Comment by throw310822
4 hours ago
Famously Steve Jobs said that the (personal) computer is "like a bicycle for the mind". It's a great metaphor because- besides the idea of lightness and freedom it communicates- it also described the computer as multiplier of the human strength- the bicycle allows one to travel faster and with much less effort, it's true, but ultimately the source of its power is still entirely in the muscles of the cyclist- you don't get out of it anything that you didn't put yourself.
Bu the feeling I'm having with LLMs is that we've entered the age of fossil-fuel engines: something that moves on its own power and produces somewhat more than the user needs to put into it. Ok, in the current version it might not go very far and needs to be pushed now and then, but the total energy output is greater than what users need to put in. We could call it a horse, except that this is artificial: it's a tractor. And in the last months I've been feeling like someone who spent years pushing a plough in the fields, and has suddenly received a tractor. A primitive model, still imperfect, but already working.
I've been calling LLMs "electric bicycles for the mind", inspired by that Jobs quote.
- some bicycle purists consider electric bicycles to be "cheating"
- you get less exercise from an electric bicycle
- they can get you places really effectively!
- if you don't know how to ride a bicycle an electric bicycle is going to quickly lead you to an accident
Not sure how this fits in the analogy, but as a cyclist I would add some people get more exercise by having an electric bicycle. It makes exercise available to more people.
I think that fits it really well.
Motorcycle might be more apt
I like this analogy. I'll add that, while electric bicycles are great for your daily commute, they're not suited for the extremes of biking (at least not yet).
- You're not going to take an electric bike mountain biking
- You're not going to use an electric bike to do BMX
- You're not going to use an electric bike to go bikepacking across the country
Actually, electric mountain bikes are popular (where they're allowed), mostly because they make ascents so easy.
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I think you're kind of missing the point discussing which vehicle compares better to LLMs. The point is not the vehicle: it's the birth of the engine. Before engines, humans didn't have the means to produce those amounts of power- at all. No matter how many people, horses or oxen they had at their disposal.
> You're not going to use an electric bike to do BMX
while there are companies that have made electric BMX bikes, i'd argue that if you're doing actual "BMX" on a motorized bike, it's just "MX" at that point :)
You probably can’t repair it yourself either.
- they still fall over if nobody's holding the bars
Slamming the brakes and going teeth first into the handlebars.
Not convinced with any of three analogies tbh they don’t quite capture what is going on like Steve jobs’ did.
And frankly all of this is really missing the point - instead of wasting time on analogies we should look at where this stuff works and then reason from there - a general way to make sense of it that is closer to reality.
I think there is a legitimate fear that is born from what happened with Chess.
Humans could handily beat computers at chess for a long time.
Then a massive supercomputer beat the reigning champion, but didn't win the tournament.
Then that computer came back and won the tournament a year later.
A few years later humans are collaborating in-game with these master chess engines to multiply their strength, becoming the dominant force in the human/computer chess world.
A few years after that though, the computers start beating the human/computer hybrid opponents.
And not long after that, humans started making the computer perform worse if they had a hand in the match.
The next few years have probably the highest probability since the cold war of being extreme inflection points in the timeline of human history.
The irony with the chess example is that chess has never been more popular.
Perhaps we're about to experience yet another renaissance of computer languages.
Chess being popular is mostly because FIDE had a massive push in the last decade to make it more audience friendly. shorter time formats, more engaging commentary etc.
While AI in chess is very cool in its own accord. It is not the driver for the adoption.
I'd argue the renaissance is already off the ground; one man's vibe-coded-slop is another man's vision that he finally has the tools to realize.
I know chess is popular because I have a friend who's enthusiastic about it and plays online regularly.
But I'm out of the loop: in order to maintain popularity, are computers banned? And if so, how is this enforced, both at the serious and at the "troll cheating" level?
(I suppose for casual play, matchmaking takes care of this: if someone is playing at superhuman level due to cheating, you're never going to be matched with them, only with people who play at around your level. Right?)
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It’s a test.
There’s really no crisis at a certain level; it’s great to be able to drive a car to the trailhead and great to be able to hike up the mountain.
At another level, we have worked to make sure our culture barely has any conception of how to distribute necessities and rewards to people except in terms of market competition.
Oh and we barely think about externalities.
We’ll have to do better. Or we’ll have to demonize and scapegoat so some narrow set of winners can keep their privileges. Are there more people who prefer the latter, or are there enough of the former with leverage? We’ll find out.
Great comment. The best part about it as well is that you could put this under basically anything ever submitted to hacker news and it would be relevant and cut to the absolute core of whatever is being discussed.
Sounds like we need FIDE rankings for software developers. It would be an improvement over repeated FizzBuzz testing, I suppose.
This isn't quite right to my knowledge. Most Game AI's develop novel strategies which they use to beat opponents - but if the player knows they are up against a specific Game AI and has access to it's past games, these strategies can be countered. This was a major issue in the AlphaStar launch where players were able to counter AlphaStar on later play throughs.
Comparing Chess AI to AlphaStar seems pretty messy, StarCraft is such a different type of game. With Chess it doesn't matter if you get an AI like Lc0 to follow lines it played previously because just knowing what it's going to play next doesn't really help you much at all, the hard part is still finding a win that it didn't find itself.
In comparison with StarCraft there's a rock-paper-scissors aspect with the units that makes it an inherent advantage to know what your opponent is doing or going to do. The same thing happens with human players, they hide their accounts to prevent others from discovering their prepared strategies.
May we get just a little more detail for the uninitiated?
I'm going to assume you're not implying that Deep Blue did 9/11 ;)
A tractor does exactly what you tell it to do though - you turn it on, steer it in a direction, and it goes. I like the horse metaphor for AI better: still useful, but sometimes unpredictable, and needs constant supervision.
The horse metaphor would also do, but it's very tied to the current state of LLMs (which by the way is already far beyond what they were in 2024). It also doesn't capture that horses are what they are, they're not improving and certainly not by a factor of 10, 100 or 1000, while there is almost no limit to the amount of power that an engine can be built to produce. Horses (and oxen) have been available for thousands of years, and agriculture still needed to employ a large percentage of the population. This changed completely with the petrol engines.
So it's clearly a cyborg horse
Depends who you listen to. There are developers reporting significant gains from the use of AI, others saying that it doesn't really impact their work, and then there was some research saying that time savings due to the use of AI in developing software are only an illusion, because while developers were feeling more productive they were actually slower. I guess only time will tell who's right or if it is just a matter of using the tool in the right way.
Probably depends how you're using it. I've been able to modify open-source software in languages I've never dreamed of learning, so for that, it's MUCH faster. Seems like a power tool, which, like a power saw, can do a lot very fast, which can bring construction or destruction.
I'm sure the same could be said about tractors when they were coming on the scene.
There was probably initial excitement about not having to manually break the earth, then stories spread about farmers ruining entire crops with one tractor, some farms begin touting 10x more efficiency by running multiple tractors at once, some farmers saying the maintenance burden of a tractor is not worth it compared to feeding/watering their mule, etc.
Fast forward and now gigantic remote controlled combines are dominating thousands of acres of land with the efficiency greater than 100 men with 100 early tractors.
Isn't this just a rhetorical trick where by referring to a particular technology of the past which exploded rapidly into dominance you make that path seem inevitable?
Probably some tech does achieve ubiquity and dominance and some does not and it's extremely difficult to say in advance which is which?
And, the end result being devastation of forests, ecosystems, animal life, fast track climate change etc.
Its like a motor bike, except it doesn't take you where you steer. It take you where it wants to take you.
If you tell it you want to go somewhere continents away, it will happily agree and drive you right into the ocean.
And this is before ads and other incentives make it worse.
It will take you where you want to go if you can clearly communicate your intent through refinement iterations.
refinement interaction == dismount your bike, and walk it where you want
If the computer is a bicycle for the human mind in digital space, then I would say AI is like a bicycle for the computer in human space.
Essentially computers bring humans into the world of numbers, AI brings computers into the world of humans.
A bit of a psychedelic take, but I really think this is the best analogy.
Fossil-fuel cars a good analogy because, for all their raw power and capability, living in a polluted, car-dominated world sucks. The problem with modern AI has more to do with modernism than with AI.
Having recently watched Train Dreams it feels like the transition of logging by hand to logging with industrial machinery.
And then with a few additional lines of Python, it becomes a tractor that drives itself.
Even if the autonomy is limited, the step change in what a single person can attempt is unmistakable
And like a tractor.. don't wear loose clothing near the spinning PTO (power take off) shaft.