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Comment by zarzavat

9 hours ago

The speedup from AI is in the exponent.

Just the other day ChatGPT implemented something that would have taken me a week of research to figure out: in 10 minutes. What do you call that speedup? It's a lot more than 10x.

On other days I barely touch AI because I can write easy code faster than I can write prompts for easy code, though the autocomplete definitely helps me type faster.

The "10x" is just a placeholder for averaging over a series of stochastic exponents. It's a way of saying "somewhere between 1 and infinity"

> Just the other day ChatGPT implemented something that would have taken me a week of research to figure out: in 10 minutes. What do you call that speedup? It's a lot more than 10x.

Can you share what exactly this was? Perhaps I don't do anything exciting or challenging, but personally this hasn't happened to me so I find it hard to imagine what this could be.

Instead of AI companies talking about their products, I think the thing to really sell it for me would be an 8 hour long video of an extremely proficient programmer using AI to build something that would have taken them a very long time if they were unassisted.

  • Sure. I needed to draw some parametric and smooth Bézier curves. LLMs are beasts at figuring out the appropriate equations. It would have taken me forever to work out where all the control points should go.