It's like the least popular opinion I have here on Lemmy, but I assure you, this is the begining.
Yes, we'll see a dotcom style bust. But it's not like the world today wasn't literally invented in that time. Do you remember where image generation was 3 years ago? It was a complete joke compared to a year ago, and today, fuck no one here would know.
When code generation goes through that same cycle, you can put out an idea in plain language, and get back code that just "does" it.
I have no idea what that means for the future of my humanity.
you can put out an idea in plain language, and get back code that just “does” it
No you can't. Simplifying it grossly:
They can't do the most low-level, dumbest detail, splitting hairs, "there's no spoon", "this is just correct no matter how much you blabber in the opposite direction, this is just wrong no matter how much you blabber to support it" kind of solutions.
And that happens to be main requirement that makes a task worth software developer's time.
We need software developers to write computer programs, because "a general idea" even in a formalized language is not sufficient, you need to address details of actual reality. That is the bottleneck.
That technology widens the passage in the places which were not the bottleneck in the first place.
I think you live in a nonsense world. I literally use it everyday and yes, sometimes it's shit and it's bad at anything that even requires a modicum of creativity. But 90% of shit doesn't require a modicum of creativity. And my point isn't about where we're at, it's about how far the same tech progressed on another domain adjacent task in three years.
Lemmy has a "dismiss AI" fetish and does so at its own peril.
Dismiss at your own peril is my mantra on this. I work primarily in machine vision and the things that people were writing on as impossible or "unique to humans" in the 90s and 2000s ended up falling rapidly, and that generation of opinion pieces are now safely stored in the round bin.
The same was true of agents for games like go and chess and dota. And now the same has been demonstrated to be coming true for languages.
And maybe that paper built in the right caveats about "human intelligence". But that isn't to say human intelligence can't be surpassed by something distinctly inhuman.
The real issue is that previously there wasn't a use case with enough viability to warrant the explosion of interest we've seen like with transformers.
But transformers are like, legit wild. It's bigger than UNETs. It's way bigger than ltsm.
And I wouldn't know where to start using it. My problems are often of the "integrate two badly documented company-internal APIs" variety. LLMs can't do shit about that; they weren't trained for it.
They're nice for basic rote work but that's often not what you deal with in a mature codebase.
Because "Integrate two badly documented APIs" is precisely the kind of tasks that even the current batch of LLMs actually crush.
And I'm not worried about being replaced by the current crop. I'm worried about future frameworks on technology like greyskull running 30, or 300, or 3000 uniquely trained LLMs and other transformers at once.
That explains your optimism. Code generation is at a stage where it slaps together Stack Overflow answers and code ripped off from GitHub for you. While that is quite effective to get at least a crappy programmer to cobble together something that barely works, it is a far cry from having just anyone put out an idea in plain language and getting back code that just does it. A programmer is still needed in the loop.
I'm sure I don't have to explain to you that AI development over the decades has often reached plateaus where the approach needed to be significantly changed in order for progress to be made, but it could certainly be the case where LLMs (at least as they are developed now) aren't enough to accomplish what you describe.
they're pretty good, and the faults they have are improving steadily. I dont think we're hitting a ceiling yet, and I shudder to think where they'll be in 5 years.