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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

> when an average human that knows programming should be able to make one that works.

Very few people who "know programming" are actually capable of creating a complete application that serves a specific purpose. Many professional programmers struggle to implement basic algorithms like prime number testing. Coding AIs absolutely outperform the average programming professional, because the average programming professional can barely program. The software industry's demand for programmers is far too great for every coding position to be filled with top-class full stack engineers.

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Who is this average programmer you're talking about? We did primality testing in literally the first sem at uni

Take a look at this old, commonly referenced article, might be before your time:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

> We did primality testing in literally the first sem at uni

There's a lot of things you did during university classes. I bet you don't even remember half of them, and of the half you do, you couldn't actually do most of them from memory right now.

The advantage LLMs have over programmers is that they've seen much more code than any human ever would, remember pretty much all of it - not necessarily verbatim, but also as learned concepts, and that this knowledge does not decay. It's all equally accessible. Whether you ask LLM for basic or optimized primality testing algorithms, or how to use some obscure part of Microsoft's DCOM that approximately nobody on the planet wrote new code for in the last decade - they'll perform equally well. Not perfect, but not worse than an average software dev that does remember the things they're asked to work with.

Yeah, no contest, llms can remember things. Big deal. You're comparing memory with intelligence. It's a part of it sure, but there's also cognition, reasoning and i don't even know what more

> You're comparing memory with intelligence. It's a part of it sure, but there's also cognition, reasoning and i don't even know what more

Yes, and LLMs show all of the specific things you've listed.

Ah, here is our disagreement. I see what you mean but I'm not totally convinced by that.. reasoning isn't just being able to verbalize the steps you take, which llms can do but more so the steps themselves, and in my experience llms can fail in that department. Maybe they are somewhere between intelligent and not intelligent? In my opinion that's far more likely, as most things are not usually binaries but spectrums in our world.

To be clear, I'm not claiming LLMs are already better than humans in general sense, across many domains of cognition. I do believe however that, in the aspects you mention, SOTA LLMs (primarily GPT-4) fairly close to humans on the spectrum - they're "playing the same game", so to speak, in the sense in which prior computer systems, and most life forms on Earth, are not.

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