Come on, the trivializations start to sound quite unfounded now. Yes, a human was needed, but no, it wasn't a "collaboration"
"However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPT–6 Astra did it entirely on its own. Carter Leffer only directed GPT–6 Astra to see if it could break any of the unbroken Enigma messages published on the Crypto Cellar Research web page."
I mean... I'm all for collaboration but I think this case is pretty clear, no?
We are fooling to me, there is no intelligence in these models, they just apply methods that were invented by humans without any consciousness on what they are doing.
At the margin the innovative human matters.
What that means for the rest of society is TBD.
Technically you built it yourself and the builder was just a minor collaborator?
Hearing a guy built his home in a week with the power of nails and a hammer would have been novel in era of mortise and tenon.
I actually found an article about raving about how fast nail production was thanks to machining advances in 1790 and that it would bring great value: https://digital.libraries.psu.edu/digital/collection/pabookn...
It’s seems to me humans haven’t changed, just which machines we praise.
Now we just code in english and the computer does the rest.
It is not yet the same as C++ or Python, for two reasons:
1) Ambiguity is still the default. Formal languages force you to resolve it up front.
English lets you paper over it until the model or the compiler (the human) notices.
2) The "compiler" (the LLM) is statistical and non-deterministic. Same prompt, different day, different bugs. A real language has a spec.
The practical move is to treat English as a high-level specification language, keep the generated artifacts inspectable, and "still know enough of the lower layers to notice when the translation went wrong."^1
[1] This is the key that is where humans can still be necessary, or at least another pass through the LLMs to decide on the best path, in the compiled code. Compilers for other languages do the same C -> Binary, etc.
A conventional compiler is bound by an as-if rule. It can take many internal routes, but the observable behavior has to match the language spec. Same source, same defined semantics. If two gcc runs emit different binaries, the program is still supposed to compute the same answers on the same inputs. That is why people treat the source as the artifact and the binary as disposable.
An LLM compiling English has no as-if rule unless you add one. "Sort the users by last active" can become a stable sort, an unstable sort, a SQL order by, an in-memory timsort, or a query that drops people with null timestamps. All of those can look like success. They are different programs. The model is not optimizing under a spec. It is filling in the parts you did not write.
A human who can read the destination language still notices when the chosen path is the wrong program.
A second model pass can compare paths, but only if you give it a way to score them: tests, types, invariant
So the historical analogy still holds, with one correction. JavaScript and Python were dismissed for being too easy, but they already had grammars and evaluators. English is easier still, and the evaluator is a statistical translator that will invent a dialect if you let it. The practical move stays the same: treat English as the spec language, pin the generated artifacts behind tests, and keep enough fluency in the lower layer to see when the translation chose a different program than the one you meant. The human is not required because the computer is weak. The human is required because the source language still leaves room for more than one destination.
English is not code just because a technology was developed that could make educated guesses based on being trained with other code that people have written as to what the code generated should look like.
Also, much of this reply looks LLM generated.
It's a machine - when we attribute it human concepts such as victory, mistakes, ethics, we also shift responsibility away from the operator and soon enough bad people will use it as an umbrella. The agent ate my homework! The agent bombed a school! Bad agent, no!
I think this sounds somewhat less silly in English because "automotive" and "automative" don't have the same hyper-visible affinity, but all the same; you may want to consider the car as a more viable analogand.
The shortcomings should really be obvious by now to anyone honest. And the marketing distortion being oushed out is just tiresome and detrimental for all of us.