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Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

I love that we are in the timeline where we are somewhat seriously evaluating probably super human intelligence by their ability to draw a svg of a cycling pelican.

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I still remember my jaw hitting the floor when the first DALL-E paper came out, with the baby daikon radish walking a dog. How the actual fuck...? Now we're probably all too jaded to fully appreciate the next advance of that magnitude, whatever that turns out to be.

E.g., the pelicans all look pretty cruddy including this one, but the fact that they are being delivered in .SVG is a bigger deal than the quality of the artwork itself, IMHO. This isn't a diffusion model, it's an autoregressive transformer imitating one. The wonder isn't that it's done badly, it's that it's happening at all.

This makes me think of a reduction gear as a metaphor. At a high enough ratio, the torque is enormous but being put toward barely perceptible movement. There is the huge amount of computation happening to result in SVG that resembles a pelican on a bicycle.

I don't love that this is the conversation and when these models bake-in these silly scenarios with training data, everyone goes "see, pelican bike! super human intelligence!"

The point is never the pelican. The point is that if a thing has information about pelicans, and has information about bicycles, then why can't it combine those ideas? Is it because it's not intelligent?

"I'm taking this talking dog right back to the pound. It told me to go long on AAPL. Totally overhyped"

Just because it's impressive doesn't mean it has "super human intelligence" though.

Well, it certainly came up with a better-looking SVG pelican than this human could have.

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