I’m working on the front end of a transcription app. It’s a lot of moving buttons and labels around to get them where I want, but there’s no way I would ever be able to do it with a keyboard as fast as using an llm. Are we putting ourselves at a competitive disadvantage to big tech et. al. by being anti ai purists?
Depends what you’re doing. For the lighter side of coding, you’ve probably nailed it. You’ll never keep up, writing boiler-plate frontend code by hand.
For, like, kernel or scientific coding, it’s probably more subjective. Of course, anything in meatspace is beyond LLMs entirely. AI is waiting on a whole new technology for that one, and so, timelines for AI electricians look barely different they did just before the LLM arrived.
Being a math person, human mathematics as we’ve known it is looking kind of doomed, now. Not because LLMs are super great at it, but because you can rigorously verify if every step works with conventional algorithms. With enough shitty lemmas thrown at the wall, if they’re all correct, you can eventually go somewhere.
In math, we’ve been replaced. Feels bad, man. (I’m not changing any takes now that it’s my field, though!)
I was sort of hoping that it was mostly dumb hype when it came to mathematicians being replaced because it’s such a highly complex and beautiful field of science :( I hate the times we’re living in
To be fair, there might still be human math not as we’ve known it. The first people documented as being replaced were hand-weavers. When the mechanical loom came along, they became the original Luddites. People still do work in textile production, though, even if the job of a mechanical loom operator is totally different.
At the very least, someone has to be able to verify the proof assistants are correct, in order to be able to verify that the proofs they verify are also correct. There’s also the task of training people in mathematical understanding for reasons other than proving theorems, which might include reverse engineering the goofy AI proofs back into something comprehensible.
Some hay has been made out of the fact the AIs which solved the Clay problem were fed a human mathematician’s approach, so I guess there’s prompt engineering, as well.
https://hexbear.net/post/9799122
Great video, it’s exactly the kind of societal decay that I think AI will bring to the world regardless of mathematics, if we do not change the world before that