[ilaksh]

It's so interesting that people are so divided on this. He even said he generated multiple applications. Yet he has found a way to just about dismiss it somehow.

AI is not going to go away and it's not going to stop improving. That would go against the entire history of computing.

We have levels of improvements in the R&D pipeline in every area: hardware, software, model architecture and training. The models will get larger, architecture more sophisticated, computation dramatically more efficient. New materials, paradigms, more efficient nano-devices, scaling up manufacturing for better devices that are already out of the lab, etc. are in progress pointed towards multiple orders of magnitude efficiency gains. And by the way, that is not at all unusual -- we have been making large and small innovations in computing efficiency for decades.

There are still some things lacking in AI -- it still is jagged intelligence. Give it a few years, people will be nostalgic about the time when humans could still point to some victories here and there. That doesn't require any major breakthroughs -- just continuing to increase the size of the models and improving the training.

[wizzledonker]

I guess, just to play devils advocate, what if code turns out to just be the minimally expressive communication medium required for a human to maintain agency over the function of a system?

If we consider (and I’m not saying this is true, just for arguments sake) that this agency is important as other humans enjoy talking to humans about a goal, rather than machines, and we think this will never change.

In this peculiar case, it actually doesn’t matter how “good” llms get - they will never cross a barrier fundamental to human nature?

[ilaksh]

Maybe you're trying to argue that LLMs won't be able to simulate humans or reproduce all of human nature. That's true, but it's not what I was discussing. I was talking about programming.

Also, they are really VLMs and VLAs and there are other types of architecture and there will be many more.

So if you think that there is something salient about humans that can't be reproduced eventually by AI, then look into religious dualism.

[wizzledonker]

> So if you think that there is something salient about humans that can't be reproduced eventually by AI, then look into religious dualism.

Contradicts

> not what I was discussing. I was talking about programming.

To be concrete: my argument is that to

> "simulate humans or reproduce all of human nature"

Is exactly what would be required for an LLM to replace a human as an effective interface for programming. Crazy hill to die on, I know, but that's the goal.

I am purely talking about programming. The reasoning looks something like this.

1. LLMs are undeniably useful as assistants when programming.

2. At some point though, they are leveraged too much. This leads to humans having an inability to reason about the generated code.

3. The LLM now needs to be as good of an interface as a human being to be of any use.

I think most people would agree with this distinction. Where people argue is where the cutoff point lies - and it's actually hard to find. How do you know when you have transitioned between the three stages? It's tempting to say, if the speedup is marginal, it isn't worth the risk.

[stwsk]

There are already extreme edge case uses for AI that are incredibly, freakishly efficient compared to literally any human. Just for say, book or film recommendations... If you want obscure in the sense that no critical re-appraisal or any kind of cult following or curiosity towards it doesn't exist at all period, I'm talking about movies with literally 7 comments across the entire internet. Great films, loved by noone, usually too old to catch any meaningful wave by now... Nothing will ever compare. I've not been able to read nearly as many books as I've watched films but every single recommendation has been fantastic and tailored to my taste in such a way that only very few people have ever achieved, and even then those people are not capable of giving you a brand new list of books to read or movies to watch every single night.

In a broader sense, computational chemistry and drug discovery is already exploding- very, very hard to see that genie being put in the bottle. They've probably created such a large backlog of potentially useful outputs that it would take centuries for humans to sift through.

Useful AI is already here! Get over it. Your term "jagged intelligence" is very good, I will have to write that one down. Jagged indeed.

[AuthAuth]

that recommendation is just a reddit comment in a thread similar to your prompt.