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"Several (thousands? tens of thousands?) actual human programmers, working together, could end up ranking as the 175th best coder on Earth" is not exactly a mind blowing take, and changing definitions mid-conversations isn't a productive way to have a conversation.
Fine, if an LLM was actually the 174th best coder on Earth, and writing code is not the hard part of delivering value through code, we should be seeing LLMs being improved by people with next to no knowledge of programming, using LLMs to assist them.
Consider the following argument:
This argument does not make sense, because accelerating from 0 to 60 is not a meaningful bottleneck on a commute through gridlocked traffic. Similarly, "being able to one-shot extremely tricky self-contained programming problems at 99.9th percentile speed" becoming cheap is not something that alleviates any major bottleneck the big AI labs face.
The basic algorithm underlying LLMs is very simple. Here's GPT-2 inference in 60 lines of not-very-complicated code. The equivalent non-optimized training code is similar in size and complexity. The open-source code that is run in production by inference and training providers is more complicated, but most of that complexity comes from performance improvements, or from compatibility requirements and the software and hardware limitations and quirks that come with those.
The thing about performance on "solve this coding challenge" benchmarks is that coding challenges are tuned such that people have a low success rate at solving them, but most valuable work that people do with code is actually solving problems where the success rate is almost 100%. "Our AI has an 80% solve rate on problems which professionals can only solve 10% of the time" sounds great, but if the AI system only has a 98% solve rate on problems which professionals can solve 99.9% of the time, that will sharply limit the usefulness of that AI system. And that remains true even if the reason that the AI system only has a 98% solve rate is "people don't want to give it access to a credit card so it can set up a test cluster to validate its assumptions".
That limitation is unimportant in some contexts (e.g. writing automated tests where, where if the test passes and covers the code you expect it to test you're probably fine) and absolutely critical in other contexts (e.g. $X0,000,000 frontier model training runs).
Also, alternative snarky answer
LLMs derive their ability to do stuff mostly from their training data, not their system architecture. And there are many, many cases of LLMs being used to generate or refine training data. Concretely, when openai pops up their annoying little "which of these two chatgpt responses is better" UI, the user answering that question is improving the LLM without needing any knowledge of programming.
I agree, because the arguments are not analogous. Jim didn't claim an LLM ranks 174th on a narrow metric of performance, it claimed it's the 174th best coder, so right off the bat the analogy to cars and commute cars in heavy traffic is fundamentally broken. When you said writing code was never the hard part, my response could be in roughly analogized to "if the Lamborghini was the (174th) fastest car, I should be able to make my commute no slower than in most other cars on the same gridlocked commute". If the limiting factors have nothing to do with the car itself, that means there's even more reason to expect that one of the best cars will at least be no worse than all the others.
It's not even clear that LLMs are analogous to cars here. When you call something a coder, I expect it to be able to do the job of a coder, rather than being a tool that helps improve performence. From what you're saying they'd be more like high-performance component that could improve a particular car, but won't be able to go anywhere on their own.
Which is why it might be a terrible idea to do things like call an LLM "the 174th best coder on Earth" based on it's ranking in such challenges.
The original tweet Jim referenced said
Jim summarized this as
Which is perhaps a little sloppy in terms of wording, but seems to me to be referring to coding as a task rather than a profession. I've never seen "coder" used as the word for the profession of people whose job requires them to write code, while I have seen that term used derogatorily to refer to people who can only code but struggle with the non-coding parts of the job like communicating with other people.
That said, if you're interpeting "coder" as a synonym for "software developer" and I'm interpreting it as meaning "someone who can solve leetcode puzzles", that's probably the whole disconnect right there.
Yeah, that's a good analogy. Coding ability is a component of a functional software developer, an important one, but one that is not particularly useful in isolation.
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