" has to do with value judgement, and that is squarely in the realm of human morality. Only humans know what humans value; generative AI can't replace that and it would be an enormous mistake to try to do so.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

ttul• 3 years ago

There is plenty of low hanging fruit to harvest with these language models in the next year, let alone ten years. And the models are improving rapidly.

GPT is a sequence to sequence model. Many jobs are effectively also sequence to sequence models. Customer support, low end software development, and accounting all fit this pattern and are good candidates for GPT automation.

Jobs that require highly specialized reasoning may fall to S2S models eventually, but the models would need to be trained in that speciality area. For instance, if exposed to all the sequences involved in the career lives of thousands of actual lawyers, I’m sure you could train up a Lawyer-GPT that would do quite well. But how do you get access to those sequences? They are by definition kept under lock and key.

Similarly, you could train GPT to be a specialist doctor assuming you could somehow capture the working life of thousands of such specialists into a form that the machine could train on. But we don’t have that data yet, so these specialist areas will remain elusive for the time being.

_y5hn• 3 years ago

Bing and o365.

chrsjxn• 3 years ago

Lawyer or Doctor AI feels like it's going to need some fundamental shift in the way these AI tools are built and used, though.

AI companies take zero responsibility for the output of their models, which is not a quality you'd want for this kind of work. That's one of the points of this reddit post.

And that's not even considering how expensive it could be to build a system that preserves attorney-client privilege or patient privacy.

legitster• 3 years ago

There is one career that I would be most worried about: internet writers.

If you do a Google search on any given topic, about 3% of what you read might be original reporting or research. The other 97% are just writers who just spend all day on Twitter and regurgitate facts. Or they just regurgitate Wikipedia, Reuters, or ScienceDirect with a tiny spin for SEO.

You know, the stuff ChatGPT is already insanely good at.

The industry has managed to support a huge number of this work for a while, and I think this could be the big reckoning.

We should also take anything we read about ChatGPT with a grain of salt knowing that the people most threatened by a technology are the people tasked with reporting on it.

adversaryIdiot• 3 years ago

is it bad to say good riddance? They ruined google with their blatant copy and pasting of information. Finding any decent, unique information has basically become impossible.

hammyhavoc2• 3 years ago

Source for the 3% stat?

xwdv• 3 years ago

Let’s see you fly in a plane with software completely developed by GPT-like AI.

p1esk5• 3 years ago

Today - no. But in a few years I will probably trust GPT generated code more than I trust my own code.

tjr6• 3 years ago

With avionics code, it's not so much about trusting a programmer (be they human or artificial), but about thorough verification and sign-off with multiple parties involved.

(As an aerospace software person, I frequently like to try to persuade folks that this is actually "engineering" software!)

I do not believe that current AI technology could write avionics software by itself, mainly because it's a very niche, very not-public field. I'm not sure what all would be involved with adequately training it, but I don't foresee this happening soon. (I could be wrong.)

However, regardless of if, or when, AI tools are adequately trained to write avionics software, writing the code is only one piece of the puzzle. The work today includes writing requirements for the the code will do (which work is reviewed and signed off on), writing code based on the requirements (which work is reviewed and signed off on), writing verification tests based on the requirements (which work is reviewed and signed off on), running the tests (which test runs and test environment is reviewed and signed off on), preparing a document paper trail which shows everything has been done per FAA regulations, etc., etc.

The first step to getting AI in the door here -- to do anything by itself -- would be to certify an AI tool for avionics software development. I suspect this by itself might be a non-starter, as the resulting outputs of neural-network-based AI tools are not sufficiently repeatable. But even if we were to imagine somehow certifying an AI tool to replace a human in the software development process, it seems not plausible that that same AI tool would replace humans in all parts of the software development process. I.e., if ChatGPT writes the code, ChatGPT can't also review the code and sign off on the code. Perhaps some other AI product could, but how different would it have to be? Is that a realistic plan, to have two completely different AI products? I don't have an answer for that, and I suspect it's a question the FAA will be trying to answer soon.

The biggest challenge, I think, is lack of repeatability. If, given the same inputs, the AI tool always produced the same outputs, it would be much easier.

Now, none of this precludes using AI tools to assist in any of these processes. It's completely removing a human from being involved which sets off the big alarms for FAA process.

gumballindie• 3 years ago

First we need to address the ip theft that openai has employed in training its data sets. Then ai can grow as it sees fit.

The world moves slower than you think: a case for ChatGPT skepticism

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