I'm not sure exactly. Maybe its just easier to work with matrix data. That's all an image is anyhow. The imaging is just to convert the text to some matrix that's tied to the text structure.
Getting to the point where these headlines depress me. I just wish they would stop getting better. I don't know where my career is gonna be in a few years.
I don't get this sentiment. Think of the future innovations possible with faster research and computation - space exploration, DNA-based health improvements, robotic helpers - read a few sci-fi books to imagine what the future can be! Computer science doesn't have to end with everybody getting laid off due to no more CRUD apps needed.
It doesn't have to, sure, maybe, but what indication do you see that the owners of these companies have any future in mind other than one in which they are in control of the majority of the wealth and power? These are private companies, not publicly owned infrastructure.
If you, like me, don't like the idea of your standard of living dropping to that of even just the mean human being on earth, I find it extremely painful to watch people justifying their way around not trying absolutely anything to raise everyone to at least our current level. Increasing productivity is demonstrably such a way, while many other experiments are so far just that: Experiments + wishful thinking.
If that merely means realigning/cutting current jobs (a process, that is ongoing from the start of human civilization itself, which brought us prosperity and why the fuck would it stop now) to me it's a moral obligation to deal with that at some other level.
There is tons to do here, certainly including how we will do redistribution better, and quickly, etc. Let's get to it.
And do what exactly? Subscribe for corporate AI brain implants? How does that solve inequality?
Also, thinking that you can bring low standards of living up to be on par with high in the current political landscape is a bit like that early Soviet space era promise about blooming apple trees on Mars.
It is guaranteed that they can only become equal by lowering the high.
Even if you don't agree with the sentiment it's not hard to understand. The pace of AI improvement has strictly accelerated, and strict acceleration is likely going to be the way things go from here. To many, this means mourning a steadier future that is no longer likely to happen.
if anything we've slowed down. i have no clue what the acceleration folks are talking about. we've been getting diminishing returns on models; the growth has been in usage and tools.
yeah, while gpt-6 is impressive, is it really as impressive as people thought it would be back in the times of gpt 3.5 or 4? let alone "omg ai acceleration agi" levels of impressive?
These things still can't solve problems in the right way. The benchmarks prove that they can solve problems. But in practice they will make your codebase look like the output of some compilation process
There's hardly any work you can think of which can't be done faster / beter with ai assistance, when your role is of reviewing and directing. If you have an anti-example, would like to hear.
I really wish that LLMs could generate good quality code without repeated instructing.
Here's where I think the issue is; they are trained to solve a problem. Not how, just whether or not they did.
Example: I asked Luna to use parser combinators to parse an Excel sheet that was represented as sparse triples (row, column, data). It imported the library and wrote spaghetti if-statement soup to get it to work. I asked Astra to fix it and it just refined the spaghetti slightly. I was able to browbeat Astra into actually using the library to complete the task. Was it faster than me doing it by hand? Probably. Was it more frustrating? Way more.
And every time I review vibe code it's always the same. Bespoke functions everywhere, no greater themes or ideas. No bigger picture. Your code can't support much if it has no central themes. You can probably one-shot a three js game to post on r/singularity for updoots. Not real code though.
I feel like the optimal way to use an LLM is to code until you feel like the rest of a problem is trivial and then you hand it off. And sometimes they still erase my code and add their own style lol
> There's hardly any work you can think of which can't be done faster / beter with ai assistance
True, and someone needs to be the creative brain behind the decisions. AI can help you implement. When I say help, I mean literally help because one-shotting and vague prompts can get you only so far, usually with a lackluster result. While AI is good at analyzing solutions, and finding out holes in one's thinking, ultimately, it is some creative actor that needs to understand the bigger picture to evaluate trade-offs, understand scope creeps, and spot overengineered implementations. For now that actor is a human.
> If you have an anti-example, would like to hear.
In my personal experience, especially with greenfield projects, smarter models tend to overengineer the solutions. However, I haven't used Fable and Astra models, maybe they are better at creative tasks without overengineering.
If your job is/you enjoy writing the code and solving technical challenges then yes this changes very heavily and AI will do this more efficiently than a human.
But if your job is designing systems and implementing solutions and coming up with good code along the way then I don't see AI getting anywhere close to making you obsolete in the foreseeable future.
I personally don't enjoy writing C++ but I really enjoy solving problems.
the trouble is if i have to review/direct the model, suddenly we go from a 10x increase in speed to a 1-3x increase in speed. sure it will be faster, but im still limited by my reviewing/directing speed, which is slower than usual because I didn't write the code
+-3 generations of British people lived in roughly the same and in many cases worse conditions (life expectancy dropped during the early industrial revolution, severely in cities). As an average person you would not have been wrong to be against it. It was only in the 1860s-1880s that conditions got better because of bargaining power of the labour class and goodwill of some rich people, two things unlikely to repeat if something like AGI really happens.
Most people who were afraid of industrialization at that point were correct to be afraid of it. It destroyed livelihoods, threw people into slave-like conditions, enabled the most immense violence ever seen, etc. etc.
Expectations are a funny thing, a year ago I thought all software industry will cut at least 30% in a year. It's very far from happening. A big change is obviously coming but now I think I'm good enough to last at least the next 5 years, which suddenly feels like a long time if you see it coming.
The truth is despite these very impressive improvements, most impressive work done by agents require many iterations running in a loop, with tens of thousands of dollars in API pricing. And it's still far from being always reliable. Somewhere along the way hardware will get better, energy will be cheaper, the market will be flooded by chips. There a physical world issues that limit all of these for now, thank god. I think 5 years is a good number.
The real damage is that enterprise work became unbearable. Slop code with slop code review, and overly verbose emails with repetitive presentations. And on the other hand, I now enjoy "coding" for myself like I'm 16 again. All I want to do is sit at home and build apps for myself and family. I barely go to work
The history of the self driving car is apt to repeat as well. I remember thinking "2015, 2018 maybe at the latest." But as 2015 (and 2018) came and went, expectations were tempered.
We will see shortened development cycles, and maybe even orders of magnitude shorter development cycles.
But hard problems remain hard (there are only so many chips, materials research and biology are difficult problems). Manufacturing remains a choke point.
I'm more concerned that the absolute worst persons on the planet are in charge of many of these technologies. If those that are in charge are more concerned about allocating resources and power in their favor, the more dismal the future of all humanity will be (including for those in charge, but they can't see that due to self-interest bias)
I think the change might be orders of magnitude more software being written rather than an order of magnitude fewer developers. There is a HUGE induced demand coming when software is so cheap to write.
I've never been a professional, but I've been coding for nearly 30 years as an amateur, and I've "written" more code in the last year than the previous 29, and it was all tooling for my very non-tech small business. It's cut HOURS out of my week, and it's all software I could not have afforded to pay developers for. But with Lovable, just describe it and iterate.
What IS going to die is software as a service. I've cancelled hundreds of dollars a month of subs and rolled my own better tooling.
throughout all of human history we've responded to technological progress not by stagnating but by raising the bar. i dont see why it would be any different today. technology + human will always beat technology alone.
Throughout all of human history, humans were the substrate of value creation. When humans can be removed from the manual labor part of a problem, they are.
Now we're clearly entering a world where humans can be removed from the intelligent-problem-solving part of the problem.
I think large database-related projects. Ai context will never be billions of tokens. And prostitution on the side. With both, we will make a good living.
I believe it's a Gemini derived model that they are running on isolated hardware. So it's not the same servers as Gemini and thus will have potentially different performance.
Apple themselves says it's a combination of on device and hosted Gemini models. But it seems Apple is hosting Gemini models themselves with far better privacy than the regular Gemini product.
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