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Remember how ChatGPT totally aced the bar exam? Wow! yeah, turns out that was just a lie
(www.nytimes.com)
this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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I mean....yea? That's kind of the point. It's not driving, it's the copilot. You're the one driving, and it will get the thermostat right because you're busy operating the vehicle and want to keep your attention on the road. That seems useful to me.
If you already have an idea of the code you want to write and start typing it, Copilot can help auto complete so you can focus on actually solving whatever problem you're working on instead of searching for the correct syntax online. I understand shitting on AI is fun and there's plenty of valid criticisms to be made, but this is actually kind of useful.
how could we possibly be critical of the technology that at best replicates basic editor functionality (templating, syntax completion), outputs wildly incorrect code, and burns rainforests?
I'm not saying you can't be critical of it, but templating and syntax completion is in fact useful. Suggesting incorrect code is obviously bad, but all of this stuff is still relatively new and I'm sure it'll get better with time. Can't we at least try to be a little optimistic about what this stuff is capable of when we give our criticisms, instead of having knee jerk reactions that make this out to be the harbinger of the apocalypse?
Side point to address the linked article: yes, computing systems use energy. If our energy grid is overly reliant on the burning of fossil fuels that release harmful emissions, that doesn't mean we need to stop the advancement of our computers. It means we need to stop using so much fossil fuels in our grid.
What is the exact point of taking this attitude? Anybody who cares to look knows exactly what’s wrong with this stuff. It’s an astonishingly, and I mean “astonishing” as in “actually beyond ordinary human comprehension” as in “literally awe-inspiring”, wasteful means (whether your energy source is fossil fuels or solar!) of doing - at the absolute outside best - extraordinarily basic shit. Every single day the window of useful applications and potential improvements narrows incredibly rapidly, and the people who are fundamentally steering the whole programme are proven liars and scam artists, and proven beyond any shadow of a doubt at that?
Who cares if it’s relatively new, or if there’s room for mild-mannered optimism? What practical teeth does that argument have? What purpose does it actually serve beyond satisfying a basically shallow political impulse to moderate perceivedly heightened emotive responses to these incredibly stark facts?
The only actually reasonable response to this farrago is full-throated opposition to every element of the whole show which is either a lie or covering for a lie, which is virtually every single element. If all that you’re left with is “hey, transformers are pretty cool, and I look forward to seeing how they contribute in their own partial way to our collective technical means of saving the planet, and incidentally anti-trust legislation should put people like Altman behind bars for the rest of their lives” then so be it! That’s a far more even-handed and fundamentally sensible response than blithely insisting that the occasional trinket has room for improvement - in fact if you’re liberal-minded it’s the essential output of any sensible thoughts on how to maintain a democratic society.
this should be a post
Someone else made this analogy somewhere else on this post, but the first cars sucked too. Horses were probably a legitimately better option for quite a while before cars developed enough to become what they are today.
Cool, because that's pretty much what I'm trying to get at here. It's a shame the people running the companies developing these tools are shitheads, but that doesn't change the fact that the underlying technology has potential and personally I look forward to seeing how it develops. There are people all over this thread (rightfully) criticizing climate impacts and shady business practices, but that doesn't mean copilot can't be useful sometimes or that it can't become more useful with time. To me it just seems like people willfully ignore any potential good this tech could bring just because others aren't using it very well right now.