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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.
What is your theory on why that LLM is not working at OpenAI and creating a better version of itself? Can that only be done by the 173rd best coder on Earth?
... why do you think LLMs are not meaningfully increasing developer productivity ar openai? Lots of developers use copilot. Copilot can use o1.
If his claim was correct, LLM's wouldn't be a tool that help OpenAI developers boost their productivity, LLM's would literally be writing better and better versions of themselves, with no human intervention.
Stackoverflow is better than most programmers at answering any particular programming question, and yet stackoverflow cannot entirely replace development teams, because it cannot do things like "ask clarifying questions to stakeholders and expect that those questions will actually be answered". Similarly, an LLM does not expose the same interface as a human, and does not have the same affordances a human has.
And that's why we don't call Stack Overflow things like "the 175th best coder on Earth".
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