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I had this thought when I saw the "Why didn’t we get GPT-2 in 2005?" article on the SSC subreddit. OpenAI were the only ones smart enough to guess a way to convert human knowledge into a machine-interpretable form, and the only ones smart enough to recognize a good idea that could be scaled up.
It feels profane to draw culture-war implications from such a monumental achievement, but this is in fact the culture-war thread. I will simply state that there is quite a bit of greatness-denial in modern Western culture (e.g. the kind of people who think JK Simmons was the bad guy in Whiplash), and that OpenAI proves that greatness exists. Greatness does not exclude great destruction; Napoleon was great. Only time will tell whether Sam Altman is great like Edison, great like Oppenheimer, or great like Napoleon.
If AI were to bully someone like Miles Teller, that’s a positive sign toward alignment for me.
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That's incorrect. A few top labs were getting there together. Just in dark research rooms.
Yes !
The tweet could not have been more timely - https://twitter.com/sama/status/1639030920798953472
Yepp
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Expanding on your comment, it’s exciting to think that this style of individual greatness could be unlocked again by these sorts of tools.
Before these generative AIs came along it seemed tautological that to build a modern software business you needed at least two or three people - usually someone to handle the business side and someone to handle the software side. I’m not as hyperbolic as some saying we won’t need SWEs anymore, but the barrier to building a working (or at least monetizable) software product just got much, much lower.
I wonder if we’ll see individuals launching software startups and actually getting to product market fit or profitability entirely solo?
With the corresponding oversupply of -> demolition of Western SWE salaries all outsourcing is dead within the decade.
I'm not concerned for countries that already have a good population:opportunity ratio like the US, but I am very much concerned about the countries whose ratio is extraordinarily poor, particularly India. Tech only really helps you accelerate existing productivity; you can't accelerate it if you don't have any.
I'm not at all sure that is true. There is so much software development that isn't getting done currently because there aren't enough (sufficiently competent) developers. I could easily see this just leading to an explosion of SW development being done rather than developers going without a job, at least in the medium term.
I definitely see revaluing of competences within the SWE space though.
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Can you please elaborate on this? Coming at it from a different angle, I get the opposite result. Undeveloped countries that import advanced tech see GDP growth that far exceeds that of already developed countries.
This is why developing countries tend to experience a "middle income trap" which happens when they can no longer rapidly develop by simply importing already mature technology.
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I mean this is true in some sense, but once you have global markets and the internet doesn’t that break down a bit? Sure countries in Africa with little to no digital infrastructure will probably fail to benefit from AI anytime soon, but I’d imagine India is well over the point where the rising tide will lift its boat.
If generative AI makes good on the promise of generating massive new amounts wealth, I’d argue that will be a boon for almost all of the developed and developing world. More economic value tends to spill over into positive effects, and as markets are more globalized that spreads broadly.
I’m not convinced outsourcing is dead - if anything labor cost will become even more expensive in some areas. Not sure about SWE.
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