But the reason I think that the recent advances we’ve made aren’t just hype is that, over the past year, I have spent at least a few hours every week interacting with various large language models, and have been consistently impressed by their ability to solve increasingly difficult tasks I give them. And as a result of this, I would say I’m at least 50% faster at writing code for both my research projects and my side projects as a result of these models.
Most of the people online I find who talk about LLM utility are either wildly optimistic, and claim all jobs will be automated within three years, or wildly pessimistic, and say they have contributed nothing and never will.
So in this post, I just want to try and ground the conversation. I’m not going to make any arguments about what the future holds. I just want to provide a list of 50 conversations that I (a programmer and research scientist studying machine learning) have had with different large language models to meaningfully improve my ability to perform research and help me work on random coding side projects.