Denying that "AI is now capable of developing its own inference hardware" on the grounds a human asked for this to happen and that humans need to be around to blame, is as useful as denying "Atomic bombs are now capable of levelling cities" on the grounds some humans had to build it, others had to put it in a delivery system, and someone had to give the order for its use.

Questions of agency are for lawyers, questions of personhood for philosophers, we're engineers and our question is capability.

Does it really have the capability? By default I'm sceptical for the same reasons given by sailingparrot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49982068

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jibalt 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And then in response you get ridiculous point-missing strawman non-analogies like ovens not cooking without a chef. Indeed, ovens and AI are quite different, in very relevant ways.

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Tanjreeve 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You are 100% correct an atomic weapon is not capable of destroying a city without humans doing a bunch of things. Hell putting a normal bomb on a plane and exploding it takes several people with specific technical skills and knowledge doing things.

> Questions of agency are for lawyers, questions of personhood for philosophers, we're engineers and our question is capability.

But it's objectively not capable without a human specifying things through prompts and training. Same as an oven can't cook a three course meal without a chef. We get around that with training data but there will always be things with no/less data or outdated knowledge.

	▲	pixl97 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		>objectively not capable without a human specifying things through prompts and trainin huh. Neither can you. If I drop your ass off in the woods at a few days old, you're back to 10,000 BC, hell more like 200,000 BC. So I don't get why you have these weird pendetic responses that are completely out of scope. Also, a huge portion of AI training these days has nothing to do with humans, AI trains AI. >there will always be things with no/less data or outdated knowledge. And guess what, you're not doing them either! HN posters keep acting like humans are an island, but nothing in the modern world works without a society. Once you put an AI in a harness that can ask questions it isn't really much different than you.
	▲	_heimdall an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		That limitation feels very much artificially imposed today, much like LLMs (mostly) not being able to learn from prompts or alter their weights on the fly. One can stand up an agent like openclaw and prompt it with something very general. That would kick off a recurring loop that could indeed see the agent decide for itself it needs to design new chip hardware. Technically a human kick started that loop, but when does that stop being important? I don't attribute all of my actions and decisions to the fact that my parents brought me into this world, for example, and I'd hope they aren't legally on the hook if I screw up.
	▲	ben_w an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> But it's objectively not capable without a human specifying things through prompts and training. Same as an oven can't cook a three course meal without a chef. Not in the same way. The only thing an oven can do by itself is thermostatic. All machine learning (LLMs included, but way broader than that) is bad at learning compared to any organic brain, to the extent that any organism this bad would starve before learning to eat. However, even a human can't become a chef unless trained, we learn a lot more than we innovate, and what we happen to want without prompting is not generally well aligned with what is desired by people who pay us, which is why we need all those boring workplace things like "a boss". But even then, this diversion is like saying "an oven can't cook a meal" in response to someone saying they built an oven and "it cooked a meal". Like, it's obvious they didn't mean it did every step by itself without anyone ever even bothering to ask it to: if they meant that version, they'd be a lot louder about it. > We get around that with training data but there will always be things with no/less data or outdated knowledge. And? The linked git page (implicitly) claims that there is sufficient training data to do this task. It may, of course, be wrong. I won't be surprised if it turns out this simulation is too far from reality. But the claim is "it does ${thing} now", not "it's generally intelligent and can do everything now".