I don't care how many terms you add to your Taylor series: your polynomial approximation of a sine wave is never going to be suitable for additive speech synthesis. Likewise, I don't care how good your predictive-text transformer model gets at instrumental NLP subtasks: it will never be a good programmer (except as far as it's a plagiarist). Just look at the Claude Code source code: if anyone's an expert in agentic AI development, it's the Claude people, and yet the codebase is utterly unmaintainable dogshit that shouldn't work and, on further inspection, doesn't work.
That's not to say that no computer program can write computer programs, but this computer program is well into the realm of diminishing returns.
The recent article where the AI companies are paying experts in the field to help train the models makes me wonder if they're also manually fixing a bunch of post-processing errors as they come up.
I’ll take that bet. How much money would you like to put on this, and we’ll have a neutral third party pick both the untrained child and the LLM.
Let me know.
It is (rightly) difficult to get hold of one uninvolved child, for safeguarding reasons, so it would be better to run it as a school (or interschool) competition, where multiple children may participate. For fairness, you may also provide multiple LLM participants (however you define that). The winner of the contest, as determined by the judge, would then determine the winner of the bet – unless the winning child had been trained, in which case we would fall back to the next-highest-ranked participant. The number of LLM candidates would be equal to the number of eligible children.
However, I don't see a good way to allow each child to pick a programming language and task, without leaving the competition results incomparable. So perhaps each child should be paired with an LLM, and the judge should determine which submission from each pair is better? But then if I only need one victory (to support my claim), this is clearly unfair. So each pair should be tested enough to determine whether they're consistently better than the LLM… but then we are demanding a lot of the child participants, for no real benefit to them.
If we can agree on a workable protocol, I can try to pull some strings and see if we can make this happen. I could use the money.
> There's a common rebuttal to this, and I hear it constantly. "Just wait," people say. "In a few months, in a year, the models will be better. They won't hallucinate. They won't fake plots. The problems you're describing are temporary." I've been hearing "just wait" since 2023.
We're not trending towards superintelligence with these AIs. We're trending towards (and, in fact, have already reached) superintelligence with computers in general, but LLM agents are among the least capable known algorithms for the majority of tasks we get them to do. The problem, as it usually is, is that most people don't have access to the fruits of obscure research projects.
Untrained children write better code than the most sophisticated LLMs, without even noticing they're doing anything special.