I think a reasonable conclusion now that AI is getting better than us humans at this, is that humans should stop doing this. I think there are strong reasons that humans should never have been doing this in the past but now it’s far more clear, AI will out complicate whatever complexity you can build and then beat at you at its handling of intricate complexity.
Humans should focus on finding simple solutions that lead to a 10X improvement. AI rarely does this, though I have noticed it some times doing this in maths, but this was the case when the solution was already present in some distant literature and no human had the expertise in 2 distant areas to make the connection. When AI does this, it is a welcome advancement, and hopefully the bridge it shows leads to exciting new developments.
But LLMs rarely do this, and I think humans should exclusively focus on this, because it seems like we are far better than LLMs at keeping things simple and finding new insights that leads to 10X, 100X improvements
How many humans can you name who really did that? Like, in the whole history of our species
Nevertheless it's certain that there has to be people alive who saw a complex problem and simplified it 10x, even if the solution never got out of their local sphere. Solutions that you and me would implement with automation and sensors, people in developing countries would find a way with less technology or resources. Even our current systems seem needlessly complex and overengineered compared to when hardware was a limitation.
If you want to think about needless complexity being everywhere, take for example the simplicity of the Internet, made when hardware was limited, against modern monstrosities like Bluetooth, now that we can just throw more hardware at problems.
Absolutely. Let's be generous and say that there are a thousand of them alive today, what about everyone else? Are their lives meaningless now?
> the simplicity of the Internet
The Internet is TCP/IP and TCP/IP is a lot of things but hardly "simple"
HN just selects for the latter who care. Yes it’s probably much harder for those who care to have a meaningful life in the presence of LLM’s unfortunately.
Isn't it likely that the constant factor slowdown of an apparently more complicated algorithm will dominate 1.78?
> The constants in the formal construction are enormous, so this does not establish a practical speedup.
A pity the author stopped here.
This seems to imply that they used Claude Opus 5.5 before it was released on September 22nd.