I primarily use GPT style tools like ChatGPT and whatnot.

The key is, rather than asking it to generate code, specify that you dont want code and instead want it to help you work through the solution. Tell it to ask you meaningful questions about your problem and effectively act as a rubber duck

Then, after you’ve chosen a solution with it, ask it to generate code based on all the above convo.

This will typically produce way higher quality results and helps avoid potential X/Y problems.

Humans are “trained” with maybe ten thousand “tokens” per day

Uhhh… you may wanna rerun those numbers.

It’s waaaaaaaay more than that lol.

and take only a couple dozen watts for even the most complex thinking

Mate’s literally got smoke coming out if his ears lol.

A single Wh is 860 calories…

I think you either have no idea wtf you are talking about, or your just made up a bunch of extremely wrong numbers to try and look smart.

1. Humans will encounter hundreds of thousands of tokens per day, ramping up to millions in school.

2. An human, by my estimate, has burned about 13,000 Wh by the time they reach adulthood. Maybe more depending in activity levels.

3. While yes, an AI costs substantially more Wh, it also is done in weeks so it’s obviously going to be way less energy efficient due to the exponential laws of resistance. If we grew a functional human in like 2 months it’d prolly require way WAY more than 13,000 Wh during the process for similiar reasons.

4. Once trained, a single model can be duplicated infinitely. So it’d be more fair to compare how much millions of people cost to raise, compared to a single model to be trained. Because once trained, you can now make millions of copies of it…

5. Operating costs are continuing to go down and down and down. Diffusion based text generation just made another huge leap forward, reporting around a twenty times efficiency increase over traditional gpt style LLMs. Improvements like this are coming out every month.

For sure, much like how a cab driver has to know how to drive a cab.

AI is absolutely a “garbage in, garbage out” tool. Just having it doesn’t automatically make you good at your job.

The difference in someone who can weild it well vs someone who has no idea what they are doing is palpable.

Good, fire 2 devs out of 3.

Companies that do this will fail.

Successful companies respond to this by hiring more developers.

Consider the taxi cab driver:

With the invention if the automobile, cab drivers could do their job way faster and way cheaper.

Did companies fire drivers in response? God no. They hired more

Why?

Because they became more affordable, less wealthy clients could now afford their services which means demand went way way up

If you can do your work for half the cost, usually demand goes up by way more than x2 because as you go down in wealth levels of target demographics, your pool of clients exponentially grows

If I go from “it costs me 100k to make you a website” to “it costs me 50k to make you a website” my pool of possible clients more than doubles

Which means… you need to hire more devs asap to start matching this newfound level of demand

If you fire devs when your demand is about to skyrocket, you fucked up bad lol

We are having massive exponential increases in output with all sorts of innovations, every few weeks another big step forward happens

https://youtu.be/d4tMzagjXrI

Wait til you realize that’s just what art literally is…

You skipped possibility 3, which is actively happening ing:

Advancements in tech enable us to produce results at a much much cheaper cost

Which us happening with diffusion style LLMs that simultaneously cost less to train, cost less to run, but also produce both faster abd better quality outputs.

That’s a big part people forget about AI: it’s a feedback loop of improvement as soon as you can start using AI to develop AI

And we are past that mark now, most developers have easy access to AI as a tool to improve their performance, and AI is made by… software developers

So you get this loop where as we make better and better AIs, we get better and better at making AIs with the AIs…

It’s incredibly likely the new diffusion AI systems were built with AI assisting in the process, enabling them to make a whole new tech innovation much faster and easier.

We are now in the uptick of the singularity, and have been for about a year now.

Same goes for hardware, it’s very likely now that mvidia has AI incorporating into their production process, using it for micro optimizations in its architectures and designs.

And then those same optimized gpus turn around and get used to train and run even better AIs…

In 5-10 years we will look back on 2024 as the start of a very wild ride.

Remember we are just now in the “computers that take up entire warehouses” step of the tech.

Remember that in the 80s, a “computer” cost a fortune, took tonnes of resources, multiple people to run it, took up an entire room, was slow as hell, and could only do basic stuff.

But now 40 years later they fit in our pockets and are (non hyoerbole) billions of times faster.

I think by 2035 we will be looking at AI as something mass produced for consumers to just go in their homes, you go to best buy and compare different AI boxes to pick which one you are gonna get for your home.

We are still at the stage of people in the 80s looking at computers and pondering “why would someone even need to use this, why would someone put one in their house, let alone their pocket”

No, it’s just not something exposed to you to see

But under the hood it very much does shift gears depending on what you ask it to do

It’s why gpt can do stuff now like analyze contents of images, basic OCR, but also generate images too.

Yet it can also do math, talk about biology, give relationship advice…

I believe open AI called the term “specialists” or something vaguely like that, at the time.

The thing is, the tech keeps advancing too so even if they tighten up deadlines, by the time they did that our productivity also took another gearshift up so we still are some degree ahead.

This isn’t new, in software we have always been getting new tools to do our jobs better and faster, or produce fancier results in the same time

This is just another tool in the toolbelt.

I am indeed getting more time off for PD

We delivered on a project 2 weeks ahead of schedule so we were given raises, I got a promotion, and we were given 2 weeks to just do some chill PD at our own discretion as a reward. All paid on the clock.

Some companies are indeed pretty cool about it.

I was asked to give some demos and do some chats with folks to spread info on how we had such success, and they were pretty fond of my methodology.

At its core delivering faster does translate to getting bigger bonuses and kickbacks at my company, so yeah there’s actual financial incentive for me to perform way better.

You also are ignoring the stress thing. If I can work 3x better, I can also just deliver in almost the same time, but spend all that freed up time instead focusing on quality, polishing the product up, documentation, double checking my work, testing, etc.

Instead of scraping past the deadline by the skin of our teeth, we hit the deadline with a week or 2 to spare and spent a buncha extra time going over everything with a fine tooth comb twice to make sure we didn’t miss anything.

And instead of mad rushing 8 hours straight, it’s just generally more casual. I can take it slower and do the same work but just in a less stressed out way. So I’m literally just physically working less hard, I feel happier, and overall my mood is way better, and I have way more energy.

Meanwhile a huge chunk of the software industry is now heavily using this “dead end” technology 👀

I work in a pretty massive tech company (think, the type that frequently acquires other smaller ones and absorbs them)

Everyone I know here is using it. A lot.

However my company also has tonnes of dedicated sessions and paid time to instruct it’s employees on how to use it well, and to get good value out of it, abd the pitfalls it can have

So yeah turns out if you teach your employees how to use a tool, they start using it.

I’d say LLMs have made me about 3x as efficient or so at my job.

They did that awhile ago, it was a big feature if gpt 3

We already did this like a year ago mate. That was like v3 of gpt

Others have covered the fact it’s because of air pressure but haven’t fully answered why that is the way it is.

It’s simple really.

The force of gravity is also at play. As you go higher up, gravity gets weaker as you get farther from the earth’s centre.

And it is that gravitational force that increases the air’s density, same reason why if you keep going down in the water, the water gets denser.

For the heat to move around you need to be in a sort of goldilocks zone of density.

It needs to be dense enough that the fluid molecules can move around and spread the convection energy around… but not so dense they can’t move much either.

Furthermore there’s actually a couple different layers of our atmosphere.

First at our level is the troposphere, where heat is absorbed into the ground itself and radiated back out, as well as the perpetual heat from the earth’s core, and reflected off the ground too (visible light).

The troposphere is warm and gets colder as you get farther away from the earth’s surface, naturally. That heat is absorbed by the air itself so, as you get farther away it gets colder as it has more air to travel through.

Up higher is the Stratosphere, where it’s ice cold and the air thins out.

However we get a sudden uptick in temp as we go even higher into what is called the Stratopause, back to briefly warm temperatures between the Stratosphere and the Mesosohere. Why? How?

Simple, this is the little sweet spot Ozone molecules hang out, forming a protective convenient bubble around the earth. Ozone absorbs Ultraviolet light from the sun and turns out that stuff is HOT, so there’s a band of a hot zone right above and below the Ozone layer. Think of it as a toasty little bubble around us.

Above is the mesosphere which cools off again and gets back to being really frosty quickly, for the same reason the Stratosphere did, distance.

Then we hit the mesosphere, which is effectively the point when the atmosphere is so thin it stops protecting and is the “outside” of our protective blanket.

You can imagine this like earth being wrapped in a blanket, and the mesosphere is everything outside the blanket. Without any protection you are subject to the unbridled radiation of the sun which means you go back to being really toasty, as you get a bit higher you are effectively in space now and will soon enough hit temps that just cook you alive in a minute or two. Really bad sunburn zone.

So to answer the question overall:

Hot air rises… but only when there is air to rise.

Top of the mountains just don’t have enough air anymore for it to really rise much more. It still does but the hot air rising effect just gets weaker and weaker as the air gets thinner due to less gravity.