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Comment by measurablefunc | Hacker News Reader

If you listen to the people who believe real AI is right around the corner then any software can be recreated from a detailed enough specification b/c whatever special sauce is hidden in the black box can be inferred from its outward behavior. Real AI is more brilliant than whatever algorithm you could ever think of so if the real AI can interact w/ your software then it can recreate a much better version of it w/o looking at the source code b/c it has access to whatever knowledge you had while writing the code & then some.

I don't think real AI is around the corner but plenty of people believe it is & they also think they only need a few more data centers to make the fiction into a reality.

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>Real AI is more brilliant than whatever algorithm you could ever think of

So with "Real AI" you actually mean artificial superintelligence.

I wrote what I meant & meant what I wrote. You can take up your argument w/ the people who think they're working on AI by adding more data centers & more matrix multiplications to function graphs if you want to argue about marketing terms.

I was just thinking that calling artificial superintelligence "Real AI" was funny.

Corporate marketing is very effective. I don't have as many dollars to spend on convincing people that AI is when they give me as much data as possible & the more data they give me the more "super" it gets.

They’re looking for AI that’s só good it’s unreal

What you describe is essentially what happened, the AI result working from specs and tests was more performant than the original. The real AI you describe just rewrote chardet without looking at the source, only better.

It was instructed to look at the source...

It was instructed NOT to look at the source, with the one exception that it was told to look at this single file full of charset definitions: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/blob/f0676c0d6a4263827924...

Is there any visibility or accountability to record exactly what it did and not look at? I doubt it. So we're left with a kind of Rorschach test: some people think LLMs follow rules like law-abiding citizens, and some people distrust commercial LLMs because they understand that commercial LLMs were never designed for visibility and accountability.

There should exist a .jsonl file somewhere with exactly that information in it - might be worth Dan preserving that, it should be in a ~/.claude/projects folder.

How do you know it didn’t look at the source?

Real AI will never be invented, because as AI systems become more capable we'll figure out humans weren't intelligent in the first place, therefore intelligence never existed.

Don't worry, just 10 more data centers & a few more gigawatts will get you there even if the people building the data centers & powerplants are unintelligent & mindless drones. But in any event, I have no interest in religious arguments & beliefs so your time will be better spent convincing people who are looking for another religion to fill whatever void was left by secular education since such people are much more amenable to religious indoctrination & will very likely find many of your arguments much more persuasive & convincing.

I mean, it sounds kinda like you're the one making religious arguments. My response is one mocking how poorly egotistical people deal with the AI effect.

Evolution built man that has intelligence based on components that do not have intelligence themselves, it is an emergent property of the system. It is therefore scientific to think we could build machines on similar principles that exhibit intelligence as an emergent property of the system. No woo woo needed.

Me & a few friends are constructing a long ladder to get to the moon. Our mission is based on sound scientific & engineering principles we have observed on the surface of the planet which allows regular people to scale heights they could not by jumping or climbing. We only need a few trillions of dollars & a sufficiently large wall to support it while we climb up to the moon.

There are lots of other analogies but the moon ladder is simple enough to be understood even by children when explaining how nothing can emerge from inert building blocks like transistors that is not reducible to their constituent parts.

As I said previously, your time will be much better spent convincing people who are looking for another religion b/c they will be much more susceptible to your beliefs in emergent properties of transistors & data centers of sufficient scale & magnitude.

>friends are constructing a long ladder to get to the moon

Congratulations, you're working on a space elevator. A few trillion dollars would certainly get us out of the atmosphere, and the amount of advances in carbon nanotube and foam metal would rocket us ahead decades in material sciences. Couple this with massive banks of capacitors and you could probably generate enough electricity for a country by the charge differential from the top to the bottom.

Oh, I get it, you were trying to be clever by saying something ignorant because it makes you feel special as a human rather than make realistic statements for the progress currently being made in the sciences.

I don't think you get it but good luck. I've already spent enough time in this thread & further engagement is not going to be productive for anyone involved.

>It is therefore scientific to think we could build machines on similar principles that exhibit intelligence as an emergent property of the system.

Sure, but this ain't it.

Actually, I think LLMs are a step in the wrong direction if we really want to reach true AI. So it actually delays it, instead of bringing us close to true AI.

But LLMs are a very good scam that is not entirely snake oil. That is the best kind of scam.

>Actually, I think LLMs are a step in the wrong direction if we really want to reach true AI.

Any particular reason beyond feelings why this is the case.

We already know expert systems failed us when reaching towards generalized systems. LLMs have allowed us to further explore the AI space and give us insights on intelligence. Even more so we've had an explosion in hardware capabilities because of LLMs that will allow us to test other mechanisms faster than ever before.

Because if it was in the right direction, then it would have been possible to amend its knowledge without going through the whole re-training procedure.

> b/c whatever special sauce is hidden in the black box can be inferred from its outward behavior.

This is not always true, for an extreme example see Indistinguishability obfuscation.

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