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Services. 2026-08-30 13:00:09 - Paul D. Foy - ArtificialIntelligence Okay looking through my ramblings, it doesn't appear that I've made a post on AI and the consequences of all these AI developments, about which we hear interminably something on the news here and there. What's my take on AI? This explosion of digital phenomena of computing things: firstly it is clear that there has been a large explosion and that there has been a step change in developments. I'm thinking particularly about the large language models, which have obviously been developed with data over a period of time but they are making a revolutionary change in that they're granting access and knowledge effortlessly to almost anybody. You can direct your researchers on the particular subject as you like and the content is fairly good and you regard it as authoritative. On my specific discipline, mathematics and software engineering, it's a somewhat nuanced picture, I think, and it's not quite as I thought it might be initially. I think actually there is even more of a need for software engineers and I don't think software engineers will be made redundant very soon at all. There's more need for knowledge of software things and software techniques and digital techniques and how to navigate this landscape, even more than there used to be, to tell the truth. I must admit it doesn't make it very easy for old people, I don't think, here, including my mother. I've experience of that. On the ability of AI to generate code, it's true it can very well generate code and it can provide routines for you which you can slot in but they're somewhat beguiling and somewhat misleading. For example you can't actually use these routines often as libraries or as things you fully understand. They might be doing things in unexpected ways. On the whole it's very difficult building from them unless you understand them very well and you understand exactly what they're doing and that takes a bit of effort. It takes the same amount of effort as it traditionally did to code, inspect things, and to understand somebody else's code so there's no time saving there. Generally it is my experience. This is my experience. I'm speaking from experience. I'm speaking from experience of trying to use these AI-generated routines, these ChatGPT-generated routines, into my own code and to use them without too much amendment. It's not possible because they don't necessarily do things in the way you expect or the way you want. The black boxes of which you don't know the innards often and you can't rely on them to do exactly what you want to do. There's no time saving actually. As a time-saving technique, I find. It hasn't proved all that useful and I'm surprised about this. I thought they'd be more useful but there is a certain amount of use in the coding things of Claude and ChatGPT but it's not quite as I expected. They're not quite as easy to use as I expected. At the end of the day you've got to fall back on the human pace of doing things often, I find. So this AI way of generating code is actually, I'm thinking, very much like Matlab was regarded when I was working as a software engineer before. There you could knock up something, you could get something visually displayed, and you could see it all but you had no idea how it was doing it or how you'd have to do it yourself to do the same thing. I think it's strange. It's put the prototyping back into the software engineer rather than anybody else to tell the truth. It's making the software engineer even more important than anybody else. That's quite a quirky development I think. All these things have got to be evaluated and used and appreciated on their merits, I find. Perhaps it's what the developers of these tools wanted. They wanted more power for the software engineer, the poor hapless software engineer. Well I think it's wored from that point of view. 2026-08-30 19:39:46 - Paul D. Foy - Yes I'm seeing these tools, Claude and ChatGPT, as prototyping tools predominantly. They're pretty good at that. They're prototyping for the software engineer. Perhaps Matlab is prototyping for the mathematician, even for the software engineer, but the software engineer can now do more with these tools so that's quite good. I quite like them for that thing. I can't really rely on them for doing serious things, to tell the truth. Doing something that has to be correct at all costs and can't have any bugs in it, they don't operate like that at the moment. Perhaps they may do, perhaps things will improve. It'd be nice to speak to the people behind these algorithms, these LLM models and things like that, what they're actually doing. I must admit I don't fully understand the algorithms of the core of it. They do seem to be using someone else's work that has been done before. They're scooping up from somewhere a routine that has been written down, done before. In some sense I don't think they're originally thinking and creating the routine there. They're patching things together from what has been done before. I can tell this because there are often mistakes in them, mistakes as a developer might make anyway, and they've found those mistakes in somebody's work somewhere. I see them as prototyping tools at the moment, to tell the truth. They're good ones, they're well worth having. I can quite see that Claude and ChatGPT, though, might be making some kind of offering for the student market, for the academic community, much like Matlab was successfully doing. I can see that coming along. Not sure academics need to be too worried, certainly not in the software engineering and mathematics field, more so the software engineering field because it is just an explosion of things to do and an explosion of software engineers needed. Software engineers are needed more than ever it seems to me. Other disciplines, well, it's replacing all knowledge. All knowledge is inaccessible at the tip of a fingertip, at the tip of a well-structured question, so that's difficult for other subjects. I think if you're a historian or a medic you can just ask the question. It'll give you all the answers with sources often. We're all becoming computer scientists!. Post a comment: |