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Comment by irchans | Hacker News Reader

Hofstadter said, "Well, maybe as important as the wheel."

If AI significantly surpasses humanity in cognitive ability, then I think it will have a much bigger impact than the wheel. (I loved GEB and DH's other writings.)

LLMs have really improved a lot of the last two years and they have shown many unexpected capabilities. I am guessing that they will get some more good input (text mostly), a lot more compute, and algorithmic improvements, so that may very well be enough to become better than 99% of humans at tasks that involve only text. Tasks that require video or image processing may be a little bit more challenging. Having very smart AI's controlling robots may just be five years away. (I recently lost a bet about autonomous driving. Five years ago, I thought that autonomous cars would be better than human drivers by now.)

I'm frightened by what AI will become over the next 10 years.

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> I recently lost a bet about autonomous driving. Five years ago, I thought that autonomous cars would be better than human drivers by now.

I think we're going to see something very similar with LLMs. The autonomous car hype was driven by seeing that they were 80% of the way there and concluding that at the rate they were going they'd make up the remaining 20% quickly. That turned out to be false: the last 20% has been much harder than the first 80%.

LLMs are in a very similar place, even GPT-4. They're good, and they're going to be more and more useful (similar to adaptive cruise control/lane assist). But I predict that they're going to level out and stop improving as rapidly as they have in the past year, and we're going to end up at a new normal that is good but not good enough to cause the crises people are worried about.

This is my bet too. I think we're going to get some fantastic new tools for doing specific tasks that work like magic, and that we could never have imagined ten years ago. I don't think we're going to get Yud hijacking a B-52.

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

But self driving cars have a much lower accident rate than humans. How did you lose the bet?

A lower accident rate in the extremely controlled conditions where they're currently allowed to operate.

I'd be interested to see if anyone has done a comparison of human drivers vs autonomous cars that controls for driving conditions.

About 5.5 years ago, I bet a friend that in 5 years you would be able to: 1 - enter a car 2 - type in an address that is far away, and then 3 - the car would drive to that other address and the passenger could just go to sleep, and 4 - this would be safe.

Six months ago, I did not think that we had reached that level of reliability, so I paid my friend.

(Hofstadter was quoting Geoff Hinton when he said that. What he himself compared the advance to was "fire".)

You are correct. I miss quoted. Thanks!

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