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Required time to move into a regulated engineering field is 4 years. 4 years in the AI world is currently a 10^4 = 10000x capability delta. It's not like the engineering and academia curmudgeons will replace their employees as much be utterly destroyed by the AI labs hiring maybe one or two tenured professors per field to make an internal startup and then letting them oversee what the megascaled reasoners spit out at breakneck pace with a sufficiently low hallucination rate.

I really wish to be wrong here.

How? Seems obvious that I missed the boat on LLMs. I don't have any ideas anyway (I have only one "idea", and it's someone elses and I have no faith that it'll get me a foothold). Robotics will be solved pretty soon by 10x reasoners if this development curve continues. Everything I can "change to" has a 2 year delta and that is a 100x capability change within the AI space right now.

> Effectively they have completely automated SWE job, pair programmer was just a marketing speak, real intention is clear.

Frankly, this was obvious to me since the Copilot Workspace announcement.

It's so hard not for me to not slide completely into nihilistic despair as a student right now. I chose wrong, and now there is nothing I can do. Day in and day out I'm talking about my projects and internships as if my entire field that I've dreamed about for the past decade isn't about to get torched. With the pace that this field is getting solved I probably won't even have enough time to "pivot" to anything before they also get solved or upturned as well.

Call me a doomsday prepper, but frankly I haven't heard a compelling argument against this line of thinking that is actually in line with the absurd development curve I've seen. 4 years ago these models weren't capable of stringing together a TODO app.

I really, really want to be wrong. I really do.

Until reasoner AI 10x's research and solves it far ahead of schedule.

You don't even need robotics, just a good multi-modal reasoner model with domain knowledge that you can attach to a headset manna-style [0]. The only thing that makes blue collar work different from any minimum wage labor is the System 2 reasoning required, and that'll get solved.

[0] https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

Sort of.

To elaborate, the idea is that a Christian (someone who has accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior) will show an outward transformation into someone who is Christ-like and obedient to God. When this doesn't happen at all, and that they remain completely un-Christian, you know it isn't genuine (See Matthew 7:15-20). The idea of how a Christian is shown by their outward renewal also touched on in Romans 12:9-21, Galatians 5:16-24, etc. It's not a perfect process, and it's the renewal is not a pre-requisite to salvation but rather an end result of salvation (Ephesians 2:8-12).

Therefore, Christians have a framework that can be used to identify and rebuke people who distort the teachings of Christianity into something that is in rebellion to God. This doesn't really exist with secular philosophy, which lays out the "ideal" but has no way to prevent itself from being warped.

1. Christianity (like other religions) has built-in protections against false teaching within their own theology, which isn't really the same for secular philosophical frameworks.

2. There's a level of outlier visibility going on with a lot of people who abuse Christianity. The Christian who sincerely follows Jesus and walks in obedience don't seek out visibility or to exalt themselves. Even ones that evangelize do it on a local scale most often. Meanwhile people who abuse Christianity (Prosperity gospel, Christian nationalists, etc.) try to seek out large followings to bolster their power or wealth, making them seem like the "face" of Christianity whe

I think it's an apples and oranges comparison to lump in Christianity (a religion that outright predicts that people will abuse it and protects itself against that) with liberalism/marxism (a philosophy that has no such protection and can be mangled into whatever you want). If anything, liberalism/marxism are more like secularized offspring of Christianity, given that they would probably never developed if it wasn't for their founding figures living in a western moral context completely drenched in Christian ideas.

And wound up building a heretical pseudo-Christianity where the messiah is a superintelligence.

How do I avoid the angst about this stuff as a student in computer science? I love this field but frankly I've been at a loss since the rapid development of these models.

What do you expect to come from full o3 in terms of automating software engineering?

As if cheap multi-modal reasoning won't completely change the nature of blue-collar labor. There isn't a single industry that won't be upturned by this stuff long-term. Most you can do is "be water" and hold onto something that won't rot away (faith for me).

I'm on your side, but there's two readings of these reports:

1) "We are serious, this is going to happen."

2) "AI is big right now so if we hype it we might get some money!"

I'd say with the current state of things it's more like two singularities in which either:

- A landian-stephensian accelerationist timeline occurs where the majority of the urban population becomes some flavor of AGI-tuned VR junkie

- An extreme naturalistic counterculture movement occurs that causes majority of the civilized world to willingly roll themselves back 1 or 2 centuries technologically in order to feel something again

What is that bump in utility in practical terms? You can point to a benchmark improvement but that's no indication the agent swarm is not reducing to "giving an llm an arbitrary amount of random guesses".

Where this ends is general intelligence though, where all more challenging tasks can simply be done by the model.

The scenario I fear is a "selectively general" model that can successfully destroy the field I'm in but keep others alive for much longer, but not long enough for me to pivot into them before actually general intelligence.

Unrelated, but since you seem to have experience here, how would you recommend getting into the bleeding edge of LLMs/Agents? Traditional SWE is obviously on it's way out, but I can't even tell where to start with this new tech and struggle to find ways to apply them to an actual project.

This is me as well. Either:

1) Just give up computing entirely, the field I've been dreaming about since childhood. Perhaps if I immiserate myself with a dry regulated engineering field or trade I would perhaps survive to recursive self-improvement, but if anything the length it takes to pivot (I am a Junior in College that has already done probably 3/4th of my CS credits) means I probably couldn't get any foothold until all jobs are irrelevant and I've wasted more money.

2) Hard pivot into automation, AI my entire workflow, figure out how to use the bleeding edge of LLMs. Somehow. Even though I have no drive to learn LLMs and no practical project ideas with LLMs. And then I'd have to deal with the moral burden that I'm inflicting unfathomable hurt on others until recursive self-improvement, and after that it's simply a wildcard on what will happen with the monster I create.

It's like I'm suffocating constantly. The most I can do to "cope" is hold on to my (admittedly weak) faith in Christ, which provides me peace knowing that there is some eternal joy beyond the chaos here. I'm still just as lost as you.

> The child, J.F., is autistic

This always sticks out to me in these lawsuits. As someone on the spectrum, I'd bet that the worst C.AI victims (the ones that spur these lawsuits) are nearly always autistic.

One of the worst parts about being on the deeper parts of the spectrum is that you actively crave social interaction while also completely missing the "internal tooling" to actually get it from the real world. The end result of this in the post-smartphone age is this repeated scenario of some autistic teen being pulled away from their real-life connections (Family, Friends (if any), School, Church) into some internet micro-community that is easier to engage with socially due to various reasons, usually low-context communication and general "like-mindedness" (shared interests, personalities, also mostly autistic). A lot of the time this ends up being some technical discipline that is really helpful long-term, but often it winds up being catastrophic mentally as they forsake reality for whatever fandom they wound up in.

I've taken a look at r/CharacterAI out of morbid curiosity, and these models seem to turn this phenomenon up to 11, retaining the simplified communication but now capable of aligning with the personality and interests of the chatter to a creepy extent. The psychological hole you can dig yourself with these chatbots is so much deeper than just a typical fandom, especially when you're predisposed to finding it appealing.

I'm not saying that C.AI is completely blameless here, but I think the same category of people getting addicted to these models is the same one that would also be called "terminally online" in today's slang. It's the same mechanisms at work internally, it just turns out C.AI is way better at exploiting it than old school social media/web2 has.

More specifically: What kind of advice does GP have for Computer Science students in school right now?

I've been frankly terrified of the pace of LLM development since 2022.

Not really product related: The current trajectory of LLMs/Agents, what is your career advice to someone in school for Computer Science right now?