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- Hacker News
- Navier stokes isn't enough, let's wait for quantum and general relativity solution but it will also not be enough. Maybe a Dyson sphere?by arisAlexis
- I think we're on the cusp of an intelligence explosion, but most jobs have no real purpose besides giving us sometime to do and a paycheck. Automating those jobs and making them 10x faster won't really help anyone. Read Bullshit Jobs by Graeber.
FWIW, why I'm rooting hard for AGI: -In the best case, AGI will lead to UBI, so unemployment for all becomes the default scenario. Sounds scary but unemployment is better than many soul-sucking occupations, e.g. cold-calling. -If AGI does result in a productivity boom due to automation, we're in for a deflationary spiral, so we don't need a huge amount of money for a decent standard of living.
It does lead to the question of how we'll find meaning in our lives, but I think we'll adapt in a few years.
- Even though I started using LLMs as soon as they became available, I was until recently very cautious around using them autonomously. I was of the opinion that I needed to provide heavy supervision around coding tasks. Granted, that was probably justified based on the model capabilities at the time.
However, lately, I have had several experiences that have completely changed my mind - the here is a high level goal (involving gathering production logs, setting up an eval, running tests, iterating, including diagnosis and coming up with new ideas, etc. and don’t bother me until it’s done. The experience has been incredible.
This has been possible because the agent has a way to iterate and hillclimb against a metric it can measure. Relatively easy in the world of software.
I’m now convinced that we will unlock the same gains once make other domains similarly “iterable”.
Eg Agent comes up with 100 new proteins, runs in lab autonomously, gathers results, iterates. One month (or whatever) later, you have your new protein designed.
by psadri - Not where, when.
Asking where is the intelligence explosion suffers the same issue as the Gorman Paradox[1] - the question proceeded the explosion by six months. Timing explosions is like timing the market - infinitely harder than predicting eventual existence.
1. https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/12/14/the-gorman-para...
by kelseyfrog - I am a smooth brained operator. very much the definition of vibecoding.
Last night I was able to give claude a task and they increased the classification accuracy from
81.3/89.9/92.1 to 90.9/99.3/99.6
In a little over 2 hours. In a task that up until opus 5.5 I was doing by hand/manually. and the day before was able to get the first results.
The intelligence explosion may just be user error.
by chzblck - https://washingtoncrossingadvisors.com/wp-content/uploads/20...
It has exploded, the explosion just isn't evenly distributed. And just as it was with the internet, most people and even most industries are not actually using it yet. Many that are are using it in name only.
People can star github repos and signup their employees for a new subscription quickly, real adoption takes far longer.
by aeternum - I don't want to discount the amazing progress we've made with technology to improve people's lives.
There's the meme that the smartest people in the world are figuring out how to show ads. It's no different this time around. I understand that not everyone working on AI is building an ad network - but ultimately it feels like that's the end result.
It didn't feel quite this way 15 years ago. Back then, it felt much more tangible how technology was improving our lives. It is sort of tangible now too - I am doing things with AI that I otherwise couldn't. But somehow if feels like progress for the sake of progress.
And to be honest, it doesn't feel like the progress is for me or the people I care about.
by jmathai - Pet theory: 70% of what we're busy with brings no value outside of keeping people busy/employed, which means automating it and making it 100x faster also brings no value in the end, no matter how much "intelligence" you can deployby toasty228