<story><title>Competitive Programming with AlphaCode</title><url>https://deepmind.com/blog/article/Competitive-programming-with-AlphaCode</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FiberBundle</author><text>It never ceases to amaze me what you can do with these transformer models. They created millions of potential solutions for each problem, used the provided examples for the problems to filter out 99% of incorrect solutions and then applied some more heuristics and the 10 available submissions to try to find a solution.&lt;p&gt;All these approaches just seem like brute-force approaches: Let&amp;#x27;s just throw our transformer on this problem and see if we can get anything useful out of this.&lt;p&gt;Whatever it is, you can&amp;#x27;t deny that these unsupervised models learn some semantic representations, but we have no clue at all what that actually is and how these model learn that. But I&amp;#x27;m also very sceptical that you can actually get anywhere close to human (expert) capability in any sufficiently complex domain by using this approach.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>noduerme</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt; filter out 99% of incorrect solutions&lt;p&gt;And next year they can filter out 99.99%. And the year after that, 99.9999%. So literally, an exponentially greater number of monkey&amp;#x2F;typewriting units. (An AI produced Shakespeare play coming soon).&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; we have no clue at all what that actually is and how these model learn&lt;p&gt;This is why I&amp;#x27;m super cool-to-cold about the AI&amp;#x2F;deep learning classes being sold to young people who would otherwise be learning fundamental programming skills. It appears to me like trying to teach someone to ride a horse before they understand what skin, bones, muscles, animals, and horses are.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;get anywhere close to human (expert) capability in any sufficiently complex domain&lt;p&gt;You can get close enough to scalp a lot of billionaires, but at the end of the day it&amp;#x27;s always going to be human coders banging our heads against management, where they &lt;i&gt;ask for shit they can&amp;#x27;t visualize&lt;/i&gt; and it&amp;#x27;s our job to &lt;i&gt;visualize how their employees&amp;#x2F;customers will use it&lt;/i&gt;. Yes it involves domain specific knowledge, but it also requires, er, having eyeballs and fingers, and understanding how a biological organism uses a silicon-based device. That&amp;#x27;s kind of the ultimate DS knowledge, after all. Now, lots of coders just copy-pasta a front end, but after all the hooplah here I&amp;#x27;d be &lt;i&gt;extremely&lt;/i&gt; surprised if in ten years an AI has caught up to your basic web mill in Indonesia when it comes to building a decent website.</text></comment>
<story><title>Competitive Programming with AlphaCode</title><url>https://deepmind.com/blog/article/Competitive-programming-with-AlphaCode</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>FiberBundle</author><text>It never ceases to amaze me what you can do with these transformer models. They created millions of potential solutions for each problem, used the provided examples for the problems to filter out 99% of incorrect solutions and then applied some more heuristics and the 10 available submissions to try to find a solution.&lt;p&gt;All these approaches just seem like brute-force approaches: Let&amp;#x27;s just throw our transformer on this problem and see if we can get anything useful out of this.&lt;p&gt;Whatever it is, you can&amp;#x27;t deny that these unsupervised models learn some semantic representations, but we have no clue at all what that actually is and how these model learn that. But I&amp;#x27;m also very sceptical that you can actually get anywhere close to human (expert) capability in any sufficiently complex domain by using this approach.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bricemo</author><text>What do you think then is the difference between going from 50th to 99.9th percentile in their other domains? Is there something materially different between ago, protein folding, or coding? (I don’t know the answer, just curious if anyone else does)</text></comment>