Comment by mlyle

> There is a wider point that ChatGPT is less autonomous than an assistant, as no matter the tenure with it, you'll not give it the level of autonomy that a human assistant would have as it would self correct to a level where you'd be comfortable with that.

IDK. I didn't give human entry level employees that much autonomy. ChatGPT runs off and does things for a minute or two consuming thousands and thousands of tokens, which is a lot like letting someone junior spin for several hours.

Indeed, the cost is so low -- better to let it "see its vision through" than to interrupt it. A lot of the reason why I'd manage junior employees closely are to A) contain costs, and B) prevent discouragement. Neither of those apply here.

(And, you know -- getting the thing back while I remember exactly what I asked and still have some context to rapidly interpret the result-- this is qualitatively different from getting back work from a junior employee hours later).

> that maybe for some classes of tasks it just won't be economically viable;

Running an LLM is expensive. But it's expensive in the sense "serving a human costs about the same as a long distance phone call in the 90's." And the vast majority of businesses did not worry about what they were expending on long distance too much.

And the cost can be expected to decrease, even though the price will go up from "free." I don't expect it will go up too high; some players will have advantages from scale and special sauce to make things more efficient, but it's looking like the barriers to entry are not that substantial.