I don’t see what’s inconsistent about it. “Due to this latest amazing algorithm, the robots keep scoring goals. What do we do? Let’s move them back a bit!” Seems like a normal way of thinking to me…
I see people fawn over technical progress every day. What are they supposed to do, stop updating their expectations and never expect any more progress?
It could of course be that there are people who “never give it up for the robots”. Or maybe they do, and they did, and they have so fully embraced the brave new world that they’re talking about what’s next.
I mean, when I sit in a train I don’t spend half the ride saying “oh my god this is incredible, big thanks to whoever invented the wheel. So smooth!”
Even though maybe I should :)
Two thoughts:
- In that context, neither do you expect people to be invested in why the train is nothing special, it’s basically a horse cart, etc, etc
- And maybe here’s where I’m weird: I often am overcome by the miracle of thousands of tons of metal hurtling along at 50 - 200mph, reliably, smoothly enough to work or eat, many thousands of times a day, for pennies per person per mile. I mean, I’ll get sucked in to how the latches to release the emergency windows were designed and manufactured at scale despite almost none of them ever being used. But maybe that’s just me.
My point isn’t that other people shouldn’t be amazed, it’s that I see this recurring assumption they aren’t. How do you know the people holding LLMs to higher standards aren’t also the same people who herald the dawn of a new AI era?
Emphasis in the text you quoted: “saying”, not “thinking”.
So I don’t think it’s the same people, because the tone is not “they’re amazing but have farther to go”; there is a substantial group who at least claims to believe there’s no qualitative difference between Opus 4.1 and the spellcheck in Word ‘95.
Not trying to be argumentative here; I appreciate the conversation and you’ve helped me sharpen my point, which I appreciate.
Half the HN front page for the past years has been nothing but acknowledging the progress of LLMs in sundry ways. I wish we actually stopped for a second. It’s all people seem to want to talk about anymore.