>Commenters on HN claim it must not be that hard, or OpenAI is lying, or cheated. Anything but admit that it is impressive
Every time on this site lol. A lot of people here have an emotional aversion to accepting AI progress. They’re deep in the bargaining/anger/denial phase.
All my life I’ve taken for granted that your value is related to your positive impact, and that the unique value of humans is that we can create and express things like no other species we’ve encountered.
Now, we have created this thing that has ripped away many of my preconceptions.
If an AI can adequately do whatever a particular person does, then is there still a purpose for that person? What can they contribute? (No I am not proposing or even considering doing anything about it).
It just makes me sad, like something special is going away from the world.
It seems a common recent neurosis (albeit protective one) to proclaim a permanent human preeminence over the world of value, moral status and such for reasons extremely coupled with our intelligence, and then claim that certain kinds of intelligence have nothing to do with it when our primacy in those specific realms of intelligence is threatened. This will continue until there's nothing humans have left to bargain with.
The world isn't what we want it to be, the world is what it is. The closest thing we have to the world turning out the way we want it making it that way. Which is why I think many of those who hate AI would give their desires for how the world ought to be a better fighting chance by putting in the work to making it so, rather than sitting in denial at what is happening in the world of artificial intelligence.
I agree that denial is not an approach that’s likely to be productive.
Finance, chemistry, biology, medicine.
> There is a related “Theorem” about progress in AI: once some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an essential ingredient of “real thinking”. The ineluctable core of intelligence is always in that next thing which hasn’t yet been programmed. This “Theorem” was first proposed to me by Larry Tesler, so I call it Tesler’s Theorem: “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”
Given that AI companies are constantly trying to slurp up any and all data online, if the model was derived from existing work, it's maybe less impressive than at first glance. If present-day model does well at IMO 2026, that would be nice.
You do have a point though that we should be writing to Sen. Marsha Blackburn instead of complaining here.