this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
103 points (68.5% liked)

Technology

58303 readers
6 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 199 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The difficult part of software development has always been the continuing support. Did the chatbot setup a versioning system, a build system, a backup system, a ticketing system, unit tests, and help docs for users. Did it get a conflicting request from two different customers and intelligently resolve them? Was it given a vague problem description that it then had to get on a call with the customer to figure out and hunt down what the customer actually wanted before devising/implementing a solution?

This is the expensive part of software development. Hiring an outsourced, low-tier programmer for almost nothing has always been possible, the low-tier programmer being slightly cheaper doesn't change the game in any meaningful way.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yeah, I'm already quite content, if I know upfront that our customer's goal does not violate the laws of physics.

Obviously, there's also devs who code more run-of-the-mill stuff, like yet another business webpage, but those are still coded anew (and not just copy-pasted), because customers have different and complex requirements. So, even those are still quite a bit more complex than designing just any Gomoku game.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

I’m already quite content, if I know upfront that our customer’s goal does not violate the laws of physics.

Haha, this is so true and I don't even work in IT. For me there's bonus points if the customer's initial idea is solvable within Euclidean geometry.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 140 points 1 year ago (8 children)

"I gave an LLM a wildly oversimplified version of a complex human task and it did pretty well"

For how long will we be forced to endure different versions of the same article?

The study said 86.66% of the generated software systems were "executed flawlessly."

Like I said yesterday, in a post celebrating how ChatGPT can do medical questions with less than 80% accuracy, that is trash. A company with absolute shit code still has virtually all of it "execute flawlessly." Whether or not code executes it not the bar by which we judge it.

Even if it were to hit 100%, which it does not, there's so much more to making things than this obviously oversimplified simulation of a tech company. Real engineering involves getting people in a room, managing stakeholders, navigating conflicting desires from different stakeholders, getting to know the human beings who need a problem solved, and so on.

LLMs are not capable of this kind of meaningful collaboration, despite all this hype.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

AI regularly hallucinates API endpoints that don't exist, functions that aren't part of that language, libraries that don't exist. There's no fucking way it did any of this bullshit. Like, yeah - it can probably do a mean autocomplete, but this is being pushed so hard because they want to drive wages down even harder. They want know-nothing middle-managers to point to this article and say "I can replace you with AI, get to work!"...that's the only purpose of this crap.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think there is less of a conspiracy, and it's just pushing investment. These AI articles sound exactly like when the internet was new and most people only had a cursory experience with it and people were pumping any company if they just said the word internet.

Now that "Blockchain" has been beaten to death, they need a new hype word to drive mindless investment.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Thank you for writing this so I only have to ~~upvore~~ upvote you.

Edit: What the difference between one key can be

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

I only have to upvore you

holy music stops

[–] nul 18 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I don't know what an upvore is and I don't want to know.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But they could replace CEOs from what I can tell.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (5 replies)
[–] [email protected] 87 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"We asked a Chat Bot to solve a problem that already has a solution and it did ok."

[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago (2 children)

to solve a problem that already has a solution

And whose solution was part of its training set...

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

half the time hallucinating something crazy in the in the mix.

Another funny: Yeah, it's perfect we just need to solve this small problem of it hallucinating.

Ahemm..... solving hallucinating is the "no it actually has to understand what it is doing" part aka the actual intelligence. The actually big and hard problem. The actual understanding of what it is asked to do and what solutions to that ask are sane, rational and workable. Understanding the problem and understanding the answer, excluding wrong answers. Actual analysis, understanding and intelligence.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Not only that, but the same variables that turn on "hallucination" are the ones that make it interesting.

By the very design of generative LLMs, the same knob that makes them unpredictable makes them invent "facts". If they're 100% predictable they're useless because they just regurgitate word for word something that was in the training data. But, as soon as they're not 100% predictable they generate word sequences in a way that humans interpret as lying or hallucinating.

So, you can't have a generative LLM that is both "creative" in that it comes up with a novel set of words, without also having "hallucinations".

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Plot twist - the AI just cut and paste from stack overflow like real devs.

[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It cost less than a dollar to run all those chatbots?

Doubt

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Do managment next and lets see who's gonna be replaced first

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 55 points 1 year ago

A test that doesn’t include a real commercial trial or A/B test with real human customers means nothing. Put their game in the App Store and tell us how it performs. We don’t care that it shat out code that compiled successfully. Did it produce something real and usable or just gibberish that passed 86% of its own internal unit tests, which were also gibberish?

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (17 children)

As someone that uses ChatGPT daily for boilerplate code because it’s super helpful…

I call complete bullshite

The program here will be “hello world” or something like that.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Absolutely I can create a code for your app.

void myApp(void) {
  // add the code for your app here
  return true;
}

You may need to change the code above to fit your needs. Make sure you replace the comment with the proper code for your app to work.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Couldn't even write a void method right, return true!

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"hello world" as a service?

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (15 replies)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The study said 86.66% of the generated software systems were "executed flawlessly."

But...

Nevertheless, the study isn't perfect: Researchers identified limitations, such as errors and biases in the language models, that could cause issues in the creation of software. Still, the researchers said the findings "may potentially help junior programmers or engineers in the real world" down the line.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So… they failed 13.34% of their own unit tests?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That’s a B+! Fire all our engineers immediately.

  • some tech CEO, somewhere
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

And how long did it take to compose the “assignments?” Humans can work with less precise instructions than machines, usually, and improvise or solve problems along the way or at least sense when a problem should be flagged for escalation and review.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

At the designing stage, the CEO asked the CTO to "propose a concrete programming language" that would "satisfy the new user's demand," to which the CTO responded with Python. In turn, the CEO said, "Great!" and explained that the programming language's "simplicity and readability make it a popular choice for beginners and experienced developers alike."

I find it extremely funny that project managers are the ones chatbots have learned to immitate perfectly, they already were doing the robot’s work: saying impressive sounding things that are actually borderline gibberish

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

the CTO responded with Python. In turn, the CEO said, "Great!" and explained that the programming language's "simplicity and readability make it a popular choice for beginners and experienced developers alike."

Yep, that does sound like my CEO.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Researchers, for example, tasked ChatDev to "design a basic Gomoku game," an abstract strategy board game also known as "Five in a Row."

What tech company is making Connect Four as their business model?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What a load of bullshit. If you have a group of researchers provide "minimal human input" to a bunch of LLMs to produce a laughable program like tic-tac-toe, then please just STFU or at least don't tell us it cost $1. This doesn't even have the efficiency of a Google search. This AI hype needs to die quick

load more comments
view more: next ›