alt Hacker NewsYeah man, and it would be wild to publish an article titled "Ford Mustang and Honda Civic win gold in the 100 meter dash at the Olympics" if what happened was the companies drove their cars 100 meters and tweeted that they did it faster than the Olympians had run.
Actually that's too generous, because the humans are given a time limit in ICPC, and there's no clear mapping to say how the LLM's compute should be limited to make a comparison.
It IS an interesting result to see how models can do on these tests - and it's also a garbage headline.
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All the while with skeptics snarkily commenting "Cars can move fast, but they can't really run like a human!"
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.
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.
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
> 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.