So many otherwise smart engineers, overrepresented on HN, have this weird mental block where they fail to take AI progress seriously. I think it's a fear that their status-defining skill could be commodified, so they adopt a mental framework that aims to dismantle the seeming legitimacy of any genuine leap in AI progress as some sort of mirage
Not just engineers - I see people attributing it to strong priors that nothing happens but in my opinion it's more some form of psychological defense mechanism against understanding there will be an intelligence vastly superior to humans which is a deeply uncomfortable thought (to many).
“Nothing ever happens” is like “you can’t beat the market.” It’s basically tautologically the strongest predictive model that we can have. A corollary is that something may happen, but it won’t be what you think.
Why should I trust these randos instead of Claude? I know Claude. I would hope Claude is smarter than whoever wants to make rules about my use of Claude. Replace Claude with Kimi, etc. if needed.
I don’t find a petition from people I don’t know who don’t care about me more compelling than my own direct experience with these models.