alt Hacker NewsI don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique.
It's this pervasive belief that underlies so much discussion around what it means to be intelligent. The null hypothesis goes out the window.
People constantly make comments like "well it's just trying a bunch of stuff until something works" and it seems that they do not pause for a moment to consider whether or not that also applies to humans.
If they do, they apply it in only the most restrictive way imaginable, some 2 dimensional caricature of reality, rather than considering all the ways that humans try and fail in all things throughout their lifetimes in the process of learning and discovery.
There's still this seeming belief in magic and human exceptionalism, deeply held, even in communities that otherwise tend to revolve around the sciences and the empirical.
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The ability to learn and infer without absorbing millions of books and all text on internet really does make us special. And only at 20 watts!
> I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique.
Because, empirically, we have numerous unique and differentiable qualities, obviously. Plenty of time goes into understanding this, we have a young but rigorous field of neuroscience and cognitive science.
Unless you mean "fundamentally unique" in some way that would persist - like "nothing could ever do what humans do".
> People constantly make comments like "well it's just trying a bunch of stuff until something works" and it seems that they do not pause for a moment to consider whether or not that also applies to humans.
I frankly doubt it applies to either system.
I'm a functionalist so I obviously believe that everything a human brain does is physical and could be replicated using some other material that can exhibit the necessary functions. But that does not mean that I have to think that the appearance of intelligence always is intelligence, or that an LLM/ Agent is doing what humans do.
Re: "I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique."
Perhaps this might better help you understand why this assumption still holds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...
it is not the assumption that humans are unique. it is that statistical models cannot really think out of the box most of the time
> I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique.
Uh, because up until and including now, we are...?
It's only because humans came up with a problem, worked with the ai and verified the result that this achievement means anything at all. An ai "checking its own work" is practically irrelevant when they all seem to go back and forth on whether you need the car at the carwash to wash the car. Undoubtedly people have been passing this set of problems to ai's for months or years and have gotten back either incorrect results or results they didn't understand, but either way, a human confirmation is required. Ai hasn't presented any novel problems, other than the multitudes of social problems described elsewhere. Ai doesn't pursue its own goals and wouldn't know whether they've "actually been achieved".
This is to say nothing of the cost of this small but remarkable advance. Trillions of dollars in training and inference and so far we have a couple minor (trivial?) math solutions. I'm sure if someone had bothered funding a few phds for a year we could have found this without ai.