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Famously Steve Jobs said that the (personal) computer is "like a bicycle for the mind". It's a great metaphor because- besides the idea of lightness and freedom
by throw310822 9mo ago
Famously Steve Jobs said that the (personal) computer is "like a bicycle for the mind". It's a great metaphor because- besides the idea of lightness and freedom it communicates- it also described the computer as multiplier of the human strength- the bicycle allows one to travel faster and with much less effort, it's true, but ultimately the source of its power is still entirely in the muscles of the cyclist- you don't get out of it anything that you didn't put yourself.
Bu the feeling I'm having with LLMs is that we've entered the age of fossil-fuel engines: something that moves on its own power and produces somewhat more than the user needs to put into it. Ok, in the current version it might not go very far and needs to be pushed now and then, but the total energy output is greater than what users need to put in. We could call it a horse, except that this is artificial: it's a tractor. And in the last months I've been feeling like someone who spent years pushing a plough in the fields, and has suddenly received a tractor. A primitive model, still imperfect, but already working.
- 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.
- rkagerer 9mo agoWhat metrics show 100X or 1000X improvement trends?
- maypop 9mo agoHaving recently watched Train Dreams it feels like the transition of logging by hand to logging with industrial machinery.
- simonw 9mo agoI've been calling LLMs "electric bicycles for the mind", inspired by that Jobs quote. - some bicycle purists consider electric bicycles to be "cheating" - you get less exercise from an electric bicycle - they can get you places really effectively! - if you don't know how to ride a bicycle an electric bicycle is going to quickly lead you to an accident
- matthewkayin 9mo agoI like this analogy. I'll add that, while electric bicycles are great for your daily commute, they're not suited for the extremes of biking (at least not yet). - You're not going to take an electric bike mountain biking - You're not going to use an electric bike to do BMX - You're not going to use an electric bike to go bikepacking across the country
- throw310822 9mo agoI think you're kind of missing the point discussing which vehicle compares better to LLMs. The point is not the vehicle: it's the birth of the engine. Before engines, humans didn't have the means to produce those amounts of power- at all. No matter how many people, horses or oxen they had at their disposal.
- cootsnuck 9mo agoI don't think they're missing the point. I think there's still fundamental disagreements about the functional utility of LLMs.
- chrisweekly 9mo agoActually, electric mountain bikes are popular (where they're allowed), mostly because they make ascents so easy.
- masterj 9mo agoPeople have definitely used ebikes for bikepacking as well. Not sure about BMX.
- WarmWash 9mo agoI think there is a legitimate fear that is born from what happened with Chess. Humans could handily beat computers at chess for a long time. Then a massive supercomputer beat the reigning champion, but didn't win the tournament. Then that computer came back and won the tournament a year later. A few years later humans are collaborating in-game with these master chess engines to multiply their strength, becoming the dominant force in the human/computer chess world. A few years after that though, the computers start beating the human/computer hybrid opponents. And not long after that, humans started making the computer perform worse if they had a hand in the match. The next few years have probably the highest probability since the cold war of being extreme inflection points in the timeline of human history.
- pmarreck 9mo agoThe irony with the chess example is that chess has never been more popular. Perhaps we're about to experience yet another renaissance of computer languages.
- the_af 9mo agoI know chess is popular because I have a friend who's enthusiastic about it and plays online regularly. But I'm out of the loop: in order to maintain popularity, are computers banned? And if so, how is this enforced, both at the serious and at the "troll cheating" level? (I suppose for casual play, matchmaking takes care of this: if someone is playing at superhuman level due to cheating, you're never going to be matched with them, only with people who play at around your level. Right?)
- retsibsi 9mo agoThe most serious tournaments are played in person, with measures in place to prevent (e.g.) a spectator with a chess engine on their phone communicating with a player. For online play, it's kind of like the situation for other online games; anti-cheat measures are very imperfect, but blatant cheaters tend to get caught and more subtle ones sometimes do. Big online tournaments can have exam-style proctoring, but outside of that it's pretty much impossible to prevent very light cheating -- e.g. consulting a computer for the standard moves in an opening is very hard to distinguish from just having memorized them. The sites can detect sloppy cheating, e.g. a player using the site's own analysis tools in a separate tab, but otherwise they have to rely on heuristics and probabilistic judgments.
- cons0le 9mo agoIts like a motor bike, except it doesn't take you where you steer. It take you where it wants to take you. If you tell it you want to go somewhere continents away, it will happily agree and drive you right into the ocean. And this is before ads and other incentives make it worse.
- MarceliusK 9mo agoEven if the autonomy is limited, the step change in what a single person can attempt is unmistakable
- GTP 9mo agoDepends who you listen to. There are developers reporting significant gains from the use of AI, others saying that it doesn't really impact their work, and then there was some research saying that time savings due to the use of AI in developing software are only an illusion, because while developers were feeling more productive they were actually slower. I guess only time will tell who's right or if it is just a matter of using the tool in the right way.
- jimkleiber 9mo agoProbably depends how you're using it. I've been able to modify open-source software in languages I've never dreamed of learning, so for that, it's MUCH faster. Seems like a power tool, which, like a power saw, can do a lot very fast, which can bring construction or destruction.
- faxmeyourcode 9mo agoI'm sure the same could be said about tractors when they were coming on the scene. There was probably initial excitement about not having to manually break the earth, then stories spread about farmers ruining entire crops with one tractor, some farms begin touting 10x more efficiency by running multiple tractors at once, some farmers saying the maintenance burden of a tractor is not worth it compared to feeding/watering their mule, etc. Fast forward and now gigantic remote controlled combines are dominating thousands of acres of land with the efficiency greater than 100 men with 100 early tractors.
- t_mahmood 9mo agoAnd, the end result being devastation of forests, ecosystems, animal life, fast track climate change etc.
- interestpiqued 9mo agoImplying that efficient agriculture is destroying the planet is a wild take
- cmrdporcupine 9mo agoAnd like a tractor.. don't wear loose clothing near the spinning PTO (power take off) shaft.
- andai 9mo agoAnd then with a few additional lines of Python, it becomes a tractor that drives itself.
- tikhonj 9mo agoFossil-fuel cars a good analogy because, for all their raw power and capability, living in a polluted, car-dominated world sucks. The problem with modern AI has more to do with modernism than with AI.
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- roughly 9mo agoIt’s sort of interesting to look back at ~100 years of the automobile and, eg, the rise of new urbanism in this metaphor - there are undoubtedly benefits that have come from the automobile, and also the efforts to absolutely maximize where, how, and how often people use their automobile have led to a whole lot of unintended negative consequences.
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- bitwize 9mo agoAI is a Boston taxicab: * You have to tell it which way to go every step of the way * Odds are good it'll still drop you off at the wrong place * You have to pay not only for being taken to the wrong place, but now also for the ride to get you where you wanted to go in the first place
- ivanstojic 9mo agoWhen tractors were invented, there was a notable reduction in human employment in agriculture in the USA. From a research paper (https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/alolmstead/Recent_Publications/Reshaping_the_Landscape.pdf https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/alolmstead/Recent_P...): > The lower-bound estimate represents 18 percent of the total reduction in man-hours in U.S. agriculture between 1944 and 1959; the upper-bound estimate, 27 percent I'm not seeing that with LLMs.
- throw310822 9mo agoAccording to Wikipedia, the Ivel Agricultural Motor was the first successful model of lightweight gasoline-powered tractor. The year was 1903. You're like someone being dismissive in 1906 because "nothing happened yet".
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