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- Hacker News
- It's the obsidian story once again.
Assume we've settled near a volcano recently and you start seeing ornate jewelry being sold on the marketplace for the first time, shiny colors, straight edges. You like them, gift them to others. That's your average ChatGPT user.
Over time, you see these rocks being attached to the tip of a spear and other tooling. People report performance improvements while farming, cutting, but many also caution that these new sharp rocks can kill people. These are your IT people using AI agents at work.
And over there, on top of the mountain, in secret caves, there's a new religious order. They claim to use these stones to predict weather, heal diseases and prophesize about the future. That's your frontier lab people.
When will all this be over? Never, though in time the knowledge will eventually dissipate. When Iron Age leaders were able to hand out iron swords in bulk to their armies, people definitely learned how dangerous these are, but later it didn't stop people from using iron in building construction and railways eventually.
Let's just hope we don't need many civilization collapses to jump through these ages this time.
And one bonus question: Does the blade really incite to violence, or do you just want to destroy stuff?
by moezd - The 1%ers are in the vertical, but the question is vertical to where?
It needs to a potential field with practical, economical, "real life" attraction well. I.e, robotics, real economic efficiency gains, manufacturing novelties.
The worry is that the 1% is attracted towards a non-practical money hole. I.e: Token burn for the lols, sophisticated software systems that dont provide actual value outside of giving NVIDIA cash.
by kooi - It is always a mistake to assume that because computers can do X, that they will be able do everything that a human that can do X is expected to be able to do.
Solving frontier math problems is mind boggling, but perhaps it says more about frontier math problems than it does about LLMs. Same with chess which was solved decades ago.
My experience is that LLMs can be useful but are underwhelming in terms of intelligence, namely the ability to quickly learn from experience and grow with you while you accomplish a task.
Thinking of them as beings is something we should move away from.
by turzmo - I feel like if the gap were so monumental that he could just point to a monument of it, rather than hand-waving at "the vertical professionals".
Alternative interpretation of the numbers; there's only a subset of productive work that LLM's are 'capable' of doing at this point. That is, work that's verifiable by a machine or doesn't require verification. Thus, the cleavage points are along that axis and-- naturally-- most human beings don't have that kind of work.
- I generally agree with the prevailing commentary here, i.e. that automating app development and maths proofs may not be as world-changing as the Artificial Intelligentsia purport / “fear” it to be.
But also, upon more reflection, it occurred to me that if we’re able to create a competent humanoid robot, that could legitimately be world changing in some good and other very bad ways. The scary part is that I don’t believe there’s any major physical / energetic barrier to this. The hardware exists, the power supplies are light enough. The only part that’s lagging is the software and motion contols; the intelligence. The part that is experiencing breakthroughs at an accelerating pace.
What if a highly intelligent and physically competent robot were available for the price of a cheap car, say ~$20k? What if that robot were competent enough to cook, clean, assist the elderly, move things around, assemble and disassemble things, etc? Billions of jobs would be displaced, or hit with a very concrete maximum wage.
Many white collar jobs, while still at risk for displacement as well, benefit from barriers like IT integration and data privacy hurdles, and the fact that corporate higher-ups simply prefer to communicate with humans.
But most blue collar / manual labor jobs have almost the opposite condition: humans introduce risk, and generally don’t enhance anybody’s “experience” - see people’s somewhat odd acceptance of higher fares for a Waymo vs an Uber. [1]
I don’t think we’re there yet, but the fact that we are rapidly accelerating our trajectory toward that world should be at the least, unsettling.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/12/waymo-rides-cost-more-than...
by plaidfuji - What exactly do we want the general public to "do" with these models? If the have no use for agentic LLMs, they obviously aren't going to be interested in the capability of those agents.
I see a lot of benefit to spreading information around the tech, but it's still in its infancy. Most people weren't on the internet when that was getting up to speed.
Meemaw and pops have their systems that they work within, and they just got familiar with the damn smartphone. Though it might help them, they probably do not want AI to organize their old photos or "clean up" their computer. Saving 5 minutes just isn't important to them.
As for professionals, yeah - companies are going to adopt these tools over the coming years. It's the "norm" in my circle, but lots of jobs just... don't use technology like that - there has ALWAYS been a major gap between people who are deep in tech and people who are not.
- Don't think the 0.2% really are in agreement that "large, complex projects that used to take them weeks/months can now be completed by agents with a prompt".
The divide seems to be between people who think you may need to understand the codebase for maintenance, potential future token costs, optimisation, code erosion & being wary of the assumptions/mistakes that they have seen LLMs make, and people who don't review code and are confident that the AI has made no mistakes and will be available for next-to-nothing forever.
It's certainly allowing the latter to move fast... but will their clients be happy if/when they break things. We'll find out soon, I'm sure.
by rico735 - by frereubu