23 ms·

Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden

• deleted 10mo ago
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• barbazoo 10mo ago
  Engine efficiency, chess rating, AI cap ex. One example is not like the other. Is there steady progress in AI? To me it feels like it’s little progress followed by the occasional breakthrough but I might be totally off here.
  • GaggiX 10mo ago
    ChatGPT was released 3 years ago and that was complete ass compared to what we have today.
  • dcre 10mo ago
    I think you are totally off. Individual benchmarks are not very useful on their own, but as far as I’m aware they all tell the same story of continual progress. I don’t find this surprising since it matches my experience as well.
  • raincole 10mo ago
    What example do you need? In every single benchmark AI is getting better and better. Before someone says "but benchmark doesn't reflect real world..." please name what metric you think is meaningful if not benchmark. Token consumption? OpenAI/Anthropic revenue?
    • jacobsenscott 10mo ago
      Whenever I try and use a "state of the art" LLM to generate code it takes longer to get a worse result than if I just wrote the code myself from the start. That's the experience of every good dev I know. So that's my benchmark. AI benchmarks are BS marketing gimmicks designed to give the appearance of progress - there are tremendous perverse financial incentives. This will never change because you can only use an LLM to generate code (or any other type of output) you already know how to produce and are expert at - because you can never trust the output.
      • whycombinetor 10mo ago
        Third party benchmarks like terminalbench exist. W.r.t code changes especially small ones (say 50 lines spread across 5 files), if you can't get an agent to make nearly exactly the code changes you want, just faster than you, that's a you problem at this point. If it maybe would take you 15 minutes, grok-code-fast-1 can do it in 2.
      • trollbridge 10mo ago
        Right. With careful use of AIs, I can use it to gather information to help me make better designs (like giving me summaries of the current best available frameworks or libraries to choose for a given project), but as far as just generating an architecture and then generating the code and devops and so on for that? It's just not there, unless you're creating an app that effectively already exists, like some basic CRUD app. If you're creating basic CRUDs, what on earth are you doing? That kind of thing should have been automated a long time ago.
        • whycombinetor 10mo ago
          What do you mean when you say building crud apps should be automated?
          • beeflet 10mo ago
            conventionally, it should have been abstracted by a higher-level language.
          • trollbridge 10mo ago
            CRUD apps are ridiculously simple and have been in existence my entire life. Yet it is surprisingly difficult to make a basic CRUD and host it somewhere. The bulk of useful but simple business apps are just a CRUD with a tiny bit of customisation and integration around them. It is true that LLMs make it easier to build these kind of things without having to become a competent programmer first.
            • 10mo ago
    • bluefirebrand 10mo ago
      > please name what metric you think is meaningful Job satisfaction and human flourishing By those metrics, AI is getting worse and worse
      • machomaster 10mo ago
        AI is very satisfied in doing the job, just ask it. AI is able to speed up the progress, to give more resources, to give the most important thing people have - time. The fact that these incredible gifts are misused (or used inefficiently) is not the problem of AI. This would be like complaining that the objective positive of increased food production is actually a negative, because people are getting fatter.
        • lomase 10mo ago
          Imagine anthropomorphing this hard.
          • machomaster 10mo ago
            You misunderstood. This is how the conversation went: 1. Is there steady progress in AI? 2. What example do you need? In every single benchmark AI is getting better and better. 3. Job satisfaction and human flourishing. Hence my answer "AI is very satisfied in doing the job, just ask it". It came about because of the stupid comment 3, which tried to link and put a blame on unrelatable things (akin to refering to obesity when asked what metrics make him say that agriculture/transportation have not made progress in the last 100 years) and at the same time anthropomorphed AI. I only accepted the premise and continued answering on the same level in order to demonstrate stupidity of their answer.
            • yeasku 10mo ago
              I did not misunderstood anything clanker.
              • machomaster 10mo ago
    • philipwhiuk 10mo ago
      OpenAI net profit. The figures for cost are wildly off to start with.
    • fzeroracer 10mo ago
      AI is getting better at every benchmark. Please ignore that we're not allowed to see these benchmarks and also ignore that the companies in question are creating the benchmarks that are being exceeded.
    • azemetre 10mo ago
      What metrics, that aren't controlled by industry, show AI getting better? Generally curious because those "ranking sites" to me seem to be infested with venture capital, so hardly fair or unbiased. The only reports I hear from academia are those being overly negative on AI.
  • Calamityjanitor 10mo ago
    The only 'line go up' graph they have left is money invested. I'm even dubious of the questions answered graph. It looks more like a feature added to internal wiki that went up in usage. Instead it's portrayed as a measure of quality or usefulness.
  • tim333 10mo ago
    Steady progress in the hardware for AI, lumpy progress in algorithms?
• personjerry 10mo ago
  I think it's a cool perspective, but the not-so-hidden assumption is that for any given domain, the efficiency asymptote peaks well above the alternative. And that really is the entire question at this point: Which domains will AI win in by a sufficient margin to be worth it?
  • danpalmer 10mo ago
    > the not-so-hidden assumption is that for any given domain, the efficiency asymptote peaks well above the alternative This is an assumption for the best-case scenario, but I think you could also just take the marginal case. Steady progress builds until you get past the state of the art system, and then the switch becomes easy to justify.
• s17n 10mo ago
  This is a fun piece... but what killed off the horses wasn't steady incremental progress in steam engine efficiency, it was the invention of the internal combustion engine.
  • deleted 10mo ago
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  • dcre 10mo ago
    According to Wikipedia, the IC engine was invented around 1800 and only started to get somewhere in the late 1800s. Sounds like the story doesn’t change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_combustion_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_combustion_engine
  • deleted 10mo ago
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  • pcrh 10mo ago
    Quite. For reference, the horse population of France didn't decline significantly until the late 1940's [0]. [0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7023172/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7023172/
  • mkl 10mo ago
    Engines, not just steam engines.
    • s17n 10mo ago
      Sure, but if you look at more complex picture of engine development you could just as easily support the proposition that programmers are currently not in any danger (by pointing out that the qualitative differences between IC and steam engines were decisive when it comes to replacing horses, and the correct analogy is that much like a steam engine could never replace a horse, a transformer model can never replace a human). Not detracting from the article, I think it's a fun way to shake your brain into the entirely appropriate space of "rapid change is possible"!
• ible 10mo ago
  People are not simple machines or animals. Unless AI becomes strictly better than humans and humans + AI, from the perspective of other humans, at all activities, there will still be lots of things for humans to do to provide value for each other. The question is how do our individuals, and more importantly our various social and economic systems handle it when exactly what humans can do to provide value for each other shifts rapidly, and balances of power shift rapidly. If the benefits of AI accrue to/are captured by a very small number of people, and the costs are widely dispersed things can go very badly without strong societies that are able to mitigate the downsides and spread the upsides.
  • traverseda 10mo ago
    I'd be more worried about the implicit power imbalance. It's not what can humans provide for each-other, it's what can humans provide for a handful of ultra-wealthy oligarchs.
    • jordwest 10mo ago
      Yeah, from the perspective of the ultra-wealthy us humans are already pretty worthless and they'll be glad to get rid of us. But from the perspective of a human being, an animal, and the environment that needs love, connection, mutual generosity and care, another human being who can provide those is priceless. I propose we break away and create our own new economy and the ultra-wealthy can stay in their fully optimised machine dominated bunkers. Sure maybe we'll need to throw a few food rations and bags of youthful blood down there for them every once in a while, but otherwise we could live in an economy that works for humanity instead.
      • vkou 10mo ago
        The thing that the ultra-wealthy desire above all else is power and privilege, and they won't be getting either of that in those bunkers. They sure as shit won't be content to leave the rest of us alone.
        • 10mo ago
• burroisolator 10mo ago
  "In 1920, there were 25 million horses in the United States, 25 million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of progress in mechanical engines. And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared. I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did." I'm reminded of the idiom "be careful what you wish for, as you might just get it." Rapid technogical change has historically lead to prosperity over the long term but not in the short term. My fear is that the pace of change this time around is so rapid that the short term destruction will not be something that can be recovered from even over the longer term.
  • falcor84 10mo ago
    My reading of tfa is exactly that - the author is hoping that we'll have at least a generation or so to adapt, like horses did, but is concerned that it might be significantly more rapid.
    • OccamsMirror 10mo ago
      To be clear though, the horses didn't adapt. Their populate was reduced by orders of a magnitude.
      • sendes 10mo ago
        True, but the horses' population started (slightly) rising again when they went from economic tools to recreational tools for humans. What will happen to humans?
        • Gigachad 10mo ago
          The horse population was being boosted beyond normal numbers by human intervention. When humans stopped breeding them the numbers dropped. At least currently humans do not need AI to reproduce.
          • baq 10mo ago
• kangs 10mo ago
  hello faster horses
• narrator 10mo ago
  Wait till the robots arrive. That they will know how to do a vast range of human skills, some that people train their whole lives for, will surprise people the most. The future shock I get from Claude Code, knowing how long stuff takes the hard way, especially niche difficult to research topics like the alternate applicable designs of deep learning models to a modeling task, is a thing of wonder. Imagine now that a master marble carver shows up at an exhibition and some sci-fi author just had robots make a perfect beautiful equivalent of a character from his novel, equivalent in quality to Michaelangelo's David, but cyberpunk.
• sothatsit 10mo ago
  This tracks with my own AI usage over just this year. There have been two releases that caused step changes in how much I actually use AI: 1. The release of Claude Code in February 2. The release of Opus 4.5 two weeks ago In both of these cases, it felt like no big new unlocks were made. These releases aren’t like OpenAI’s o1, where they introduced reasoning models with entirely new capabilities, or their Pro offerings, which still feel like the smartest chatbots in the world to me. Instead, these releases just brought a new user interface, and improved reliability. And yet these two releases mark the biggest increases in my AI usage. These releases caused the utility of AI for my work to pass thresholds where Claude Code became my default way to get LLMs to read my code, and then Opus 4.5 became my default way to make code changes.
  • AIorNot 10mo ago
    I would add Gemini Nano Banna Pro to that list - (its words with image ability) is amazing..
• wrs 10mo ago
  Point taken, but it's hard to take a talk seriously when it has a graph showing AI becoming 80% of GDP! What does the "P" even stand for then?
  • baq 10mo ago
    It’s called exponential growth and humans are well known to be almost comically bad at identifying and interpreting it.
    • rogerrogerr 10mo ago
      When people make forward looking statements using the term “exponential growth”, you can always replace that with “S-curve”. Remember when we had two weeks of data, and governments acted like Covid was projected to kill everyone by next Tuesday?
  • lostmsu 10mo ago
    Pokens
• adventured 10mo ago
  It's astounding how subtly anti-AI HN has become over the past year, as the models keep getting better and better. It's now pervasive across nearly every AI thread here. As the potential of AI technical agents has gone from an interesting discussion to extraordinarily obvious as to what the outcome is going to be, HN has comically shifted negative in tone on AI. They doth protest too much. I think it's a very clear case of personal bias. The machines are rapidly coming for the lucrative software jobs. So those with an interest in protecting lucrative tech jobs are talking their book. The hollowing out of Silicon Valley is imminent, as other industrial areas before it. Maybe 10% of the existing software development jobs will remain. There's no time to form powerful unions to stop what's happening, it's already far too late.
  • bwfan123 10mo ago
    > The hollowing out of Silicon Valley is imminent I think AI tools are great, and I use them daily and know their limits. Your view is commonly held by management or execs who don't have their boots on the ground.
    • trollbridge 10mo ago
      That's what I've observed. I currently have more work booked than I can reasonably get done in the next year, and my customers would be really delighted if I could deliver it to them sooner, and take on even more projects. But I have yet to find any way that just adding AI tools to the mix makes us orders-of-magnitude better. The most I've been able to squeeze out is a 5% to 10% increase.
    • glitchc 10mo ago
      But they do have their hands on your budget, and they are responsible for creating and filling positions.
  • trollbridge 10mo ago
    I don't think is the case; I think what's actually going on is that the HN crowd are the people who are stuck actually trying to use AI tools and aware of their limitations. I have noticed, however, that people who are either not programmers or who are not very good programmers report that they can derive a lot of benefit from AI tools, since now they can make simple programs and get them to work. The most common use case seems to be some kind of CRUD app. It's very understandable this seems revolutionary for people who formerly couldn't make programs at all. For those of us who are busy trying to deliver what we've promised customers we can do, I find I get far less use out of AI tools than I wish I did. In our business we really do not have the budget to add another senior software engineer, and we don't the spare management/mentor/team lead capacity to take on another intern or junior. So we're really positioned to be taking advantage of all these promises I keep hearing about AI, but in practical terms, it saves me at an architect or staff level maybe 10% of my time and for one of our seniors maybe 5%. So I end up being a little dismissive when I hear that AI is going to become 80% of GDP and will be completely automating absolutely everything, when what I actually spend my day on is the same-old same-old of trying to get some vendor framework to do what I want to get some sensor data out of their equipment and deliver apps to end customers that use enough of my own infrastructure that they don't require $2,000 a month of cloud hosting services per user. (I picked that example since at one customer, that's what we were brought in to replace: that kind of cost simply doesn't scale.)
• deleted 10mo ago
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• jsheard 10mo ago
  Cost per word is a bizarre metric to bring up. Since when is volume of words a measure of value or achievement?
  • StilesCrisis 10mo ago
    It also puts a thumb on the scale for AI, which tends to emit pages of text to answer simple questions.
    • jsheard 10mo ago
      The chart is actually words "thought or written" so I guess they are running up the numbers even more by counting Claudes entire inner monologue, on top of what it ultimately outputs.
    • garciasn 10mo ago
      Sounds like any post-secondary, graduate student, or management consultant out there being there are, very often, page/word count or hours requirements. Considering the model corpora, wordiness wins out.
  • bdangubic 10mo ago
    these are not just “words” but answers to questions from people who got a job at anthropic had…
  • kashyapc 10mo ago
    It's not merely cost per word, but it is even more bizarre: "cost per word thought", whatever that is. Most of these "word thoughts" from LLMs of today are just auto-completed large dumps of text.
  • sanex 10mo ago
    There was a time when these models were novel that if use it to write for me. After a year or so the verboseness and lack of personality got old. Now all I have is a decent proofreader. Maybe they'll take over my job but I'm finding the trend going the other way right now.
• websiteapi 10mo ago
  funny how we have all of this progress yet things that actually matter (sorry chess fans) in the real world are more expensive: health care, housing, cars. and what meager gains there are seem to be more and more concentrated in a smaller group of people. plenty of charts you can look at - net productivity by virtually any metric vs real adjusted income. the example I like are kiosks and self checkout. who has encountered one at a place where it is cheaper than its main rival and is directly attributable to (by the company or otherwise) to lower prices?? in my view all it did was remove some jobs. that's the preview. that's it. you will lose jobs and you will pay more. congrats. even with year 2020 tech you could automate most work that needs to be done, if our industry wouldn't endlessly keep disrupting itself and have a little bit of discipline. so once ai destroys desk jobs and the creative jobs, then what? chill out? too bad anyone who has a house won't let more be built.
  • atleastoptimal 10mo ago
    Those are all expensive because of artificial barriers meant to keep their prices high. Go to any Asian country and houses, healthcare and cars are priced like commodities, not luxuries. Tech and AI have taken off in the US partially because they’re in the domain of software, which hasnt bee regulated to the point of deliberate inefficiency like other industries in the US.
    • tyre 10mo ago
      If we had less regulation of insurance companies, do you think they’d be cheaper? (I pick this example because our regulation of insurance companies has (unintuitively) incentivized them to pay more for care. So it’s an example of poor regulation imo)
      • davidw 10mo ago
        Health care is the more complicated one of the examples cited, but housing definitely is an 'own goal' in how we made it too difficult to build in too many places - especially "up and in" rather than outward expansion. Stuff like this isn't Wall Street or Billionaires or whatever bogeyman - it's our neighbors: https://bendyimby.com/2024/04/16/the-hearing-and-the-housing-shortage/ https://bendyimby.com/2024/04/16/the-hearing-and-the-housing...
• jameslk 10mo ago
  > Back then, me and other old-timers were answering about 4,000 new-hire questions a month. > Then in December, Claude finally got good enough to answer some of those questions for us. > … Six months later, 80% of the questions I'd been being asked had disappeared. Interesting implications for how to train juniors in a remote company, or in general: > We find that sitting near teammates increases coding feedback by 18.3% and improves code quality. Gains are concentrated among less-tenured and younger employees, who are building human capital. However, there is a tradeoff: experienced engineers write less code when sitting near colleagues. https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum5926/files/2025-11/Power%20of%20Proximity%20to%20Coworkers%20November%202025.pdf https://pallais.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum592...
• 1970-01-01 10mo ago
  How about we stop trying the analogy clothing on and just tell it like it is? AI is unlike any other technology to date. Just like predicting the weather, we don't know what it will be like in 20 months. Everything is a guesstimate.
  • dredmorbius 10mo ago
    I think that you're on to something here, though I agree more with your first sentence than the second. AI is not identical to, as the article compares, mechanical power. But your weather-forecasting comment suggests a possible similarity (though not the one you go to): for all the millions-fold increase in compute power, and the increased density and specificity of meterological measurements, our accurate weather-forecasting window has only extended by a factor or so of two (roughly five days to ten). That is, there are applications for which vastly more information-processing capacity provides fairly modest returns. And there are also those in which it's transformative. I'd put reusable rockets in that category, where we can now put sufficiently-reliable compute (and a whole bunch of rocket-related hardware) on a boost-phase rocket such that it can successfully soft-land. For some years I've been thinking of the notion of technology not as some general principle ("efficiency" is the classic economics formulation), but as a set of specific mechanisms each of which has specific capabilities and limitations.[1] I've held pretty constant with nine of these: 1. Fuels. Applying more (or more useful) energy to a process. 2. Energy transmission and transformation. 3. Materials. Specific properties, abundance, costs, effects, limitations. 4. Process knowledge --- how to do things. What's generally described as "technical knowledge", here considered as a specific mechanism of technology. 5. Structural or causal knowledge --- why things work. What's generally described as "scientific knowledge". 6. Networks. Interactions between nodes via links, physical or virtual, over which matter, energy, information, or some mix flow. Transport, comms, power, information. 7. Systems. Constructs including sensing, processing, action, and feedback. Ranging from conceptual to mechanical to human and social. 8. Information. Sensing, perceiving, processing, storing, retrieving, and transmitting. Ranging from our natural senses to augmented ones, from symbolic systems (language, maths) to algorithms. 9. Hygiene. Sinks and unintended consequences, affecting the function and vitality of systems, and their mitigations or limits. AI / AGI falls into the 8th category: information, specifically information processing. And as such, getting back to my original point, we can compare it with other information-related technological innovations: speech, writing, maths, boolean logic, switches (valves, transistors, etc.), information storage/retrieval, etc. And, yes, human thought processes. We do have some priors we can look at here, and they might help guide us in what a true AGI might be able to accomplish, and what its limitations may be. It's often noted (including in this thread) that AGI would not presently be able to persist without copious human assistance, in that it's predicated on a vast technological infrastructure only a small portion of which it would be capable of substituting for. It's quite likely that AGI would be both competitive with and complementary to much human activity. In the horse analogy, it's worth noting that the first stage of mechanised transport development, with steam shipping and rail technology, horses were strongly complementary in that they fulfilled the last-mile delivery role which steamships and locomotives couldn't furnish. Horse drayage populations actually boomed during this period. It was development of ICE-powered lorries which finally out-competed the horse-drawn cart for intra-urban delivery. AGI-as-augmenting-humans is an already highly-utilised model, and will likely persist for some time. Experiments in AGI replacing humans will no doubt occur, some successful, others not. I'd suggest that my 9th category, hygiene, and specifically failure modes of AGI, will likely prove highly interesting. Mechanised transport also relies heavily on fuels and/or energy storage. The past 200 or so years were predicated on nonrenewable fossil fuels, first coal then oil, and there were several points in that timeline where continued availability of cheap fuels was seriously in question. We're now reaching the point where even given abundant supply, the relatively-clean byproducts of use are proving, at scales of current use, incompatible with climatic stability, possibly extending to incompatible with advanced technological civilisation or even advanced life on Earth (again, category 9). AGI relies on IC chip manufacture (the province of vanishingly few companies), on copious amounts of electricity, scarce physical resources, and various legal regimes concerning use of intellectual works, property, profit, and more (categories 1, 2, 3, and 7, at a minimum). Whether or not a world with pervasive AGI proves to be a stable or unstable point is another open question. ________________________________ Notes: 1. A sampling of prior HN discussions may be found with this search: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adredmorbius%20ontology%20technological%20mechanisms&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>.
• WhyOhWhyQ 10mo ago
  Humans design the world to our benefit, horses do not.
  • bluefirebrand 10mo ago
    Most humans don't. Only the wealthy and powerful are able to do this And they often do it at the expense of the rest of us
• AstroBen 10mo ago
  Cool, now lets make a big list of technologies that didn't take off like they were expected to
• echelon 10mo ago
  > And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared. > I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did. > But looking at how fast Claude is automating my job, I think we're getting a lot less. This "our company is onto the discovery that will put you all out of work (or kill you?)" rhetoric makes me angry. Something this powerful and disruptive (if it is such) doesn't need to be owned or controlled by a handful of companies. It makes me hope the Chinese and their open source models ultimately win. I've seen Anthropic and OpenAI employees leaning into this rhetoric on an almost daily basis since 2023. Less so OpenAI lately, but you see it all the time from these folks. Even the top leadership. Meanwhile Google, apart from perhaps Kilpatrick, is just silent.
  • trollbridge 10mo ago
    At this point "we're going to make all office work obsolete" feels more like a marketing technique than anything actually connected to reality. It's sort of like how Coca-Cola implies that drinking their stuff will make you popular and well-liked by other attractive, popular people. Meanwhile, my own office is buried in busywork that there are currently no AI tools on the market that will do the work for us, and AI entering a space sometimes increases busywork workloads. For example, when writing descriptions of publications or listings for online sales, we have to put more effort now into not sounding like it was AI-generated or we will lose sales. The AI tools for writing descriptions / generating listings are not very helpful either. (An inaccurate listing/description is a nightmare.) I was able to help set up a client with AI tools to help him generate basically a faux website in a few hours that has lots of nice graphic design, images, etc. so that his new venture looks like a real company. Well, except for the "About Us" page that hallucinated an executive team plus a staff of half a dozen employees. So I guess work like that does get done faster now.
  • glitchc 10mo ago
    Well, tbf the author was hired to answer newbie questions. Perhaps the position is that of an evangelist, not a scientist.
    • baq 10mo ago
• kazinator 10mo ago
  Ironically, you could use the sigmoid function instead of horses. The training stimulus slowly builds over multiple iteration and then suddenly, flip: the wrong prediction reverses.
• fizlebit 10mo ago
  yeah but machines don't produce horseshit, or do they? (said in the style of Vsauce)
• johnsmith1840 10mo ago
  I mean it's hard to argue that if we invented a human in a box (AGI) human work would be irrelevent. But I don't know how we could watch current AI and anyone can say we have that. The big thing this AI boom has showed us that we can all be thankful to have seen is what a human in a box will eventually look like. The first generation of humans to be able to see that is a super lucky experience to have. Maybe it's one massive breakthrough away or maybe it's dozens away. But there is no way to predict when some massive breakthrough will occur Illya said 5-20 that really just means we don't know.
  • goatlover 10mo ago
    Why a human in a box and not an android? A lot of jobs will require advanced robotics to fully automate. And then there are jobs where customer preference is for human interaction or human entertainment. It's like how superior chess engines have not reduced the profession of chess grandmasters, because people remain more interested in human chess competition.
    • baq 10mo ago
      The assumption is superhuman AGI or a stronger ASI could invent anything it needed really fast, so ASI means intelligent robots within years or months, depending on manufacturing capabilities.
• conartist6 10mo ago
  I thought this was going to be about how much more intelligent horses are than AIs and I was disappointed
• billisonline 10mo ago
  An engine performs a simple mechanical operation. Chess is a closed domain. An AI that could fully automate the job of these new hires, rather than doing RAG over a knowledge base to help onboard them, would have to be far more general than either an engine or a chessbot. This generality used to be foregrounded by the term "AGI." But six months to a year ago when the rate of change in LLMs slowed down, and those exciting exponentials started to look more like plateauing S-curves, executives conveniently stopped using the term "AGI," preferring weasel-words like "transformative AI" instead. I'm still waiting for something that can learn and adapt itself to new tasks as well as humans can, and something that can reason symbolically about novel domains as well as we can. I've seen about enough from LLMs, and I agree with the critique that som type of breakthrough neuro-symbolic reasoning architecture will be needed. The article is right about one thing: in that moment AI will overtake us suddenly! But I doubt we will make linear progress toward that goal. It could happen in one year, five, ten, fifty, or never. In 2023 I was deeply concerned about being made obsolete by AI, but now I sleep pretty soundly knowing the status quo will more or less continue until Judgment Day, which I can't influence anyway.
  • rvz 10mo ago
    Remember, these companies (including the author) have an incentive to continue selling fear of job displacement not because of how disruptive LLMs are, but because of how profitable it is if you scare everyone into using your product to “survive”. To companies like Anthropic, “AGI” really means: “Liquidity event for (AI company)” - IPO, tender offer or acquisition. Afterwards, you will see the same broken promises as the company will be subject to the expectations of Wall St and pension funds.
    • deleted 10mo ago
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    • xmcqdpt2 10mo ago
      There is a lot of critihype https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5 https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-cr...
• namesbc 10mo ago
  Software engineers used to know that measuring lines of code written was a poor metric for productivity... https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html
  • actionfromafar 10mo ago
    So, a free idea from me: train the next coding LLM to produce not regular text, but patches which shortens code while still keeping the code working the same.
    • wyre 10mo ago
      gonna tell claude to write all my code in one line
      • lomase 10mo ago
        Imagine you are a Perl programmer writing js...
    • NitpickLawyer 10mo ago
      They can already do that. A few months ago I played around with the kaggle python golf competition. Got to top 50 without writing a line of code myself. Modern LLMs can take a piece of code and "golf" it. And modern harnesses (cc / codex / gemini cli) can take a task and run it in a loop if you can give them clear scores (i.e. code length) and test suites outside of their control (i.e. the solution is valid or not). No idea why you'd want this in a normal job, but the capabilities are here.
      • actionfromafar 10mo ago
        LLMs won't ever shut up. That seems unfixable. But a "hack" would perhaps be to train them to make longer patches but which actually removes code.
  • underyx 10mo ago
• pbw 10mo ago
  This is food for thought, but horses were a commodity; people are very much not interchangeable with each other. The BLS tracks ~1,000 different occupations. Each will fall to AI at a slightly different rate, and within each, there will be variations as well. But this doesn't mean it won't still subjectively happen "fast".
  • erichocean 10mo ago
    That looks to me like there are ~1000 interchangeable economic human roles for AI to replace. So I guess we should check to see if computers are good at scaling or doing things concurrently. If not, no worries!
  • hnfong 10mo ago
    Whether people are interchangeable with each other isn't the point. The point is whether AI is interchangeable with jobs currently done by humans. Unless and until AI training requires 1000 different domain experts, the current projection is that at some point AI will be interchangeable with all kinds of humans...
• glitchc 10mo ago
  Conclusion: Soylent..?
  • nextworddev 10mo ago
    damn
• leowoo91 10mo ago
  We still have chess grandmasters if you have noticed..
  • xlbuttplug2 10mo ago
    Yes, and we'll continue to have human coding competitions for entertainment purpose. Good luck trying to live off the prize money though.
    • nextworddev 10mo ago
      Hikaru makes good money streaming on Twitch tho
      • hurturue 10mo ago
        so you're telling me there will be money for about 100 top streaming programmers
• byronic 10mo ago
  my favorite part was where the graphs are all unrelated to each other
• richardles 10mo ago
  I've also noticed that LLMs are really good at speeding up onboarding. New hires basically have a friendly, never tired mentor available. It gives them more confidence in the first drafted code changes / design docs. But I don't think the horse analogy works. It's really changing cultural expectations. Don't ping a human when an LLM can answer the question probably better and faster. Do ping a human for meaningful questions related to product directions / historical context. What LLMs are killing is: - noisy Slacks with junior folks questions. Those are now your Gemini / chat gpt sessions. - tedious implementation sessions. The vast majority of the work is still human led from what I can tell.
  • 8note 10mo ago
    you still lose a bit from not having those juniors' questions around - where is your documentation sucking or your code is confusing?
    • baq 10mo ago
      Both questions are getting scary good answers from the latest models. Yes, I tried, on a large proprietary code base which shouldn’t be included in any training set.
    • NitpickLawyer 10mo ago
      We are now at a point where the tech can help with both of those, today. You can have a cc session "in a loop" going through your docs / code and try to do x and y, and if it gets stuck, that's a pretty good signal that something sucks there. At least you can get a heatmap of what works ootb, and what needs more eyes.
  • candiddevmike 10mo ago
    That sounds like a horrible onboarding experience. Human mentors provide a lot more than just answering questions, like providing context, comraderie or social skills, or even coping mechanisms. Starting a new job can be terrifying for juniors, and if their only friend is faceless chat bot...
• john-radio 10mo ago
  I've never visited this blog before but I really enjoy the synthesis of programming skill (at least enough skill to render quick graphs and serve them via a web blog) and writing skill here. It kind of reminds me of the way xkcd likes to drive home his ideas. For example, "Surpassed by a system that costs one thousand times less than I do... less, per word thought or written, than ... the cheapest human labor" could just be a throwaway thought, and wouldn't serve very well on its own, unsupported, in a serious essay, and of course the graph that accompanies that thought in Jones's post here is probably 99.9% napkin math / AI output, but I do feel like it adds to the argument without distracting from it. (A parenthetical comment explaining where he ballparked the measurements for himself, the "cheapest human labor," and Claude numbers would also have supported the argument, and some writers, especially web-focused nerd-type writers like Scott Alexander, are very good at this, but text explanations, even in parentheses, have a way of distracting readers from your main point. I only feel comfortable writing one now because my main point is completed.)
• kgk9000 10mo ago
  I think the author's point is that each type of job will basically disappear roughly at once, shortly after AI crosses the bar of "good enough" in that particular field.
  • xlbuttplug2 10mo ago
    I think the turning point will be when AI assisted individuals or tiny companies are able to deliver comparable products/value as the goliaths.
    • esafak 10mo ago
      That would be the ideal scenario; when you can build a small business more easily.
    • pmg101 10mo ago
      Why hasn't this happened already? I'm willing to believe the hype on LLMs except that I don't see any tiny 1-senior-dev-plus-agents companies disrupting the market. Maybe it just hasn't happened "yet"... But I've been kind of wondering the same thing for most of 2025.
      • xlbuttplug2 10mo ago
        I think it has to get good enough to a point where humans are not the bottleneck for code review and course correction. I guess the "velocity" multiplier is closer to 10x rather than the 1000x needed for true disruption capability.
• blondie9x 10mo ago
  This post is kind of sad. It feels like he's advocating for human depopulation since the trajectory aligns with horse populations declining by 93% also.
  • taneq 10mo ago
    Not advocating, just predicting. And not necessarily actual population, just population in paid employment.
  • throw234234234 10mo ago
    Indeed. I do wonder if the inventors of the "transformer architecture" knew all the potential Pandora's boxes they were opening when they invented it. Probably not. No one wants to say the scary potential logical conclusion of replacing the last value that humans have a competitive advantage in; that being intelligence and cognition. For example there is one future scenario of humanity where only the capital and resource holders survive; the middle and lower classes become surplus to requirements and lose any power. Its already happening slowly via inflation and higher asset prices after all - it is a very real possibility. I don't think a revolution will be possible in this scenario; with AI and robotics the rich could outnumber pretty much everyone.
  • dsego 10mo ago
    Not advocating, just warning about things to come.
• cuttothechase 10mo ago
  >>This was a five-minute lightning talk given over the summer of 2025 to round out a small workshop. Glad I noticed that footnote. Article reeks of false equivalences and incorrect transitive dependencies.
• COAGULOPATH 10mo ago
  > In 1920, there were 25 million horses in the United States, 25 million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of progress in mechanical engines. But would you rather be a horse in 1920 or 2020? Wouldn't you rather have modern medicine, better animal welfare laws, less exposure to accidents, and so on? The only way horses conceivably have it worse is that there are fewer of them (a kind of "repugnant conclusion")...but what does that matter to an individual horse? No human regards it as a tragedy that there are only 9 billion of us instead of 90 billion. We care more about the welfare of the 9 billion.
  • BeefySwain 10mo ago
    The equivalency here is not 9 billion versus 90 billion, it's 9 billion versus 90 million, and the question is how does the decline look? Does it look like the standard of living for everyone increasing so high that the replacement rate is in the single digit percentage range, or does it look like some version of Elysium where millions have immense wealth and billions have nothing and die off?
  • schoen 10mo ago
    > No human regards it as a tragedy that there are only 9 billion of us instead of 90 billion. I have met some transhumanists and longtermists who would really like to see some orders of magnitude increase in the human population. Maybe they wouldn't say "tragedy", but they might say "burning imperative". I also don't think it's clearly better for more beings to exist rather than fewer, but I just want to assure you that the full range of takes on population ethics definitely exists, and it's not simply a matter of straightforward common sense how many people (or horses) there ought to be.
• ternus 10mo ago
  Regarding horses vs. engines, what changed the game was not engine efficiency, but the widespread availability of fuel (gas stations) and the broad diffusion of reliable, cheap cars. Analogies can be made to technologies like cell phones, MP3 players, or electric cars: beyond just the quality of the core technology, what matters is a) the existence of supporting infrastructure and b) a watershed level of "good/cheap enough" where it displaces the previous best option.
  • baq 10mo ago
    It’s both. A steam engine at 2% efficiency is good only for digging up more coal for itself, and barely so. Completely different story at 20%. Every doubling is a step function in some area as it becomes energetically and economically rational to use it for something.
  • dredmorbius 10mo ago
    And roads, and other auto-friendly (or auto-dependent) infrastructure and urban / national land-use. Cars went from a luxury to a necessity, though largely not until after WWII in the US, and somewhat later in other parts of the world. There remain areas where a car is not required, or even a burden. NYC, and a few major metropolitan regions, as well as poorer parts of the world (though motorcycles and mopeds are often prevalent there).
• pansa2 10mo ago
  > 90% of the horses in the US disappeared Where did they go?
  • xwolfi 10mo ago
    they grew old and died ?
    • ekelsen 10mo ago
      sometimes not nearly so pleasant for them.
    • dsego 10mo ago
      There is a TV movie In Pursuit of Honor (1995) claiming to be based on true events. My short search online states that such things were never really documented, but it's plausible that there were similar things happening. > In Pursuit of Honor is a 1995 American made-for-cable Western film directed by Ken Olin. Don Johnson stars as a member of a United States Cavalry detachment refusing to slaughter its horses after being ordered to do so by General Douglas MacArthur. The movie follows the plight of the officers as they attempt to save the animals that the Army no longer needs as it modernizes toward a mechanized military.
  • 20after4 10mo ago
    The glue factory.
• tomxor 10mo ago
  Terrible comparison. Horses and cars had a clearly defined, tangible, measurable purpose: transport... they were 100% comparable as a market good, and so predicting an inflection point is very reasonable. Same with Chess, a clearly defined problem in finite space with a binary, measurable outcome. Funny how Chess AI replacing humans in general was never considered as a serious possibility by most. Now LLMs, what is their purpose? What is the purpose of a human? I'm not denying some legitimate yet tedious human tasks are to regurgitate text... and a fuzzy text predictor can do a fairly good job of that at less cost. Some people also think and work in terms of text prediction more often than they should (that's called bullshitting - not a coincidence). They really are _just_ text predictors, ones trained on such a humanly incomprehensible quantity of information as to appear superficially intelligent, as far as correlation will allow. It's been 4 years now, we already knew this. The idea that LLMs are a path to AGI and will replace all human jobs is so far off the mark.
• twodave 10mo ago
  Horses eat feed. Cars eat gasoline. LLMs eat electricity, and progress may even now be finding its limits in that arena. Besides the fact that just more compute and context size aren’t the right kind of progress. LLMs aren’t coming for your job any more than computer vision is, for a lot of reasons, but I’ll list two more: 1. Even if LLMs made everyone 10x as productive, most companies will still have more work to do than resources to assign to those tasks. The only reason to reduce headcount is to remove people who already weren’t providing much value. 2. Writing code continues to be a very late step of the overall software development process. Even if all my code was written for me, instantly, just the way I would want it written, I still have a full-time job.
  • somenameforme 10mo ago
    Yip, the famous example here being John Maynard Keynes, of Keynesian economics. [1] He predicted a 15 hour work week following productivity gains that we have long since surpassed. And not only did he think we'd have a 15 hour work week, he felt that it'd be mostly voluntary - with people working that much only to give themselves a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Instead our productivity went way above anything he could imagine, yet there was no radical shift in labor. We just instead started making billionaires by the thousand, and soon enough we can add trillionaires. He underestimated how many people were willing to designate the pursuit of wealth as the meaning of life itself. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics
    • schmichael 10mo ago
      Productivity gains are more likely to be used to increase margins (profits and therefore value to shareholders) then it is to reduce work hours. At least since the Industrial Revolution, and probably before, the only advance that has led to shorter work weeks is unions and worker protections. Not technology. Technology may create more surplus (food, goods, etc) but there’s no guarantee what form that surplus will reach workers as, if it does at all.
      • goatlover 10mo ago
• mark242 10mo ago
  Someone who makes horseshoes then learns how to make carburetors, because the demand is 10x. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
  • dominicrose 10mo ago
    > Governments have typically expected efficiency gains to lower resource consumption, rather than anticipating possible increases due to the Jevons paradox I think that it's true that governments want the efficiency gains but it's false that they don't anticipate the consumption increases. Nobody is spending trillions on datacenters without knowing that demand will increase, that doesn't mean we shouldn't make them efficient.
  • Tzt 10mo ago
    In that analogy "someone" is an AI, who of course switches from answering questions from humans, to answering questions from other AIs, because the demand is 10x.
• florilegiumson 10mo ago
  If AI is really likely to cause a mass extinction event, then non-proliferation becomes critical as it was in the case with nuclear weapons. Otherwise, what does it really mean for AI to "replace people" outside of people needing to retool or socially awkward people having to learn to talk to people better? AI surely will change a lot, but I don't understand the steps needed to get to the highly existential threat that has become a cliché in every "Learn CLAUDE/MCP" ad I see. A period of serious unemployment, sure, but this article is talking about population collapse, as if we are all only being kept alive and fed to increase shareholder value for people several orders of magnitude more intelligent than us, and with more opposable thumbs. Do people think 1.2B people are going to die because of AI? What is the economy but people?
  • baq 10mo ago
    Capitalism gives, capitalism takes. Regulation will be critical so it doesn’t take too much, but tech is moving so fast even technologists, enthusiasts and domain researchers don’t know what to expect.
  • tim333 10mo ago
    I don't think the people will die, just have AI do the jobs. The people will probably still be there giving instructions.
• chairmansteve 10mo ago
  4000 questions a month from new hireds. How many of those were repeated many times. A lot. So if they'd built a wiki? I am not an AI sceptic.. I use it for coding. But this article is not compelling.
• mrtesthah 10mo ago
  LLMs can only hallucinate and cannot reason or provide answers outside of their training set distribution. The architecture needs to fundamentally change in order to reach human equivalence, no matter how many benchmarks they appear to hit.
  • baq 10mo ago
    The sometimes stumble and hallucinate out of distribution. It’s rare, it’s more rare that is actually a good hallucination, but we’ve figured out how to enrich uranium, after all.
• themafia 10mo ago
  > Back then, me and other old-timers were answering about 4,000 new-hire questions a month. > Then in December, Claude finally got good enough to answer some of those questions for us. What getting high on your own supply actually looks like. These are not the types of questions most people have or need answered. It's unique to the hiring process and the nascent status of the technology. It seems insane to stretch this logic to literally any other arena. On top of that horses were initially replaced with _stationary_ gasoline engines. Horses:Cars is an invalid view into the historical scenario.
• GreenJacketBoy 10mo ago
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• tills13 10mo ago
  Person whose job it is to sell AI selling AI is what I got from this post.
  • hurturue 10mo ago
    person whose job is to not be replaced by AI saying AI is hype is what I get from your comment
    • lomase 10mo ago
      I does not work buddy. Nobody gets paid to not buy AI.
      • hurturue 10mo ago
        "it's difficult to make someone understand a thing when his job depends on him not understanding it"
  • agos 10mo ago
    in Italy we have a saying for this - "innkeeper, how is the wine?"
• socketcluster 10mo ago
  I think my software engineering job will be safe so long as big companies keep using average code as their training set. This is because the average developer creates unnecessary complexity which creates more work for me. The way the average dev structures their code requires like 10x the number of lines as I do and at least 10x the amount of time to maintain... The interest on technical debt compounds like interest on normal debt. Whenever I join a new project, within 6 months, I control/maintain all the core modules of the system and everything ends up hooked up to my config files, running according to the architecture I designed. Happened at multiple companies. The code looks for the shortest path to production and creates a moat around engineers who can make their team members' jobs easier. IMO, it's not so different to how entrepreneurship works. But with code and processes instead of money and people as your moat. I think once AI can replace top software engineers, it will be able to replace top entrepreneurs. Scary combination. We'll probably have different things to worry about then.
  • retrac98 10mo ago
    Unnecessary complexity isn’t much of a problem when the code is virtually free to maintain or throw away and replace.
    • socketcluster 10mo ago
      Depends on the size and complexity of the problem that the system is solving. For very complex problems, even the most succinct solution will be complex and not all parts of the code can be throwaway code. You have to start stacking the layers of abstractions and some code becomes critical. Like think of the Linux Kernel, you can't throw away the Linux Kernel. You can't throw away Chromium or the V8 engine... Millions of systems depend on those. If they had issues or vulnerabilities and nobody to maintain, it would be a major problem for the global economy.
      • gjvc 10mo ago
        companies have been abandoning products for decades, and shuffling ongoing support onto other entities. nothing has to be "thrown away" as you keep suggesting.
• anshulbhide 10mo ago
  Yet, this applies for only three industries so far - coding, marketing and customer support. I don't think applies for general human intelligence - yet.
• Mawr 10mo ago
  What is this horseshit. What exactly does specifically engine efficiency have to do with horse usage? Cars like the Ford Model T entered mass production somewhere around 1908. Oh, and would you look at the horse usage graph around that date! sigh The chess ranking graph seems to be just a linear relationship? > This pink line, back in 2024, was a large part of my job. Answer technical questions for new hires. > > Claude, meanwhile, was now answering 30,000 questions a month; eight times as many questions as me & mine ever did. So more == better. sigh. Ran any, you know, studies to see the quality of those answers? I too can consult /dev/random for answers at a rate of gigabytes per second! > I was one of the first researchers hired at Anthropic. Yeah. I can tell. Somebody's high on their own supply here.
  • empiricus 10mo ago
    Well, for some reason horse numbers and horse usage dropped sharply at a moment in time. Probably there was some horse pandemic I forgot about.
• Bleedblood 10mo ago
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• kaluga 10mo ago
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• globular-toast 10mo ago
  And what happened to human population? It skyrocketed. So humans are going to get replaced by AI and human population will skyrocket again? This analogy doesn't work.
  • tim333 10mo ago
    Virtual humans?
• gaigalas 10mo ago
  People back then were primarily improving engines, not making articles about engines being better than horses. That's why it's different now.
• bad_username 10mo ago
  AI currently lacks the following to really gain a "G" and reliably be able to replace humans at scale: - Radical massive multimodality. We perceive the world through many wide-band high-def channels of information. Computer perception is nowhere near. Same for ability to "mutate" the physical world, not just "read" it. - Being able to be fine-tuned constantly (learn things, remember things) without "collapsing". Generally having a smooth transition between the context window and the weights, rather than fundamental irreconcilable difference. These are very difficult problems. But I agree with the author that the engine is in the works and the horses should stay vigilant.
• palmotea 10mo ago
  Aren't you guys looking forward to the day when we get the opportunity to go the way of all those horses? You should! I'm optimistic; I think I'd make a fine pot of glue. AI, faster please!
• burnto 10mo ago
  The 1220s horse bubble was a wild time. People walked everywhere all slow and then BAM guys on horses shooting arrows at you. AI is like that, but instead with dudes in slim fitting vests blogging about alignment
• YmiYugy 10mo ago
  To stay within the engine analogy. We have engines that are more powerful than horses, but 1. we aren’t good at building cars yet, 2. they break down so often that using horses often still ends up faster, 3. we have dirt tracks and feed stations for horses but have few paved roads and are not producing enough gasoline.
  • dominicrose 10mo ago
    yes and the question is do horses have 20 years or less i.e. 5 years?
• d4rkn0d3z 10mo ago
  It might be better to think about what a horse is to a human, mostly a horse is an energy slave. The history of humanity is a story about how many energy slaves are available to the average human. In times past, the only people on earth who had their standard of living raised to a level that allowed them to cast there gaze upon the stars were the Kings and there courts, vassals, and noblemen. As time passed we have learned to make technologies that provide enough energy slaves to the common man that everyone lives a life that a king would have envied in times past. So the question arises as to whether AI or the pursuit of AGI provides more or less energy slaves to the common man?
  • nicbou 10mo ago
    Since AI is using my work without permission and capturing the value on behalf of tech companies, I feel like I am an energy slave to AI.
  • zwnow 10mo ago
    The goal is to eradicate the common man. Turns out you dont need a lot of energy, food, water, space if there aren't 8 billion humans to supply. It's the tech billionaires dream, replacing humans with robotic servants. Corporations do not care about the common man.
    • dominicrose 10mo ago
      Full robotic servants are very costly, only AI servants are cheap enough. But I do think we're going to see more wars and robotic use in wars.
  • myrmidon 10mo ago
    The big problem I see with AI is that it undermines redistribution mechanisms in a novel and dangerous way; despite industrialization, human labor was always needed to actually do anything with capital, and even people born in poverty could do work to get their share of the growing economical pie. AI kinda breaks this; there is a real risk that human labor is going to become almost worthless this century, and this might mean that the common man ends up worse off despite nominal economic growth.
• torginus 10mo ago
  Oh no, it's the lowercase people again.
• gniv 10mo ago
  This makes me think of another domain where it could happen: electricity generation and distribution. If solar+battery becomes cheap enough we could see the demise of the country-scale grid.
  • Gud 10mo ago
    I work in the energy sector. I test high voltage gas insulated switchgear for a living. With this setup, you would need batteries that can sustain load for weeks on end, in many parts of the world.
• zkmon 10mo ago
  The work done by horses was not the only work out there. Games played by chess masters was not the only sport on the planet. Answering questions and generating content is not the only work that happens at work places.
• sceptic123 10mo ago
  > A system that costs less, per word thought or written, than it'd cost to hire the cheapest human labor on the face of the planet. Is it really possible to make this claim given the vast sums of money that have gone in to AI/LLM training?
  • agos 10mo ago
    it's coming from an extremely biased source, that's why nobody else would make that claim
  • myrmidon 10mo ago
    I'd say yes, because AI training is mostly fixed-cost and not that expensive when you compare it to raising/educating human labor. Early factories were expensive, too (compared to the price of a horse), but that was never a show-stopper.
• haritha-j 10mo ago
  Horses pull carts. Chessbots play chess. Humans do lots of things. Equivalence in one thing is not equivalence in the vast collection of things we do.
  • dredmorbius 10mo ago
    AI seems capable of doing lots of things, particularly in comparison to domain-specific programming or even domain-specific AI. Your critique doesn't seem so powerful as you might suppose.
    • haritha-j 10mo ago
      Capable yes, but human equivalence comes at different times, which means AI human equivalnce to humans in general will be staggered, and not a sudden cliff as the author claims. But in all fairness I don't imagine this to be a powerful critique, I wouldn't be at all shocked if I'm wrong.
      • dredmorbius 10mo ago
        The point of the article as I see it is that incremental improvements lead to sudden changes, when equivalence is reached in a specific domain. It's a bit like rising water in a lake or river. You're fine, until you aren't, though the specific "aren't" moment will depend on your elevation relative to the body of water, of the height of any protections (levees, dams, storm walls), and any mitigating mechanisms (e.g., flood control pumps). Up until the point that your defences are overtopped, your feet are dry. Once overtopped, you're wet. Same with AGI (again, presuming that the present LLM/GD approach continues to provide returns): a slow but gradual increase in capability can subsume more and more human intellectual / cognitive tasks, and for each individual task, that moment is fairly likely to be rather sudden.
        • haritha-j 10mo ago
          Yeah, I think that's fair. Although for more complex tasks done by humans it may be a bit more gradual in the sense that there's a lto of sub tasks plus this is much more probabilistic than car go faster than horse for cheaper.
• inquirerGeneral 10mo ago
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• leg100 10mo ago
  > In 1920, there were 25 million horses in the United States, 25 million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of progress in mechanical engines. I really doubt horses would be ambivalent about this, let alone about anything. Or maybe I'm wrong, they were in two minds: oh dear I'm at risk of being put to sleep, or maybe it could lead to a nice long retirement out on a grassy meadow. But they're in all likelihood blissfully unaware.
• bgwalter 10mo ago
  "I was one of the first researchers hired at Anthropic." The article is a Misanthropic advertisement. The "AI" mafia feels that no one wants their products and doubles down. They are so desperate that Pichai is now talking about data centers in space on Fox News. Next up are "AI" space lasers.
• 20after4 10mo ago
  Maybe I can get a job programming for the Amish.
• maciejzj 10mo ago
  I may have developed some kind of paranoia reading HN recently, but the AI atmosphere is absolutely nuts to me. Have you ever thought that you would see a chart showing how population of horses was decimated by the mass introduction of efficient engines accompanied by an implication that there is a parallel to human population? And the article is not written in any kind of cautionary humanitarian approach, but rather from perspective of some kind of economic determinism? Have you ever thought that you would be compared to a gasoline engine and everyone would discuss this juxtaposition from purely economic perspective? And barely anyone shares a thought like "technology should be warranted by the populace, not the other way around?". And the guy writing this works at Anthropic? The very guy who makes this thing happen, but is only able to conclude this with "I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did". What the hell.
  • barrkel 10mo ago
    Incentives rule everything. For the Romans, winning wars was the main source of elite prestige. So the Empire had to expand to accommodate winning more wars. Today, the stock market and material wealth dominates. If elite dominance of the means of production requires the immiseration of most of the public, that's what we'll get.
    • thaumasiotes 10mo ago
      > For the Romans, winning wars was the main source of elite prestige. So the Empire had to expand to accommodate winning more wars. That's almost 100% backwards. The Republic expanded. The Empire, not so much.
      • classified 10mo ago
        Isn't that burying the lede on a technicality?
      • majewsky 10mo ago
        GP appears to be using "empire" as in "imperalistic" instead of as in "emperor".
• andai 10mo ago
  "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster humans!"
• emsign 10mo ago
  Wow! That is highly unscientific and speculative. Wow!
• skywhopper 10mo ago
  Truly depressing to see blasé predictions of AI infra spending approaching WW2 levels of GDP as if that were remotely desirable. One, that’s never going to happen, but if it does, it’ll mean a complete failure to address actual human needs. The amount of money wasted by Facebook on the Metaverse could have ended homelessness in the US, or provided universal college. Now here we are watching multiple times that much money get thrown by Meta, Google, et al into datacenters that are mostly generating slop that’s ruining what’s left of the Internet.
• cryptonector 10mo ago
  > 25 million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of progress in mechanical engines. Ambivalent??
• cryptonector 10mo ago
  This is another one of those apocalyptic posts about AI. It might actually be true. I recommend reading The Phools, by Stanislav Lem -- it's a very short story, and you can find free copies of it online. Also maybe go out for some fresh air. Maybe knowledge work will go down for humans, but plumbing and such will take much longer since we'll need dextrous robots.
• nateburke 10mo ago
  Horses never figured out how to get government bailouts.
• oidar 10mo ago
  I think AI is probably closer to jet engines than it is to horses.
  • dredmorbius 10mo ago
    Howso?
• oxag3n 10mo ago
  > I was one of the first researchers hired at Anthropic. ... > But looking at how fast Claude is automating my job, I think we're getting a lot less. TL;DR If your work is answer questions, that can be retrieved from a corpus of data with inverted index + embedding, you'll be obsolete pretty fast.
• LanceWinslow 10mo ago
  You know, this whole conversation reminds me of that old critique on Communism; Once the government becomes so large and encompassing, it reaches a point where it no longer needs to the people to exist, thus, people are culled by the millions, as they are simply no longer needed.
• moralestapia 10mo ago
  Great post. This is the context wherein the valuation of AI companies makes sense, particularly those that already got a head start and have captured a large swath of that market.
• eigencoder 10mo ago
  I'm confused. Isn't the sharp decline in the graph due to the population boom?
• naveen99 10mo ago
  It’s not like humans are standing still. Humans are still improving faster than ai.
• dealflowengine 10mo ago
  Everyone is missing the real valuable point here: we never needed 90+% of horses in the first place.
• trabant00 10mo ago
  Yawn, another article which hand picks success stories. What about the failures? Where's the graph of flying cars? Humanoid house servant robots? 3D TVs? Crypto decentralized banking for everyone? Etc. Anybody who tells you they can predict the future is shoveling shit in his mouth then smiling brown teeth at the audience. 10 years from now there's a real possibility of "AI" being remembered as that "stuff that almost got to a single 9 reliability but stopped there".
• cornhole 10mo ago
  if ai takes my job, good riddance
• ath3nd 10mo ago
  [dead]
• HeavyStorm 10mo ago
  Ripping off Yuval in big style.