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.

    • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I mean, we aren’t exactly teaching kids how to hand calculate trig anymore. Sin, Cos, and Tan operations are pretty much exclusively done with a calculator and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who graduated in the last 25 years who knows any other way to do it.

      • 257m@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        I haven’t graduated high school yet and even I know how to calculate sin and cos with the taylor series maclurin expansion. I am still in grade 11 and I assume they would be teaching it next year when I take my calculus class? Do they not teach it anymore?

    • JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      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.

      • Skvlp@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        I disagree. They need to understand math, but not being able to calculate math problems in their head.

        • Dojan@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          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.

          • wewbull@feddit.uk
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            9 months ago

            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.

            • Dojan@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              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

              • Explaining unclear code
              • Writing clear documentation (it was really good at this)
              • Rubberducking

              Essentially, it was a great helper, but a horrendous developer. Felt more like I was tutoring it than anything else.

              • Skvlp@lemm.ee
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                9 months ago

                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 :)

                • Dojan@lemmy.world
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                  9 months ago

                  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.

      • HeavyDogFeet@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        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.

      • berg@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        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.

      • yildolw@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        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

  • Pat12@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    I know some Gen Z recent grads who use chatgpt to write their code.

    back in my day, we had to write our code ourselves…

    • desconectado@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      I use chatgpt for coding (millennial). You still need to know how to code though, because 50% of the time it doesn’t work properly. You need to explain the nature of your variables, and the overall process you want to achieve. But I still save a good amount of time, because now I don’t need to remember the specific syntax for a particular function, and it has saved me reading documentation because in can tell how some functions work by context.

      Not learning how to code because of ai is like not learning math because there are calculators, sure, you don’t need to know the multiplication tables by heart, but you need to know what multiplication is and how it’s used to solve real world pringles.

      • Cyyy@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        i use chatgpt for coding (i can code myself but it helps with a lot of stuff), and if I wouldn’t be able to code i would wonder why nothing works. but because i know how to code i know that chatgpt is often just writing horrible code which often does something completly else than asked. so i often think “screw this i do it myself” after countless trys to let chatgpt fix it.

  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time…when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…”

    Carl Sagan, Astrologist/Horposcopist from ancient times.

  • T156@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Isn’t this basically “CEO of AI hardware company says that more people should use AI”? Not really news, since you wouldn’t really expect him to say otherwise.

      • Blemgo@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Linus Torvals talk at the Aalto University. Specifically a segment where he talks about how hard it is to work with Nvidia when it comes to the Linux kernel.

  • hubobes@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    I use LLMs daily to code but the more complex the issue is I try to solve the more work I have to do to get it to actually produce what I need. I feel like at some point we will get to where UML failed…it will just be easier to write the code.

    But I don’t like writing long Linq queries or Angular templates or whatever, it does that quite well (70% of the time it is 70% correct or so). So it takes over the part of coding I dislike.

    So no just being able to write code might be unnecessary but that’s like 10% of my day.

    • fidodo@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Writing single functions just isn’t the hard part of programming in the vast majority of programs, the hard part is managing a project in a maintainable, robust, and extensible way.

  • Annoyed_🦀 @monyet.cc
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    9 months ago

    I thought coding skill is mostly about logical thinking, problem solving, and idea implementation instead of merely writing code?

    Even then, who’s gonna code to improve the AI in a meaningful way if everyone not learning to code? What if AI write their own update badly and no one correct it, and then the badly written AI write an even worst version of it? I think in biology we called that cancer.

    • OleoSaccharum@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      Coding, like writing scientific papers, or novels, is only about randomly generating strings, silly human.

      • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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        9 months ago

        Coding, like writing scientific papers, or novels, is only about randomly generating strings

        See also, litigation, medical diagnoses, creating art that evokes an emotional reaction in its audience, etc.

        It turns out that virtually all human advancement and achievement comes down to simply figuring out what the next most likely token is based on what’s already been written.

        (/j incase it’s not obvious)