alt Hacker NewsIt's a matter of perspective and expectations.
The automobile was a useful invention. I don't know if back then there was a lot of hype around how it can do anything a horse can do, but better. People might have complained about how it can't come to you when called, can't traverse stairs, or whatever.
It could do _one_ thing a horse could do better: Pull stuff on a straight surface. Doing just one thing better is evidently valuable.
I think AI is valuable from that perspective, you provide a good example there. I might well be disappointed if I would expect it to be better than humans at anything humans can do. It doesn't have to. But with wording like "co-scientist", I see where that comes from.
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It's not just about doing something better but about the balance between the pros and the cons. The problem with LLMs are hallucinations. If cars just somehow made you drive the wrong way with the frequency that LLMs send one down the wrong path with compelling sounding nonsense, then I suspect we'd still be riding horses nowadays.
> It could do _one_ thing a horse could do better: Pull stuff on a straight surface
I would say the doubters were right, and the results are terrible.
We redesigned the world to suit the car, instead of fixing its shortcomings.
Navigating a car centric neighbourhood on foot is anywhere between depressing and dangerous.
I hope the same does not happen with AI. But I expect it will. Maybe in your daily life AI will create legal contracts there are thousands of pages long And you will need AI of your own to summarise them and process them.