Péter Seprűs

engineer. privacy & security enthusiast. passionate learner. book lover. wannabe polyglot. hiker. climber. environmentalist.

[Péter Seprűs @ppseprus]

@neilrkaye Hey Neil! I was wondering if I could get a high res image of this picture to print it and put it on my wall? Thanks! 🙇‍♂️

[EDRi @edri]

🚨An extremely wide range of experts have warned against the misguided & dangerous measures in the @EU_Commission's Child Sexual Abuse Material Regulation #CSAR. See the summary below. ↩️

Like this thread and pass it on!🧵

#StopScanningMe

[Péter Seprűs @ppseprus]

@bookdepository FUCK.

[Peter Nixey @peternixey]

I'm in the top 2% of users on StackOverflow. My content there has been viewed by over 1.7M people. And it's unlikely I'll ever write anything there again.

Which may be a much bigger problem than it seems. Because it may be the canary in the mine of our collective knowledge.

A canary that signals a change in the airflow of knowledge: from human-human via machine, to human-machine only. Don’t pass human, don’t collect 200 virtual internet points along the way.

StackOverflow is *the* repository for programming Q&A. It has 100M users & saves man-years of time & wig-factories-worth of grey hair every single day.

It is driven by people like me who ask questions that other developers answer. Or vice-versa. Over 10 years I've asked 217 questions & answered 77. Those questions have been read by millions of developers & had tens of millions of views.

But since GPT4 it looks less & less likely any of that will happen; at least for me. Which will be bad for StackOverflow. But if I'm representative of other knowledge-workers then it presents a larger & more alarming problem for us as humans.

What happens when we stop pooling our knowledge with each other & instead pour it straight into The Machine? Where will our libraries be? How can we avoid total dependency on The Machine? What content do we even feed the next version of The Machine to train on?

When it comes time to train GPTx it risks drinking from a dry riverbed. Because programmers won't be asking many questions on StackOverflow. GPT4 will have answered them in private. So while GPT4 was trained on all of the questions asked before 2021 what will GPT6 train on?

This raises a more profound question. If this pattern replicates elsewhere & the direction of our collective knowledge alters from outward to humanity to inward into the machine then we are dependent on it in a way that supercedes all of our prior machine-dependencies.

Whether or not it "wants" to take over, the change in the nature of where information goes will mean that it takes over by default.

Like a fast-growing Covid variant, AI will become the dominant source of knowledge simply by virtue of growth. If we take the example of StackOverflow, that pool of human knowledge that used to belong to us - may be reduced down to a mere weighting inside the transformer.

Or, perhaps even more alarmingly, if we trust that the current GPT doesn't learn from its inputs, it may be lost altogether. Because if it doesn't remember what we talk about & we don't share it then where does the knowledge even go?

We already have an irreversible dependency on machines to store our knowledge. But at least we control it. We can extract it, duplicate it, go & store it in a vault in the Arctic (as Github has done).

So what happens next? I don't know, I only have questions.

None of which you'll find on StackOverflow.

(I write on AI from a technical and product perspective. If you find that interesting then please do follow me for more)

[Péter Seprűs @ppseprus]

@TBAlphabets @EAlphabets Hey Tim! Im new around, but been a Hungarian for some time now 😅 Little correction here: Székely-Hungarian would be somewhat more accurate. But while recent politics would like you to think the two are equivalent, the reality is that this is probably "just" of Székely origin 😉

[Péter Seprűs @ppseprus]

@Whokd1f1q @Rainmaker1973 Thanks! 🙂

[Péter Seprűs @ppseprus]

@TheGuySwann Thank you, @TheGuySwann! I had a ton of other questions and it would have been awesome to actually join in.. I will try to get on Discord and ask my questions there instead. Awesome stuff by @keet_io, I've been a long time fan and really looking forward for this to take up! 😎

[Péter Seprűs @ppseprus]

@TheGuySwann Me!!! :D

[Péter Seprűs @ppseprus]

@TheGuySwann ...ahhh! Why don't I have the ability to Request here?! 😅

[Péter Seprűs @ppseprus]

@TheGuySwann Instead of Mb or whatever, will there be another way to set thresholds for chats? Eg. for one chat I want to keep history forever, while another chat I might want to only retain half a year or whatever...

[Péter Seprűs @ppseprus]

@peppesilletti Well, Im not sure if they "must"...

[Péter Seprűs @ppseprus]

@peppesilletti I consider myself more of a generalist than a specialist, so I usually prefer the overall picture. I want to (need to) know the end use to feel engaged and be able to come up with the best solutions I can potentially provide.

[Péter Seprűs @ppseprus]

@peppesilletti And maybe, it's not about caring for the product, but about having a completely different mindset in general. A specialist would potentially be a specialist in every aspect of his/her life.

[Péter Seprűs @ppseprus]

@peppesilletti And I might have been a little unclear with my original reply. What I meant to write is that maybe you just label things differently: a generalist would be your "product thinker", while a specialist is the one who "like to be told what to do"...

[Péter Seprűs @ppseprus]

@peppesilletti No clue... just sayin' 😅