Science and Technology links (December 25 2022)

Published by

Daniel Lemire

A computer science professor at the University of Quebec (TELUQ).

8 thoughts on “Science and Technology links (December 25 2022)”

  1. Elon is, indeed, one of the early investors in OpenAI, but it can hardly be called one of his ventures. He even quit the board because of possible conflict of interest.

    The model behind ChatGP, text-davinci-003, has been available in the OpenAI playground for a while (free registration). It somehow made far less buzz when it wasn’t conversational but merely predicted the next word in a text. It also seems less scary. We don’t tend to project a personality onto a prediction model. But it has the same core capabilities.

  2. As a parent of kids who are about to decide what kind of career to pursue, is there any point in still encouraging them to follow their interests in CS and math? To me, the future job prospects of software engineers increasingly look very bleak, given the code generating capabilities of ChatGPT…

    1. It is unlikely that ChatGPT or any other artificial intelligence (AI) system will make software engineers redundant. While AI and machine learning systems can automate certain tasks, they still require human oversight and input to function effectively.

      Software engineers play a crucial role in the development and maintenance of AI and machine learning systems. They are responsible for designing and implementing the algorithms that power these systems, as well as integrating them into existing systems and applications.

      Additionally, software engineers are responsible for debugging and troubleshooting issues that arise, as well as continuously improving and updating the AI and machine learning systems to keep them functioning at their best.

      Therefore, it is unlikely that ChatGPT or any other AI system will completely replace the need for software engineers. Instead, it is more likely that AI and machine learning systems will augment the work of software engineers and enable them to be more efficient and effective in their roles.

      Btw: the above was written by ChatGPT… 😉

    2. Good programmers will be among the last to go. There are already tools to write boilerplate code; this is an evolution of that. Until general AI takes all intellectual and creative work, we’ll need people who can translate the nebulous desires of a business into working systems. And while ChatGPT and it’s ilk can reproduce and combine existing systems, like they’re trained on, they can’t imagine novel systems. Yet.

  3. Regarding the fusion, it’s not a factor of 10 sadly, it’s a factor of 100, because efficiency of the lasers is only 1% (they used 400 megajoules) and heat is not transformed into electricity with losing half of that in the way.

  4. Looks like dec 2022 was a huge huge month for breakthroughs. Chatgpt and Net fusion were introduced. Two of the biggest technologies since the last many years (decades?)/

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