Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight

They're already better than you at reciting historical facts. I'd guess they're probably better at composing poems (they're not great but far better than the average person).

Or you agree with me? I'm not looking for prescience marks, I'm just less convinced that people really make the more boring and obvious predictions.

I'll make one prediction that I think will hold up. No LLM-based system will be able to take a generic ask like "hack the nytimes website and retrieve emails and password hashes of all user accounts" and do better than the best hackers and penetration testers in the world, despite having plenty of training data to go off of. It requires out-of-band thinking that they just don't possess.

This is unlikely for the trivial reason that some tasks are roughly saturated. Modest improvements in chess playing ability are likely. Huge improvements probably not. Even more so for arithmetic. We pretty much have that handled.

But the more substantive issue is that intellectual tasks are not all interconnected. Getting significantly better at drawing hands doesn’t usually translate to executive planning or information retrieval.

- If I want Claude Code to write some specific code, it often handles the task admirably, but if I'm not sure what should be written, consulting Claude takes a lot of time and doesn't yield much insight, where as 2 minutes with a human is 100x more valuable.

- I asked ChatGPT about some political event. It mirrored the mainstream press. After I reminded it of some obvious facts that revealed a mainstream bias, it agreed with me that its initial answer was wrong.

These experiences and others serve to remind me that current LLMs are mostly just advanced search engines. They work especially well on code because there is a lot of reasonably good code (and tutorials) out there to train on. LLMs are a lot less effective on intellectual tasks that humans haven't already written and published about.

Most likely that was just its sycophancy programming taking over and telling you what you wanted to hear

so is a textbook, but no-one argues that's intelligent

They're better at regurgitating historical facts than me because they were trained on historical facts written by many humans other than me who knew a lot more historical facts. None of those facts came from an LLM. Every historical fact that isn't entirely LLM generated nonsense came from a human. It's the humans that were intelligent, not the fancy autocomplete.

Now that LLMs have consumed the bulk of humanity's written knowledge on history what's left for it to suck up will be mainly its own slop. Exactly because LLMs are not even a little bit intelligent they will regurgitate that slop with exactly as much ignorance as to what any of it means as when it was human generated facts, and they'll still spew it back out with all the confidence they've been programed to emulate. I predict that the resulting output will increasingly shatter the illusion of intelligence you've so thoroughly fallen for so far.