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Comment by strict9 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting to see an opinion piece on the register pointing out 3 camps, none of which apply to most people I know who work in software development.

Mainly that ai is a useful tool. Sometimes it is magical but has limits and is often wrong. It can be a great illustrator of sunk cost fallacy when working on very complex problems. But light years faster and more useful than googling for solutions when faced with a difficult debugging challenge. On net I would much prefer to have ai around than not.

I think it is a miss that software development is completely omitted in this article, esp a tech or tech adjacent publication that's been around for forever.

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Read on then — the author suggests a 4th camp that I believe you (and I as a matter of fact) can agree with.

"I propose a fourth: AI is now as good as it's going to get, and that's neither as good nor as bad as its fans and haters think…"

I suppose I disagree with "as good as it's going to get" … but for the time being (this decade?) this might be correct.

Taking out the fact we're talking about "AI" for the moment.. doesn't it seem unusual to speculate that despite recent progress, it's just going to be.. flat from here out? (That's directed at El Reg, not you.)

Hard to take the rest of it seriously with them taking a position like that. I can't think of a time that's been true for any technology in my career. Whether they were ones I found useful or not.

> doesn't it seem unusual to speculate that despite recent progress, it's just going to be.. flat from here out?

No? When new tech arrives there is always a bunch of low hanging fruit around so there is quick progress immediately afterwards, but then it flatlines relatively quickly and progress is as slow as usual again.

So its a safe bet that progress will slow down to the usual level sooner or later, and it seems to be around now for text models, as this flatlining happens faster the more you invest into it since you exhaust the low hanging fruit faster.

Sure, slowing is natural for the reason you say. But the statement we're commenting on is:

> AI is now as good as it's going to get

And that's just silly, from my point of view.

Why is it silly? Cars haven't fundamentally changed in the past 50 years, they have gotten a lot better but not in a game changing way, society still functions the same with cars as 50 years ago.

I see the same thing with text models, you can say they improve but not in a game changing way, and you have the same scenario as cars. It wouldn't be wrong for a person to say "cars are as good as they ever going to get" 50 years ago, in his lifetime he was right, nothing happened with cars that would force him to change his habits during his life.

But up to 50 years ago cars changed quite quickly, so you could say it is weird to say cars wouldn't start flying or such in 50 years, but here we are, nothing dramatically changed.

Tesla self-driving/Waymo/Comma.ai isn't perfect, but they're good at what they do. That's a pretty dramatic change, in the last year or so. You get in the car, and then don't actually have to drive it, the car does it for you. Sure there are some corner cases that still haven't been solved, but most of the time, I get in the car and it just does its thing for me.

Something I've been doing a lot lately is investigating the people on HN that push various beliefs, and in this comment thread there's two voices pushing for how much AI is going to continue to grow, going forwards.

Who are these two voices? Well, we've got fragmede, who, looking through their HN profile, works at NVIDIA as a "senior AI infrastructure engineer", and we've got mh-, who, looking through their HN profile, works at Wunderkind, which is "pioneering a new category of AI agentic marketing".

So, the two people in here pushing messaging about how great and valuable AI is, and how it'll continue to get better, have their jobs/livelihood tied to AI and people continuing to pour money into AI.

It almost always turns out that way. The people protesting the loudest for some idea universally are somehow tied to profiting by convincing people of that idea. Not that that means they're wrong, of course. Just providing context.

My comment wasn’t about AI infra, my job, or broad societal changes. I write code for a living and worry about losing my job to AI like any other developer. I was just describing my experience with self-driving cars doing their thing. The key is whether the argument holds up on its merits. Pointing to someone’s job is background context, not a substitute for engaging with what they actually said.

Thanks. It's worthwhile context that I perhaps should have disclosed, but I don't think it affects my opinions in this thread.

My opinion was simply in reaction to an, IMO, nonsensical claim:

> AI is now as good as it's going to get

And it would have been the same no matter what* technology we're discussing.

* Ok, someone commented NFTs. But I never considered that a technology.

(Since it's in the thread now: my opinions are mine, not my employer's.)

and you didn't even mention the fact that they can now run on solar power instead of dinosaur fuel

quite a lot has changed with cars

doesn't really have anything to do with the future of AI, tho

Have you not heard of the various AI winters? Or the Gartner hype cycle?

There was lots of progress in NFTs. Not much going on there these days.

NFTs were kind of a scam to sell you jpgs on the grounds that insider Bob had sold one to insider Harry for $20k and so you're getting a bargain buying one for $15k. It's a different thing really.

But it has. Aircraft have long stopped getting faster or bigger or having a longer range. They get marginally more efficient, but not better for consumers. Cars are mostly the same. Audio codecs. Everything has a balancing loop somewhere. With AI there are several, eg. the better it is, the more content is made using AI, the worse AI is

In no particular order:

Air travel (thanks to efficiencies) costs a fraction of what it used to, look up what % of people have traveled by air and compare that to previous decades.

Cars are safer than ever, per mile driven, for their occupants and substantially more comfortable. They're also more efficient, but we've consciously traded that for heavier cars for crash safety.

Lossless audio codecs are ubiquitous, and there are low-loss low-latency wireless audio codecs deployed to billions of devices.

Agree with the AI statement, though.

The efficiencies in air travel don't come from the airplanes. They come from optimizing routes, eliminating competition, and cramming far more people on an airplane.

That saves a lot of money, and despite complaining people seem to accept the tradeoff of cheaper flights for an unpleasant experience. That comes from using basically the same technology as a half-century ago, with more customers.

This is just factually incorrect. Yes, business efficiencies have come from all sorts of tactics, but this being HN: the engine on the 737 MAX uses >30% less fuel at cruise than the JT8D from the 1970s-era 737s.

Not to mention airframe improvements in both aerodynamics and materials.

Yeah, it does seem like progress has plateaued considerably. The leaps from GPT 2 to 3, 3 to 4, and 4 to 5 shrinks with each one, with 5 being particularly disappointing.

I, with no evidence, feel like GPT-5 was an efficiency release. Save as much power/compute while mitigating the quality loss leaving only the top model (using similar compute as previous models) to show real improvement.

We should remember that Moore’s law was not just about the number of transistors but also the unit cost. GPT-5 works like any modern CPU with both power and efficiency cores.

> On net I would much prefer to have ai around than not.

I agree sort of, but on the other hand we don't know their true cost, whether that's the out-of-pocket expenses, or the pollution and high electricity/water costs that will result.

Of course we know, it’s not magic, but some people like to spread FUD to further their own agendas.

You forget to include the information pollution cost. AI slop is becoming inescapable in Google search results. So this new tool is completely obliterating the usefulness of old tools by flooding them with VC-subsidized crap.

There are lots of things people do that are much more polluting and less useful or efficient than AI, such as eating meat, driving cars, traveling on airplanes etc, the latter two particularly in terms of business use cases especially when we have video call technology and remote work.

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