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Comment by bashfulpup | Hacker News Reader

Very typical SV argument that R&D is "complex" and everything else is "simple".

Would it blow your mind if I told you 10yrs ago that we'd have AI that can do math/code better than 99% of humans but ordering a hotdog on doordash would be cutting edge and barely doable?

I don't disagree that "common" tasks are more valuable. I only argue that the argument these are easily automatable is a viewpoint based on ignorance. RPA has been around for over a decade and is not used in many tasks. AI is largely the same, until we get massive unrestriced access to the data for it we will not automate it.

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> if I told you 10yrs ago that we'd have AI that can do math/code better than 99% of humans

This not even remotely close to true. Like not even a little bit. I use Cursor and Gemini for work daily and I'd be hard pressed to think AI is a "better" programmer than any professional software engineer. Sure it makes writing code faster and more efficient, because you just click tab and three lines are written for you. It absolutely isn't better than me at coding though.

The claim about math is even more unbelievable than the claim about coding. We still don't have a single theorem proved and published by a LLM without human aid. LLMs barely follow a discussion in basic topology. It's incredibly ridiculous to state they're better than 99% of people. More like 0% of mathematicians and maybe 50% of college freshman.

The top 50% of college freshman math and physics majors is approximately equal to the top 1% of all people.

https://danluu.com/p95-skill/

I realized today while coding with cursor that AI seems to operate exactly the way I intuit it does, which is it acts like a junior engineer who works by copying existing code but doesn’t understand why. For a lot of tasks that works great, I do this a lot as a senior engineer, but I know when not to. you can’t let it run wild, because it doesn’t know when not too.

> a junior engineer who works by copying existing code but doesn’t understand why

Given the amount of time I have spent fixing code written like this over the years it is not encouraging.

> We still don't have a single theorem proved and published by a LLM without human aid.

I'm pretty sure that by "do math" the parent was referring to applying math, as one would do in the course of other tasks, and not mathematical research, just as by "code" they likely referred to writing code to solve a problem and not to algorithmic research.

And from my experience teaching & tutoring both math and programming at various levels, I would absolutely agree with the claim that AIs like Claude 3.7 Sonnet surpass over 99% of humans at typical short tasks.

It'll probably take some more time until context, memory and tool-use are improved sufficiently to allow AIs to tackle longer-term tasks effectively, but I'm sure it'll get there. And just as an example of progress, there was recently a post about the first "fully AI-generated paper to pass peer review without human edits or interventions" [0].

[0] https://www.rdworldonline.com/sakana-ai-claims-first-fully-a...

>10yrs ago [...] ordering a hotdog on doordash would be cutting edge and barely doable?

Online food ordering is a lot older than 15 years.

Doordash is not the same as traditional online ordering. DD and all delivery apps are 3rd party middlemen that set their own menu prices and operate separately from the restaurant.

Through this kind of obfuscation, they incentivize the growth of things like ghost kitchens, which are basically faceless factories. Nobody would order from them if they drove by one. but on the apps, they are displayed as standalone restaurants.

While I know there have been some issues with working conditions at ghost kitchens, I've also heard tons of horrible stories from regular kitchens, so it's not clearly to me that there's a significant difference on that front.

As for referring to them as "faceless factories", I can't even start to imagine what sentiment that should evoke in me. I don't have an issue buying food products made at actual factories, and have visited quite a few. As such I don't have any issue ordering from a ghost kitchen located in an industrial area that may look like a factory on the outside.

The code that AI is good at currently is exactly common tasks.

Good luck getting it to write a competitive video card driver for Nvidia hardware or anything else that requires actual creative problem solving that isn’t github boilerplate.

It's only common among trained experts. For most people, even simple code is astonishingly difficult.

I personally get more value from AI when coding more complex and novel things. Not fully automated, but English has become the most valuable language for me when coding.

I think this is the blind spot that a lot of tech workers have.

To them, AI is years (decades?) away from being able to produce an Excel clone.

To average people, excel is just a tool to add up columns of numbers. Something AI is readily capable of today.

> Good luck getting it to write a competitive video card driver for Nvidia hardware

Jensen says they use AI to build their chips.

> $CEO says they use $HYPED_TECH to build their $PRODUCT.

Color me surprised.

What about you, do you use AI currently?

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