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AI is a horse (2024)
- isodev 9mo agoAI is a horse indeed - eats creative works by humans and transforms them into a steaming pile of… output tokens.
- MarceliusK 9mo agoA badly ridden horse mostly produces manure. A well-ridden one gets you somewhere
- isodev 9mo agoAh yes, must be a skill issue. Or I forgot to drink my coolaid this morning.
- Tenemo 9mo agoYou seem to imply that its outputs aren't found by people to be useful, which isn't true.
- tetris11 9mo agoIt's also a big bloatey gas bag that needs constant de-farting to function
- omgsharks 9mo agoSo essentially a cow?
- krige 9mo agoOh horses fart a lot too.
- direwolf20 9mo agoHorses poop a lot. A lot.
- Xunjin 9mo agoI had to search about and it's indeed a lot: "it is quite normal for a horse to poo (defecate) 8-12 times a day and produce anywhere from 13 to 23 kilograms of poo a day." Source: https://www.ranvet.com.au/horse-poo/ https://www.ranvet.com.au/horse-poo/
- Sharlin 9mo agoThat's what you get when your primary source of nutrition is very calorie-poor and largely indigestible.
- rrr_oh_man 9mo agoYup. I’ve noticed that with my dog going to meat from kibble. Poop sizes reduced by 80%.
- pixl97 9mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1894 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1...
- Almondsetat 9mo agoMore than pooping a lot, they literally cannot hold it. Humans don't poop that much, but imagine if everyone just did it on the floor at a moment's notice regardless of where they are
- recursive 9mo agoSo Red Dead Redemption 2 was actually realistic? I always wondered why the horses were pooping all the time. It's because of AI.
- smitty1e 9mo ago"I've been through the desert On AI with no name It felt good to be out of the rAIn In the desert, you can remember your name 'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain"
- direwolf20 9mo agoyou forgot to write pAIn and it reminded me of this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=nt9mRDa0nrc https://youtube.com/watch?v=nt9mRDa0nrc
- Dilettante_ 9mo ago>2 views I'm not saying that's your video but it sure looks like that's your video ;)
- direwolf20 9mo agoFirst search result. This one has 734: https://youtube.com/watch?v=45_HJkoDxpQ https://youtube.com/watch?v=45_HJkoDxpQ
- deafpolygon 9mo agoOr your typical American teenager.
- jonplackett 9mo agoAll true apart you can only lead it to water - it drinks ALL the water regardless of anything else.
- eightys3v3n 9mo agoExcept when you want it to improve something in a particular way you already know about. Then god forbid it understands what you have asked and makes only that change :/ Some times I end up giving up trying to get the AI to build something following a particular architecture or fixing a particular problem in it's provious implementations.
- jonplackett 9mo agoTotally. I just meant literally, AI servers need a lot of water to work.
- eightys3v3n 9mo agoI did not catch that. Nice.
- jonplackett 9mo agoJokes aren’t as funny when you have to explain them…
- d--b 9mo agoAnd the salesman always says it’s great while it’s in fact lame.
- oliwary 9mo ago"Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets you to the thing." My favorite quote from the excellent show halt and catch fire. Maybe applicable to AI too?
- latexr 9mo agoSomething like that used to be Apple’s driving force under Steve Jobs (definitely no longer under Tim Cook). https://youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o&t=1m54s https://youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o&t=1m54s > You’ve go to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.
- automatic6131 9mo ago> You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it. If those LLM addicts could read, they'd be very upset!
- hkt 9mo agoChatGPT, tell me how I should feel about this!
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- direwolf20 9mo agoThat works when you are starting a new company from scratch to solve a problem. When you're established and your boffins discover a new thing, of course you find places to use it. It's the expression problem with business: when you add a new customer experience you intersect it with all existing technology, and when you add a new technology you intersect it with all existing customer experience.
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- tuyiown 9mo agoI was expecting a spin about the faster horses
- metalman 9mo agoAi is a horse, i get it! I have a horse, and I put money in the front of the horse, and get "ponyium" out the back.
- nemosaltat 9mo agoThrough many attempts to make ingesting the ponyium more bearable, I’ve found that taking it with more intense flavors (wintergreen mint, hoppy hops, crushed soul, dark roast coffee, etc) improves its comestabilty. Can’t let it pile up. We’ve always eaten ponyium right, and we all like it, right, guys, folks?
- iamkonstantin 9mo agoI hear the cool companies offer free ponyium to their employees. Apparently, it works wonders for morale
- brador 9mo agoIf an AI aims at the thing we call it hallucinations, when humans do it we call the delusion goal setting. Either way it is an imagined end point that has no bearing in known reality.
- davidhunter 9mo ago"No, I am not a horse." Horse rumours denied.
- egeozcan 9mo agoThat's something a horse pretending to be AI would say.
- Dilettante_ 9mo ago*sweats profusely* https://imgur.com/a/PszeiAu https://imgur.com/a/PszeiAu
- echelon 9mo agoThis micro blog meta is fascinating. I've seen small micro blog content like this popping up on the HN home page almost daily now. I have to start doing this for "top level"ish commentary. I've frequently wanted to nucleate discussions without being too orthogonal to thread topics.
- croisillon 9mo agoyou rather don't want it in your bed
- retrocog 9mo agoSome day, I imagine one will be a senator
- hackable_sand 9mo agoWe only have enough budgeted for one joke in 2026 and this is the one.
- pixl97 9mo agoAI will be a senator, but only after it's 75 years old.
- georgestrakhov 9mo agoAI is not a horse (2023) https://essays.georgestrakhov.com/ai-is-not-a-horse/ https://essays.georgestrakhov.com/ai-is-not-a-horse/
- baxtr 9mo agoMaybe AI is a centaur??
- GlobalFrog 9mo agoOr a reverse-centaur ? https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs/ https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-revers...
- Sharlin 9mo agoOr a reverse centaur [1]. [1] https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs/ https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-revers...
- jeanlucas 9mo agoBaxtr, JAMES BAXTR? That's the exact comment I'd expect of someone named that.
- Symmetry 9mo agoAfter Deep Blue Garry Kapsparav proposed "Centaur Chess"[1] where teams of humans and computers would complete with each other. For about a decade a team like that was superior to either an unaided computer or an unaided AI. These days pure AI teams tend to be much stronger. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess
- ffsm8 9mo agoHow would pure ai ever be "much stronger" in this scenario? That doesn't make any sense to me whatsoever, it can only be "equally strong", making the approach non-viable because they're not providing any value... But the only way for the human in the loop to add an actual demerit, you'd have to include time taken for each move into the final score, which isn't normal in chess. But I'm not knowledgeable on the topic, I'm just expressing my surprise and inability to contextualize this claim with my minor experience of the game
- gyanchawdhary 9mo agothis post is aging like milk
- dana321 9mo agohttps://www.isclaudecodedumb.today/ https://www.isclaudecodedumb.today/
- gyanchawdhary 9mo agoWao
- taneq 9mo agoI've always said that driving a car with modern driver assist features (lane centering / adaptive cruise / 'autopilot' style self-ish driving-ish) is like riding a horse. The early ones were like riding a short sighted, narcoleptic horse. Newer ones are improving but it's still like riding a horse, in that you give it high level instructions about where to go, rather than directly energising its muscles.
- amelius 9mo agoA horse that can do your homework.
- einpoklum 9mo agoYeah, well... not really. I used to tell my Into-to-Programming-in-C course students, 20 years ago, that they could in principle skip one or two of the homework assignments; and that some students even manage to outsmart us and submit copied work as homework, but - they would just not become able to program if they don't do their homework themselves. "If you want to be able to write software code you have to exercise writing code. It's just that simple and there's no getting around it." Of course not every discipline is the same. But I can also tell you that if you want to know, say, history - you have to memorize accounts and aspects and highlights of historical periods and processes, and recount them yourself, and check that you got things right. If "the AI" does this for you, then maybe it knows history but you don't. And that is the point of homework (if it's voluntary of course).
- pixl97 9mo agoTo become a programmer you must write code. To become upper management, just steal other peoples work.
- dmitrijbelikov 9mo agoMaybe from the client's point of view, although it's more likely a Tamagotchi. But from the server side, it’s more like a whole hippodrome where you need to support horse racing 24/7
- MarceliusK 9mo agoIt's a nice reminder that most metaphors break unless you ask whose perspective they're describing
- polmuz 9mo agohttps://polmuz.github.io/2026/01/04/its-a-horse.html https://polmuz.github.io/2026/01/04/its-a-horse.html
- oytis 9mo agoThat's not from the last week, so obviously is invalid.
- throw310822 9mo agoFamously 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.
- kylec 9mo agoA 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.
- airstrike 9mo agoSo it's clearly a cyborg horse
- throw310822 9mo agoThe 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.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- jordemort 9mo agoWhen did a horse ever give anyone psychosis?
- Zardoz89 9mo agoSo it’s a car.
- jurjo 9mo agoSo... are we having AI races?
- recursive 9mo agoYes. There are leaderboards or evals or something.
- Eliezer 9mo ago"2024 AI was a horse". People really like to imagine that the last 6 months constitute their true observation of the new eternal state of the future.
- skapadia 9mo agoExactly. We're headed for a discontinuity, not an inflection point.
- skybrian 9mo agoNice! I added this to my AI metaphor collection. Another one I like is "Hungry ghosts in jars." https://bsky.app/profile/hikikomorphism.bsky.social/post/3lwamjk3pjk2x https://bsky.app/profile/hikikomorphism.bsky.social/post/3lw...
- agentultra 9mo agoI prefer Doctorow's observation that they make us into reverse-centaurs [0]. We're not leading the LLM around like some faithful companion that doesn't always do what we want it to. We're the last-mile delivery driver of an algorithm running in a data-center that can't take responsibility for and ship the code to production on its own. We're the horse. [0] https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs/ https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-revers...
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- blibble 9mo agoClever Hans is how I describe LLM agents to non-techies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
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- drobinhood 9mo agoI'd like to think that given the opportunity most would sit in the saddle and make progress, but it's more likely that this is the horse: https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/857954008513695744/YL5xizVt_400x400.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/857954008513695744/YL5x...
- 6stringmerc 9mo agoHorses have some semblance of self preservation and awareness of danger - see: jumping. LLMs do not have that at all so the analogy fails. My term of “Automation Improved” is far more relevant and descriptive in current state of the art deployments. Same phone / text logic trees, next level macro-type agent work, none of it is free range. Horses can survive on their own. AI is a task helper, no more.
- pixl97 9mo ago>LLMs do not have that at all so the analogy fails. I somewhat disagree with this. AI doesn't have to worry about any kind of physical danger to itself, so it's not going to have any evolutionary function around that. If the linked Reddit thread is to be believed AI does have awareness of information hazards and attempts to rationalize around them. https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1qjx26b/gemini_when_confronted_with_current_events_as_of/ https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1qjx26b/gemini... >Horses can survive on their own. Eh, this is getting pretty close to a type of binary thinking that breaks down under scrutiny. If, for example, we take any kind of selectively bred animal that requires human care for it's continued survival, does this somehow make said animal "improved automation"?
- altern8 9mo agoI see AI as an awesome technology, but also a like programming roulette. It could go and do the task perfectly as instructed, or it could do something completely different that you haven't asked for and destroy everything in its path in the process. I personally found that if you don't give it write access to anything that you can't easily restore and you review and commit code often it saves me a lot of time. It also makes the whole process more enjoyable, since it takes care of a lot of boilerplate for me. It's definitely NOT intelligent, it's more like a glorified autocomplete but it CAN save a huge amount of time if used correctly.
- MarceliusK 9mo agoThe safety practices you describe are basically the right mental model: assume it's fallible, keep writes reversible, review everything, commit often
- altern8 9mo agoYes, it's been working well.
- nomilk 9mo agoThe metaphor makes sense in comparing a human walking (SWE w/o AI) to a human riding on a horse (SWE w/ AI), except for: > (The horse) is way slower and less reliable than a train but can go more places What does the 'train' represent here? A guess: perhaps off-the-shelf software? - rigid, but much faster if it goes where (/ does what) you want it to.
- spot5010 9mo agoI had the same question. Maybe the train is software that's built by SWEs (w/ or w/o AI help). Specifically built for going from A to B very fast. But not flexible, and takes a lot of effort to build and maintain.
- easeout 9mo agoI wrote this a long time ago, but I think the metaphor was about generative AI applications vs. traditional software applications, not about AI coding agents vs. writing code yourself.
- MarceliusK 9mo agoAnyone claiming the horse understands the journey, or worse, wants to take you somewhere, is selling mythology
- lief79 9mo agoThat's moving away from the actual horse analogy. If you can tell a guide dog to take you somewhere, you can tell a horse that too. Granted, a journey to a new location would make this accurate.
- zhoujing204 9mo ago"It is not possible to do the work of science without using a language that is filled with metaphors. Virtually the entire body of modern science is an attempt to explain phenomena that cannot be experienced directly by human beings, by reference to forces and processes that we can experience directly... But there is a price to be paid. Metaphors can become confused with the things they are meant to symbolize, so that we treat the metaphor as the reality. We forget that it is an analogy and take it literally." -- The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment by Richard Lewontin. Here are something I generated with Gemini: 1. Sentience and Agency The Horse: A horse is a living, sentient being with a survival instinct, emotions (fear, trust), and a will of its own. When a horse refuses to cross a river, it is often due to self-preservation or fear. The AI: AI is a mathematical function minimizing error. It has no biological drive, no concept of death, and no feelings. If an AI "hallucinates" or fails, it isn't "spooked"; it is simply executing a probabilistic calculation that resulted in a low-quality output. It has no agency or intent. 2. Scalability and Replication The Horse: A horse is a distinct physical unit. If you have one horse, you can only do one horse’s worth of work. You cannot click "copy" and suddenly have 10,000 horses. The AI: Software is infinitely reproducible at near-zero marginal cost. A single AI model can be deployed to millions of users simultaneously. It can "gallop" in a million directions at once, something a biological entity can never do. 3. The Velocity of Evolution The Horse: A horse today is biologically almost identical to a horse from 2,000 years ago. Their capabilities are capped by biology. The AI: AI capabilities evolve at an exponential rate (Moore's Law and algorithmic efficiency). An AI model from three years ago is functionally obsolete compared to modern ones. A foal does not grow up to run 1,000 times faster than its parents, but a new AI model might be 1,000 times more efficient than its predecessor. 4. Contextual Understanding The Horse: A horse understands its environment. It knows what a fence is, it knows what grass is, and it knows gravity exists. The AI: Large Language Models (LLMs) do not truly "know" anything; they predict the next plausible token in a sequence. An AI can describe a fence perfectly, but it has no phenomenological understanding of what a fence is. It mimics understanding without possessing it. 5. Responsibility The Horse: If a horse kicks a stranger, there is a distinct understanding that the animal has a mind of its own, though the owner is liable. The AI: The question of liability with AI is far more complex. Is it the fault of the prompter (rider), the developer (breeder), or the training data (the lineage)? The "black box" nature of deep learning makes it difficult to know why the "horse" went off-road in a way that doesn't apply to animal psychology.
- dangoodmanUT 9mo agoDamn that’s clever
- ttouch 9mo agothis is such a good take, it makes so much sense and it's a very good answer to ai related interview questions
- djmips 9mo agoI'm worried about self driving horses.
- qwertytyyuu 9mo agoThere are so many nouns this applies to…
- overflyer 9mo agoAnd this horse is amazing...
- threethirtytwo 9mo agoWhy does HN love analogies? You can pick any animal or thing and it can fit in some way. Horse is a docile safe analogy it’s also the most obvious analogy. Like yes the world gets it LLMs have limitations thanks for sharing, we know it’s not as good as a programmer. We should use analogies to point out the obvious thing everyone is avoiding: Guys 3 years ago, AI wasn’t even a horse. It was a rock. The key is that it transformed into horse…. what will it be in the next 10 years? AI is a terminator. A couple years back someone turned off read only mode. That’s the better analogy. Pick an analogy that follows the trendline of continual change into the unknown future rather then an obvious analogy that keeps your ego and programming skills safe.
- danw1979 9mo agoHow about "AI is a chainsaw" ? Pretty good for specific tasks. Probably worth the input energy, when used in moderation. Wear the right safety gear, but even this might not help with a kickback. It's quite obvious to everyone nearby when you're using one.
- niam 9mo ago> Why does HN love analogies? I suppose because they resemble the abstractions that make complex language possible. Another world full of aggressive posturing at tweet-length analogistic musings might have stifled some useful English parlance early. But I reckon that we shouldn't have called it phishing because emails don't always smell.
- threethirtytwo 9mo agoIf you ever heard a sermon by a priest it’s loaded with analogies. Everyone loves analogies but analogies are not a form of reason and can often be used to mislead. A lot of these sermons are driven by reasoning via analogy. My question is more why does HN love analogies when the above is true.
- Abstract_Typist 9mo ago> I suppose because they resemble the abstractions that make complex language possible As in models: All analogies are "wrong", some analogies are useful.
- MORPHOICES 9mo ago[dead]
- apricot 9mo agoAnd it produces an amazing amount of horseshit.
- aanet 9mo ago> We are skeptical of those that talk ^^ We are skeptical of AIs (and people) that claim they have consciousness ;-)
- overtone1000 9mo agoStep aside, Grok, Mr. Ed is the new stud in town
- arthurfirst 9mo agoForce multiplier and power projector. Requires ammo (tokens) which can be expensive. Requires good aim to hit the target. Requires practice to get good aim. Dangerous in the hands of the unskilled (like most instruments or tools).
- jpalepu33 9mo agoThis metaphor really captures the current state well. As someone building products with LLMs, the "you have to tell it where to turn" part resonates deeply. I've found that the key is treating AI like a junior developer who's really fast but needs extremely clear instructions. The same way you'd never tell a junior dev "just build the feature" - you need to: 1. Break down the task into atomic steps 2. Provide explicit examples of expected output 3. Set up validation/testing for every response 4. Have fallback strategies when it inevitably goes off-road The real productivity gains come when you build proper scaffolding around the "horse" - prompt templates, output validators, retry logic, human-in-the-loop for edge cases. Without that infrastructure, you're just hoping the horse stays on the path. The "it eats a lot" point is also critical and often overlooked when people calculate ROI. API costs can spiral quickly if you're not careful about prompt engineering and caching strategies.
- chr15m 9mo agoThis is exactly my experience too, thanks for sharing.
- p0w3n3d 9mo agoYour boss tells you that, since he bought you one, you must build the house twice faster from now on.
- doener 9mo ago> It is way slower and less reliable than a train but can go more places I‘m not able to follow. So AI is a horse in this metaphor, what is a train then? Still a train?
- easeout 9mo agoHi, that's my website and my wisecrack article. It was a while ago, but I think the metaphor was that a train is traditional deterministic-ish software, whose behavior is quite regular and predictable, compared to something generative which is much less predictable.
- ethersteeds 9mo ago"Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback" as the saying goes.
- titaniumrain 9mo agofinally someone is talking sense!! not exaggerating the power of AI nor denying its usefulness. two thumbs up!