rafterydj

> They didn't copy the texts per-se, they studied the relationships between words to build a statistical/predictive model of natural language.

I understand exactly what you mean by this, and you are wrong. If they did not copy them, it would not be possible to extricate copyrighted works out of the model like Harry Potter. You can argue against the copyright system, but don't pretend that what they've done is essentially an advanced form of copying. The data is in the weights.

I agree with the OP; this technology does not seem an appropriate fit for survival equipment. By definition survival scenarios can be life and death. Even one "You're absolutely right!" level mistake from an LLM could give a user bad information, leading to John Doe eating a mushroom he really should not have eaten.

Yeah I'm just gonna say you're dead wrong and leave it at that.

A landfill with a hard drive full of Bitcoin is still a landfill.

Sorry to hear that. So disappointed in the AI companies for making no serious efforts towards transparency for the citation of works and prior art.

Not antagonizing but curious: how else would you do it?

Just wanted to chime in and say that is a very good talk, and I recommend people give it the time.

I'm part of the skeptic camp, and I'd argue that we are never going to have LLMs solving all problems. Therefore, we need humans to know and understand how to solve problems. Unfortunately, when "the genie is out of the bottle" and most (but not all!) problems are solved, it becomes very very hard to argue for doing things the hard way.

Furthermore, it becomes practically impossible to argue for doing things the hard way for all of the solved problems, which were and are necessary for being able to learn the craft deeply. At the very least, deeply "enough" to advance the state of the art.

In short: 1) Humans are necessary. 2) Knowledge and experience are necessary. 3) Humans need time and practice to gain knowledge and experience.

When one side argues that one or all of the above points are false, I don't believe them.

Realistically, we are seeing people even in the most pro-AI groups begrudgingly concede #1 and #2, while expecting #3 to just sort itself out.

How many programmers have made anything culturally significant??

You are on an online forum geared towards programmers, using the world wide web created by a programmer. The concept of a video game did not exist before they were being programmed.

You think the world just appeared as it is and everyone only does things for money? Never because, unlike people who use every shortcut possible, they actually care about the details?

You have my sympathy. I can't offer you any advice, but I was just thinking earlier about how awful I feel for younger people working in this industry, and that didn't even include being Ukrainian.

I don't know, this does not feel like the message hit OpenAI where it needed to hit, if this is their primary response.

I upvoted you because I think your point is well said, but I do disagree. Primarily because the fundamental shift you mention is not just the coding layer, nor the architecture, nor even the "human vision" component - it is and will continue to be a funnel for slop.

Skilled programmers may continue to be able to work with it, but only while their understanding of what the software is holds out. In my opinion there is no learning to be had with these tools beyond familiarizing someone with the beginner stages of what programming arts can produce. Things like version control, explanation of fundamental data structures, easily understood scripts, etc.

But when the "sloppification" creeps in on large projects (which happened before AI but is much faster these days), the opacity of the codebase increases an order of magnitude faster than it's transparency. Thus far LLMs are not immune to confusion or mistakes, and so it stands to reason, it will not be possible to build ever new complex software with this technology.

Because of that, it's trivial to see that the skills involved are still required, but with much less incentive to learn them. Not only is it far, far easier to take shortcuts with Claude than it is a Commodore 64, it also rewards shortcuts with faster results at the expense of true understanding. This means that the next generation using these tools won't be filtered out by determination and troubleshooting to the same degree as the last. The Commodore 64 produced a generation of programmers; Claude Code will produce a generation of administrative software users.

While I'm being critical, I do want to state that administrative software users are absolutely needed in society. It's just not the same thing as what you and I call programming, the main difference being the expectation of creating or at least the capacity to create something new. That is, not another clone of an existing project, or a new integration of an existing plugin architecture. I'm not saying we won't progress as a society, but it's my belief that LLMs won't "democratize" software - they will drown it.

That's one of the reasons my new side project is using C99. No idea if it will work, but I'm hoping that once I get comfortable working with it I won't need to get help from Google/forums/LLMs as much, and I can have an actual good day again.