Jensen Huang says kids shouldn’t learn to code — they should leave it up to AI.::At the recent World Government Summit in Dubai, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made a counterintuitive break with tech leader wisdom by saying that programming is no longer a vital skill due to the AI revolution.
Well, a lot of maths can be done with a calculator. They don’t need to learn to actually understand the maths unless either they actually want to, or they’re going into something like engineering.
I disagree. They need to understand math, but not being able to calculate math problems in their head.
Absolutely. The calculator is a tool to help you solve a problem. If you don’t understand the problem, then at best you can’t confirm if the answer is correct or not, and at worst the entire exercise is completely lost on you.
The same applies to LLMs. Sure you can get them to spit out code, but unless you understand the code it might be tough to verify that it does what you want. Further, if the code needs adapting (as it often does) then you are shit out of luck if you don’t understand it.
Sure you can ask the LLM to make changes, but the moment something goes wrong in the prompt you have an error sitting there polluting all future output.
Indeed. I’ve been watching a number of evaluations of different LLMs, where people give it a set of problems and then evaluate the results. The number of times I’ve seen “Well it got that wrong, but if we let it re-evaluate it, it gets it right”. If that’s the case, the model is useless. You have to know the right answer before you can ask the model for an answer because the answer you’ll get can’t be trusted.
Might as well flip a coin.
Yeah. I was tasked with evaluating LLMs for software dev at my company last year. Tried a few solutions and tools, and various workflows from just using it as a crutch to basically instructing the LLM to make the application. The former was rarely necessary (but sometimes helpful) and the latter was ridiculously cumbersome.
You need to be specific, and leave no room for interpretation, because the moment you do the latter it’ll start making stuff up that doesn’t necessarily fit in with the spec, and while you can correct that, that’s tedious in and of itself, and once it’s already had the idea it’ll often have a hard time letting go of it.
I also had several cases where it outright ignored provided context. That was even more frustrating because then it made assumptions that I’d already proven to be false.
The best use cases I got from it was
Essentially, it was a great helper, but a horrendous developer. Felt more like I was tutoring it than anything else.
I haven’t seen anyone mention rubberducking or documentation or understanding code as use cases for AI before, but those are truly useful and meaningful advantages. Thanks for bringing that to my attention :)
There are definitely ways in which LLMs and imaging models are useful. Hell I’ve been playing around with vocal synthesis for years, SynthV’s AI models are amazing, so even for music there’s use cases. The problem is big corporations just fucking it up. Rampant theft, no compensation for the original creators, and then they’re sitting on the models like dragons. OpenAI needs to rename themselves, preferably years ago, because there’s nothing open about them.
The way I see it, the way SynthV (and VOCALOID prior to that) works is great; you hire a vocalist with the express purpose of making a model out of their voice. They know what they’re getting into, and are getting compensated for it. Then there are licenses and such on these models. In some cases, like those produced by Eclipsed Sounds, anyone that uses a model to create a song gets decently free reign. In others, like the Bushiroad models, you are fairly restricted in what you can do with them.
Meaning the original artist has a say. It’s why some models, like Cangqiong, will never get AI updates; the voice provider’s wishes matter.
Using computer generated stuff as a crutch in the creation process is perfectly fine I feel, but outright trying to replace humans with “AI” is a ridiculous notion.
There has been synths that has been used to trigger vocal samples, among other things, for like 40(?) years, and this almost sounds like an evolution to that?
There are a lot of technological innovations in music (vax roll recording, tape recording, DAW recording, tube amps, transistor amps, amp modellers, Mellotron, analog synths, modular synths, digital synths, soft-synths, etc, etc, etc), and I think there’s surely more to come, and awesome new music to be made possible from the technological advantages.
I agree that the technology is not the problem, but how it’s used. If, let’s say, giant corporations feed all of human art into their closed, proprietary models only to churn out endless amounts of disposable entertainment, it would be detrimental to the creation of original art and I’d look upon that as a bad thing. But I guess we as a society has decided that we want to empower our corporate overlords at the expense of ourselves, to go far off topic of the original thread :/
Kind of? But I think, particularly with SynthV offering such realistic vocals, it might be useful for producers that can’t easily get vocalists, or don’t want to/can’t sing themselves. You can also obviously use it to create backing vocals and fill things out if you realise that you need more vocals and your vocalist isn’t available.
Or, maybe you’re like me and just enjoy tinkering with the voice. Here’s an example song by someone that’s pretty talented at tuning these.
This is the road I fear we’re heading down and it’s so dystopic. 😭
As an autist i can it agree more, understanding something is a requirement for me to do well.
So much of my struggles in school where based on using formulas without knowing why or whats behind them, not understanding the broader practical implications and intended goals of assignments, i was just told to just do them, the way it is asked with the formulas i was given (or was forced to remember). Lost motivation, my will to live even, spiraled and crashed hard in the end.
I got better, now i am sitting here scribbling all kinds of math in my little black book as a way to relax. I dont watch “tv” but i wont miss a kurtzegesagt or a veritasium.
I inherently love science, in major contrast to my later high school grades.
Absolutely. If one just “does as told” without understanding without understanding there is no way of knowing if one is lost or not.
I’ve had similar experiences in school myself, and they truly are detrimental to both learning and the joy of learning.
I’m glad you are doing better, and thanks for sharing your story :)
This is objectively stupid. There are tonnes of things you learn in maths that are useful for everyday life even if you don’t do the actual calculations by hand.
In many engineering professions you really need to understand the underlying math to have a chance in hell to interpret the results correctly. Just because you get a result doesn’t mean you get an answer.
Scientific calculators can do a ton of stuff, but they’re all useless if you don’t know anything about math. If you don’t know anything about the subject, you can’t formulate the right questions.
You need to learn what is addition subtraction multiplication division and also how it works to do anything meaningful with it in calculator…
They aren’t going to catch the typo or order of operations error they made on their calculator if they don’t understand the math
And that’s why people don’t understand that I’m not magic. Seriously, no you should know how to do math, understand how it works. Just like how as an engineer I need to understand how stories work.