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Comment by doginasuit | Hacker News Reader

I actually consider compilers more impressive, and a compiler was an important part of making this possible.

Are transistors more impressive than compilers then? And presumably accounting is more impressive than transistors?

I’m not sure I can get behind the “foundations are necessarily more impressive than edifices” view..

To each their own. I mean compilers didn’t produce trillions of dollars of investment, and produce serious and profound philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness but you’re right, thank god we have C

Compilers just made it all possible, but they are not new and shiny. LLMs did not produce the philosophical questions, but they do raise them. It's worth noting that computers have been changing the way we think about consciousness long before LLMs, largely thanks to compilers.

Yea there’s no logical stopping point when you use that logic. Why not say electricity or the element silicon?

I don't think the level of investment in an idea is equivalent to how impressive it may be. Most of the investment in AI is based on the idea that it will make professions and human labour obsolete, which means whoever has the reins at the moment it "solves" the "problem" of human labour will effectively reign over everyone else. The level of investment is then somewhat orthogonal to how technically impressive it is.

Not to mention that the less easily-explainable a technical achievement is, the less investment it will attract simply because fewer people will grasp the ramifications. You can describe AI in two words ("machine human") while it would take a few more to describe compilers in an instantly understandable way.

This may not go over well but I also find electricity more impressive.

I mean - I'd say electricity, agriculture, steam power, metallurgy, silicon computing (cmos), atomic power, the scientific method - these are _all_ very impressive - all lead to drastic changes for humanity. Not sure how I'd rank them.

I personally think AI will end up sitting in the top 3 of these - but that is an opinion. I do think it is obvious it is at least _somewhere_ in that list.

Absolutely agree

Compilers were required for our whole tech ecosystem. They just didn’t require trillions of dollars of investment to become useful.

What a weird fucking measuring stick. By your logic crypto is one of man's greatest achievements because it received oodles of investor cash, and kicked up tons of conversations online about the nature of finance and banking.

It’s not the measuring stick, what it can do is the measuring stick. Another person comparing a system that can do Erdos proofs to a compiler or even worse, crypto? Everyone has a right to be unimpressed i just find it incredible to be so dismissive with a straight face.

It's a machine that's tricked you into thinking it's something greater. It's a calculator 2.0 with a smiley face sticker slapped on it, nothing more.

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