Maybe you’re the one who needs breaking out of your cached beliefs.
That’s not a credible position, but there isn’t anything that I or anyone else can say to someone who simply doesn’t want to believe something.
In my experience modern models are better at all tasks than models from two years ago, especially complex multi-step tasks.
I think most are actually worth, as agentic harnesses seem to optimize for solving poorly described problems rather than following complex procedures as written. In other words, instruction following maximizing models seem to make worse free-form agents, but they're really all that some domains need.
I suspect GPT 5.6 would be even better at it, if given the same sycophantic system prompt and lack of guardrails.
It wasn't "better" it was better at kissing your ass which matches what a lot of people want in a partner.
For example, every day people teach teenagers how to drive and with only dozens of hours of practice, they are on the road.
i can link you likely dozens of comments from people wrong about this replying to me over the last 5 years
That's not what people mean when they say "moving the goalposts". It means that people are adamant that something wasn't important/hard/impressive once the "AI" solves it. And then they come up with another thing that needs to be solved in order to prove it is important/hard/impressive. And once that happens, they do it again. And again. That's what "moving the goalposts" means.
It's also very much not a new phenomenon. It's been happening since the 1980s. As you can see from this quote from GEB by Hofstadter:
> There is a related "Theorem" about progress in AI: once some mental function is programmed, people soon cease to consider it as an essential ingredient of "real thinking". The ineluctable core of intelligence is always in that next thing which hasn't yet been programmed. This "Theorem" was first proposed to me by Larry Tesler, so I call it Tesler's Theorem: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."
-Alan Turing (allegedly)
I don't see how that's any better.
In recent years, I have commonly seen the phrase "you're moving the goalposts" deployed by the "it might be sentient" crowd to shoot down the "it's a stochastic parrot" crowd when the latter respond to a new development with "OK but...". In a well-understood field of inquiry, that would be a clear case of goalpost-moving, in the commonly-understood meaning of the phrase where requirements are retroactively changed in response to them having been met. Thank you OP. 'Artificial Intelligence', and indeed intelligence in general, is very much not a well-understood field of inquiry - in fact we don't even have a common agreement about what 'intelligence' is. We are therefore learning as we go (even after all this time!) but making rapid progress in recent years. When rapid progress is made in a poorly-understood field, then how can our definitions and requirements for success not change? This is arguably one of the most pathological development projects ever - what are the requirements? 'It thinks like a human'? What does that mean? And the answer is we don't know what that means, and we're working it out as we go - moving the goalposts. If we didn't move the goalposts, then by definition we already knew exactly where we were headed at the beginning, and we very clearly did not.
Side note that, in case it's not obvious, none of this detracts from how impressive LLMs are. They're a marvel of the modern age, all the problems notwithstanding. However I reserve the right to stay sceptical about their capabilities.
It's in how they change, not the fact that they change. The skeptics seem to have secret definitions for intelligence, sentience, consciousness, creativity, etc. that amounts to "a thing only humans have". Often that thing is equivalent to a soul. When yesterday's challenge (LLMs don't have X because they can't do Y!) is met, Y changes but X stays the same. This is not the process by which a field matures, it is a rhetorical technique used by skeptics to avoid honestly stating or confronting their internal definitions. That can be revealed by asking the skeptic the following:
"Forget LLMs. What if we made a completely physically accurate simulation of a human being?"
Many say no, that simulated human being still couldn't have (intelligence, consciousness, sentience, creativity, ...). This reveals that there is a necessary metaphysical component to those attributes, at which point any scientific-minded person will leave the debate.
> If we didn't move the goalposts, then by definition we already knew exactly where we were headed at the beginning, and we very clearly did not.
The criticisms are directed toward people who did clearly act like they knew, not the ones who were honest that they did not know.
To me, the goalposts were already defined by the person you were responding to. "The impact of AI is getting undeniable", so, the goalposts are "the impact of AI". Probably something like "the impact of AI is high, or will be soon".
Note that this does not depend on things like AI sentience or defining "intelligence" more rigorously, it just depends on AI impact.
The fundamental argument that I've personally made since the early days of this is that LLMs are not reasoning, in the way that word is commonly understood.
There are lots of reasons why that argument needs to evolve that could certainly appear to be "moving the goalposts", but let's take an example.
A lot of AIs were tripped up by the question "Should I walk or drive 50m to the carwash?" Several folks liked to use that as an example that illustrates that LLMs aren't reasoning, but as the models have been trained on that specific example, it's of course less useful. An AI can mostly nail it now.
So a different example is needed. A new demonstration of how these things fail at basic reasoning a child can do.
Did I move the goalposts? I don't think so. The fundamental argument stays the same. It's not hard to find lots of examples that trip up LLMs, because they are what they are: statistical inference machines. Nothing more and nothing less.
Useful, sure. But also commonly misapplied to areas for which they are inappropriate solutions.
The motte is "AI useful". The bailey is "Singularity is nigh".
(I'm personally still skeptical about this, but I'm being pulled towards accepting it).
"AI is useful" is too low of a bar, and "singularity is nigh" is too high. "AI is on its way to upending society" is about in the middle, and still vastly contentious among laypeople.
But there are people like Ed Zitron, frequently posted and cited here, who disagree even with the former.
Personally I prefer to follow explorers rather than swamp-sitters.
"it isn't clear whether generative AI actually provides much business value at all"
"cannot seem to find a product that people will pay for, in part because the results are so mediocre"
"Last week, we got our first real, definitive glimpse of what’s around that corner that future. And boy, was it underwhelming."
"OpenAI claims that o1 “performs similarly to PhD students on challenging benchmark tasks in physics, chemistry, and biology.” Just not in geography, it seems. Or basic elementary-level English language tests. Or math. Or programming. "
"Worse still, it's kind of hard to explain why anybody should give a shit about o1."
"o1 shows that OpenAI is both desperate and out of ideas."
"the software is not becoming more useful"
Honestly, every other line is quotable in this context.
But it seems we have somehow optimized away shame. It wasn’t good for profits, I guess.
I agree with the parent that we need to acknowledge that we're at a turning point in history. I lived through some of them (internet, ubiquitous personal computing). But it's somewhat difficult to comprehend the impact of this one for many people.
I do biomedical research at one of the top European research institutions. We're very well-funded, but I can clearly see the gap between us (say, top-100) and top-10. I also realize this gap is going to get so much wider unless we invest heavily in AI access (and I'm not so sure I can sell anything more expensive than $20 Claude subscription to the leadership).
I think people having 6-7 figure SOTA AI budgets will move exponentially faster than those who don't. That makes me worried.
So, for me, it's not a question of recalibrating expectations. We're way past that.
Not long ago many folks were saying AI was the same as the crypto bubble. No real useful technology and only hype.
I think AI is clearly both revolutionary and useful. Revolutionary insofar as the job I do has changed almost completely in a year or so span.
There is irony here
We need to figure out how to restructure the global economy. How does UBI work internationally, if the AI companies are taking revenue in the US? What’s the tax base for it? What does that say about international trade and protectionism? Do countries end up splitting into different trading blocks based on their level of access and legality of AI (I assume some will ban it outright)?.
How does intellectual property work in an AI generated future? What about healthcare advances, who gets to own those?
What about meaning, what about purpose? How do we replace the work ethic that tells us we are our jobs and idleness is immoral? How do you replace “What do you do?” As one of the first questions you ask a new person?
That sort of thing.
If you are correct, I expect corporations to reap massive profits while most Americans try to find a way to survive in a world where they are obsolete.
And it's sad, really, because I think these two groups would make a great pairing if they could stop arguing against one another for a moment. They'll both be impacted about as much and probably have the same ultimate goals (to lead dignified lives).
But it seems these days everyone is more interested in Kayfabe and feeling like they're in the right than working together, so maybe I should just keep quiet rather than attract the ire of both groups...
I don't know if it is fair to say they're in denial. For my part, I don't expect life to get much better for regular people (especially short term), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't work to try to make it happen.
What a lot of people want to do, and I’m not saying that you’re one of them, is to assume that a positive outcome is impossible and either do nothing or loudly yell that the world is ending. Neither is particularly useful.
Or, as I said above, others just deny that there’s anything to see here and try to get people to move along.
Shane Legg (DeepMind co-founder), one of the more intelligent and thoughtful people you'll find in the industry, could only offer "it's a tough problem - we need to think about it" when recently interviewed by Hannah Fry.
On the surface the most likely outcome for AI allowed to replace jobs is extraordinarily negative, especially since it is a general capability technology, not a specific one where displaced workers can just move to another field. Once AI becomes more capable it will be able to do the vast majority of white collar jobs, including any new ones that may appear as a result of AI. As Shane Legg put it, "if your job can be done remotely, sitting in front of a computer, then it can probably be replaced by AI".
Not only does AI threaten to replace ALL the white collar jobs, but it is rapidly going after blue collar (factory jobs, driving jobs) and pink collar ones (Japanese robotics for elder-care) as well.
If a positive outcome (which doesn't include putting displaced workers on welfare - UBI) is possible, then it sure would be nice to hear it, and the silence from the AI companies, and government for that matter, is deafening.
Eventually UBI will be the norm, and if the living standards of a person on UBI is as good as yours or mine today, that will be an enormous win for everyone. It’s like pensions, once these were only for the elderly poor, now they’re a right for everyone in most developed countries.
It’s also interesting that for most of human history leisure time was the point of life, and only in recent modernity has work come to be the meaning of someone’s existence.
UBI has to be commensurate with production being automated. That’s a big logistical problem, if you think building datacenters is a challenge try bringing about radical abundance, but even so it’s not insurmountable. It just needs to be taken on as project and not seen as an impossibility.
So much of this is not about what is possible so much as what people believe is possible. We can do anything if we try.
I see comments like this tossed around a lot, but what makes you say this? Don't you think its more likely that most people end up in poverty?
See "Machines of Loving Grace" by Dario Amodei: https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace.
"Massive Economic Abundance: Because AI will exponentially grow the total economic pie, overall resource scarcity will diminish. The fundamental challenge shifts from producing wealth to distributing wealth."
So how do we go from everyone out of work, no income to spend on food, or the goods and services that the AI is producing, to "massive economic abundance"?!
It's like the meme:
Step 1: Create AI
Step 2: AI takes all the jobs
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit! (massive economic abundance)
What is step 3?
"Massive Economic Abundance" implies massive increase in produced goods. This implies massive deflation, ceteris paribus. So step 3 could be simply printing money to pay for UBI. Deflation from AI productivity increase and inflation from UBI money printing will cancel out.
> In the near term handling the transition. Jobs will be lost, careers ended, people won’t be able to reskill quickly enough. At the same time AI is an enormous opportunity to uplift living standards, but nobody has the logistics of this figured out.
> We need to figure out how to restructure the global economy. How does UBI work internationally, if the AI companies are taking revenue in the US? What’s the tax base for it? What does that say about international trade and protectionism? Do countries end up splitting into different trading blocks based on their level of access and legality of AI (I assume some will ban it outright)?.
UBI in the United States is never going to happen in time. If it happens at all. We don’t even get universal healthcare. I think people who think AI will be a net positive for humanity are also in some sort of denial.
In a different US political climate I would entertain it. If these frontier labs weren’t so clearly going after the money, I would entertain it.
LLMs are clearly a step up for capitalists so I just can’t see any inclusion of LLMs move towards more progressive ideologies.
My own $0.02 on the economics piece - every country should have a sovereign wealth fund. Governments should block market access from automated[0] companies until those companies provide equity contributions to the wealth fund for that country. This aligns regulator and corporate interests. Dividends flow into the sovereign wealth funds and then can be allocated locally from there - UBI, job programs, etc. Let different jurisdictions explore different ways to structure a post-labor society.
On the broader social front - I think a lot of lack of meaning discussion boils down to the overemphasis we have on your job as your self-worth. We need to realign our societal expectations - and people need to spend more time with their families.
[0] for this to work, I think we would need well accepted metrics for 'how automated' a company is - and that probably needs a 3rd party auditing industry.
Is there any government that has gotten socialism correct for its citizens? I'd point to UAE/Qatar if they didn't depend on human servitude and inequality.
The only way to win is to wield the AI.
Humanity survives (but we reading this probably don't), the AI treats the living humans like the Emperor's favorite pets (probably a pretty good life), and then the AI does whatever else it deems important.
Bad news for you -- there's a 100% chance we all die. Sorry to be the one to tell you.
And you accuse the 'other side' of 'suicidal apathy'??
You should put down the AI and do some self-reflection on how you came to hold these views.
Does it bother you that the people who are publicly cocksure that P(doom) is moments away are the same people that have profited most handsomely from that pronouncement?
That the 'humanists' that want to do 'altruism' for 'potential future humans' and are the same people that commit fraud and theft at a civilizational scale, then sell this 'intelligence' to any child-incinerating militaries with spare cash?
It's not wrong to want to do good, but if a system that is branded 'do (the most) good' commits great evils, you are morally and intellectually obligated to step back and reconsider how you are spending your time.
Also, I asked a chicken and a feral rock dove what it's like to be not be 'apex' and they burbled at me and kept eating millet and sunflower seeds.
Would you like me to follow up with them? I'm not sure what point you expected them to make.
You hallucinated the "preemptive nuclear war". He didn't say anything about nukes. That's your own invention.
> Does it bother you that the people who are publicly cocksure that P(doom) is moments away
20% is not "cocksure". The "moments" is again an exaggeration.
Every problem is a search problem. Nuke the data centers.
P(doom) = 98.9% (Aug-2026) P(doom) = 98.2% (July-2026) P(doom) = 98.2% (Jun-2026) P(doom) = 98.5% (May-2026) P(doom) = 98.8% (mid-April-2026) P(doom) = 98.7% (April-2026) P(doom) = 98.7% (March-2026) P(doom) = 98.5% (mid-Feb-2026) P(doom) = 97% (Feb-2026) P(doom) = 94% (Jan-2026) P(doom) = 93% (Dec-2025) P(doom) = 95% (July-2025)
Powerful word, `if`. "You're not only wrong you're a fulminating psychopath" is a perfectly valid response to getting it wrong like a fulminating psychopath.
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
Now you are again postulating that there would be no more extreme progress in the near future. That's actually more "insane".
not sure how many will get this reference but "AI" for science and math is like super-shoes for runners
at first we are blown away by the impossible improvements including sub-2-hour realworld marathon and every other PR/CR/WR is dialed down
but then the improvements slow and reach a stall point because of the limit of technology and the source of the achievement
ie. sub-2-hour marathon yes, sub-1-hour never happening (rollerblade inline-skate record is 1-hour marathon)
The fact we see a lift is not the same as evidence that the lift is unbounded.
The lift being finite is supported by the fact improvements have come at the edges: improvements from human feedback, improvements in harnesses, improvements on model compatibility with harnesses, improvements in inference efficiency with new architectures, etc. If we were just training better models from scratch that would be one thing, but we are just making better use of a tool we've developed.
As a programmer, I am mostly interested in whether my role is sustainable long-term and whether the models will get better. I don't feel in jeopardy yet, but two more years like this and the calculus of hiring software engineers could shift even further. QAs are already overwhelmed with work
basically everything Benjamin Franklin did was trial and error because no-one understood what electricity was in the slightest
almost everything Edison did was trial and error too, he had his lab try thousands of materials for his long lasting lightbulb filament
even the most advanced "AI" today is just machine-learning going through everything already known trying to piece together previously discovered facts, admittedly at levels and detail impossible by human hands
but that means there are limits and it's not really "AI"
I’m not a mathematician so I have zero clue what “ New upper bounds on sphere-packing density down to the Cohn–Elkies thresholds” means.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/two-critical-updates-re-as...
As always, PR hype. Goalposts have not moved.
Guys, please use critical thinking. The haters don't hate by default, we hate because we're gaslit about this stuff every day and it's annoying. Extraordinary claims require proof, and they're not giving us information that would be essential to knowing if this is actually significant or not.
Remember October 2024 Pelicans [1] ? It's been only less than 2 years.
We don't know what will come in the next 2 years. But the progress doesn't seem to stop for now.
[1] https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/25/pelicans-on-a-bicycle/
People are skeptical of the announcement because the room include several PHDs in math and physics. The prompts are not published so we can see how generic the starting prompt is.
He literally says it's an impressive feat in the second article.
The only way that is PR hype is if you're invoking the insane conspiracy that frontier AI labs are just buying off results that would otherwise be career defining for a mathematician, just for marketing.
The posts you linked are urging caution regarding the exaggerated e/acc-esque lies peddled by people like Musk, not that the models haven't proven themselves as having genuine ability to contribute to research in some areas.
They still do things that I find incredibly annoying and “dumb”. And I still have to clean up messes they make quite often.
But on the whole they are clearly smarter than before. No extraordinary claims needed. I just try to learn how the tool works and how to use it effectively.
I remember the time when he insisted that diffusion-based image generators trained on Internet scale data will never be able to make an image of a horse riding an astronaut. Today you can generate 4K video of that.
I heard that Gary Kasparov was impacted by AI chess, but at least he still seems to have a job, so don't give up.