[adamtaylor_13]

That's a pedantic word game. The industry at-large doesn't track lines of code as a measure of velocity. So, yes, faster does mean more productive, since that's what any sane programmer means when they say "I built it faster". They don't mean that they literally slapped the keyboard faster than someone else.

[spzb]

And yet "slapping the keyboard faster" is all that AI does. It doesn't design architecture. It doesn't think. It doesn't reason. All it does is search for and copy-paste code from elsewhere on the internet. If you're lucky it might even be code that works and does what you want it to.

[ben_w]

This is mostly false.

> It doesn't design architecture.

It can do that. Won't say it's amazing, but it can do it.

> It doesn't think. It doesn't reason.

Can you define these in ways that aren't tautologically limited to humans? I have yet to encounter anyone who has managed this while making such an objection to any form of AI.

> All it does is search for and copy-paste code from elsewhere on the internet.

They provably don't work like that. Both because local models exist, can be run offline, still spit out code to solve problems; and because some world records have been set by them, for some CS-related maths problems the best known method was invented by an AI which used an LLM as a component.

https://the-decoder.com/openais-ai-beats-every-human-at-atco...

https://deepmind.google/blog/alphaevolve-a-gemini-powered-co...

[spzb]

> Can you define these in ways that aren't tautologically limited to humans?

No, because that’s the point. It’s not intelligent because intelligence is a human characteristic.

> Both because local models exist, can be run offline

It’s not that they search interactively, it’s that the whole internet has been sucked into the training set.

[ben_w]

> No, because that’s the point. It’s not intelligent because intelligence is a human characteristic.

A rose by any other name, etc.

Defining the meaning of the word you use to suit your preferences and then gluing to that other people's uses of the same word is not a well-reasoned argument, it's the human equivalent of a failure mode we saw in early AI, where a label saying "taxi" can fool a classifier into thinking a clock is a taxi: https://bliss-e-v.github.io/SCAM-project-page/

Will you choosing a tautologically-limiting definition that equals human, prevent AI from performing well enough to replace you at work? No, it will not: when the AI is good enough to do the work, it will do the work regardless of what you call it.

This has already happened in various other fields that have been automated, even though (a) the consensus is those AI are "not intelligent" and (b) workers before that automation insisted their work required intelligence and could not be automated.

(Plus the same example in the opposite direction: while creationists are busy denying that evolution can work and claiming there has to be an intelligent designer, simulated evolution is a standard approach in machine learning).

> It’s not that they search interactively, it’s that the whole internet has been sucked into the training set.

Training.

As in, it learned. First by reading the internet, then by feedback as it tried to make stuff and was rated by the quality of output.

It would be coherent to argue instead that intelligence is the number of examples one needs before one has learned a thing; by this standard AI is as thick as pond scum (rate: evolution), and even the fact that silicon is faster than synapses by the ratio to which joggers are faster than continental drift only makes up for this where the examples exist.

Unfortunately, this topic is software, and the examples exist.