I had a computer that could talk and make decisions in 1982. It sounded pretty robotic and the decisions were 1982-level AI: Lots of if statements.

I'm not really trying to be snarky; I'm trying to point out to you that you're being really vague. And that when you actually get really, really concrete about what we have it ... starts to seem a little less magical than saying "computers that talk and think". Computers that are really quite good at sampling from a distribution of high-likelihood next language tokens based upon complex and long context window is still a pretty incredible thing, but it seems a little less likely to put us all out of a job in the next 10 years.

>I had a computer that could talk and make decisions in 1982.

And it became and industry that as completely and totally changed the world. The world was just so analog back then.

>starts to seem a little less magical than saying "computers that talk and think"

Computer thinking will never become magical. As soon as we figure something out it becomes "oh that is just X". It is human thinking that will become less magical over time.

The "talking and making decisions" part didn't change the world, though. It was the digital spreadsheets and letters that did.

Define "make decisions" such that an 'if' statement does not qualify but an llm does.

LLMs may be a stepping stone to AGI. It's impressive tech. But nobody's proven anything like that yet, and you're running on pure faith not facts here.

i mean, if given the choice between using a coding agent like the codex ui, or a CS intern, I would take the coding agent every time. to me its self evident whats going on

I get a new batch of CS interns for my team every year, and I use Claude Code every day. I think Claude is pretty amazing and it definitely provides value for me, but I would choose the intern every time. I am really skeptical of any claims of getting the kind of productivity and capability growth out of an LLM that would make it an adequate replacement for a human developer.

Well frankly your lack of concrete arguments makes it seem a lot like you don't actually understand what's going on here.

I'm enjoying the new LLM based tooling a lot, but nothing about it suggests that we're in any way near to AGI because it's very much a one trick pony so far.

When we see generative AI that updates its weights in real time (currently an intractible problem) as part of the feedback loop then things might get very interesting. Until then it's just another tool in the box. CS interns learn.

Even by HN standards, this is just an incredible comment. You’d think it’s satire, but I doubt it.

One of the reasons I like to swing by HN on the weekend is that the flavor of the comments is a lot spicier. For better or worse.

Is that a thing now?

Has been for a while, the difference isn’t huge but it does seem to be a difference.

Slightly different cohorts.

ive been on HN for about 15 years :)

Yet your account is only 3 years old. Do you just constantly have to hide the silly things that you say?

see i was thinking my comments didnt go far enough in describing what we are witnessing

You should post something more substantial than this.

its a problem of imagination, "situational awareness". People are simply not aware of what we have discovered, their minds cannot see beyond a chatbox. thats not even to mention the smoothness of the loss functions the big ai labs are seeing, the smooth progression of the scaling laws. its all there, it progresses daily

The last thing we need is a bunch of random chatter, but that’s all these things can do. They can’t make decisions because they don’t actually relate to the real world. Humans (like you, apparently) may think a talking computer is a magic oracle but you’re fooling yourself.