AI can be an amazing productivity multiplier for people who know what they're doing.

This result reminded me of the C compiler case that Anthropic posted recently. Sure, agents wrote the code for hours but there was a human there giving them directions, scoping the problem, finding the test suites needed for the agentic loops to actually work etc etc. In general making sure the output actually works and that it's a story worth sharing with others.

The "AI replaces humans in X" narrative is primarily a tool for driving attention and funding. It works great for creating impressions and building brand value but also does a disservice to the actual researchers, engineers and humans in general, who do the hard work of problem formulation, validation and at the end, solving the problem using another tool in their toolbox.

>AI can be an amazing productivity multiplier for people who know what they're doing.

>[...]

>The "AI replaces humans in X" narrative is primarily a tool for driving attention and funding.

You're sort of acting like it's all or nothing. What about the the humans that used to be that "force multiplier" on a team with the person guiding the research?

If a piece of software required a team of ten to people, and instead it's built with one engineer overseeing an AI, that's still 90% job loss.

For a more current example: do you think all the displaced Uber/Lyft drivers aren't going to think "AI took my job" just because there's a team of people in a building somewhere handling the occasional Waymo low confidence intervention, as opposed to being 100% autonomous?

> The "AI replaces humans in X" narrative is primarily a tool for driving attention and funding.

It's also a legitimate concern. We happen to be in a place where humans are needed for that "last critical 10%," or the first critical 10% of problem formulation, and so humans are still crucial to the overall system, at least for most complex tasks.

But there's no logical reason that needs to be the case. Once it's not, humans will be replaced.

I'm not sure you can call something an optimizing C compiler if it doesn't optimize or enforce C semantics (well, it compiles C but also a lot of things that aren't syntactically valid C). It seemed to generate a lot of code (wow!) that wasn't well-integrated and didn't do what it promised to, and the human didn't have the requisite expertise to understand that. I'm not a theoretical physicist but I will hold to my skepticism here, for similar reasons.

Actually, the results were far worse and way less impressive than what the media said.

> for people who know what they're doing.

I worry we're not producing as many of those as we used to

Right. If it hadn't been Nicholas Carlini driving Claude, with his decades of experience, there wouldn't be a Claude c compiler. It still required his expertise and knowledge for it to get there.