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Comment by libraryofbabel | Hacker News Reader

I’d rather talk about the history of steam engines than AI today, so: let’s just say it sounds like at some time in the past you saw a clunky inefficient Newcomen steam engine pumping water out of a coal mine, and you hated it, and now you think that’s all steam engines are or can be or can do: they’re loud and annoying and they’re just for pumping coal mines. Then one day someone tells you they’re powering mechanized looms in cotton mills and you flat out deny it and you don’t even want to go into the mill to take a look, because you hated that first steam engine so much.

It’s right there. You can go and see it any time, doing the things you don’t think it’s capable of doing. Just a little curiosity is all you need.

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Where is the huge mass of good software that AI has created?

Yup. I judge by results too. I'm still waiting for that too.

I see a whole lot of software created by smart people - as far as I can tell, about the same amount of software they would have created on their own.

Open to being wrong! But show me the results.

No no, an intelligent person looking at a crude steam engine could see what potential it has. This is not hindsight.

It is generating large amount of power on demand.

From that one can imagine what it could do. But more importantly in this context, one could also imagine what it could NEVER do. If someone say "Oh, the mighty steam engine! It lets us print 100x more books than we were doing before. Who knows, may be some day it will even start writing new books!"

And at that point, if you understand anything about the steam engine, or writing, you can call bluff. But if you don't understand what the steam engine is doing, and if you don't actually know what it takes to come up with a story, one could take a look at the engine printing the books, and blunder into the conclusion that it printing an entirely new book is only a question of time.

So in short, it is not "hate", just the acknowledgement about what it is not.

> No no, an intelligent person looking at a crude steam engine could see what potential it has. This is not hindsight

Steam engines were known since the first century, at the vert least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

It does take a lot of imagination and creativity to come up with new and better ways to use an already existing idea. We're currently just scratching the surface of what LLMs are going to do for us

Yea, sure.

Better search could be used in ways that we can't think of right now..

I already use AI tools for more things than just "better search". Like, today. For work.

Yes, part of some kinds of work is actually just a glorified looking-up aka search.

For example, even something like "I want python code to do X" could get exact hit in a stack overflow answer using regular internet "search"

Just wrote about it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47178461

From your exact link,

> The aeolipile is considered to be the first recorded steam engine or reaction steam turbine, but it is neither a practical source of power nor a direct predecessor of the type of steam engine invented during the Industrial Revolution.

Which is the exact point I was trying to make? It's still a steam engine, the basic idea is there and, yet, nobody saw its huge potential

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47179154

The ancient Greeks surely would have realised that an aeolipile could be used as a source of power, if they'd had abundant combustible fuel, a need for rotary motion, and no better source of it.

Newcomen engines are mere curiosities today, because we have better sources of power (better engines). In the past, they had better sources of power too (donkeys, wind, water, or human slaves). Newcomen engines, like all technologies, are only viable in certain economic environments. In all others they are curiosities.

There are lots of intelligent people looking at AI and imagining its potential

Are you just saying that you're more intelligent than them? You can see clearly, where all the steam engine technicians can't?

What are they saying that contradicts with something I said?

Well, you said:

The potential of the current crop of LLM/AIs will stop at being a very powerful tool to search large volumes of text using free-form questions.

I do think that pretty clearly contradicts with what a lot of people who make/use LLM models are saying haha

Early steam engines did not produce large amounts of power on demand, though. They produced small amounts of power, were a hassle to fuel and maintain, and broke often. It was reasonable that the engineers of the 1700s said "well, until someone improves on this, it's not worth using"..

.. which is not far off from what people said about ChatGPT in 2022.

I don't know how long it'll take for AI to be as broadly impactful as the steam engine was, but.. it's definitely coming. I expect the world to look radically different in 50 years.

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