3/28/2023: GPT-4 is Mind Blowing

My productivity skyrocketed

Have you guys tried GPT-4 OpenAI released last week yet? It is truly high quality and understands my intent a lot better. I have been doing a lot of ETL/Analytics work on blockchain data and ChatGPT-4 has been immensely helpful. I asked ChatGPT to convert my MySQL schema into RedShift Schema and to write a PySpark script (with a sample given by me) on AWS Glue. It finished all the work in seconds and the scripts just worked. I ETLed 3 tables from MySQL to RedShift in ~10 minutes. This used to be a two hour slog including a lot of copy and paste. I am a lot more productive because of the tools.

Next, I was trying out a new dashboard-ing tool called Retool. Their documentation was not very good. I asked ChatGPT to teach me how to do specific things on Retool and I was able to set up something pretty quickly. I thought it would take me hours to get familiar with Retool but again it took me only minutes.

My general feeling is that GPT-4 understands my intent a lot better than GPT-3 and in turn produces much better results. Some people said it’s (almost) AGI. Honestly, I don’t care. But my understanding is that GPT-4 is an LLM supercharged with state-of-the-art Reinforcement Learning (from Human Feedback). I don’t know if this setup is enough to get us to AGI but I do know this technology will make white collar workers a lot more productive. As a result of that, we might not need so many people to work on white collar jobs. If we only need 20% of the white collar workers to produce 500% of the current output, how do we redistribute the wealth? Obviously, most of the increased productivity is generated by the AI, not the humans who operate AI.

Another worry I have is that this technology will make people stupid. I spent all these years learning various programming languages, system architecture, DevOps and data science to have a lot of context in software development. I am sure this applies to most other white collar professions too. But for young generations who don’t have to go through the learning to get tasks done, I wonder if people will use their brain less. It’s quite likely AI will be way smarter and way more productive than most if not all human beings and it’s unclear how useful intellect will be in the AI-ruled world . Maybe I am just overthinking it. Under the new world order, arrogant intellectuals will become irrelevant. Human beings will be happy and prosperous and live in peace governed by the very powerful and very rational AI.