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Wake up, babe, new OpenAI frontier model just dropped.
Well, you can’t actually use it yet. But the benchmarks scores are a dramatic leap up.. Perhaps most strikingly, o3 does VERY well on one of the most important and influential benchmarks, the ARC AGI challenge, getting 87% accuracy compared to just 32% from o1. Creator of the challenge François Chollet seems very impressed.
What does all this mean? My view is that this confirms we’re near the end-zone. We shouldn’t expect achieving human-level intelligence to be hard in the first place, given all the additional constraints evolution had to endure in building us (metabolic costs of neurons, infant skull size vs size of the birth canal, etc.). Since we hit the forcing-economy stage with AI sometime in the late 2010s, ever greater amounts of human capital and compute have been dedicated to the problem, so we shouldn’t be surprised. My mood is well captured by this reflection on Twitter from OpenAI researcher Nick Cammarata:
Apparently this AI is ranked as the 175th best coder on Earth. I think we’ve reached the point, where anyone working in software needs to either pivot to developing AIs themselves or else look for an exit strategy. It looks like humans developing “apps”, websites and other traditional software development has 1-3 years before they’re in a similar position to horse and buggy drivers in 1920.
Considering that people already thought LLMs could write code well (they cannot in fact write code well), I'm not holding my breath that they are right this time either. We'll see.
My brother in Christ, the 174th best coder on Earth is literally an LLM.
No, it is ranked as 175th in a specific ranking. That is with access to all analysis, answers of this existing questions. Solving question is distinctively easier if you seen the answer.
Make no mistake, LLM are much better at coding than I would predict 10 years ago. Decade ago I would laugh at anyone predicting such progress, and in fact I mocked any idea of AI generating code that is worth looking at. And trawling internet for such solutions is extremely powerful and useful. And ability to (sometimes) adapt existing code to novel situation still feels like magic.
But it is distinctively worse at handling novel situations and taking any context into account. Much worse than such ranking suggest. Leaving aside all cheating of benchmarks and overfitting and Goodhart's law and all such traps.
If this AI would be really 174th best coder on Earth then they would be already releasing profitable software written by it. Instead, they release PR stuff. I wonder why? Maybe at actual coding it is not so great?
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