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Comment by bachmeier | Hacker News Reader

The reason AI is hyped is because it's easy to get the first 80% or 90% of what you need to be a viable alternative at some task. Extrapolating in a linear fashion, AI will do the last 10-20% in a few months or maybe a couple years. But the low-hanging fruit is easy and fast. It may never be feasible to complete the last few percent. Then it changes from "AI replacement" to "AI assisted". I don't know much about radiology, but I remember before the pandemic one of the big fears was what we'd do with all the unemployed truck drivers.

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> Extrapolating in a linear fashion, AI will do the last 10-20% in a few months or maybe a couple years

That's a hefty assumption, especially if you're including accuracy.

> That's a hefty assumption, especially if you're including accuracy.

That's exactly what the comment is saying. People see AI do 80% of a task and assume development speed will follow a linear trend and the last 20% will get done relatively quickly. The reality is the last 20% is hard-to-impossible. Prime example is self-driving vehicles, which have been 80% done and 5 years away for the past 15 years. (It actually looks further than 5 years away now that we know throwing more training data at the problem doesn't fix it.)

We are at 95 percent now for self driving. I regularly use Waymo robot cars in sf. No driver. The gap is now just scaling.

Take what is 100% complete in one city and do it in another city.

Problem was solved… you just missed the boat.

Waymo barely works, with 24/7 monitoring by humans in a "fleet response" center[0], in 4 cities in the world. That's only 95% done if you're counting good enough for government work.

[0] https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/

The monitoring might be 24/7 but its reaction time is nothing usable in a life-and-death situation. Or I just cannot imagine a human being notified "I think I'm crashing into something" and able to take over and do anything of significance within that second to avoid the crash (except hitting on the brakes which the car could do just as well). So don't read too much into the response team, it has definitely its use but won't save you from plunging into that sinkhole who just appeared.

OP is being facetious, the "last 20%" is a common saying implying that you've back-loaded the hard part of a task.

That's their point, I think; since the 50s or so, people have been making this mistake about AI and AI-adjacent things, and it never really plays out. That last '10%' often proves to be _impossible_, or at best very difficult; you could argue that OCR has managed it, finally, at least for simple cases, but it took about 40 years, say.

> The reason AI is hyped is because it's easy to get the first 80% or 90% of what you need to be a viable alternative at some task.

No, it's because if the promise of certain technologies is reached, it'd be a huge deal. And of course, that promise has been reached for many technologies, and it's indeed been a huge deal. Sometimes less than people imagine, but often more than the naysayers who think it won't have any impact at all.

> Extrapolating in a linear fashion, AI will do the last 10-20% in a few months or maybe a couple years

Extrapolating in a linear fashion, in a few years my child will be ten foot tall, weight six hundred pounds, and speak 17 languages.

The first 90% is the easy part. It's the other 90% that's hard. People forget that, especially people who don't work in software/technology.

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