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The Adolescence of Technology

darioamodei.com

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Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#31

Post by dpflan »

root_axis wrote: post #25
jonas21 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At this point it seems pretty clear that LLMs are having a major impact on how software is built, but for almost every other industry the practical effects are mostly incremental. Even just a year ago, most people thought the practical effects in software engineering were incremental too. It took another generation of models and tooling to get to the point where it could start having a large impact. What makes you…

Software is more amenable to LLMs because there is a rich source of highly relevant training data that corresponds directly to the building blocks of software, and the "correctness" of software is quasi-self-verifiable. This isn't true for pretty much anything else.

The more verifiable the domain the better suited. We see similar reports of benefits from advanced mathematics research from Terrence Tao, granted some reports seem to amount to very few knew some data existed that was relevant to the proof, but the LLM had it in its training corpus. Still, verifiably correct domains are well-suited.

So the concept formal verification is as relevant as ever, and when building interconnected programs the complexity rises and verifiability becomes more difficult.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#32

Post by fragmede »

root_axis wrote: post #16
l1n wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's something Sonnet 4 did last year Hate to be that gal but a lot has changed in the past year

Not with respect to this particular type of failure.

Not sure what you mean.

https://claude.ai/share/8368a541-57d3-4139-88b5-2b007c47c690

Claude finds it's in the KJV first thing.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#34

Post by johnfn »

firasd wrote: post #4

When I see Dario say all this I wonder what he's seeing that seems so differentiated from my POV I wonder how much of Anthropic's success is based on a horde of prompt to code examples that they post-train on. We shouldn't assume Opus' web dev skills are the same as general intelligence Here's something Sonnet 4 did (Jul 2025) that I don't think a human intern would do when I made a wikisource tool (transcript follow…

I find one-off anecdotal examples like this to be a bit like discourse around global warming - "Look at that ridiculous polar vortex we had this week! Global warming can't possibly be a thing!" Of course, a trend line comprises many points, and not every point falls perfectly in the center of the line! I'm not necessarily saying you are right or wrong, but your argument should address the line (and ideally give some reason why it might falter) rather than just a single point on that line.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#35

Post by reducesuffering »

This is the most important article to come across HN in a while and I encourage you to read it for the immense intellectual wisdom it contains rather than the reflexive uneducated discourse on AI that envelops HN these days. I'm sure if you read it end-to-end you'd likely agree.

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#36

Post by firasd »

johnfn wrote: post #34
firasd wrote: post #4

When I see Dario say all this I wonder what he's seeing that seems so differentiated from my POV I wonder how much of Anthropic's success is based on a horde of prompt to code examples that they post-train on. We shouldn't assume Opus' web dev skills are the same as general intelligence Here's something Sonnet 4 did (Jul 2025) that I don't think a human intern would do when I made a wikisource tool (transcript follow…

I find one-off anecdotal examples like this to be a bit like discourse around global warming - "Look at that ridiculous polar vortex we had this week! Global warming can't possibly be a thing!" Of course, a trend line comprises many points, and not every point falls perfectly in the center of the line! I'm not necessarily saying you are right or wrong, but your argument should address the line (and ideally give some…

Ah but I'm not arguing about the rate of change in the trend. I'm saying the signals are decoupled. That is to say an LLM can be as good as a programmer as Linus Torvalds without having even basic knowledge-generalization abilities we assume the median human with no specialized skills would have (when given the same knowledge an LLM has)

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#38

Post by strange_quark »

firasd wrote: post #4

When I see Dario say all this I wonder what he's seeing that seems so differentiated from my POV I wonder how much of Anthropic's success is based on a horde of prompt to code examples that they post-train on. We shouldn't assume Opus' web dev skills are the same as general intelligence Here's something Sonnet 4 did (Jul 2025) that I don't think a human intern would do when I made a wikisource tool (transcript follow…

> When I see Dario say all this I wonder what he's seeing that seems so differentiated from my POV

Billions of dollars

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#39

Post by Balgair »

foobar10000 wrote: post #21
Balgair wrote: post #2

Initial thought about 1/5th of the way through: Wow, that's a lot of em-dashes! i wonder how much of this he actually wrote? Edit: Okay, section 3 has some interesting bits in it. It reminds me of all those gun start-ups in Texas that use gyros and image recognition to turn a C- shooter into an A- shooter. They all typically get bought up quite fast by the government and the tech shushed away. But the ideas are just…

For your Edit 2 - yes. Being discussed and looked at actively in both the open and (presumably being looked at) closed communities. Open communities being, for example : https://ssp.mit.edu/cnsp/about . They just published a series of lectures with open attendance if you wanted to listen in via zoom - but yeap - that's the gist of it. Spawned a huge discussion :)

Thanks for the link! Last thing I see there is from September though. Do you have a more direct link to the zoom recordings?

Re: The Adolescence of Technology

#40

Post by fc417fc802 »

root_axis wrote: post #25
jonas21 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At this point it seems pretty clear that LLMs are having a major impact on how software is built, but for almost every other industry the practical effects are mostly incremental. Even just a year ago, most people thought the practical effects in software engineering were incremental too. It took another generation of models and tooling to get to the point where it could start having a large impact. What makes you…

Software is more amenable to LLMs because there is a rich source of highly relevant training data that corresponds directly to the building blocks of software, and the "correctness" of software is quasi-self-verifiable. This isn't true for pretty much anything else.

Presumably at some point capability will translate to other domains even if the exchange rate is poor. If it can autonomously write software and author CAD files then it can autonomously design robots. I assume everything else follows naturally from that.
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