| ▲ | jelder 4 hours ago |
| > If you encountered a cheetah in pre-industrial times (and survived the meeting), you might think it was impossible for anything to go faster. Fun fact, there is no historical evidence of an adult human ever dying from a cheetah attack. They are naturally shy, and a lot smaller than you may realize. |
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| ▲ | forinti 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| There's a story about some Kenyans outrunning a Cheetah in 6km. It had been killing their livestock, so they decided to go after it. Cheetahs are very fast, but humans have way more endurance. |
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| ▲ | shagie 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Cheetahs are very fast, but humans have way more endurance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon > The Man versus Horse Marathon is an annual race over 21 miles (34 km), where runners compete against riders on horseback through a mix of road, trail and mountainous terrain. The race, which is a shorter distance than an official marathon road race, takes place in the Welsh town of Llanwrtyd Wells every June. > ... > The event started in 1980, when local landlord Gordon Green overheard a discussion between two men in his pub, the Neuadd Arms. One man suggested that over a significant distance across country, man was equal to any horse. Green decided that the challenge should be tested in full public view, and organised the first event. While the horses had a string of wins from 2008 to 2019, 2022 to 2025 had three wins for humans and one win for a horse. The next race event: https://www.green-events.co.uk/man-v-horse | | |
| ▲ | FergusArgyll a few seconds ago | parent | next [-] | | There was a great radiolab episode about it a few years ago but I remember it being in Utah not UK | |
| ▲ | blaze33 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The Man vs Horse marathon is interesting but in a real race we have no actual chance of winning. There are horse endurance races where the winner arrived in 7,5 hours after 160km[1]. That's a sub 2-hours marathon almost 4 times in a row (not to mention with a guy on your back). [1] https://eatnstays.com/uaes-almazrouei-wins-almutadil-cup-at-... | | |
| ▲ | stephencanon 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | “in a real race we have no actual chance of winning” is an absolutely wild thing to say in response to a link to a real race in which the human has won the last few years in a row. | | |
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| ▲ | aqfamnzc 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Wow, seems surprisingly balanced. I would guess that if it was 50% longer distance than humans would win reliably, and 50% shorter would allow the horses to win? | | |
| ▲ | notahacker 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Think it's more to do with hilly, wooded courses unfavourable to horses and a requirement that the horse's heart rate remain below a certain threshold when inspected by a vet in the middle and end of a course, whereas the leading humans are maxing out their efforts I don't think the Mongol cavalry would lose races to humans over any distance of steppe | | |
| ▲ | neaden an hour ago | parent [-] | | Yeah I think on say, a proper road the horse would win at any distance. |
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| ▲ | topkai22 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think the term is persistence hunting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting). There was an intriguing blog post years ago (which sadly I can’t find) about how terrifying a fictional portrayal of persistence hunting would be- grinding down prey through exhaustion, thinking you’ve escaped but being slowly tracked down. | | |
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| ▲ | suzzer99 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Ice yachts get well over 100 mph. I'm not sure how much they were used in pre-industrial times. |
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| ▲ | cute_boi 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Yep. That said, unlike cheetahs, there’s plenty of evidence of leopards attacking humans. And these days, it’s the leopards, the closed-AI types and misanthropes -- telling everyone, “AI will take your job and there’s nothing you can do about it.” |
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| ▲ | ctoth 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I keep seeing this and I want to speak to it. When Dario and others say things like "this is happening and we should probably figure out what to do about it" what ends up happening is people hear "this is happening," see that the person warning them is the person doing the thing, and then short-circuit. "Why can't you just stop then?" Dario's point, and the point of the people actually trying to solve the problem, is that AI is not just Anthropic and OpenAI. It's the knowledge that you can put more compute in, and get more capability out. It is a technology now. It exists, in the world. Wishing will not make it go away. Being angry at it will not make it go away. Lying about how much water it uses will not make it go away. If Anthropic and OpenAI Shut down tomorrow, Accenture will not say "oh guess that llm thing won't work, let's go back to hiring humans!" It is a truth that you can multiply matrices and get something that is economically useful. We cannot un-know this. Physics allows it, so it will happen. So we should probably figure out what the heck to do about it. If your answer is something along the lines of "restrict it" then 1. let me know how that goes when other people don't, and 2. I really would rather prefer a world where we have the machines do the work the machines can do, not a world where we have human makework. If this means we need to figure out redistribution, let's talk about redistribution! | | |
| ▲ | mbgerring 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Physics allows this, and actually taking advantage of it requires billions of dollars of unprecedented infrastructure buildout that is already destabilizing the power grid. The only reason that infrastructure buildout is happening at all is the ideological capture of a small handful of obscenely wealthy people, who are fueling this buildout by spreading the extreme paranoia you’re echoing here. I do not understand why no one else can see the circularity of this reasoning. There is nothing inevitable about tying up all of this productive capital in the pursuit of AI. There are many, many other projects requiring similar capital and human effort, with much more obvious payoffs, such as decarbonizing the world’s energy systems. “It’s physically possible to provide abundant electricity without burning fossil fuels” is more provably true than any of the insane science fiction bullshit that undergirds the AI buildout, and yet, the entire clean energy industry is still having to build insane financial Rube Goldberg contraptions to make incremental progress. “Inevitability” is a lie, period. This entire thing is extremely historically contingent, and we could easily stop this train tomorrow. | | |
| ▲ | ctoth 18 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > This entire thing is extremely historically contingent, and we could easily stop this train tomorrow. So, the Baruch Plan? The Manhattan Project was $~2B in 1945 dollars, and a national-scale industrial mobilization. Now North Korea has the bomb. That's with nuclear material, which doesn't get easier and easier and easier to work with every year. Compare to the price to train GPT-2 in 2019 ($43,000), and in 2026 ($73) [0]. [0]: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2017703360393318587 |
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| ▲ | somesortofthing 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | A US-China AGI ban treaty could prevent superintelligence indefinitely. Data centers are hard to hide. Have fun buying GPUs when you're cut off from all global payments. America would have to make some unpleasant concessions but that seems like a solid trade for preventing a wide variety of nightmare futures. | | |
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