a million monkeys typing for a million years generating the works of Shakespeare
FFS, it's one monkey and infinite years. This is the second time I've seen someone make this mistake in an AI article in the past month or so.
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
460 points (94.9% liked)
Technology
60082 readers
2807 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I always thought it was a small team, not millions. But yeah, one monkey with infinite time makes sense.
load more comments
(21 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
"Shortly thereafter, Altman pronounced “the dawn of the Intelligence Age,” in which AI helps humankind fix the climate and colonize space."
Few things ring quite as blatantly false to me as this asinine claim.
The notion that AI will solve the climate crisis is unbelievably stupid, not because of any theory about what AI may or may not be capable of, but because we already know how to fix the climate crisis!
The problem is that we're putting too much carbon into the air. The solution is to put less carbon into the air. The greatest minds of humanity have been working on this for over a century and the basic answer has never, ever changed.
The problem is that we can't actually convince people to stop putting carbon into air, because that would involve reducing profit margins, and wealthy people don't like that.
Even if Altman unveiled a true AGI tomorrow, one smarter than all of humanity put together, and asked it to solve the climate crisis, it would immediately reply "Stop putting carbon in the air you dumb fucking monkeys." And the billionaires who back Altman would immediately tell him to turn the damn thing off.
load more comments
(27 replies)
Finally
How is it useful to type millions of solutions out that are wrong to come up with the right one? That only works on a research project when youre searching for patterns. If you are trying to code, it needs to be right the first time every time it's run, especially if it's in a production environment.
TDD, Test Driven Development. A human writes requirements, with help of the AI he/she derrives tests from the requirements. AI writes code until the tests don't fail.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Especially for programming, you definitely don't need to be right the first time and of course you should never run your code in a production environment for the first time. That would be absolutely reckless.
Well actually there's ways to automate quality assurance.
If a programmer reasonably knew that one of these 10,000 files was the "correct" code, they could pull out quality assurance tests and find that code pretty dang easily, all things considered.
Those tests would eliminate most of the 9,999 wrong ones, and then the QA person could look through the remaining ones by hand. Like a capcha for programming code.
The power usage still makes this a ridiculous solution.
That seems like an awful solution. Writing a QA test for every tiny thing I want to do is going to add far more work to the task. This would increase the workload, not shorten it.
We already have to do that as humans in many industries like automobile, aviation, medicine, etc.
We have several layers of tests:
- Unit test
- Component test
- Integration / API test
- Subsystem test
- System test
On each level we test the code against the requirements and architecture documentation. It's a huge amount of work.
In automotive we have several standard processes which need to be followed during development like ASPICE and ISO26262:
load more comments
(7 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
If you first have to write comprehensive unit/integration tests, then have a model spray code at them until it passes, that isn't useful. If you spend that much time writing perfect tests, you've already written probably twice the code of just the solution and reasonable tests.
Also you have an unmaintainable codebase that could be a hairball of different code snippets slapped together with dubious copyright.
Until they hit real AGI this is just fancy auto complete. With the hype they may dissuade a whole generation of software engineers picking a career today. If they don't actually make it to AGI it will take a long time to recover and humans who actually know how to fix AI slop will make bank.