There are two major mistakes here.

The first is equating human and LLM intelligence. Note that I am not saying that humans are smarter than LLMs. But I do believe that LLMs represent an alien intelligence with a linguistic layer that obscures the differences. The thought processes are very different. At top AI firms, they have the equivalent of Asimov's Susan Calvin trying to understand how these programs think, because it does not resemble human cognition despite the similar outputs.

The second and more important is the feedback loop. What makes gambling gambling is you can smash that lever over and over again and immediately learn if you lost or got a jackpot. The slowness and imprecision of human communication creates a totally different dynamic.

To reiterate, I am not saying interns are superior to LLMs. I'm just saying they are fundamentally different.

And, if we're being honest, the way people talk about interns is weirdly dehumanizing, and the fact that they are always trotted out in these AI debates is depressing.

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simonw 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> And, if we're being honest, the way people talk about interns is weirdly dehumanizing, and the fact that they are always trotted out in these AI debates is depressing.

Yeah, I agree with that.

That thought crossed my mind as I was posting this comment, but I decided to go with it anyway because I think this is one of those cases where I think the comparison is genuinely useful.

We delegate work to humans all the time without thinking "this is gambling, these collaborators are unreliable and non-deterministic".

	▲	throw4847285 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		True. I think that's why my second point is much stronger. The main issue is not delegation, or human vs machine intelligence. It's the instant feedback. Human collaboration has always been slow and messy. Large tech companies have always looked for ways to speed up the feedback loop, isolating small chunks of work to be delegated to contractors or offshore teams. LLMs have supercharged that. If you have a skilled prompter you can get to a solution of good enough quality by rapidly iterating, asking for output, correcting the prompt, etc. That is good in that if you legitimately have good ideas and the block is execution speed. But if the real blocker is elsewhere, it might give you the illusion of progress. I don't know. Everything is changing too fast to diagnose in real time. Let's check back in a year.