[jwalgenbach]

Cars don't run. And even if they did, or you tortured the definition to include rolling on fairly straight prepared paths as running, it is only better for specific definitions of better.

Cars are faster on reasonable traversable terrain. Are they more or less energy efficient? Under what circumstances? Do they self navigate the best path around obstacles? Better is really subjective.

And this applies to the large language models too. Just like calculators, they are going to do some things better, or maybe cheaper. But I've played with them trying to get them to write non-trivial programs, and they really do fail confidently. I suspect the amount of source code online means that any common problem has been included in the training data, and the LLM constitutes a program. So, at this point for programming, it's fancy Google. And that has value, but it is not intelligence.

I am not saying we (as a society) shouldn't be worried about these developments. Near as I can tell, they will mostly be used to further concentrate wealth among the few, and drive people apart because we already can't settle on a common set of (reasonably) objective facts about what is going on -- both problems are probably the same thing from different perspectives...