Comment by atleastoptimal
4 days ago
>AI model performs astounding feat everyone claimed was impossible or won’t be achieved for a while
>Commenters on HN claim it must not be that hard, or OpenAI is lying, or cheated. Anything but admit that it is impressive
Every time on this site lol. A lot of people here have an emotional aversion to accepting AI progress. They’re deep in the bargaining/anger/denial phase.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what AI means about being human. Not about apocalypses or sentience or taking our jobs, but about “what is a human” and “what is the value of a human”.
All my life I’ve taken for granted that your value is related to your positive impact, and that the unique value of humans is that we can create and express things like no other species we’ve encountered.
Now, we have created this thing that has ripped away many of my preconceptions.
If an AI can adequately do whatever a particular person does, then is there still a purpose for that person? What can they contribute? (No I am not proposing or even considering doing anything about it).
It just makes me sad, like something special is going away from the world.
The fact that you're honestly grappling with this reality puts you far ahead of most people.
It seems a common recent neurosis (albeit protective one) to proclaim a permanent human preeminence over the world of value, moral status and such for reasons extremely coupled with our intelligence, and then claim that certain kinds of intelligence have nothing to do with it when our primacy in those specific realms of intelligence is threatened. This will continue until there's nothing humans have left to bargain with.
The world isn't what we want it to be, the world is what it is. The closest thing we have to the world turning out the way we want it making it that way. Which is why I think many of those who hate AI would give their desires for how the world ought to be a better fighting chance by putting in the work to making it so, rather than sitting in denial at what is happening in the world of artificial intelligence.
That’s very insightful, thank you.
I agree that denial is not an approach that’s likely to be productive.
Sort of a naive response, considering many of the folks calling out the issues have significant experience building with LLMs or building LLMs.
Denying the rapid improvement in AI is the only naivety that really matters in the long run at this point. I haven’t seen much substantive criticism of this achievement that boils down to anything more than “well it’s a secret model so they must not be telling us something”
I'm building with LLMs, and they're solving problems that weren't possible to solve before due to how many resources they would consume. Resources, as in human-hours.
Finance, chemistry, biology, medicine.
A problem as old as the field. Quote from the 80s:
> There is a related “Theorem” about progress in AI: once some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an essential ingredient of “real thinking”. The ineluctable core of intelligence is always in that next thing which hasn’t yet been programmed. This “Theorem” was first proposed to me by Larry Tesler, so I call it Tesler’s Theorem: “AI is whatever hasn’t been done yet.”
I guess my major question would be: does the training data include anything from 2025 which may have included information about the IMO 2025?
Given that AI companies are constantly trying to slurp up any and all data online, if the model was derived from existing work, it's maybe less impressive than at first glance. If present-day model does well at IMO 2026, that would be nice.
Are the human participants in the IMO held to the same standard?
Thank you for this pop psychology evaluation. It could have been written by an an "AI".
Simply stating what is going on in the comments, as happens any time AI hits a previously thought to be impossible or far-off milestone.
I'm very much not in denial about my open source being being stolen without attribution or the layoffs that are rationalized by fake "AI" productivity.
You do have a point though that we should be writing to Sen. Marsha Blackburn instead of complaining here.
It's a good camp to be in. If we're wrong, that will be awesome!
Get ready to downvoted, the wave of single minded is coming
There is a diversity of opinions on this site. I do hope that soon more of the intelligent commenters who have spent a while denying AI progress will realize what’s actually happening and contribute their brainpower to a meaningful cause in the lead up to AI-human parity. If we want a good future in a world where AI is smarter than humans, we need to do alignment work soon.