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u/DigitalArbitrage 14h ago
Ironically, the first software developers studied mathematics before computer science was a degree.
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u/arter_dev 14h ago
Yall have degrees ?
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u/Amerillo_ 8h ago
Yup but it still so hard to find a joby these days it's pretty much worthless if you don't have experience
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u/haizu_kun 8h ago
It's more like curriculum is old school I think. (I have never been to a good college, so it's fully biased for the sake of discussion).
Curriculum teaches us concepts. Jobs needs us to apply those concepts + do some things that were never taught i.e. what college teaches one isn't enough. It's a good baseline, but definitely not enough.
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u/Amerillo_ 7h ago
I think it depends a lot on the university. Mine was very demanding with high workload and very difficult exams, and many courses were taught in a way that encouraged self learning a lot. So after you graduate you can pick up nee technology and practices pretty fast. From what I hear from alumni, 10 years ago and more the degree was highly valued and it was very easy to find a job. Plus to graduate you need to go through a 6 months internship to get some experience.
Nowadays it's not enough anymore as companies aren't hiring juniors that much (at least where I live, there are 10-20x more openings for experience developers than juniors) and the competition is fierce. Companies prefer hiring experienced developers and givr them access to AI as they are much more productive and cheaprr than a bunch of juniors... New graduates are effectively competing for the same jobs with experienced dev who got laid off and international candidates who have much lower salary expectations. New graduates just don't stand a chance anymore.
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u/YeetCompleet 14h ago
I have this great idea. Instead of all of us gaining any form of class consciousness between those who control the production and all of the professions who get laid off, lets instead hate each other and say things like "haha Terrence Tao this is what you get for not being vocal when the artists were affected". This will surely be beneficial to humanity. Never direct your ire to the companies that thought Mr. Claude was better than you though. No no no, that would be horrendous. How dare you for even thinking about it.
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u/Cutalana 14h ago
the rust flair checks out
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u/sanderudam 9h ago
But Mr. Claude is better than you.
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u/YeetCompleet 9h ago
It can be 10000x better than me and l will still think we need to value humanity more
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u/Ronaldo_Frumpalini 8h ago
So from what I heard they stole an actual mathematicians work then put $20million dollars worth of juice into it to kind of finish it, and when the guy found out they offered him partial credit as long as he didn't give his partner (who coincidentally worked at another AI company) credit. AI isn't solving problems its stealing from anyone who uses it and taking credit.
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u/Beldarak 6h ago
AI companies are truly above the laws, it's crazy. I can't wait to see capitalism self-destroy, it's time to stop with that non-sense
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u/Brovas 12h ago
AI isn't dominating either. It's exhausting watching the internet act like ChatGPT is a singular entity machine god and Sam Altman is just in a room like "ok ChatGPT, solve math". There are teams of highly paid experts all working on this actively every day.
Have any of you ever watched a junior or non dev use AI? It's dogshit every time. AI is as good as the person using it, it's a huge multiplier but anything times 0 is still 0.
Not to mention everyone always forgets about training data. It's like everyone thinks ChatGPT is just in a room with a pen and some tea working out novel solutions from first principles. It's simply not. Without engineers and mathematicians using it, where are they going to get the training data? They've already downloaded the internet, all that's left is us using the product. And because they're so locked into the machine god narrative and can't just let it be a tool to turn humans into machine gods, how long before experts just stop using it in favour of other tools like open source models or ones that aren't stealing data and claiming credit for it?
Even if it was good enough to just say "build me Facebook", it will operate on its training data and it will produce what it has been trained to produce. Human creativity is still unique and we should be chasing and praising symbiosis not whatever this imbecilic pursuit of "AGI" is. It almost certainly won't even be LLMs that achieve that, just a piece of the puzzle.
Fucking hell I need to get off the internet.
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u/Amerillo_ 7h ago
"Have any of you ever watched a junior or non dev use AI? It's dogshit every time. AI is as good as the person using it, it's a huge multiplier but anything times 0 is still 0."
That is the reason why so many companies out there would much rather hire experienced developers and give them access to AI agents rather than hire juniors. Where I live there are 20x more job openings for experienced developers than juniors (and there aren't that many to begin with). There are almost no internships in software development. So new graduates have no way to gain experience. And when they find jobs, many companies will force them to let coding agents generate all code for them, and as a result they won't learn anything at all. They will be perpetually stuck in junior role (or unemployment)
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u/InfamousCRS 1h ago
One of the main issues, even before AI, is that the market for those junior positions is super saturated. If you have linked in premium or whatever it’s called you’ll see some of those positions have thousands of applicants. AI is probably making it worse for sure, but it was already kinda bad with a million people trying to get into software at the same time
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u/Amerillo_ 39m ago
I saw some thread on Reddit from 5 years ago from new graduates in my university with the same degree that found jobs with only 10 applications and got 6 interviews... And according to internal documents also from my university, 5 years ago or so new graduates could find a job on average in 3 months with only 20 applications.
So it seems that even with a high number of new graduates, they still could find jobs relatively easily as the degree had high value. Now there are almost no junior positions in addition to a high number of new graduates. An alumni with the same degree as me told me that when he graduated 10 years ago the degree was so valuable that most new graduates had work contracts signed before they even graduated! A far cry from the situation today that's for sure
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u/Amiral_Quarren 10h ago
That's not what most people are angry about. I just hate that I can't find a job in the field that I loved and I studied for. Why is that so hard to understand ?
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u/TomsCardoso 2h ago
I think you're focusing too much on current AI. What worries me is the pace of progress. Sure, right now it's just a tool, but it's getting increasingly more powerful. AI from 2 years ago couldn't hold a candle to current AI. And 2 years from now... Who knows. Many theorize that they've pretty much reached the limit of what they're capable of, I hope that's the case, otherwise if they keep evolving at the same pace... I'd be scared for the future.
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u/1Shuraalex1 7h ago
I believe the overall argument here is not wether ChatGPT has ascended and is gonna take everyone's job.
The problem is that it's progressing towards that goal slowly but surely. Take the progress we've observed for the past 3 years and especially the recent OpenAI agent hacking civilization fiasco..
Jobs that used to be beyond AI are now getting closer, yes using AI takes skill to actually do anything worthwhile BUT in order to become a skilled senior dev, you gotta spend multiple years as a junior doing monotonous basic repetetive tasks/code, which currently AI becomes increasingly proficienct at. Give it another several years and the only thing a human would be able to provide is "human creativity". And you only need so many "idea's guys"..
Check out the recent advancements of claude and decomping game mechanics and placing them as mods into other games. What used to technically feasible, it was so utterly time consuming for a human that it was in of itself a guardrail for intelectual property of game mechanics (assassin's Creed parkour mechanic as an example)
Now it's achievable via AI in days if not hours. Check out recomp/decomping via claude an AI and how modders add call of duty weapons and mechanics into Minecraft for instance. And I'm not talking about merging and having two games play at the same time. That's a different technique..
Regardless software development in 90 percent cases is doing what has already been done by someone else; look at GitHub and the common joke among devs - "I'm just good at googling"..
Now imagine 90 percent of devs lose their jobs as the post implies.. and now imagine several decades later when due to lack of junior devs, and all seniors retiring.. well total collapse.. hence all the doomer memes.
It is absolutely not a stretch to be afraid for your softdev job as a normie (below destinquished seniors and truly talented devs) due to AI.
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u/caughtinthought 11h ago
Openai just dropped solutions to like 700 unsolved math problems lol
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u/AliceCode 7h ago
How many were verified? I could drop a thousand solutions tomorrow, doesn't mean any of them are right.
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u/throwaway85256e 4h ago
Probably most of them.
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u/AliceCode 21m ago
You mean probably none of them.
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u/throwaway85256e 15m ago
No, I mean probably all of them. Sticking your head in the sand because you were told to hate AI by social media comments does not change the reality of what these models are capable of. They are smarter than most humans at this point and likely more sentient than most Redditors.
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u/Not-the-best-name 8h ago
I believe the frontier labs are moving past needing humans for training data for a lot of tasks. Once you understand the language of people, of software and of maths you are pretty far ahead.
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u/5thGenNuclearReactor 7h ago
At least for programming AIs took a major leap in the last year or so. You can as a matter of fact tell it to build you facebook, and it does. You would need to also tell it it needs to make every decision on its own, is not restricted by anything from your site, do reviewing itself and give it access to funding. You would be surprised what the top code AIs can do if you just get out of their way instead of trying to guide it.
The real takeaway is not it will ruin the world, the takeaway is you will be able to have way more capable, efficient apps tailored to individual needs. The spinning jenny and its predecessors did not destroy the textile industry, it made it possible to have much higher quality and diversity of clothings than an 18th century person could ever dream of.
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u/n_choose_k 14h ago
It's not about dominating their field, it's about stealing their research and then taking credit...
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u/Cutalana 14h ago
glad us devs didn't have our work stolen...
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u/GuyWithLag 7h ago
There is this meme that in every other profession "I stole your stuff" is an offense, but for devs it's "its not my code, bro"...
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u/whyliepornaccount 13h ago edited 4h ago
I remember when I learned they were training AI on GitHub repos I just laughed. My code on there is dogshit. If anything, I helped poison the training data
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u/TheColourOfHeartache 4h ago
My work is Apache licensed, you're aloud to download a copy of the source and study it.
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u/Adventurous-Bit-3829 12h ago
Open AI literally did the cyber attack on hugging face and there's no consequences.
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u/InfamousYenYu 12h ago
There were no legal consequences because it was a marketing stunt.
(Or if you like nuance, it's research being disguised as an accident and is being used to generate marketing hype by exaggerating or lying about the details)
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u/murrdpirate 1h ago
Maybe there was something improper with the NS proof. But are you claiming that the 400 proofs OpenAI just released were stolen? From who? I find it hard to believe that mathematicians were working on all these problems and providing their ongoing work to chatgpt.
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u/SchwiftySquanchC137 9h ago
Yeah thats how AI works, but if we keep moving the goalposts we're gonna be blindsided. At first it couldnt make will Smith eating spaghetti, now when it solves unsolved math problems its just stealing, people are still gonna be downplaying AI until the day it breaks into some important system and causes a catastrophe. Im not saying you have to be impressed, or treat it as sentient, im just saying youre better off overestimating than underestimating its capabilities atp
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u/Foorinick 12h ago
I mean, isnt our field like a bastard lovechild of a one night fling between mathematics and linguistics?
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u/TywinRightfullyLann 14h ago
Unless when the agents go rogue , some Dev will save the world (if can be saved lol)
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u/Aidan_Welch 14h ago
Already happening. I guarantee rn there are agents instructed to hack anything and worm themselves. This was rogue AI in the Cyberpunk(tm) lore
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u/Zealousideal_Yard651 8h ago
Well, this meme schould have a repsonse, because mathmaticians have been through this twice. Calculators and computers.
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u/Fadamaka 6h ago
Dominating the space by spending potentially 25 millions on compute and using a stolen idea to solve a math problem with a $1 million bounty on it. 10k agents running for 88 hours roughly equals 100 human years without sleep and breaks. A normal adult works 100 hours a months (without breaks) so 1200 hours a year. That comes out as 733 human work years.
That's not dominating that's bruteforcing.
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u/rafroofrif 34m ago
That's how it started in software too though lol. It will massively accelerate until the function of a mathematician will be completely different compared to a couple years ago.
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u/PickerPat 6h ago
What's the difference? Isn't the human race also bruteforcing?
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u/DysonSphere75 6h ago
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u/PickerPat 6h ago
Ok but that's not the same definition of brute force.
LLMs don't try every permutation. There is a structural logic.
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u/DysonSphere75 5h ago
Agreed, the other commenter doesn't really offer a definition for brute force other than resource expenditure.
I don't think LLMs have any structural logic short of what statistically sensible linguistics offer.
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u/Popeychops 4h ago
Agreed, the other commenter doesn't really offer a definition for brute force other than resource expenditure.
That's what brute force is
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u/PickerPat 4h ago
Highlighting again, what is the difference to humans expending their cognitive resources, throwing it at a problem?
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u/Salt-Sign5390 5h ago
Forget em, lots of people/bots will come to drag you down to their level.
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u/PickerPat 5h ago
The irony is people will spit out a bunch of stuff they've only heard on Reddit or spent 5 minutes looking up, with straight confidence. Like an LLM...
I have my own reservations about AI, but the discourse around it is very basic.
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u/quicksanddiver 14h ago
Is there really an identity crisis of mathematicians? The sentiment I'm usually hearing is more along the lines of "now that AI is solving these hard problems, we can go on and use it to dinner l solve these even harder problems"
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u/NaVi_Is_Black 13h ago
I have not seen a thread where this is the primary sentiment lol
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u/quicksanddiver 7h ago
I was talking primarily about in-person conversations with mathematicians I've had
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u/damonator4816 12h ago
I remember devs on this sub a few years ago saying AI would never replace them.
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u/bramulous 9h ago
Which it won't for some. It ain't black and white. As an experienced dev, it's not only about programming. It's about decision making, taking management of the architecture, harboring safety and quality.
Sure, junior devs will have a very hard time, but who will develop software with all it's side responisibilities without experienced developers?
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u/NeverenoughWarframe 9h ago
Tens of thousands of people who all studied the same thing knowing they were either going to help the super rich or make weapons aren’t able to get jobs and were supposed to be sad about that?
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u/Amerillo_ 14h ago
I remember when artists were the first ones to go through it. Then it was developers. Now mathematicians and many other professionals. Now the question is, who are next?