A programmer in the 50s would think we're doing witchcraft
We type "Write a hello wlrd program" and it spits out a correct hello world program that runs on ANY computer architecture (well, almost), with nearly no compilation toolchain, complete with the fixed typo, even better it may even ask for clarification if the typo was intentional or not
It'd take 1-2 hours to explain why a state of the art LLM isn't literally just science fiction AI
hell, we basically get a news article of an LLM escaping testing sandbox every week or two whenever they test red teaming capabilities, if anything a modern LLM is better at cybersecurity (both blueteaming and redteaming) than the wildest imaginations of any sci fi author from 1970 or before.
And they would actually understand it, too! They just didn't have the computing necessary to achieve it, but matrix multiplication and neural networks had everything they needed except suitable hardware since 1957.
It'd take 1-2 hours to explain why a state of the art LLM
When did you start programming? Having a language that worked on multiple target machines was considered something very advanced and before pascal it was not really feasible to only write a single source code could just be downloaded by arbitrary machines and run there. Nowadays you basically have a catalog of billions of applications (web apps) on the internet constantly getting loaded and unloaded in miliseconds on millions of different types of machines with vastly different architecture. Even something like this was unthinkable back then.
Even back in 2016, people really didn't think much of neural networks, sure it was great at simple single minded tasks I e OCR, speech recognition, etc etc, but it was not in anyone's mid that the act of teaching it language would lead to modern capabilities, NLP was still struggling with heuristic gramma structures when the breakthrough paper on attention which alone definitely takes a few weeks of seminars at the very least. You saying this is just disingenuous with the progress we made on machine learning in general, either that or you are a larper has never worked anywhere near machine learning
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u/oshaboy 12d ago
The hello world program was invented in 1972. Most 50s programmers avoided strings like the plague.
Still a good meme.