Hacker News: skepticATX

New comment by skepticATX in "AI coding is gambling"

skepticATX — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:09:57 +0000

You generally don’t assign work to an intern just for the output, though.

New comment by skepticATX in "747s and coding agents"

skepticATX — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 16:06:11 +0000

Reviewing code is absolutely different from writing it, and in my opinion much harder if the goal is more than surface level understanding.

This is what I am still grappling with. Agents make more productive, but also probably worse at my job.

New comment by skepticATX in "OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network"

skepticATX — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 07:48:36 +0000

One explanation is that this is effectively a quid pro quo, given Brockman’s enormous financial support of the current president.

New comment by skepticATX in "Layoffs at Block"

skepticATX — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 01:28:31 +0000

So much software just flat out doesn’t work that people don’t even notice how bad X has gotten.

New comment by skepticATX in "How will OpenAI compete?"

skepticATX — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 13:04:48 +0000

I actually think that plateauing is the best case scenario for big labs.

I think there are three broad scenarios to consider:

- Super-intelligence is achieved. In this scenario the economics totally break down, but even ignoring that, it’s hard to imagine that there are any winners except for the the singular lab that gets here first.

- Scaling laws hold up and models continue to get better, but we never see any sort of “takeoff”. In this scenario, models continue to become stale after mere months and labs have to spend enormous amounts of money to stay competitive.

- Model raw capabilities plateau. In this scenario open source will catch up, but labs will have the opportunity to invest in specific verticals.

I believe that we’re already seeing the third scenario play out, but time will tell.

New comment by skepticATX in "Society will accept a death caused by a robotaxi, Waymo co-CEO says"

skepticATX — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 14:51:45 +0000

This seems roughly equivalent to liability insurance.

New comment by skepticATX in "Society will accept a death caused by a robotaxi, Waymo co-CEO says"

skepticATX — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 14:45:19 +0000

It’s much easier to accept fatalities caused by other humans because there is someone to hold responsible. Will autonomous vehicle companies be held responsible when they cause fatalities?

It also goes beyond just the total number of fatalities. Just like we don’t accept DUIs, we shouldn’t accept negligence or laziness from autonomous vehicle developers even if their product is safer than human drivers.

New comment by skepticATX in "The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership"

skepticATX — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 13:32:06 +0000

I think the more interesting question is who will be on the panel?

A group of ex frontier lab employees? You could declare AGI today. A more diverse group across academia and industry might actually have some backbone and be able to stand up to OpenAI.

New comment by skepticATX in "The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership"

skepticATX — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 13:28:26 +0000

How is this not a terrible deal for Microsoft? I’m not confident that an “expert panel” will prevent OpenAI from prematurely declaring AGI.

New comment by skepticATX in "GPT-5 for Developers"

skepticATX — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 18:05:01 +0000

This was really a bad release for OpenAI, if benchmarks are even somewhat indicative of how the model will perform in practice.

New comment by skepticATX in "OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025"

skepticATX — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 21:25:43 +0000

Never heard of those either. And I took the highest level math courses offered. The only competition I can remember is participating in is Academic Decathlon.

New comment by skepticATX in "OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025"

skepticATX — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 19:17:31 +0000

I’m in the US but this was a while back, in the south. It was a highly ranked school and ended up producing lots of PhDs, but many of the families were blue collar and so there just wasn’t any awareness of things like this.

New comment by skepticATX in "OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025"

skepticATX — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 18:14:33 +0000

OpenAI’s systems haven’t been pure language models since the o models though, right? Their RL approach may very well still generalize, but it’s not just a big pre-trained model that is one-shotting these problems.

The key difference is that they claim to have not used any verifiers.

New comment by skepticATX in "OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025"

skepticATX — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 17:52:00 +0000

I’m not trying to take away from the difficulty of the competition. But I went to a relatively well regarded high school and never even heard of IMO until I met competitors during undergrad.

I think that the number of students who are even aware of the competition is way lower than the total number of students.

I mean, I don’t think I’d have been a great competitor even if I tried. But I’m pretty sure there are a lot of students that could do well if given the opportunity.

New comment by skepticATX in "OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025"

skepticATX — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 16:55:47 +0000

Has anyone independently reviewed these solutions?

My proving skills are extremely rusty so I can’t look at these and validate them. They certainly are not traditional proofs though.

New comment by skepticATX in "Will the AI backlash spill into the streets?"

skepticATX — Sat, 24 May 2025 17:14:38 +0000

Access to cheap goods may lead to short term satisfaction, but will never lead to long term fulfillment.

New comment by skepticATX in "Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane"

skepticATX — Wed, 21 May 2025 13:22:19 +0000

Where are the expectations coming from? The major labs continually claim that these models are now PhD level, whatever that even means.

New comment by skepticATX in "Veo 3 and Imagen 4, and a new tool for filmmaking called Flow"

skepticATX — Wed, 21 May 2025 02:31:39 +0000

The fact that so many feel the same way about this technology (I do too!) is an indictment of humanity, not the technology itself.

We _could_ use this to empower humans, but many of us instinctively know that it will instead be used to crush the human spirit. The end result of this isn’t going to be an expansion of creative ability, it’s going to be the destruction of creative jobs and the capture of these creative mediums by a few large companies.

New comment by skepticATX in "Generative AI Hype Peaking"

skepticATX — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 17:43:42 +0000

The industry only has themselves to blame. When you promise literal utopia and inevitably don’t deliver, you can’t be surprised by what happens next.

New comment by skepticATX in "Microsoft is plotting a future without OpenAI"

skepticATX — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 19:39:32 +0000

Listening to Satya in recent interviews I think makes it clear that he doesn’t really buy into OpenAI’s religious-like view of AGI. I think the divorce makes a lot of sense in light of this.