it’s getting to the point where I notice people say it a lot, especially IRL now for whatever reason recently.
And for clarity I’m not in research or anything, so these people just mean ‘LLM/image gen’, not utilities like OCR or (usually not) transcription.
Some have argued it’s just more efficient (which I can kind of get), while others think you’re actively hindering your intelligence somehow.
On the first point:
I’ve tried it occasionally to see how it compares to my own skill, and while it produces a functional result, it’s always very derivative work to the point where you can find things with the exact same names of other ‘public’ (but not libre) works, and often isn’t the ideal solution to what it targets. So I can see how you can get things out of it, but it never felt really that profound to me.
But for the second… isn’t this supposed to be the tool for people to do things they aren’t experienced in? If anything, you probably need to be able to understand how to write pertaining to the task so the token probabilities are biased toward writing from that area.
And even then, if all you end up doing is prompting AI, then wouldn’t you ultimately serve no purpose outside of being glorified QA?
I guess I’m trying to figure out what exactly non-users would be ‘falling behind’ in that affects them more than those who use AI?
My concern is that the current models have been trained on current technology by stealing knowledge from the existing pool of senior and junior engineers as well as a whole load of hobbyists.
If everyone moves up to senior now using LLMs, that’s all well and good now, but then there’ll be no juniors to steal the grunt work from to train AI and no-one to move up to senior in a decade or two.
Do you really think that the hobbyists are going to be enough to steal from to perpetuate the system in the near future?
It also means that when some new technology comes out there won’t be a wealth of knowledge for the AI to consume and regurgitate, so the use of new technologies will be hindered if everyone relies on AI trained on current technology.
I had something about stagnation in the comment at one point, but I guess my attempt to make it implicit didn’t quite survive the edit.
I read yours to be about stalling with current tech, which is certainly the case. I was trying to make it explicit that the stagnation is an issue for both current and new technologies that doesn’t have anything for AI to be trained on.
Reworded to make that clearer.
That’s my concern too. We’re already seeing middle school and high school kids out sourcing all their thinking to AI. Once this generation of devs is gone, who’s going to replace them? I’m sure there will be SOME people who find a fascination with learning and knowing and trying code on their own. But that won’t be enough people.
You act like it is their code …
The majority of coders “steal” code from other coders on Stack Overflow. This has been happening since coding was invented.
The thing is that it’s apparently expected that everyone use AI.
With StackOverflow it was less than the full complement of developers who went there for help, so there was always someone to provide answers.
AI will kill StackOverflow and places like it. AI will create a dearth of new developers, and those that still choose the profession will be AI rotted and unable to move up or advance. They won’t post anywhere on the Internet, and even if they do, what they know was derived from StackOverflow before it stopped being updated. That’s not even a complete cover of tech now, let alone several years down the line when tech has moved on.
This whole thing is cashing in an investment and in 20 years we’re going to be confused about why that investment is no longer accruing interest.
We’ve already seen models degrading from being trained on LLM-generated data. The big companies were overly eager to follow the EU directive to watermark output. I think that’s solely so that they can filter it out when scraping for future training data. They’re running out of good training data to steal. I don’t imagine they’ll be paying a fair wage to anyone generating novel good data.
Entry jobs disappearing is uncharted territory. My latest hire had three years work experience in a very niche field. I’d have a hard time justifying anyone more jr than that for a startup burning investor capital.