One could say they might be "superhuman" here in the same way that LLMs might be said to be superhuman at math. Perhaps they do this work faster and more effectively than any person could manually. But they are certainly still doing it the "human" way ie reasoning with legible and coherent thoughts, rather than communing through some Matrix-like symbology which is what people who skimmed the article seem to be assuming.
That "faster and more effectively" part is undeniably superhuman, and it can result in qualitative leaps in capabilities.
For example, an LLM's ability to comprehend and explain a complex codebase, that it's never seen before, far outstrips that of any human.
People like to come up with factors to quantify how much more efficient LLMs are. A newly hired human developer working on a complex codebase can take months to get up to speed, to get a holistic understanding of how it works so that they're able to make non-trivial changes. An LLM can do it in minutes. That's a factor on the order of 10,000x.
It may not be "communing through some Matrix-like symbology," but at some point it starts to seem that way.
One could say they might be "superhuman" here in the same way that LLMs might be said to be superhuman at math. Perhaps they do this work faster and more effectively than any person could manually. But they are certainly still doing it the "human" way ie reasoning with legible and coherent thoughts, rather than communing through some Matrix-like symbology which is what people who skimmed the article seem to be assuming.
That "faster and more effectively" part is undeniably superhuman, and it can result in qualitative leaps in capabilities.
For example, an LLM's ability to comprehend and explain a complex codebase, that it's never seen before, far outstrips that of any human.
People like to come up with factors to quantify how much more efficient LLMs are. A newly hired human developer working on a complex codebase can take months to get up to speed, to get a holistic understanding of how it works so that they're able to make non-trivial changes. An LLM can do it in minutes. That's a factor on the order of 10,000x.
It may not be "communing through some Matrix-like symbology," but at some point it starts to seem that way.
"I think a smart human ML researcher could perform all of these tasks."
And do that for how long?
always one in the room
Discussion on source:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50341174
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