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this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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Take all you want, it will only take a few hallucinations before no one trusts LLMs to write code or give advice
We already have those near constantly. And we still keep asking queries.
People assume that LLMs need to be ready to replace a principle engineer or a doctor or lawyer with decades of experience.
This is already at the point where we can replace an intern or one of the less good junior engineers. Because anyone who has done code review or has had to do rounds with medical interns know... they are idiots who need people to check their work constantly. An LLM making up some functions because they saw it in stack overflow but never tested is not at all different than a hotshot intern who copied some code from stack overflow and never tested it.
Except one costs a lot less...
So, the whole point of learning is to ask questions from people who know more than you, so that you can gain the knowledge you need to succeed…
So… if you try to use these LLMs to replace parts of sectors, where there need to be people that can work their way to the next tier as they learn more and get better at their respective sectors, you do realize that eventually there will no longer be people that can move up their respective tier/position, because people like you said “Fuck ‘em, all in on this stupid LLM bullshit!” So now there are no more doctors, or real programmers, because people like you thought it would just be the GREATEST idea to replace humans with fucking LLMs.
You do see that, right?
Calling people fucking stupid, because they are learning, is actually pretty fucking stupid.
Where did I say "Fuck 'em, all in on this stupid LLM bullshit!"?
But yes, there is a massive labor issue coming. That is why I am such a proponent of Universal Basic Income because there are not going to be enough jobs out there.
But as for training up the interns: Back in the day, do you know what "interns" did? And by "interns" I mean women because sexism but roll with me. Printing out and sorting punch cards. Compilers and general technical advances got rid of those jobs and pushed up where the "charlie work" goes.
These days? There are good internships/junior positions and bad ones. A good one actually teaches skills and encourages the worker to contribute. A bad one has them do the mindless grunt work that nobody else wants to. LLMs get rid of the latter.
And... I actually think that is good for the overall health of workers, if not the number (again, UBI). Because if someone can't be trusted to write meaningful code without copying it off the internet and not even updating variable names? I don't want to work with them. I spend too much of my workday babysitting those morons who are just here there to get some work experience so they can con their way into a different role and be someone else's problem.
And experience will be gained the way it is increasingly being gained. Working on (generally open source) projects and interviewing for competitive internships where the idea is to take relatively low cost workers and have them work on a low ROI task that is actually interesting. It is better for the intern because they learn actual development and collaboration skills. And it is better for the staff because it is a way to let people work on the stuff they actually want to do without the massive investment of a few hundred hours of a Senior Engineer's time.
And... there will be a lot fewer of those roles. Just like there were a lot fewer roles for artists as animation tools stopped requiring every single cell of animation to be hand drawn. And that is why we need to decouple life from work through UBI.
But also? If we have less internships that consist of "okay. good job. thanks for that. Next time can you at least try and compile your code? or pay attention to the squiggly red lines in your IDE? or listen to the person telling you that is wrong?"? Then we have better workers and better junior developers who can actually do more meaningful work. And we'll actually need to update the interviewing system to not just be "did you memorize this book of questions from Amazon?" and we'll have fewer "hot hires" who surprise everyone by being able to breath unassisted but have a very high salary because they worked for facebook.
Because, and here is the thing: LLMs are already as good, if not better than, an intern or junior engineer. And the companies that spend money on training up interns aren't going to be rewarded. Under capitalism, there is no reason to "take one for the team" so that your competition can benefit.