Comment by charcircuit
6 hours ago
AI is smarter than everyone already. Seriously, the breadth of knowledge the AI possesses has no human counterpart.
6 hours ago
AI is smarter than everyone already. Seriously, the breadth of knowledge the AI possesses has no human counterpart.
Just this weekend it (Gemini) has produced two detailed sets of instructions on how to connect different devices over bluetooth, including a video (that I didn’t watch), while the devices did not support doing the connections in that direction. No reasonable human reading the involved manuals would think those solutions feasible. Not impressed, again.
It's pretty similar to looking something up with a search engine, mashing together some top results + hallucinating a bit, isn't it? The psychological effects of the chat-like interface + the lower friction of posting in said chat again vs reading 6 tabs and redoing your search, seems to be the big killer feature. The main "new" info is often incorrect info.
If you could get the full page text of every url on the first page of ddg results and dump it into vim/emacs where you can move/search around quickly, that would probably be similarly as good, and without the hallucinations. (I'm guessing someone is gonna compare this to the old Dropbox post, but whatever.)
It has no human counterpart in the same sense that humans still go to the library (or a search engine) when they don't know something, and we don't have the contents of all the books (or articles/websites) stored in our head.
> I'm guessing someone is gonna compare this to the old Dropbox post, but whatever.
If they do, you’ll be in good company. That post is about the exact opposite of what people usually link it for. I’ll let Dan explain:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281
Dan makes a case for being charitable to the commenter and how lame it is to neener-neener into the past, not that it has some opposite meaning everyone is missing out on.
1 reply →
> If you could get the full page text of every url on the first page of ddg results and dump it into vim/emacs where you can move/search around quickly, that would probably be similarly as good, and without the hallucinations.
Curiously, literally nobody on earth uses this workflow.
People must be in complete denial to pretend that LLM (re)search engines can’t be used to trivially save hours or days of work. The accuracy isn’t perfect, but entirely sufficient for very many use cases, and will arguably continue to improve in the near future.
> The accuracy isn’t perfect
The reason why people don't use LLMs to "trivially save hours or days of work" is because LLMs don't do that. People would use a tool that works. This should be evidence that the tools provide no exceptional benefit, why do you think that is not true?
> People must be in complete denial
That seems to be a big part of it, yes. I think in part it’s a reaction to perceived competition.
The only way LLM search engines save time is if you take what it says at face value as truth. Otherwise you still have to fact check whatever it spews out which is the actual time consuming part of doing proper research.
Frankly I've seen enough dangerous hallucinations from LLM search engines to immediately discard anything it says.
5 replies →
knowledge != intelligence
If knowledge == intelligence then Google and Wikipedia are "smarter" than you and the AGI problem has been solved for several decades.
AI has more knowledge than everyone already, I wouldn't say smarter though. It's like wisdom vs intelligence in D+D (and/or life).. wisdom is knowing things, intelligence is how quick you can learn / create new things.
Knowledge is what I see equivalent with a big library. It contains mostly correct information in the context of the book (which might be incorrect in general) and "ai" is very good at taking everything out of context, Smashing a probability distribution over it and picking an answer which humans will accept. E.g. it does not contain knowledge, at best the vague pretense of it.
AI has zero knowledge, as to know something is to have done it, or seen it first hand. AI has access to a great deal of data, much of it aquired through criminal action, but no way to evaluate that information other than cross checking for citations and similar occurances. Even for a human, infering things is difficult and uncertain, and so we regularly see AI fall of the cliff of cohearant word salading. We are heading strait at an idiocracy writ large that is trying to hide there raciorilgio insanity behind algorythims. Sometimes it's hard to tell, but it seems that a hairdresser has just been put in charge of the US passport office, which is highy sugestive of a new top level program to issue US citizenship on demand, but everbody else will be subject to the "impartiality" of privatly owned and operated AI policing.
It's like saying google search is smarter than everyone, amount of information indexed by it has no human counterpart, such a silly take...
Man, what are we supposed to do with people who think the above?
>ChatGPT (o3): Scored 136 on the Mensa Norway IQ test in April 2025
If you don't want to believe it, you need to change the goal posts; Create a test for intelligence that we can pass better than AI.. since AI is also better at creating test than us maybe we could ask AI to do it, hang on..
>Is there a test that in some way measures intelligence, but that humans generally test better than AI?
Answer:Thinking, Something went wrong and an AI response wasn't generated.
Edit, i managed to get one to answer me; the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI). Created by AI researcher François Chollet, this test consists of visual puzzles that require inferring a rule from a few examples and applying it to a new situation.
So we do have A test which is specifically designed for us to pass and AI to fail, where we can currently pass better than AI... hurrah we're smarter!
The validity of IQ tests as a measure of broad intelligence has been in question for far longer than LLMs have existed. And if it’s not a proper test for humans, it’s not a proper test to compare humans to anything else, be it LLMs or chimps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Validity...
>Create a test for intelligence that we can pass better than AI
Easy? The best LLMs score 40% on Butter-Bench [1], while the mean human score is 95%. LLMs struggled the most with multi-step spatial planning and social understanding.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.21860v1
To be intelligent is to realise that any test for intelligence is at best a proxy for some parts of it. There's no objective way to measure intelligence as a whole, we can't even objectively define intelligence.
I'd do the same thing I'd do with anyone that has a different opinion than me: try my best to have an honest and open discussion with them to understand their point of view and get to the heart of why they believe said thing, without forcefully tearing apart their beliefs. A core part of that process is avoiding saying anything that could cause them to feel shame for believing something that I don't, even if I truly believe they are wrong, and just doing what I can to earnestly hear them out. The optional thing afterwards, if they seem open to it, is express my own beliefs in a way that's palatable and easily understood. Basically explain it in a language they understand, and in a way that we can think about and understand and discuss together, not taking offense to any attempts at questioning or poking holes in my beliefs because that is the discovery process imo for trying something new.
Online is a little trickier because you don't know if they're a dog. Well, now a days it's even harder, because they could also not have a fully developed frontal lobe, or worse, they could be a bot, troll, or both.
Well said, and thank you for the final paragraph. Made me chuckle.
I don't know, it's kinda terrifying how this line of thinking is spreading even on HN. AI as we have it now is just a turbocharged autocomplete, with a really good information access. It's not smart, or dumb, or anything "human" .
It just shows that true natural intelligence is difficult to define by proxy.
Do you think your own language processing abilities are significantly different from autocomplete with information access? If so, why?
Just brace for the societal correction.
There's a lot of things going on in the western world, both financial and social in nature. It's not good in the sense of being pleasant/contributing to growth and betterment, but it's a correction nonetheless.
That's my take on it anyway. Hedge bets. Dive under the wave. Survive the next few years.
Having knowledge is not exactly the same as being smart though is it.
It's at least one component of it, and by being exceptional in that component it makes up for what it lacks in other components.
Although it helps immensely.
Only if you understand it..
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