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Comment by the8472 | Hacker News Reader

"It's like if a squirrel started playing chess and instead of "holy shit this squirrel can play chess!" most people responded with "But his elo rating sucks""

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It's more like "We were promised, over and over again, that the squirrel would be autonomous grand master level. We spent insane amounts of money, labour, and opportunity costs of human progress on this. Now, here's a very expensive squirrel, that still needs guidance from a human grandmaster, and most of it's moves are just replications of existing games. Oh, it also can't move the pieces by itself, so it depends on Piece Mover library."

My opinion: you are critiquing electricity because the candles are still better / more affordable / more honestly made.

You seem to be mad that companies are in the business of selling us things. It's the way this whole thing works.

If you don't think this is impressive: stop everything you're doing and go make a c compiler that can build the Linux kernel.

For reference, I use LLMs daily for coding. I do think they are useful.

I am speaking about corporations and sales tactics, because this VERY experiment was done by exactly such a corporation. How about you think about how "this whole thing works", and apply it to their post? What did they not write? How many worse experiments did they not post about to not jeopardize investments?

I don't find this impressive, because it doesn't do anything I'd want, anything I'd need, anything the world needs, and it doesn't do anything new compared to my personal experience. Which, just to reiterate, is that LLMs are useful, just not nowhere close to as world shattering/ending as the CEOs are selling it. Acknowledging that has nothing to do with being a luddite.

To be a bit pedantic, I'm not accusing you of being a Luddite. That would mean that you were fundamentally opposed to a new technology that's obviously more useful.

Instead, in my opinion you are not giving enough grace to what is being demonstrated today.

This is my analogy: you're seeing electrical demonstrations in front of your very eyes, but because the charlatans who are funding the research haven't quite figured out how to harness it, you're dismissing the wonder. "That's all well and good, but my beeswax candles and gas lamps light my apartment just fine."

Until the juice is worth the squeeze, the beeswax candles and gas lamps are likely more than fine.

It is very impressive indeed, but impressiveness is not the same as usefulness. If important further features can’t get implemented anymore The usefulness is pretty limited. And usefulness further needs to be weighed against cost.

even a squirrel that needs guidance from a human grandmaster, is heavily inspired by existing games, and who can use Piece Mover library is incredible. 5 years ago the squirrel was just a squirrel. then it was able to make legal moves. now it can play a whole game from start to finish, with help. that is incredible

I think the post you're responding to would agree, but is trying to make the argument that it isn't worth the cost:

> spent insane amounts of money, labour, and opportunity costs of human progress on this

That said, I would 100% approve of certain people pouring all their energy into AI to rather focus on teaching squirrels chess!

Any way you slice it: LLMs provide real utility today, right now. Even yesterday, before Opus/Codex were updated. So the money was not all for naught. It seems very plausible given the progress made so far that this new industry will continue to deliver significant productivity gains.

If you want to worry about something, let's worry about what happens to humanity when the world we've become accustomed to is yanked out from underneath us in a span of 10-20 years.

I'm not trying to get coached in chess by the squirrel for 200 per month though.

"The squirrel can do my job and more? It can do five years of my work in a month? For only $20k? Pssh, but I bet it copied someone's homework."

Developer salaries are about to tank.

This is the end of the line. People are just in denial.

Soon companies will hire the squirrel instead of you. And the squirrel will transform into enormous infrastructure we can't afford ourselves.

"One mega squirrel to implement your own operating system overnight. Just $100k."

It's going to be out of the reach of humans / ICs soon. Purely industrial. And all innovation will accrue to the capital holders.

Open weights models are our only hope of keeping a foot in the door.

IF you want the code to be reviewed and maintained you still need a developer. A developer can craft a better spec.

This is really questionable outcome. So you'll have your own custom OS riddled with holes that AI won't be capable of fixing because the context and complexity became so high that running any small bug fix would cost thousands of dollars in tokens.

Is this how tech field ends? Overengineered brittle black-box monstrosities that nobody understands because important thing for business was "it does A, B, and C" and it doesn't matter how.

But the Squirrel is only playing chess because someone stuffed the pieces with food and it has learned that the only way to release it is by moving them around in some weird patterns.

But people have been telling us for years that the squirrel was going to improve at chess at an exponential rate and take over the world through sheer chess-mastery.

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