Gideon Lewis-Kraus

And those, you know, those are different challenges and different pleasures.

And we've kind of like relocated the like human aptitude here to just like a different place in the chain.

That there is a worry that if these machines become so capable across the board so quickly that there won't be any refuge for us to relocate to.

You know, I always go into this stuff with an open mind about what I'm going to discover or else it's not worth doing.

And insofar as I had kind of priors in this piece, my feeling was, look, I know that these things are really good at matching patterns and they're really good at structured problems.

So, of course, they're going to be good at coding because coding is a highly structured language without a lot of ambiguity.

And at the end, you can just tell whether it works or not.

There's kind of a thumbs up, thumbs down, whether it succeeded.

And that's like the perfect example of something that these models are very good at, where the task is clear and the evaluation is clear at the end.

And I went into this thinking where I'm unconvinced is in areas of human culture and activity where all of that is a lot murkier, where tasks that require grappling with ambivalence and feelings of ambiguity are

and something that's much more complicated and slippery and not easily reduced to a formula.

And most importantly, that can't just be evaluated at the end with whether it works or not.

There's no such thing as whether a poem works in the end or doesn't work in the end.

These are the much messier domains of human culture.

And I suppose I went into it with the hope

that I was going to come out the other end feeling like, yes, there is still this kind of province of human activity that is going to be immune from this kind of routine pattern matching.

But, you know, and I still certainly hope that, and there's part of me that has that unshakable intuition, but,

I'm a lot less confident than I was at the beginning that I do now feel like maybe we can't just tell ourselves stories about we're going to mark off this area of human activity and say like that requires special human faculties that for whatever reason, these models are not ever going to be able to replicate.

merely on the basis of pattern matching.

That now, you know, my confidence in that view has certainly been shaken.