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Gameplan492 t1_jczru9p wrote

I've often felt that AI is a bit like virtual reality - it's promised a lot over the decades and is undoubtedly better than previous iterations, but it's still not a substitute for the real thing.

Take the example of code writing. It will help make engineering faster, but you still need to know what to ask for and then what do with it. Until AI can guess what we need and how and where we want it implemented, how can it really replace a human?

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mjrossman OP t1_jczv8o2 wrote

100%, it makes engineering faster, not more real. the critical step outside of that is that AI makes the flow of ideation to execution more feasible if the cost of engineering is prohibitive enough to have made that flow infeasible in the past. this applies to RFCs as well. it's like the difference of having connected rooms in virtual reality because the environment suddenly upgraded to doors and opposable thumbs.

it doesn't take much for a layperson to hallucinate bad code via prompt right now, whereas the barrier for layperson to manifest any code used to be binary in the past. it's going to be even easier to subdivide an LLM prompt into chains of prompts. if one can load the respective codebase/docs as context (GPT-4 goes up to 32k tokens), the cost of hallucinating bad, but very relevant code, gets progressively cheaper.

right now, I expect any OSS community to progressively gain the ability to dogfood on whatever natural language the testers and powerusers are outputting. I think that major platforms, like social media, are quickly going to figure out that they can offer an experimental branch and not twiddle their thumbs around an unanswered user survey because of how easy it will be to transcribe sentiment & nuanced feedback from the comments.

point being, software doesn't impact the world because of how self-involved the team of a monolith is. software impacts the world when the modularity spikes (between many teams/firms and the larger market).

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blueSGL t1_jd1lnsk wrote

What are your thoughts on Microsoft Office 365 Copilot ?

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mjrossman OP t1_jd1mvnv wrote

I think that LibreOffice & Collabora will stack nicely on Open Assistant. for every software that interfaces via natural language with the user, there is probably an opensource LLM and an open repo that acts as its client.

as far as subscription-based productivity software, I will refer back to this classic.

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nova_demosthenes t1_jd1t4pv wrote

It doesn't "replace a human." Just as a few people and a couple pieces of farm equipment replaced dozens or hundreds of workers on a farm, so too will AI coupled with a software architect and a couple seasoned programmers replace entire teams.

I know this because I'm already doing it.

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WalterWoodiaz t1_jd5abnp wrote

Could you elaborate further please?

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nova_demosthenes t1_jd5co5y wrote

Software architects design software or modifications into "chunks" that perform simple operations. Since many of those chunks have established "convention," they are autogenerated.

The newer parts are then built synthetically by AI by scanning countless samples, interpreting them down to sub-components, and stitching together a new piece of software that's a reasonable approximation of what the chunk is described to need to do in human language.

Your software engineers then review and verify the code.

So it's incredibly quick iterations.

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