Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

andyljones.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 663 posts

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#21

Post by AIorNot »

sothatsit wrote: post #13

This 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 offerin…

I would add Gemini Nano Banna Pro to that list - (its words with image ability) is amazing..

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#22

Post by websiteapi »

funny how we have all of this progress yet things that actually matter (sorry chess fans) in the real world are more expensive: health care, housing, cars. and what meager gains there are seem to be more and more concentrated in a smaller group of people.

plenty of charts you can look at - net productivity by virtually any metric vs real adjusted income. the example I like are kiosks and self checkout. who has encountered one at a place where it is cheaper than its main rival and is directly attributable to (by the company or otherwise) to lower prices?? in my view all it did was remove some jobs. that's the preview. that's it. you will lose jobs and you will pay more. congrats.

even with year 2020 tech you could automate most work that needs to be done, if our industry wouldn't endlessly keep disrupting itself and have a little bit of discipline.

so once ai destroys desk jobs and the creative jobs, then what? chill out? too bad anyone who has a house won't let more be built.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#23

Post by jameslk »

> Back then, me and other old-timers were answering about 4,000 new-hire questions a month.

> Then in December, Claude finally got good enough to answer some of those questions for us.

> … Six months later, 80% of the questions I'd been being asked had disappeared.

Interesting implications for how to train juniors in a remote company, or in general:

> We find that sitting near teammates increases coding feedback by 18.3% and improves code quality. Gains are concentrated among less-tenured and younger employees, who are building human capital. However, there is a tradeoff: experienced engineers write less code when sitting near colleagues.

https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#26

Post by OccamsMirror »

falcor84 wrote: post #19
burroisolator wrote: post #6

"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.

To be clear though, the horses didn't adapt. Their populate was reduced by orders of a magnitude.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#28

Post by jacobsenscott »

raincole wrote: post #14
barbazoo wrote: post #2

Engine 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?

Whenever I try and use a "state of the art" LLM to generate code it takes longer to get a worse result than if I just wrote the code myself from the start. That's the experience of every good dev I know. So that's my benchmark. AI benchmarks are BS marketing gimmicks designed to give the appearance of progress - there are tremendous perverse financial incentives.

This will never change because you can only use an LLM to generate code (or any other type of output) you already know how to produce and are expert at - because you can never trust the output.

Re: Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

#29

Post by echelon »

> 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.

> But looking at how fast Claude is automating my job, I think we're getting a lot less.

This "our company is onto the discovery that will put you all out of work (or kill you?)" rhetoric makes me angry.

Something this powerful and disruptive (if it is such) doesn't need to be owned or controlled by a handful of companies. It makes me hope the Chinese and their open source models ultimately win.

I've seen Anthropic and OpenAI employees leaning into this rhetoric on an almost daily basis since 2023. Less so OpenAI lately, but you see it all the time from these folks. Even the top leadership.

Meanwhile Google, apart from perhaps Kilpatrick, is just silent.

Post reply on HN