How many people graduate from a US software engineering degree each year? About 100k? If they (the 100k in the US) earn $100k each in the first year, before gaining the skills to earn more, that's $10 billion a year, every year. If you can capture that market for next 20 years, it's worth $200 billion.
Except… can you capture it? A junior dev is… not exactly someone you want connecting to your business-critical database without supervision, and a real human dev will get better with a predictable rate. Will LLMs get better? The makers are betting on that, but we'll only know after the model releases, and even then after we play with them for a bit to differentiate between the record performance on whichever benchmark and the actual work we want them to do.
Then there's the question of can you really keep an edge for 20 years with investments today: Sometime between 2030-2035, there's likely to be models matching 2025-SOTA performance that run on ${year}'s high-end smartphone.
(Well, unless we all die in WW3 because of Russia getting desperate from its failure to remove Ukraine's sovereignty, or because China has a hot war with Taiwan and/or the USA messing with global consumer electronics supplies, but I don't think those get priced into the market…).
But that's just the USA's software developers in just their first year after graduating. Software devs are 1% of the US job market, the first year after graduation is (66-21=45 years, 1/45 ~= 2%) of a working life, the US is just 4% of the world's population/25% GDP.
For the 1% to matter, there have to be other jobs that LLMs can do as well as a fresh graduate. I don't know, are LLMs like someone the first year out of law school or medical school, or are those schools better than software? Certainly the home robotics' AI are nowhere near ready yet, no plumber, no driver (despite the news about new car AIs), would you trust an Optimus to cut your hair? etc.
For the 2% to matter, depends how seriously you take the projections of improvements. Myself, I do not. Looks like exponential improvements come at exponential costs, and you run out of money to spend for further improvements very quickly.
For the 4% to matter, depends on how fast other economies grow. 4% by population, about 25% by GDP. I believe China is still growing quite fast, likely to continue. Them getting +160% growth, and thus getting 2.6x times the money available to burn on AI tokens, over the next 20 years would be unsurprising.
All in all, I don't think the USA is competent enough at large-scale projects to handle the infrastructure that this kind of AI would need, so I think it's a bubble and will burst before 2030 because of that. China seems to be able to pull off this kind of infrastructure, so may pull ahead after the US does whatever it does.
> For the 1% to matter, there have to be other jobs that LLMs can do as well as a fresh graduate. I don't know, are LLMs like someone the first year out of law school or medical school, or are those schools better than software?
Before looking to medical and law schools, I might look to middle-manager school or salesperson school or bookkeeper school.
I don’t know enough to speculate even beyond those crude guesses, but as I thought about this question, I found it interesting to skim the US’ employment-by-detailed-occupation chart:
I take satisfaction living in a house I did not build using tools I could not use or even enumerate, tools likewise acting on materials I can neither work with nor name precisely enough to be unambiguous, in a community I played no part in before moving here, kept safe by laws I can't even read because I've not yet reached that level of mastery of my second tongue.
It has a garden.
I've been coding essentially since I learned to read, I have designed boolean logic circuits from first principles to perform addition and multiplication, I know enouhg of the basics of CPU behaviours such that if you gave me time I might get as far as a buggy equivalent of a 4004 or something, and yet everything from there to C is a bunch of here-be-dragons and half-remembered uni modules from 20 years ago, then some more exothermic flying lizards about the specifics of "modern" (relative to 2003) OSes, then apps which I actually got paid to make.
LLMs lets everything you don't already know be as fun as learning new stuff in uni or as buying new computers from a store, whichever you ask it for.
In this scenario your starting out as an gardener, would you rather having LLM "plant me five bulbs and two tulips in ideal soil conditions" or would you rather grow them yourself? If the latter you wouldn't gain skills as if you had the previous year made the compost, double dug the soil and sowed the seeds.
All this knowledge learnt, skills gained and achievement that lost in the process. You may be novice and it may not bring all your flowers to bloom but if you succeed in one, that's the accomplishment, the feel good energy.
LLM may bring you the flowers, but you've not attempted. You've palmed the work to something else and just busking in the result. I wouldn't count that being a achievement; I just couldn't take pride in that. I was brought up in a strict form of "cheating: your only cheating yourself" ideology which may be what triggering this.
I would accept that on terms of teaching that there is a net plus for LLM's. A glorified Liberian. A traditional teacher may teach you one method - one for the whole class, LLM can adjust it's explanation until it clicks with yourself. "Explain it using Teddy Bears" -- a 24/365 resource allowing you to learn.
As such a LLM explaining that "your switch case statement is checking if the variable is populated and not that if the file is empty" on your existing written the code is relaying back a fault that would be no different of if you had asked a professional to review.
I just can't grip the feel of having LLM code for you. When you do it spreads like regex; you become dependent on it. "Now display a base64 image retrieved from an internal hash table while checking that the rendered image is actually 800x600" and that it does but the knowledge how-to becomes lost. You have to put double time in to learn what it did, question it's efficiency and assume it hasn't introduced further issues. It may take yourself few hours, days to get the logic right but at least you can take a step back and look at it knowing it's my code, my skills that made that single flower bloom.
The cat is out of the bag, reality is forcing you to embrace. It's not for me and that's fine; I'm not going to grudge over folk enjoying the ability to experience a specialist subject. I do become concerned when I see dystopian dangers ahead and see a future generation degraded in knowledge because we got vibe and over-hyped the current.
> In this scenario your starting out as an gardener, would you rather having LLM "plant me five bulbs and two tulips in ideal soil conditions" or would you rather grow them yourself? If the latter you wouldn't gain skills as if you had the previous year made the compost, double dug the soil and sowed the seeds. All this knowledge learnt, skills gained and achievement that lost in the process. You may be novice and it may not bring all your flowers to bloom but if you succeed in one, that's the accomplishment, the feel good energy.
I am a novice in the garden. I do it because I want to, because it's fun to do.
I don't know what does and doesn't work, and therefore I am asking LLMs (VLMs) lots of questions. I am learning from it.
But I know it is not as smart as it acts, that it will tell me untrue things. I upload a photo of a mystery weed, ChatGPT tells me it's a tomato, I can tell it's not a tomato because of the tiny black berries, I ask around on Telegram and it's a self-seeding solanum nigrum.
Other times, the AI is helpful:
Me: [upload a picture of the root ball of my freshly purchased Thuja Brabant]
ChatGPT: That root ball is severely root-bound—classic “pot-shape memory”. If planted as-is, the roots will continue circling, restricting growth and potentially strangling the plant over time.
You must correct this before planting. Here’s how:
…
My mum was a gardener. It would be nice if I could ask her. Sadly, she's spent the last few years fertilising some wild flowers from underneath, which makes it difficult to get answers.
Sure, but saying that such a person "is Jesus" is a strong claim.
I mean, ignore the name itself[0], and the iconography[1], and the things that can be justified by misunderstandings[2], and that the reason he got stabbed in the belly by the Roman soldier was because dying that fast was incredibly suspicious: do you really think there's evidence for someone in that era, actually making genuinely lame people walk, actually blind people see, and actually coming back from the dead?
The account can be fictional even when the person exists. Consider how there's a lot of people today, even on Hacker News, who say that Elon Musk "single-handedly" did all the things done by the companies he owns and the people employed there, and then imagine those "single-handedly" accounts became a book, and people deified his memory a century later based on the "single-handedly" claims in that book — even though there's a real Musk behind it, the person in the book would be a fiction inspired by the truth.
[0] Which will obviously be wrong, given a few layers of mis-hearing, phonetic transcription, ambiguous reading of that transcription, and the way that even William Shakespeare wrote his own name a bunch of different ways none of which is the currently mandatory one to avoid getting dinged points for mis-spelling in an English exam
Also, the Cult of Mithras would have things to say if they were still around…
[2] Take the feeding of the 5000, and apply the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect on the reporting: you could have an actual reality of lots of people bringing their food, not wanting to share, the disciples being told to share what they have, that creating social pressure from everyone else to share, and it's entirely plausible for this kind of thing to be reported as a "miracle" even today, if you look around at the parts of the world press willing to use that kind of language.
Then there's walking on water, where you get the punchline to the old joke about the Priest, the Rabi, and the Wiccan who go on an inter-faith fishing trip together…
Virgin birth: First, the joke about Joseph being a gullible cuckold who just believed the excuse Mary cooked up; second, the possibility of Mary being assaulted while she slept and genuinely not knowing it happened; thirdly, "virgin" having other meanings besides current use; fourthly, pregnancy is possible from dry humping, so technical virginity may be preserved: https://www.allohealth.com/blog/reproductive-health/pregnanc...
BTC itself can't do that: the transaction rate would be borderline even just for a low-ball estimate of all the once-a-month payments happening in just the city of Berlin.
The various proposals for layer-2 stuff makes it look like a bunch of banks using a funky currency without any of the controls that exist because weird currencies are bad for business, but AFAICT because of that, the BTC part itself works like interbank balancing transactions, and the BTC transaction rate isn't sufficient to cover once-a-day interbank balancing transactions.
Not to come down on either side, but I am begging commenters to refrain from using a Eurocentric lens when discussing a technology that wasn't even invented in Europe.
I don't know the history. That would be the source of my discontent. Every time things like this come up, the hyperfocus on Western experience erases whatever insight could have been gained by looking at the topic in its totality. My guess is that whatever dynamic the history of the printing press in the East might have lent to this conversation wasn't even considered until I brought it up. That was my contribution.
You should look in a mirror (and proofread). Everything you're accusing me of applies to you. It's an overwrought reaction which indicates that I hit a nerve. You'd better soothe that ego bruise with a bit of curiosity, than with the tantrum you've been throwing.
More broadly (like "not just UK" broadly) if you get rid of propaganda paid for with your own taxes, what you're left with isn't "no propaganda" but rather "everyone else's propaganda".
If your government is a democracy and you are not an elite yourself, this is bad for you. If you're not in a democracy or you are part of the elite (in this example meaning you can pay for the creation of propaganda to serve your own interests), that's good for you.
Except… can you capture it? A junior dev is… not exactly someone you want connecting to your business-critical database without supervision, and a real human dev will get better with a predictable rate. Will LLMs get better? The makers are betting on that, but we'll only know after the model releases, and even then after we play with them for a bit to differentiate between the record performance on whichever benchmark and the actual work we want them to do.
Then there's the question of can you really keep an edge for 20 years with investments today: Sometime between 2030-2035, there's likely to be models matching 2025-SOTA performance that run on ${year}'s high-end smartphone.
(Well, unless we all die in WW3 because of Russia getting desperate from its failure to remove Ukraine's sovereignty, or because China has a hot war with Taiwan and/or the USA messing with global consumer electronics supplies, but I don't think those get priced into the market…).
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