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Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

You dismiss "pattern matching" as some sort of trivial thing, so why weren't humans able to apply the same pattern matching to find and fix these defects?

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They often were able. Fifteen bugs claimed by mythos were bugs that were already fixed, which the model plagiarized from git history or the kernel mailing list.

> You dismiss "pattern matching" as some sort of trivial thing

I didn't say that - Greg said it in the talk. You interpreted wrong. However, human are a few orders of magnitude slower than agents. Our context windows is definitely less than 1 million tokens (I believe, heck we don't even know how our brain works)

Human brains don’t have a context window. The brain just constantly reconfigures itself on new input. The AI people call this “continuous learning” and believe it’s one of the most important things current AIs are missing.

How did you know that? No one knows how human brain work yet. So don't pretend.

We do actually know pretty well how the brain works at the level of neurons. We don't know the higher levels of how all of those interactions work to produce certain behaviors.

Cellular neuroscience is a very active research field, and until we actually manage to derive organism behaviours from cellular-level models we won't know that those models are complete enough to do so. We haven't even managed that for C. Elegans, with 959 neurons, let alone humans, with 86 billion.

So we don’t know anything, we can mechanistically dissect any phenomena, but that rarely yields the ability to make interesting or useful predictions, i.e. understanding.

We don't even understand how a single neuron works and are still finding out they have way more connections and connection types than we thought they had.

I think it's safe to say we still have a woefully limited understanding of how the brain works.

And you don’t know how many “context tokens” the brain has. So don’t pretend

By quoting this segment, I inferred that you agreed with Greg.

If you disagree with Greg, then I apologize for inadvertently criticizing you personally.

My point stands, that we're back to debating some metaphysical understanding of what "real intelligence" is when the real standard should be "does it do a better job than humans at this specific task"?

I don't care if the Waymo isn't "truly" intelligent, it drives better than I do, that's a very good thing.

We're all pattern matchers, and if the machine pattern matcher is can find defects and vulns that human pattern matchers can't, that's also a very good thing.

You must be terrible at driving.

They are. Just like the rest of us.

I don’t worry about the models, I worry that people with brains who matter can’t or won’t grasp what you wrote.

> I don't care if the Waymo isn't "truly" intelligent, it drives better than I do, that's a very good thing.

The funny thing about Waymos is that they seem amazing driving all on their own everywhere until it rains (as it did where I live for the last two days), then they're suddenly nowhere to be seen, because they can't operate correctly in conditions that I've been driving in for my entire life.

This is a metaphor for AI as a whole.

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