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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> A sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done this; but they didn't.

Isn't that something of a given? If possible then a sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done it. If impossible, ChatGPT couldn't have done it. Everything an AI ever has or will do is presumably going to be within reach of a sufficiently dedicated human analyst or a large enough team of them.

The only real learning here is another example of a task that would have required intelligence up until an AI does it, then we suddenly discover that analysts don't do anything requiring general intelligence.

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Most contemporary stories around AI include the implication that AI did something humans couldn't. This is because the big players have been shilling AGI hard for a while, and their valuations depend on maintaining the sentiment that serious progress in that direction is being made.

Is there anything that LLMs (or any software for that matter) could imaginably and theoretically do but do humans qualitatively cannot do?

I don't really know what I'm talking about but I imagined the difference was always quantitative (in a nutshell: they need less time).

Or almost any invention for that matter.

Washing machines can’t do anything humans do, they just remove labour. Trucks don’t do anything longboats can’t, it just need less labour and time/effort to build roads rather than canals. Computers can’t calculate anything humans can’t dry run by hand etc.

Everything in reality is about reducing time/effort/material/cost or achieving more with less resource.

Yes. I'd also argue there isn't anything humans couldn't do in theory, other than things strictly prohibited by known laws of physics. It's been pretty conclusively shown in the last 100 years, we're past tipping point of civilizational knowledge and scientific infrastructure.

What stops us from doing any specific thing is always allocation of resources - there's finite amount of time/effort/material/labor available, and past trivial amounts we need more and more people to agree on some allocation. Reduction of time/effort/material/labor costs of any thing is what moves it closer from "infeasible" to "feasible" for us to do. But again, short of violating laws of physics, it was never "impossible".

And then you realize AI was made by humans...

What I mean is that "can be done by humans" is ill defined. Are you allowed to use pencil and paper? That's not part of your body? Do you have to be strapped into a coffin for it to count as human-done? How about wheels, sticks and stones? Allowed to use those tools? How about an abacus? Or is electricity the line to draw?

No, they don't - that implication is in the heads of people who believe AI is magic, or believe AI is advertised as magic, or believe that humans are dumb.

The actual implication is, and always been, different: AI did something humans theoretically could, given enough time, motivation and budget, but they didn't, because it wasn't the best use of time or money. AI therefore demonstrates its value, by opening up problems that were previously uneconomical to solve.

AI demonstrates it's value by solving a problem humans found not worth their time.

This is less valuable than me asking chatgpt to find me a recipe.

Not "not worth their time", but "that they cannot afford to solve".

That's the same sentence.

They cannot afford to lose the worth of their time solving that problem.

Yeah, but then it's clear it's describing a good chunk of most interesting and most important problems there are, for individuals and societies alike.

There's a lot we can't afford to work on simply because living has stupidly high overhead.

> that implication is in the heads of people who believe AI is magic, or believe AI is advertised as magic, or believe that humans are dumb.

Yes! I believe that class of people are called "investors."

Your point is basically correct, I think, but the illusion of value that a corporate entity offers, and the reality of the value that the corporate entity is creating, are distinct things.

I'm not sure I agree. More is different. Being able to execute logic at a higher scale and speed would make some previously infeasible intelligence tasks possible, resulting in a new level of intelligence.

> A sufficiently dedicated human analyst could have done this; but they didn't.

I read that as saying that a human typically wouldn't have the time or the patience. But now with a sufficiently smart LLM, the problem becomes tractable.

Sci-fi plot:

We change as a society the definition of intelligence to "what humans can do better than AI".

We end up in a world where AI is only worse than humans in things where we are worse chimpanzees.

Long-term, if we allow AI to manufacture machines, the set of such things is empty.

Immediate-term, it's pretty clear that natural division of labor is that computers do the thinking, and humans do the menial, manual work that requires mixing precision and power movements in field conditions.

‘Thinking’ is rich. They are not thinking.

Ironically the person verifying the output does both the thinking and doing in that regard. For without this - the output of an llm could be of zero value.

Obviously not true, unless you think that "idea" is the only thing, and "execution" is worthless, at arbitrary timescales.

Which would make 99% of us "not thinking" 99% of the time.

You seem to have a poor understanding of how humans operate.

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