I think your analogy is interesting but it falls apart because “moving fast” is not something we consider uniquely human, but “solving hard abstract problems” is

Not my analogy, parent is the one who brought up automobiles. Maybe that's who you meant to reply to.

I'm talking about the headline saying they "won gold" at a competition they didn't, and couldn't, compete in.

Cars going faster than humans or horses isn't very interesting these days, but it was 100+ years ago when cars were first coming on the scene.

We are at that point now with AI, so a more fitting headline analogy would be "In a world first, automobile finishes with gold-winning time in horse race".

Headlines like those were a sign that cars would eventually replace horses in most use-cases, so the fact that we could be in the the same place now with AI and humans is a big deal.

It was more than interesting 100+ years ago -- it was the subject of wildly inconsistent, often fear-based (or incumbent-industry-based) regulation.

A vetoed 1896 Pennsylvania law would have required drivers who encountered livestock to "disassemble the automobile" and "conceal the various components out of sight, behind nearby bushes until [the] equestrian or livestock is sufficiently pacified". The Locomotive on Highways Act of 1865 required early motorized vehicles to be preceded by a person on foot waving a red flag or carrying a red lantern and blowing a horn.

It might not quite look like that today, but wild-eyed, fear-based regulation as AI use grows is a real possibility. And at least some of it will likely seem just as silly in hindsight.

For more than thirty years, the speed limit for cars in Britain was 4mph - a self-propelled vehicle travelling faster than walking pace was obviously unconscionably dangerous.

To celebrate the raising of the speed limit to a daring 12mph, a group of motorists organised a drive from London to Brighton. At the time, driving 54 miles in a single day was seen as an audacious feat and few people imagined that such a great distance could be travelled in such complicated and newfangled contraptions without mechanical incident.

For decades, the car was seen as a plaything for the wealthy that served no practical purpose. The car only became an important mode of transportation after very many false starts and against strong opposition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts#Locomotives_Ac...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_to_Brighton_Veteran_Car...

> what happened was the companies drove their cars 100 meters and tweeted that they did it faster than the Olympians had run

That would be indeed an interesting race around the time cars were invented. Today that would be silly, since everyone knows what cars are capable of, but back then one can imagine a lot more skepticism.

Just as there is a ton of skepticism today of what LLMs can achieve. A competition like this clearly demonstrates where the tech is, and what is possible.

> there's no clear mapping to say how the LLM's compute should be limited to make a comparison

There is a very clear mapping of course. You give the same wall clock time to the computer you gave to the humans.

Because what it is showing is that the computer can do the same thing a human can under the same conditions. With your analogy here they are showing that there is such a thing as a car and it can travel 100 meters.

Once it is a foregone conclusion that an LLM can solve the ICPC problems and that question has been sufficiently driven home to everyone who cares we can ask further ones. Like “how much faster can it solve the problems compared to the best humans” or “how much energy it consumes while solving them”? It sounds like you went beyond the first question and already asking these follow up questions.

You're right, they did limit to 5 hours and, I think, 3 models, which seems analogous at least.

Not enough to say they "won gold". Just say what actually happened! The tweets themselves do, but then we have this clickbait headline here on HN somehow that says they "won gold at ICPC".

Agreed. The linked messaging is much more clear: "achieved gold-medal level performance". This clearly separates them from competing against humans, which they didn't do, because their constraints are very different. The "AI wins gold at ICPC" line really does seem designed to rile people up.

> under the same conditions

That's a very interesting question. When comparing wildly different computing machines, how to make a fair comparison?

At least two criteria comes in mind: the volume and the energy consumption.

Indeed we can safely assume that more volume and more energy leads to more computation power. For example, it is not fair to compare a 10m^3 room filled with computers with 10cm^3 computer. The same goes with the number of kilowhat-hours used.

Thinking further on those two criteria for GPUs and humans, we could also consider the access to energy and volume. First, energy access for machines has dramatically increased since the industrial revolution. Second, volume access for machines has also increased since the beginning of the mass production. In particular, creating one cube meter of new GPUs is faster than giving birth to a new human.

tldr: fair comparison of two machines should take into account their volume and their energy consumption. On the other hand, this might be mitigated by how fast a machine can increase its volume, and what is its bandwidth for energy consumption.

All the while with skeptics snarkily commenting "Cars can move fast, but they can't really run like a human!"

... in opposition to the car makers who want to turn everything into highways and parking lots, who really want all forms of human walking to be replaced by automobiles.

"They really cant run like a human," they say, "a human can traverse a city in complete silence, needing minimal walking room. Left unchecked, the transitions to cars would ruin our city. So lets be prudent when it comes to adopting this technology."

"I'll have none of that. Cars move faster than humans so that means they're better. We should do everything in our power to transition to this obviously superior technology. I mean, a car beat a human at the 100m sprint so bipedal mobility is obviously obsolete," the car maker replied.

This metaphor drops some pretty key definitional context. If the common belief prior to this race was that cars could not beat horses, maybe someday but not today, then the article is completely reasonable, even warranted.