7 ms·

Firstly, automobiles are really impressive. Second, with that out the way, these cars are not playing the same game as horses… first, and quite obviously they

Firstly, automobiles are really impressive. Second, with that out the way, these cars are not playing the same game as horses… first, and quite obviously they have massive amounts of horsepower, which is kind of like giving a team of horses… many more horses. But also cars have an absolutely massive fuel capacity. Petrol is such an efficient store of chemical energy compared to hay and cars can store gallons of it. I think if you give my horse the ability of 300 horses and fed it pure gasoline, I would be kind of embarrassed if it wasn’t able to win a horse race.

huflungdung 1y ago
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lbrandy 1y ago
I was struck how the argument is also isomorphic to how we talked about computers and chess. We're at the stage where we are arguing the computer isn't _really_ understanding chess, though. It's just doing huge amounts of dumb computation with huge amounts of opening book and end tables and no real understanding, strategy or sense of whats going on. Even though all the criticism were, in a sense, valid, in the end none of it amounted to a serious challenge to getting good at the task at hand.
LaffertyDev 1y ago
I don’t think you’ll find many race tracks that permit horses and cars to compete together. (I did enjoy the sarcasm, though!)
Swizec 1y ago
> Firstly, automobiles are really impressive. Second, with that out the way, these cars are not playing the same game as horses Yes. That’s why cars don’t compete in equestrian events and horses don’t go to F1 races. This non-controversial surely? You want different events for humans, humans + computers, and just computers. Notice that self driving cars have separate race events from both horses and human-driven cars.
- gxs 1y ago
  Yeah I think the only thing OP was passing judgement on is on the competition aspect of it, not the actual achievement of any human or non human participant That’s how I read it at least - exactly how you put it
- throw310822 1y ago
  I think you missed that the whole point of this race was: "did we build a vehicle faster than a horse, yes/no?" Which matters a lot when horses are the fastest land vehicle available. (We're so used to thinking of horses as a quaint and slow mean of transport that maybe we don't realize that for millennia they've been the fastest possible way to get from one place to another.)
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Swizec 1y ago
    > "did we build a vehicle faster than a horse, yes/no?" Yeah fair. There's also that famous human vs horse race that happens every few years. So far humans keep winning (because it's long distance)
    - dwohnitmok 1y ago
      If you're talking about the Man versus Horse Marathon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon) it's the other way around. Overwhelmingly the horses win. Only occasionally does the human.
      - Swizec 1y ago
        I stand corrected. My memory garbled that. Thanks!
- in-silico 1y ago
  The point is that up until now, humans were the best at these competitions, just like horses were the best at racing up until cars came around. The other commenter is pointing out how ridiculous it would be for someone to downplay the performance of cars because they did it differently from horses. It doesn't matter if they did it using different methods, that fact that the final outcome was better had world-changing ramifications. The same applies here. Downplaying AI because it has different strengths or plays by different rules is foolish, because that doesn't matter in the real world. People will choose the option that that leads to the better/faster/cheaper outcome, and that option is quickly becoming AI instead of humans - just like cars quickly became the preferred option over horses. And that is crazy to think about.
bgwalter 1y ago
The massive amounts of compute power is not the major issue. The major issue is unlimited amount of reference material. If a human can look up similar previous problems just as the "AI" can, it is a huge advantage. Syzygy tables in chess engines are a similar issue. They allow perfect play, and there is no reason why a computer gets them and a human does not (if you compare humans against chess engines). Humans have always worked with reference material for serious work.
- chpatrick 1y ago
  Humans are allowed to look up and learn from as many previous problems as they want before the competition. The AI is also trained on many previous problems before the competition. What's the difference?
  - bgwalter 1y ago
    Deleted, because the "AI" geniuses and power users pointed out that Tao does not have a point. You can get this one to -4 as well, since that seems to be the primary pleasure for "AI" one armed bandit users.
    - chpatrick 1y ago
      It doesn't say anywhere that Gemini used any of those things at ICPC, or that it used more real-world time than the humans. Also, who cares? It's a self contained non-human system that could solve an ICPC problem it hasn't seen before on its own, which hasn't been achieved before. If there was a savant human contestant with photographic memory who could remember every previous ICPC problem verbatim and can think really fast you wouldn't say they're cheating, just that they're really smart. Same here. If there was a man behind the curtain that was somehow making this not an AI achievement then you would have a point, but there isn't.
      - raspasov 1y ago
        I think "hasn't seen before" is a bit of an overstatement. Sure, the problem is new in the literal sense that it does exist verbatim elsewhere, but arguably, any competition problem is hardly novel: they are all some permutation of problems that exist and have been solved before: pathfinding, optimization, etc. I don't think anyone is pretending to break new scientific ground in 5 hours.
GoatInGrey 1y ago
Snark aside, I would expect a car partaking in a horse race to beat all of the horses. Not because it's a better horse, but because it's something else altogether. Ergo, it's impressive with nuance. As the other commenter said.
furyofantares 1y ago
Yeah 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.
- LPisGood 1y ago
  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
  - furyofantares 1y ago
    Not my analogy, parent is the one who brought up automobiles. Maybe that's who you meant to reply to. I'm talking about the headline saying they "won gold" at a competition they didn't, and couldn't, compete in.
- in-silico 1y ago
  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.
  - gwbrooks 1y ago
    It was more than interesting 100+ years ago -- it was the subject of wildly inconsistent, often fear-based (or incumbent-industry-based) regulation. A vetoed 1896 Pennsylvania law would have required drivers who encountered livestock to "disassemble the automobile" and "conceal the various components out of sight, behind nearby bushes until [the] equestrian or livestock is sufficiently pacified". The Locomotive on Highways Act of 1865 required early motorized vehicles to be preceded by a person on foot waving a red flag or carrying a red lantern and blowing a horn. It might not quite look like that today, but wild-eyed, fear-based regulation as AI use grows is a real possibility. And at least some of it will likely seem just as silly in hindsight.
melenaboija 1y ago
Comparing power with reasoning does not make any sense at all. Humans have surpassed their own strength since the invention of the lever thousands of years ago. Since then, it has been a matter of finding power sources millions of times greater such as nuclear energy
Gud 1y ago
Your analogy is flawed. Are the humans allowed to bring their laptops and use the internet? Or a downloaded copy?
LunaSea 1y ago
Power is one thing, efficiency is another. Humans are more efficient watt for watt than any AI ever invented. Now if you were to limit AIs to 400 watts we could probably thinks it's fair.
- matheusd 1y ago
  > Humans are more efficient watt for watt than any AI ever invented. Indeed they are. For now. The long term trend is not in our favor.
  - LunaSea 1y ago
    I disagree, the long term trend is that we do not have the available electricity and water for this to continue for much longer.
    - pedrosorio 1y ago
      Regarding electricity, it depends on what you mean by “we”, I guess https://www.voronoiapp.com/energy/-China-Generated-More-Electricity-in-2024-Than-the-US-EU--India-Combined-5260 https://www.voronoiapp.com/energy/-China-Generated-More-Elec...
rich_sasha 1y ago
There's a difference. How much money went into training the computer here Vs the human? If you want to prove that a computer can, at extreme cost and effort, beat a human - sure, it's possible. But you can also conclude that putting a lot of money and effort pays off. It's more like comparing a horse to a Ferrari that had millions of development costs, has a team of engineers maintaining it, isn't reusable, and just about beats Chestnut. It's a long way until the utility of both is matched.
j_timberlake 1y ago
This response is good but the more general problem is that people are in "It doesn't look like anything to me" mode like Westworld robots seeing advanced technology. If there's a way to snap people out of that, I've never seen it.

huflungdung 1y ago

[dead]

lbrandy 1y ago

I was struck how the argument is also isomorphic to how we talked about computers and chess. We're at the stage where we are arguing the computer isn't _really_ understanding chess, though. It's just doing huge amounts of dumb computation with huge amounts of opening book and end tables and no real understanding, strategy or sense of whats going on. Even though all the criticism were, in a sense, valid, in the end none of it amounted to a serious challenge to getting good at the task at hand.

LaffertyDev 1y ago

I don’t think you’ll find many race tracks that permit horses and cars to compete together. (I did enjoy the sarcasm, though!)

Swizec 1y ago

> Firstly, automobiles are really impressive. Second, with that out the way, these cars are not playing the same game as horses Yes. That’s why cars don’t compete in equestrian events and horses don’t go to F1 races. This non-controversial surely? You want different events for humans, humans + computers, and just computers. Notice that self driving cars have separate race events from both horses and human-driven cars.

gxs 1y ago
Yeah I think the only thing OP was passing judgement on is on the competition aspect of it, not the actual achievement of any human or non human participant That’s how I read it at least - exactly how you put it
throw310822 1y ago
I think you missed that the whole point of this race was: "did we build a vehicle faster than a horse, yes/no?" Which matters a lot when horses are the fastest land vehicle available. (We're so used to thinking of horses as a quaint and slow mean of transport that maybe we don't realize that for millennia they've been the fastest possible way to get from one place to another.)
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Swizec 1y ago
  > "did we build a vehicle faster than a horse, yes/no?" Yeah fair. There's also that famous human vs horse race that happens every few years. So far humans keep winning (because it's long distance)
  - dwohnitmok 1y ago
    If you're talking about the Man versus Horse Marathon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon) it's the other way around. Overwhelmingly the horses win. Only occasionally does the human.
    - Swizec 1y ago
      I stand corrected. My memory garbled that. Thanks!
in-silico 1y ago
The point is that up until now, humans were the best at these competitions, just like horses were the best at racing up until cars came around. The other commenter is pointing out how ridiculous it would be for someone to downplay the performance of cars because they did it differently from horses. It doesn't matter if they did it using different methods, that fact that the final outcome was better had world-changing ramifications. The same applies here. Downplaying AI because it has different strengths or plays by different rules is foolish, because that doesn't matter in the real world. People will choose the option that that leads to the better/faster/cheaper outcome, and that option is quickly becoming AI instead of humans - just like cars quickly became the preferred option over horses. And that is crazy to think about.

bgwalter 1y ago

The massive amounts of compute power is not the major issue. The major issue is unlimited amount of reference material. If a human can look up similar previous problems just as the "AI" can, it is a huge advantage. Syzygy tables in chess engines are a similar issue. They allow perfect play, and there is no reason why a computer gets them and a human does not (if you compare humans against chess engines). Humans have always worked with reference material for serious work.

chpatrick 1y ago
Humans are allowed to look up and learn from as many previous problems as they want before the competition. The AI is also trained on many previous problems before the competition. What's the difference?
- bgwalter 1y ago
  Deleted, because the "AI" geniuses and power users pointed out that Tao does not have a point. You can get this one to -4 as well, since that seems to be the primary pleasure for "AI" one armed bandit users.
  - chpatrick 1y ago
    It doesn't say anywhere that Gemini used any of those things at ICPC, or that it used more real-world time than the humans. Also, who cares? It's a self contained non-human system that could solve an ICPC problem it hasn't seen before on its own, which hasn't been achieved before. If there was a savant human contestant with photographic memory who could remember every previous ICPC problem verbatim and can think really fast you wouldn't say they're cheating, just that they're really smart. Same here. If there was a man behind the curtain that was somehow making this not an AI achievement then you would have a point, but there isn't.
    - raspasov 1y ago
      I think "hasn't seen before" is a bit of an overstatement. Sure, the problem is new in the literal sense that it does exist verbatim elsewhere, but arguably, any competition problem is hardly novel: they are all some permutation of problems that exist and have been solved before: pathfinding, optimization, etc. I don't think anyone is pretending to break new scientific ground in 5 hours.

GoatInGrey 1y ago

Snark aside, I would expect a car partaking in a horse race to beat all of the horses. Not because it's a better horse, but because it's something else altogether. Ergo, it's impressive with nuance. As the other commenter said.

furyofantares 1y ago

Yeah 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.

LPisGood 1y ago
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
- furyofantares 1y ago
  Not my analogy, parent is the one who brought up automobiles. Maybe that's who you meant to reply to. I'm talking about the headline saying they "won gold" at a competition they didn't, and couldn't, compete in.
in-silico 1y ago
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.
- gwbrooks 1y ago
  It was more than interesting 100+ years ago -- it was the subject of wildly inconsistent, often fear-based (or incumbent-industry-based) regulation. A vetoed 1896 Pennsylvania law would have required drivers who encountered livestock to "disassemble the automobile" and "conceal the various components out of sight, behind nearby bushes until [the] equestrian or livestock is sufficiently pacified". The Locomotive on Highways Act of 1865 required early motorized vehicles to be preceded by a person on foot waving a red flag or carrying a red lantern and blowing a horn. It might not quite look like that today, but wild-eyed, fear-based regulation as AI use grows is a real possibility. And at least some of it will likely seem just as silly in hindsight.

melenaboija 1y ago

Comparing power with reasoning does not make any sense at all. Humans have surpassed their own strength since the invention of the lever thousands of years ago. Since then, it has been a matter of finding power sources millions of times greater such as nuclear energy

Gud 1y ago

Your analogy is flawed. Are the humans allowed to bring their laptops and use the internet? Or a downloaded copy?

LunaSea 1y ago

Power is one thing, efficiency is another. Humans are more efficient watt for watt than any AI ever invented. Now if you were to limit AIs to 400 watts we could probably thinks it's fair.

matheusd 1y ago
> Humans are more efficient watt for watt than any AI ever invented. Indeed they are. For now. The long term trend is not in our favor.
- LunaSea 1y ago
  I disagree, the long term trend is that we do not have the available electricity and water for this to continue for much longer.
  - pedrosorio 1y ago
    Regarding electricity, it depends on what you mean by “we”, I guess https://www.voronoiapp.com/energy/-China-Generated-More-Electricity-in-2024-Than-the-US-EU--India-Combined-5260 https://www.voronoiapp.com/energy/-China-Generated-More-Elec...

rich_sasha 1y ago

There's a difference. How much money went into training the computer here Vs the human? If you want to prove that a computer can, at extreme cost and effort, beat a human - sure, it's possible. But you can also conclude that putting a lot of money and effort pays off. It's more like comparing a horse to a Ferrari that had millions of development costs, has a team of engineers maintaining it, isn't reusable, and just about beats Chestnut. It's a long way until the utility of both is matched.

j_timberlake 1y ago

This response is good but the more general problem is that people are in "It doesn't look like anything to me" mode like Westworld robots seeing advanced technology. If there's a way to snap people out of that, I've never seen it.