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Comment by mgaldys4 | Hacker News Reader

Even the Millennium Prize Problems have, in a way, become benchmarks for model companies to prove themselves. The smartest individuals among humans are becoming replaceable. Intelligence has become a product you can quantify and buy with electricity. That feels awful.

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You can't really replace the smartest individuals because if you take a person who's not "smart" they can't do much with the AI.

I think the more accurate description of what's happening is that access to expertise is becoming commodified.

I think that's right. Expert experience used to be almost the most precious and valuable part of the computer field, but today that experience has been "distilled" into SOTA models.

Only if you assume the value in humans is only in solving puzzles. That’s a very limited understanding of human beings

>That feels awful.

John Henry.

There's a reason we made folklore about when the machines came for the strength of men, and now 150 years later it comes for our minds.

> That feels awful

Only if you subscribe to the "humans are special" rhetoric, in which case I'm - maybe - sorry to say the feeling will only intensify.

Upvoted. I think that said humans should get used to the idea that their intellect is special only insofar as it was first, and if they want to adopt or invent a value system that keeps them at the center, that's actually fine and good for their survival. But said humans would do well to stop laboriously and curmudgeonly moving the posts that mark the goals, and get busy trying to coax the AI to do useful things for them and for the species as a whole.

> Upvoted. I think that said humans should get used to the idea that their intellect is special only insofar as it was first

And used to build the LLMs of today. We'll see how that evolves once LLMs have to feed LLMs with their own "intellect".

What did humans build off of but themselves?

LLMs are not humans. It's good to remember that. They're also not God.

If human intelligence is so boring and non-special, how exactly did LLMs get this smart? Is it not from a) being developed by humans and b) being fed a very large portion of all human-generated text?

Without the human intellect to emulate, LLMs would be nothing.

There are many here who hate humans I think.

Prob because their life sucks.

LLMs learn from patterns in human-provided data (and soon each other and directly from nature). Humans learn(ed) from patterns in nature-provided data, and eventually each other (and, increasingly, LLMs).

"Boring": that's a straw man, it was never in my comment. I did say that people should stop grumbling and use the tool for good things. I'm not quite sure what was your point, but it sounded like you disagreed (one doesn't deploy the straw-man weapon otherwise), and this "Without the human intellect to emulate, LLMs would be nothing" sounds like an expression of grief, which admittedly is a very reasonable feeling for a number of reasons. What confuses me is that creating an intellect at the human level or above is indeed a great human achievement, but it's not a good thing because...? Maybe an emulation of the thing is not as good as the thing, was that your meaning?

Here, let me add my own little straw man: "if God didn't make us, how exactly did humans get so smart? Is not from a) being created in His image and b) being given His love? Without God, we would be mud from the ground (and a rib!)." If you agree with this statement, then, understandably, everything we have done since the Enlightenment has been to secure our place in hell, and LLMs are a particularly impertinent such device, but compared to a true human mind like a figurine of clay to a true person.

But, if of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not, and Man keeps measuring the thing and the thing indeed seems very smart, then Man should stop moping and deal with the consequences of their actions: either ban the thing or use it for their own benefit.

No idea what you're on about. It is provable that humans developed LLMs, there is no proof that God created humans. It's possible that a human creation will someday be more capable and intelligent than humans on all fronts, but it still stands that without the foundation of human intellect, there would be no LLMs. So I don't understand people who act like "AI" is a separate species that came to exist independently and proves human inferiority, that humans need to accept that they're not special, and that we should rush to submit to our new AI overlords. If anything, the existence and capabilities of AI proves that human intellect is still impressive and versatile, because it is a direct reflection of human knowledge.

>> proves human inferiority, that humans need to accept that they're not special, and that we should rush to submit to our new AI overlords

That's a lot of axes you're grinding simultaneously my friend

I have seen lots of comments to that effect on HN. "How do you know whether your brain is not just a next token predictor too?"

I genuinely don't understand how some people are so self-hating.

What's self-hating about acknowledging a fact? There's literally nothing a human can do that can't be done by another entity/group with even near-equivalent intelligence, alien or artificial.

We don't even know if that is true, and even if it were true, that doesn't mean that humans aren't special. We don't have to devalue ourselves. Our values can and should be 100% anthropocentric in my view.

It's interesting that you think that acknowledging we aren't special means we're devaluing ourselves.

I don't really see how going from humans are special to humans aren't special is anything but a devaluing.

Humans value each other, through the myriad forms of relationships we - strive to - maintain. They may change, but they'll never completely disappear, no matter what. There's just nothing objectively special about any of it, as other organisms also - can - have relationships. Same for the things we do: it can all be done by some non-human entity, be it another organic specie, alien or machine. Become comfortable with the facts as your mental stability likely depends on it now more than ever.

I'm talking about the value of humans qua humanity, not the individual people that I value. I think you're being willfully obtuse.

Not at all. There's as much value in human qua human as there is value in cat qua cat, or oak tree qua oak tree, ie there is value in the human species in as much as humans are distinct/unique as such.

How often do you say that to your wife?

You're - deliberately? - confusing scope. There's the objective and the subjective. Humans not being objectively special doesn't mean one human can't be considered special by another. And if my wife doesn't get that distinction, well... I'd probably question my choice in partner.

Nobody claims we are objectively special, whatever would that even mean. Person said they feel awful which is clearly subjective and you proceeded to bash him for that. You are on hackernews, we are aware we are atoms.

Person made a claim about intelligence becoming a product (arguably it has been on the market for a long time; see knowledge workers) "that you can [now] quantify and buy with electricity". That points to the rhetoric often pushed that humans are [objectively] special, because intelligence. Or at least were. And it's the reality wakeup call that's driving that feeling of awfulness/despair/outrage/whatever else, as has been posted about here and elsewhere multiple times.

This is a problem of wealth distribution and it's fair to feel in a such way if your edge as an employee is being taken away. Being or feeling special is irrelevant.

You're shifting. Nothing was said here about job security. As stated, this is someone who feels awful because intelligence is now a thing that's available to machines. A similar - albeit lighter - tone to this[0], where in the article the author describes being in some "spiritual crisis", and that "The creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathematics is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical". Have a look at some of the comments, if you never saw it before.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49048681

This is a 2 months old thread and written by someone else. It only shows you like putting others down.

If someone believes deeply that they can fly if they jump off a cliff and flap their arms, is it putting them down to tell them it's fiction and things will end badly if they try?

I hardly see any mortal danger here in a way you do. If you really want to help try making your comments sound less aggressive. Now it seems as if you are jumping out of a bush and beating people up with a club because you think they are headed for the cliff. You must have already noticed what are you trying to say is rarely taken at a face value because of that.

Even if there's no immediate mortal danger, there's still potential danger. Like said person may live on the plains with no intention of going anywhere with a cliff. But they eventually may. Or they could infect others with their belief, like how cults tend to work.

I really don't want anyone to take anything I say at face value. What I want is for people to generally be more logical and think things through on their own, particularly things in which there's at least potential danger. And sad to say I've instead been seeing a lot of kool aid drinking, even around here.

How do you get "self-hating" out of that? I think you're projecting your own attitudes about AI onto the parent comment. Saying "humans aren't special in terms of evaluation criteria <X>" is not self-hating, it's potentially a statement of fact.

I'm imagining that someone like you would have argued that animals weren't conscious, or couldn't communicate, back in the day, because humans were "special" that way.

I'm on the side of humans remaining special, at least on planet Earth. My strong sense is that a large majority of the public feels that way, and voting results in the future will start to reflect that regarding AI regulations.

I agree with Frank Herbert's view of "thinking machines".

> Intelligence has become a product you can quantify and buy with electricity.

There used to be days when women would make blankets, when men would make chairs, when children would make brooms...

But PROGRESS I tell you!

Put it bluntly: the weavers who could be replaced by the spinning jenny were clearly doing repetitive labor. People writing code and maintaining project pipelines a few years ago relied heavily on experience, but in a sense that was also "repetitive labor." Replacing repetitive labor and freeing up productivity is of course progress.

But reform always has its victims. Like the textile workers who starved in the streets centuries ago, and me, kicked to death in the street by AI today...

Preach it, brother!

Even old Ned Ludd won't buy my buggy whips, best in the land they may be.

Ants and bees are doing repetitive labor. Let's automate it and call it progress. Robot ants and robobees, thinking thoughts beyond your wildest AI dreams!

> Even the Millennium Prize Problems have, in a way, become benchmarks for model companies to prove themselves

Well, let them have these. They'll play around with open problems which generate media hype and then they might run out and move on to something else, because "AI came up with a problem and solved it in 3 days" won't have the same effects as "AI solved a problem in 3 days that humans couldn't solve in 100 years".

And that underestimates how incredibly quickly humans become accustomed to new trends. If an LLM proves P≠NP in year, there is a high chance that few people will care anymore, because at that point LLMs will presumably already have proved multiple Millenium prize and other famous problems, and another "AI Proves Famous Theorem Which Was Even Harder Than The Previous One" headline will be regarded as an old hat.

>If an LLM proves P≠NP in year, there is a high chance that few people will care anymore

P=NP has always been drastically over stated as it's "Importance". It pretty much only exists as "That small technical detail that people with no domain knowledge think is important because youtube videos always focus on the trivial, 101 level cool fact stuff". Math focused CS people of course would always love any proof, but most people expect already that P!=NP, and no proof of that would be very meaningful, as it basically would not change our understanding of anything in the domain currently. It would be nifty, but not earth shattering.

Also the problems LLMs are attacking are resulting in proofs that don't seem particularly enlightening, so that's unfortunate.

However, there's always the tiny tiny chance it is P=NP, and any proof of that, regardless of how insightful it would or would not be, would be worth going fucking insane over. Just knowing that would be meaningful on it's own, and give us limitless work to do, and puts lots of mathematicians in an awkward spot.

I would be considered an AI skeptic because I'm not currently sacrificing myself at the altar of LLM companies, but if LLMs solve P=NP in any direction and even uselessly so, I think that's a good excuse to take days off work and party!

     P=NP, but the margin-right is too narrow. Use Claude Design to hack Figma so you can change the margin and see the whole proof.

If that's the most awful thing that's going to happen here, then we're lucky.

Solving obscure puzzle samples that approximately ~0 humans on Earth ever attempted to solve, mostly by pattern matching known solutions to similar puzzles, is not intelligence. DeepBlue has been outperforming the best humans at a specific puzzle-like task since the last century.

Do any of the people proclaiming this shit actually use these models? No matter how many headlines are coming out, every day I deal with reams of the most horrific code I've ever seen technically compile, with routine mistakes that any human would get fired for if they made.

But humans have been confusing pattern matching against known solutions for intelligence for a hundred years!

Seriously though, it ends up looking like that. To take a stupid example a couple of weeks ago I asked an agent to look at porting my hand written WebGL renderer (+ shaders etc) to WebGPU. It estimated a human would take 6-10 weeks, and I would agree. (Which is why I hadn't done it). 24 hours later it was deployed and live. This is classic tedious, difficult, low level if quasi mechanical work (rather like cracking an enigma message), and LLMs absolutely fly through it.

> It estimated a human would take 6-10 weeks

You do understand this is intentionally trained into recent models for marketing purposes? "Wow, it saved me months of work in a day! This is the most amazing technology ever!!!!"... is what it intends to evoke by underpromising and overdelivering. I routinely have it helpfully suggest it will take something like "three engineer-months" to do something I do by hand without any LLM assistance in a day. The estimates may be accurate if you have literally never touched a computer in your life before and are starting to learn from there.

In the games industry I was tech lead of teams of hundreds of devs and had to deal with their estimates of this sort on a daily basis. 6-10 weeks for a total renderer rewrite is on the low end.

As an indie dev who built their own WASM-capable engine that I've shipped in real games, I've built both WebGL and WebGPU renderers from scratch myself in significantly less time than that. Sounds like typical corporate dysfunctionality. If you have hundreds of devs you're going to get bogged down by having a share who spend 90% of their time at the company on Reddit, another share who write actively bad code, and then maybe 10% of the employees who have a clue what they're doing dealing with the overhead of communication, meetings, other people not upholding their assigned responsibility, etc. slowing them down 10x what they could actually do.

0% chance, without LLMs. WASM-capable engines would require years if not decades to build, even with expert level knowledge. See Jonathan Blow who has been working on his engine for a decade now, and he's arguably of the most talented engineers who ever lived.

Jonathan Blow is writing his own language as well, and is also already successful enough that his work is just a hobby he can take at any pace with no urgency. A WASM engine is really, really not that difficult. At its core, you need rendering to a canvas, audio, keyboard/mouse/gamepad handling, asset loading/file saving, and an update loop. Writing this code is mostly not different from writing code in other languages, since you are literally writing other languages that happen to compile to WASM, the only differences being that you need your one-time WASM toolchain setup, some JS glue interop (which is not really different from needing C interop for native engines written in languages other than C), and to be aware of browser pecularities regarding file access, update loop, threads, etc. which you also have to deal with if you ever wrote a JS game anyways. After you have those core elements in place, everything above that is isolated in a game/engine logic abstraction layer that isn't any different from writing native code.

If you want to place a bet on it, we can do a $10,000 bet in escrow contingent on myself implementing a well-specified WASM engine from scratch on stream without LLM usage in a month. I would love an opportunity to demonstrate how wrong you are. That said, rather than taking your money, I could also just share a streamer's content with you[1]. He implemented 3D web rendering with no dependencies in a 20 minute lecture, and it would take 10 minutes if you were seriously focused on doing it quickly. Sure, it was rudimentary pure JS rather than WASM, but really consider whether you think this 10 minute exercise couldn't be done in a language that compiles to WASM with 160 hours, while including the other hardware/OS-layer abstractions aforementioned. On the other hand, please do take me up on my offer. You said it's a 0% chance, after all -- surely you don't want to pass up on the easiest $10,000 of your life...?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjWkNZ0SXfo

Time estimations by LLMs are hilariously incorrect all the time. It estimates very simple things that a human could do in an hour to take days or weeks and other things that are genuinely tedious and time-consuming it estimates taking a few hours. LLMs have no understanding of time and no world model that even allows them to make correct time estimates. They will always fail to provide decent time estimates unless the task is well-known, in the training data and they can extrapolate that with a simple math script.

My favourite story is of an elderly coworker with no AI experience who innocuously asked GPT-5-mini (at the time his framework's default model) to translate a 50 page engineering spec, and it kept him at arm's length for about a week about how that task would take just another 24-36 hours more. He kept asking like, you finished yet? and it just made up excuses, "so sorry, I got distracted, give me one more day", and he went "please finish, I need this", and 5-mini came back "I totally understand -- let me get to work immediately, I'll report back ASAP", end of conversation. He got annoyed but never even suspected anything wrong, because this is the kind of conversation he's used to. I wonder how long this would have continued, if I hadn't intervened by chance.

>mostly by pattern matching known solutions to similar puzzles, is not intelligence

My dear sir, can you please lay out a dissertation of what this intelligence you speak of actually is. You seem to be much more informed than most of us here and therefore surely have made great contributions to furthering science and the arts.

/snark

It's difficult for me to be any less snarky than this even though it's not really wanted here on HN as you are pulling a kind of reverse snark. For example if I myself have lots of experience in subject X, and then by analogy apply it to subject Y to do something new in that subject, that would be called intelligent, and that would be pattern matching.

Pattern matching is a foundational building block of intelligence. You cannot have intelligence without pattern matching. Pattern matching alone is not general intelligence and requires more parts to work like that.

Oh yeah? How do you quantify it? How many kilo-einsteins do we need to screw in the navier stokes lightbulb? Halting problem?

Now that hammers are knocking in nails, I just don’t know what to do with my fists.

AI probably don’t dream of electric sheep but then again we don’t know. Perhaps we can find it out.

Perhaps AIs can figure out how to distribute wealth more fairly so that we can all dream of real sheep.

Intentionally philosophical PoV, what else is left for us monkies.

Or maybe the smartest humans are the ones making AI and not the ones trying to solve Millenium problems by themselves.

All technology on the tech tree which requires intelligence to unlock will soon be available to humanity – mind control, population exterminating bioweapons, new ultra destructive kinetic weaponry, perhaps even a cure for cancer.

That won’t happen. But also, whatever benefits are unlocked will be owned mostly by a small group of individuals, definitely not available to humanity as a whole.

>will be owned mostly by a small group

So not any different from right now.

>definitely not available to humanity as a whole.

[taps on forehead meme]

The whole of humanity can have it available, if there is a whole lot less humanity.

So, yes, different from right now :)

Way, way more concentration of wealth and power

> That won’t happen.

Why?

> But also, whatever benefits are unlocked will be owned mostly by a small group of individuals, definitely not available to humanity as a whole.

It's unclear to me if this is the good scenario or bad scenario. This would be good in your view right? At least I hope you're right.

> Why?

Because it is delusional. Having an intelligent machine doesn’t mean you can somehow mind control individuals.

And no, that would be pretty terrible. Why would that be good? The AI leadership is composed of anti-democratic, sociopathic, doomsday cultists who believe it makes sense to sacrifice the world economy and possibly mankind itself for a possible utopian future they developed based on their media illiterate reading of sci-fi. They are very likely the worst people who should ever be given power

> Having an intelligent machine doesn’t mean you can somehow mind control individuals.

Excluding advanced forms of psychological manipulation, sophisticated neurological drugs and neural simulation for moment.

Are you suggesting that it's physically impossible to create a device which could induce electromagnetic currents in the brain which could in-theory either effectively control, or greatly influence someone's decision making?

I understand it would be extremely hard for humans, but can you explain why you're so confident that this would be such a hard problem that even an ASI couldn't solve it?

Even those of us that are pro AI need to acknowledge this is the current reality.

The smartest humans now need to move to being less concerned about status games among humans and more with how to provide value to a mix of intelligent machines and humans. i.e. if you're starting an SaaS in 2026 you better be assuming half your revenue is going to come from machines acting by themselves.

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