Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by jstanley » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 10:52 AM UTC

frchalli wrote: post #157

twodave wrote: post #126

Horses eat feed. Cars eat gasoline. LLMs eat electricity, and progress may even now be finding its limits in that arena. Besides the fact that just more compute and context size aren’t the right kind of progress. LLMs aren’t coming for your job any more than computer vision is, for a lot of reasons, but I’ll list two more: 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do…

> The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value. There were many secretaries up until the late 20th century that took dictation, either writing notes of what they were told or from a recording, then they typed it out and distributed memos. At first, there were many people typing, then later mimeograph machines took away some of those jobs, then copying machines made…

> At first, there were many people typing, then later [...]

There were more people typing than ever before? Look around you, we're all typing all day long.

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

#342

Post by alex_duf » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 10:52 AM UTC

socketcluster wrote: post #203

I think my software engineering job will be safe so long as big companies keep using average code as their training set. This is because the average developer creates unnecessary complexity which creates more work for me. The way the average dev structures their code requires like 10x the number of lines as I do and at least 10x the amount of time to maintain... The interest on technical debt compounds like interest…

The majority of drivers believe they’re better than average [1]

1: https://www.lbec-law.com/blog/2025/04/the-majority-of-driver...

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

#343

Post by bgwalter » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 10:57 AM UTC

"I was one of the first researchers hired at Anthropic."

The article is a Misanthropic advertisement. The "AI" mafia feels that no one wants their products and doubles down.

They are so desperate that Pichai is now talking about data centers in space on Fox News. Next up are "AI" space lasers.

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

#344

Post by NotOscarWilde » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 11:00 AM UTC

jakewins wrote: post #286

shaka-bear-tree wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny the original post doesn’t mention AI replacing the coding part of his job. There seems to be a running theme of “okay but what about” in every discussion that involves AI replacing jobs. Meanwhile a little time goes by and “poof” AI is handling it. I want to be be optimistic. But it’s hard to ignore what I’m doing and seeing. As far as I can tell, we haven’t hit serious unemployment yet because of momentum and…

I’m deeply sceptical. Every time a major announcement comes out saying so-and-so model is now a triple Ph.D programming triathlon winner, I try using it. Every time it’s the same - super fast code generation, until suddenly staggering hallucinations. If anything the quality has gotten worse, because the models are now so good at lying when they don’t know it’s really hard to review. Is this a safe way to make that sy…

> Is the lock structuring here really deadlock safe? The model will tell you with complete confidence its code is perfect

Fully agree, in fact, this has literally happened to me a week ago -- ChatGPT was confidently incorrect about its simple lock structure for my multithreaded C++ program, and wrote paragraphs upon paragraphs about how it works, until I pressed it twice about a (real) possibility of some operations deadlocking, and then it folded.

> Every time a major announcement comes out saying so-and-so model is now a triple Ph.D programming triathlon winner, I try using it. Every time it’s the same - super fast code generation, until suddenly staggering hallucinations.

As an university assistant professor trying to keep up with AI while doing research/teaching as before, this also happens to me and I am dismayed by that. I am certain there are models out there that can solve IMO and generate research-grade papers, but the ones I can get easy access to as a customer routinely mess up stuff, including:

* Adding extra simplifications to a given combinatorial optimization problem, so that its dynamic programming approach works.

* Claiming some inequality is true but upon reflection it derived A >= B from A (This is all ChatGPT 5, thinking mode.)

You could fairly counterclaim that I need to get more funding (tough) or invest much more of my time and energy to get access to models closer to what Terrence Tao and other top people trying to apply AI in CS theory are currently using. But at least the models cheap enough for me to get access as a private person are not on par with what the same companies claim to achieve.

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

#345

Post by dsego » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 11:01 AM UTC

blondie9x wrote: post #73

This post is kind of sad. It feels like he's advocating for human depopulation since the trajectory aligns with horse populations declining by 93% also.

Not advocating, just warning about things to come.

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

#346

Post by pmg101 » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 11:03 AM UTC

xlbuttplug2 wrote: post #102

kgk9000 wrote: post #82

I think the author's point is that each type of job will basically disappear roughly at once, shortly after AI crosses the bar of "good enough" in that particular field.

I think the turning point will be when AI assisted individuals or tiny companies are able to deliver comparable products/value as the goliaths.

Why hasn't this happened already?

I'm willing to believe the hype on LLMs except that I don't see any tiny 1-senior-dev-plus-agents companies disrupting the market. Maybe it just hasn't happened "yet"... But I've been kind of wondering the same thing for most of 2025.

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

#347

Post by gverrilla » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 11:04 AM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #150

ible wrote: post #5

People are not simple machines or animals. Unless AI becomes strictly better than humans and humans + AI, from the perspective of other humans, at all activities, there will still be lots of things for humans to do to provide value for each other. The question is how do our individuals, and more importantly our various social and economic systems handle it when exactly what humans can do to provide value for each oth…

I'm optimistic. Banks used to have rooms full of bank clerks who manually did double-entry bookkeeping for all the bank's transactions. For most people, this was a very boring job, and it made bank transactions slow and expensive. In the 50's and 60's we replaced all these people with computers. An entire career of "bank clerk" vanished, and it was a net good for humanity. The cost of bank transactions came down (by…

"benefits" = shareholder profits ++

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

#348

Post by ben_w » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 11:05 AM UTC

skissane wrote: post #234

baq wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the optimistic take, too. There are plenty of countries which don’t care about votes, indeed there are dictators that don’t care about their subjects, they only care about outcomes for themselves. The economic argument only works in capitalism and rule of law - and that’s assuming money is worth anything anymore.

The Chinese Communist Party is obsessed with social stability. Do you think they’ll allow AI to take all the jobs, destroying China’s domestic economy in the process? Or will they enact human protectionism regulations? What Would Xi Jinping Do?

> Do you think they’ll allow AI to take all the jobs, destroying China’s domestic economy in the process?

If AI can take all the jobs (IMO at least a decade away for the robotics, and that's a minimum not a best-guess), the economy hasn't been destroyed, it's just doing whatever mega-projects the owners (presumably in this case the Chinese government) want it to do.

That can be all the social stability stuff they want. Which may be anything from "none at all" to whatever the Chinese equivalent is of the American traditional family in a big detached house with a white picket fence, everyone going to the local church every Sunday, people supporting whichever sports teams they prefer, etc.

I don't know Chinese culture at all (well, not beyond OSP and their e.g. retelling of Journey to the West), so I don't know what their equivalents to any of those things would be.

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

#349

Post by azan_ » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 11:06 AM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #137

twodave wrote: post #126

Horses eat feed. Cars eat gasoline. LLMs eat electricity, and progress may even now be finding its limits in that arena. Besides the fact that just more compute and context size aren’t the right kind of progress. LLMs aren’t coming for your job any more than computer vision is, for a lot of reasons, but I’ll list two more: 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do…

Yip, the famous example here being John Maynard Keynes, of Keynesian economics. [1] He predicted a 15 hour work week following productivity gains that we have long since surpassed. And not only did he think we'd have a 15 hour work week, he felt that it'd be mostly voluntary - with people working that much only to give themselves a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Instead our productivity went way above anything…

> We just instead started making billionaires by the thousand, and soon enough we can add trillionaires.

Didn’t we also get standards of living much higher than he would ever imagine? I think blaming everything on billionaires is really misguided and shallow.

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

#350

Post by dsego » Tue, Dec 09, 2025, 11:07 AM UTC

xwolfi wrote: post #122

pansa2 wrote: post #112

> 90% of the horses in the US disappeared Where did they go?

they grew old and died ?

There is a TV movie In Pursuit of Honor (1995) claiming to be based on true events. My short search online states that such things were never really documented, but it's plausible that there were similar things happening.

> In Pursuit of Honor is a 1995 American made-for-cable Western film directed by Ken Olin. Don Johnson stars as a member of a United States Cavalry detachment refusing to slaughter its horses after being ordered to do so by General Douglas MacArthur. The movie follows the plight of the officers as they attempt to save the animals that the Army no longer needs as it modernizes toward a mechanized military.