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Comment by o_nate | Hacker News Reader

There's an old game in the investing world of trying to time the top of a stock bubble by picking out the most breathless headlines and magazine covers, looking for statements such as the famous 1929 quote from two weeks before the market crash: "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." By that metric, we may be getting close to the top of the AI hype bubble, with headlines such as the one I saw recently in the NY Times for an Ezra Klein column: "The Government Knows A.G.I. Is Coming".

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Listening to his podcast on the topic was so disappointing. I think Ezra is a smart guy, but he doesn’t understand the field and the entire premise of the long discussion was that LLMs are going to get us to AGI.

He also casually dropped that he talked to people at firms with "high amount of coding", who told him that by the end of this or next year "most code will not be written by humans".

Yeah, okay. I work each day with Copilot etc and the practical value is there, but there are so many steps missing for this statement to be true, that I highly doubt it.

My case is, wouldn't we already see the tools that are at least getting close to this goal? I can't believe that (or AGI in fact) to be a big bang release. It looks more like baby steps for now.

I mostly write java, and I rarely even look at the byte code, let alone the output of C2. I guess AGI took my job.

>most code will not be written by humans

That cant even be considered a useful metric seeing as I spend similar time reviewing gpt written code

> but he doesn’t understand the field and the entire premise of the long discussion was that LLMs are going to get us to AGI.

You might disagree with this assessment, but it doesn't show that he doesn't understand the field, since many of the people in the field also think this. At least to the definition of AGI he used - AI that can replace most of the economic work done by humans.

> it doesn't show that he doesn't understand the field, since many of the people in the field also think this

Have you ever interviewed people for software positions?

After being a part of the interview loop myself for a while, I am confident that “many of the people in the field” also don’t understand it. Not even talking about the leetcode gauntlet or complex systems design at all, just pure fundamentals and very basics. Not even talking about the larger scale picture of the business .

With that in mind, the fact that “many of the people in the field” he interviewed at “places with high amount of coding” agreed with him doesn’t say much.

I've been interviewing people for fifteen years, yes.

And while it's true that many people don't understand much, I don't think this applies to many people working at frontier model or AI companies. Especially not the high level people Ezra said he talked with.

Fair. I am not sure if people working at AI companies is a good measurement for this, as they have a personal stake in their claims.

Maybe I am just morally corrupt enough to entertain this idea, but people working at AI companies overexaggerating and overhyping the impact of their work sounds like an obvious move.

I doubt it's that. But he also talked to people outside of these ai companies. The person he interviewed on the podcast was in the Biden administration.

I stop reading/listening as soon as AGI or Superintelligence is mentioned.

The AGI piece from Ezra was frustrating, to the extent that after listening to him talk about technology in this podcast, it made me question the quality of his knowledge in domains I know far less about.

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