A Research Preview of Codex

It looks we are in this interesting cycle: millions of engineers contribute to open-source on github. The best of our minds use the code to develop powerful models to replace exactly these engineers. In fact, the more code a group contributes to github, the easier it is for the companies to replace this group. Case in point, frontend engineers are impacted most so far.

Does this mean people will be less incentivized to contribute to open source as time goes by?

P.S., I think the current trend is a wakeup call to us software engineers. We thought we were doing highly creative work, but in reality we spend a lot of time doing the basic job of knowledge workers: retrieving knowledge and interpolating some basic and highly predictable variations. Unfortunately, the current AI is really good at replacing this type of work.

My optimistic view is that in long term we will have invent or expand into more interesting work, but I'm not sure how long we will have to wait. The current generation of software engineers may suffer high supply but low demand of our profession for years to come.

> P.S., I think the current trend is a wakeup call to us software engineers. We thought we were doing highly creative work, but in reality we spend a lot of time doing the basic job of knowledge workers: retrieving knowledge and interpolating some basic and highly predictable variations. Unfortunately, the current AI is really good at replacing this type of work.

Most of the waking hours of most creative work have this type of drudgery. Professional painters and designers spend most of their time replicating ideas that are well fleshed-out. Musicians spend most of their time rehearsing existing compositions.

There is a point to be made that these repetitive tasks are a prerequisite to come up with creative ideas.

> doing the basic job of knowledge workers

If you extrapolate and generalize further... what is at risk is any task that involves taking information input (text, audio, images, video, etc.), and applying it to create some information output or perform some action which is useful.

That's basically the definition of work. It's not just knowledge work, it's literally any work.

As much as I support community developed software and "free as in freedom", "Open Source" got completely perverted into tricking people to work for free for huge financial benefits for others. Your comment is just one example of that.

For that reason all my silly little side projects are now in private repos. I dont care the chance somebody builds a business around them is slim to none. Dont think putting a license will protect you either. You'd have to know somebody is violating your license before you can even think about doing anything and that's basically impossible if it gets ripped into a private codebase and isnt obvious externally.

I disagree. AI have shown to most capable in what we consider creative jobs. Music creation, voice acting, text/story writing, art creation, video creation and more.

> "Open Source" got completely perverted into tricking people to work for free for huge financial benefits for others

I'm quite conflicted on this assessment. On one hand, I was wondering if we would get better job market if there were not much open-sourced systems. We may have had a much slower growth, but we would see our growth last for a lot more years, which mean we may enjoy our profession until our retirement and more. On the other hand, open source did create large cakes, right? Like the "big data" market, the ML market, the distributed system market, and etc. Like the millions of data scientists who could barely use Pandas and scipy, or hundreds of thousands of ML engineers who couldn't even bother to know what semi positive definite matrix is.

Interesting times.

If you mean create as in literally, sure. But not in being creative. AI can't solve novel problems yet. The person you're replying to obviously means being creative not literally creating something.

What is the qualifier for this? Didn't one of the models recently create a "novel" algorithm for a math problem? I'm not sure this holds water anymore.

> Does this mean people will be less incentivized to contribute to open source as time goes by?

personally, I completely stopped 2 years ago

it's the same as the stack overflow problem: the incentive to contribute tends towards zero, at which point the plagiarism machine stops improving

> AI have shown to most capable in what we consider creative jobs

no it creates shit thats close enough for people who are in a rush and dont care.

ie, you need artwork for shit on temu, boom job done.

You want to make a poster for a bake sale, boom job done.

Need some free music that sounds close enough to be swifty, but not enough to get sued, great.

But as an expression of creativity, most people cant get it to do that.

Its currently slightly more configurable clipart.

Now do open science.

More generally, specialty knowledge is valuable. From now on, all employees will be monitored in order to replace them.

You can't say AI is creating something new but that it isn't being creative with clearly explaining why you think that's the case. AI is creating novel solution to problems humans haven't cracked in centuries. I don't see anything more creative than this.

> AI creates novel algorithms beating thousands of googlers.

Random HNer on an AI post one day later

> Its currently slightly more configurable clipart.

It's so ridiculous at this point that I can just laugh about this.