I mean, I was going for a brief example of the concept, not something I would expect to be actually full spec. As with any kind of software interaction, it does what you tell it to do not what you want it to do. So being explicit and identifying all the required features and corner cases is still going to be important. But I don’t see why that’s any different from now other than when you ask an experienced developer to make a chat app, they will ask for the additional parameters based on prior experience. No reason to assume the hypothetical AI dev won’t get to that level at some point.
stevensonmt
dimitarvp
Apart from, you know, the human actually understanding what you are talking about, and the large language model just inferring statistically when you might mean, based on previous training data, while having zero actual understanding?
2
stevensonmt
Context matters here. The statement you quoted was preceded by
being explicit and identifying all the required features and corner cases is still going to be important.
Whether the receiver of the information uses “actual understanding” or statistically informed inference doesn’t matter. In both cases the sender needs to provide all the relevant information.
To your point that understanding by the developer is different from the inference by the LLM, that’s why I said the developer might be able to ask for missing relevant information up front based on prior experience and understanding of the problem space. I don’t see why an advanced AI couldn’t get to the point of specialized knowledge in the future, though I fully understand that the current iterations are not close to that.
0
dimitarvp
Disagreed, simply because that requires combinatorics on a mind-blowing scale. As @dmitriid outlined above, just for one project idea you can have millions of combinations of yes/no prompts. To encompass what we do with software today we’d likely need something on the order of hundreds of trillions of combinations.
Don’t get me wrong, I do like statistics. But it does have limits.
Better hardware and/or better optimized algorithms will make it possible in TheFuture™? Absolutely. I have my doubts for the next 1-5 years however.
0
stevensonmt
I don’t know why you keep cutting off part of my statement to make it look like I’m arguing a point that I’m not making. You quoted
but the point was the next sentence
My point was not about the merits of human intelligence or the limits of AI. It was simply that from a practical perspective, the person who desires someone or something else to produce the software always has to provide the requirement specs said software needs to fulfill but should not care about the process of actually producing the code. Which is NOT the point I originally posted about either. I keep getting dragged further away from the simple idea that when we are using AI to generate code we don’t need to continue using abstractions that were developed explicitly to make it easier for humans to generate code. That’s the sum total of my thoughts on this topic, so I think I’ll bow out now.
0
dmitriid
It does.
Because actual understanding means understanding the constraints, legal implications, applicability etc.
E.g. just the simple fact of “display image on screen in a scalable manner” means zilch without understanding the context. E.g., if your scalable app is only/mostly accessed through mobile phones, you can easily downscale and resize all images, and save millions on storage. But if the actual target audience is professional photographers who use the app all the time because it’s an easy way to access photos on the go, you need to store the actual RAW images as well.
AI has no understanding of that.
And anyone who says that it’s just a matter of refining prompts, has never:
- tried to actually get a full technical description from humans for a task (good luck asking a non-technical product owner whether you should store images in webp or png)
- worked on a project with more than a few moving parts (that team responsible for scalable storage? it’s outside the statistical model of your AI, and has its own constraints)
2
D4no0
Yeah it would be nice to have a formal and structured language for dealing with specifications of business logic, one that would be able to go into more technical details should that need arise, oh wait, that is just a programming language 
.
1
AstonJ
Just hit DT:
Key figures in artificial intelligence want training of powerful AI systems to be suspended amid fears of a threat to humanity.
They have signed an open letter warning of potential risks, and say the race to develop AI systems is out of control.
Twitter chief Elon Musk is among those who want training of AIs above a certain capacity to be halted for at least six months.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and some researchers at DeepMind also signed.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, recently released GPT-4 - a state-of-the-art technology, which has impressed observers with its ability to do tasks such as answering questions about objects in images.
The letter, from Future of Life Institute and signed by the luminaries, wants development to be halted temporarily at that level, warning in their letter of the risks future, more advanced systems might pose.
“AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity,” it says.
What are they worried about tho - the threat to humanity, or their businesses..
1
dimitarvp
