Wait till the robots arrive. That they will know how to do a vast range of human skills, some that people train their whole lives for, will surprise people the most. The future shock I get from Claude Code, knowing how long stuff takes the hard way, especially niche difficult to research topics like the alternate applicable designs of deep learning models to a modeling task, is a thing of wonder. Imagine now that a master marble carver shows up at an exhibition and some sci-fi author just had robots make a perfect beautiful equivalent of a character from his novel, equivalent in quality to Michaelangelo's David, but cyberpunk.
Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
11–20 of 663 posts
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#12Engine efficiency, chess rating, AI cap ex. One example is not like the other. Is there steady progress in AI? To me it feels like it’s little progress followed by the occasional breakthrough but I might be totally off here.
I think you are totally off. Individual benchmarks are not very useful on their own, but as far as I’m aware they all tell the same story of continual progress. I don’t find this surprising since it matches my experience as well.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#13This tracks with my own AI usage over just this year. There have been two releases that caused step changes in how much I actually use AI:
1. The release of Claude Code in February
2. The release of Opus 4.5 two weeks ago
In both of these cases, it felt like no big new unlocks were made. These releases aren’t like OpenAI’s o1, where they introduced reasoning models with entirely new capabilities, or their Pro offerings, which still feel like the smartest chatbots in the world to me.
Instead, these releases just brought a new user interface, and improved reliability. And yet these two releases mark the biggest increases in my AI usage. These releases caused the utility of AI for my work to pass thresholds where Claude Code became my default way to get LLMs to read my code, and then Opus 4.5 became my default way to make code changes.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#14Engine efficiency, chess rating, AI cap ex. One example is not like the other. Is there steady progress in AI? To me it feels like it’s little progress followed by the occasional breakthrough but I might be totally off here.
What example do you need? In every single benchmark AI is getting better and better.
Before someone says "but benchmark doesn't reflect real world..." please name what metric you think is meaningful if not benchmark. Token consumption? OpenAI/Anthropic revenue?
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#15Point taken, but it's hard to take a talk seriously when it has a graph showing AI becoming 80% of GDP! What does the "P" even stand for then?
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#16It's astounding how subtly anti-AI HN has become over the past year, as the models keep getting better and better. It's now pervasive across nearly every AI thread here.
As the potential of AI technical agents has gone from an interesting discussion to extraordinarily obvious as to what the outcome is going to be, HN has comically shifted negative in tone on AI. They doth protest too much.
I think it's a very clear case of personal bias. The machines are rapidly coming for the lucrative software jobs. So those with an interest in protecting lucrative tech jobs are talking their book. The hollowing out of Silicon Valley is imminent, as other industrial areas before it. Maybe 10% of the existing software development jobs will remain. There's no time to form powerful unions to stop what's happening, it's already far too late.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#17[deleted]
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#18Cost per word is a bizarre metric to bring up. Since when is volume of words a measure of value or achievement?
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#19"In 1920, there were 25 million horses in the United States, 25 million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of progress in mechanical engines. And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared. I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did." I'm reminded of the idiom "be careful what you wish for, as you might just get it." Rapid technogical change has historically lead to p…
My reading of tfa is exactly that - the author is hoping that we'll have at least a generation or so to adapt, like horses did, but is concerned that it might be significantly more rapid.
Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden
#20[deleted]