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"AI solves niche thing you've never heard of" is a daily headline at this point. What's genuinely cool isn't that AI managed to solve some specific problem onl

"AI solves niche thing you've never heard of" is a daily headline at this point. What's genuinely cool isn't that AI managed to solve some specific problem only a handful of people even cared about, it's that humanity can now cheaply clean up its backlog of such things.* That does not mean that specific instances of it are still very interesting though. This article is the "I had claude vibecode a thermostat for my bathtub" of cryptography. * And in this case I'm not sure it even meets that bar. For all we know a couple readers back when the book released had a delightful afternoon with it, solved the riddle, then forgot about it.

IshKebab 20d ago
I disagree. This may be some niche thing that I've never heard of but a) it's still non-trivial; it still would have been science fiction to solve it a few years ago, and b) have you already forgotten the Navier Stokes drama? That is not some niche thing I've never heard of. It kind of blows my mind how quickly people have forgotten both the state of AI in ~2010, and the outlook. If you had asked 100 people in 2010 whether they would see AI that could actually pass the Turing test in their lifetimes, you would have got 100 "no"s. AI had been an unsolved problem for literally decades and it was firmly in the nuclear fusion/flying cars category.
- u8080 20d ago
  "Yeah it is just token predictor, it could not even beat top 0.01% domain experts so it does not count as intelligence"
  - emanuele232 20d ago
    that's the point, it is clear the the bar to determine if llms are useful / intelligent is being moved every time these systems improve, but it is starting to fell like people are in denial. we are seeing significant progress, at a rate we are absolutely not used to experience.
    - card_zero 20d ago
      They deny what: that they're very impressed, that they think it's cool, that their minds are blown, that they really really like it? Denying these things is allowed, you know. Edit: if you're going to try to stage an intellectual wrestling match on the topic of is this thing awesome or not, you might as well make it a proper wrestling match and maybe get greased-up Turkish style. It would be more entertaining and you'd be more likely to arrive at a meaningful conclusion.
    - tripzilch 20d ago
      you forget the bar was moved very far down with all the slop we're experiencing with images, music and especially code you can't claim "you keep moving the bar", if the very first thing when an LLM drooled out a piece of code, was to proclaim "this is good enough cause it gets the job done" followed by a barrage of "we're not quite there yet but exponentials or something, so very soon it'll be incredible" yeah, from there it sure looks like "moving up the bar"
    - tripledry 20d ago
      Im very impressed by the technology, I must admit that I didn't expect it to advance this fast. But, at the same time, I'm really tired of there always being some shroud of dishonesty (ex. navier stokes and the two mathematicians working on it). At this point my default is that I don't blindly trust the companies, I try to keep in mind they are trying to sell their product and win market share, there are so many perverse incentives at play I just can't take anything at face value.
- Dylan16807 20d ago
  > If you had asked 100 people in 2010 whether they would see AI that could actually pass the Turing test in their lifetimes, you would have got 100 "no"s. There's no way that's accurate. We already had big claims of the Turing test being passed in 2014, by a bot that had been doing almost as well for years. There were plenty of people expecting fusion in their lifetimes too and that's going okay.
  - IshKebab 19d ago
    > We already had big claims of the Turing test being passed in 2014 Nah there was that bullshit Loebner prize or whatever, but that was just shitty chatbots being "judged" by people asking questions like "how are you today?" and then being breathlessly reported by the press. It was a publicity stunt. Perhaps I should have said "100 people well-informed about AI".
    - Dylan16807 19d ago
      From what I can find of early 2000s predictions, plenty of informed people saw good odds of strong AI by 2050.
supermatt 20d ago
Aren’t many of the greatest problems obscure to the lay?
tim333 19d ago
The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems weren't that obscure.

IshKebab 20d ago

I disagree. This may be some niche thing that I've never heard of but a) it's still non-trivial; it still would have been science fiction to solve it a few years ago, and b) have you already forgotten the Navier Stokes drama? That is not some niche thing I've never heard of. It kind of blows my mind how quickly people have forgotten both the state of AI in ~2010, and the outlook. If you had asked 100 people in 2010 whether they would see AI that could actually pass the Turing test in their lifetimes, you would have got 100 "no"s. AI had been an unsolved problem for literally decades and it was firmly in the nuclear fusion/flying cars category.

u8080 20d ago
"Yeah it is just token predictor, it could not even beat top 0.01% domain experts so it does not count as intelligence"
- emanuele232 20d ago
  that's the point, it is clear the the bar to determine if llms are useful / intelligent is being moved every time these systems improve, but it is starting to fell like people are in denial. we are seeing significant progress, at a rate we are absolutely not used to experience.
  - card_zero 20d ago
    They deny what: that they're very impressed, that they think it's cool, that their minds are blown, that they really really like it? Denying these things is allowed, you know. Edit: if you're going to try to stage an intellectual wrestling match on the topic of is this thing awesome or not, you might as well make it a proper wrestling match and maybe get greased-up Turkish style. It would be more entertaining and you'd be more likely to arrive at a meaningful conclusion.
  - tripzilch 20d ago
    you forget the bar was moved very far down with all the slop we're experiencing with images, music and especially code you can't claim "you keep moving the bar", if the very first thing when an LLM drooled out a piece of code, was to proclaim "this is good enough cause it gets the job done" followed by a barrage of "we're not quite there yet but exponentials or something, so very soon it'll be incredible" yeah, from there it sure looks like "moving up the bar"
  - tripledry 20d ago
    Im very impressed by the technology, I must admit that I didn't expect it to advance this fast. But, at the same time, I'm really tired of there always being some shroud of dishonesty (ex. navier stokes and the two mathematicians working on it). At this point my default is that I don't blindly trust the companies, I try to keep in mind they are trying to sell their product and win market share, there are so many perverse incentives at play I just can't take anything at face value.
Dylan16807 20d ago
> If you had asked 100 people in 2010 whether they would see AI that could actually pass the Turing test in their lifetimes, you would have got 100 "no"s. There's no way that's accurate. We already had big claims of the Turing test being passed in 2014, by a bot that had been doing almost as well for years. There were plenty of people expecting fusion in their lifetimes too and that's going okay.
- IshKebab 19d ago
  > We already had big claims of the Turing test being passed in 2014 Nah there was that bullshit Loebner prize or whatever, but that was just shitty chatbots being "judged" by people asking questions like "how are you today?" and then being breathlessly reported by the press. It was a publicity stunt. Perhaps I should have said "100 people well-informed about AI".
  - Dylan16807 19d ago
    From what I can find of early 2000s predictions, plenty of informed people saw good odds of strong AI by 2050.

supermatt 20d ago

Aren’t many of the greatest problems obscure to the lay?

tim333 19d ago

The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems weren't that obscure.