Why is it silly? Cars haven't fundamentally changed in the past 50 years, they have gotten a lot better but not in a game changing way, society still functions the same with cars as 50 years ago.

I see the same thing with text models, you can say they improve but not in a game changing way, and you have the same scenario as cars. It wouldn't be wrong for a person to say "cars are as good as they ever going to get" 50 years ago, in his lifetime he was right, nothing happened with cars that would force him to change his habits during his life.

But up to 50 years ago cars changed quite quickly, so you could say it is weird to say cars wouldn't start flying or such in 50 years, but here we are, nothing dramatically changed.

Tesla self-driving/Waymo/Comma.ai isn't perfect, but they're good at what they do. That's a pretty dramatic change, in the last year or so. You get in the car, and then don't actually have to drive it, the car does it for you. Sure there are some corner cases that still haven't been solved, but most of the time, I get in the car and it just does its thing for me.

Something I've been doing a lot lately is investigating the people on HN that push various beliefs, and in this comment thread there's two voices pushing for how much AI is going to continue to grow, going forwards.

Who are these two voices? Well, we've got fragmede, who, looking through their HN profile, works at NVIDIA as a "senior AI infrastructure engineer", and we've got mh-, who, looking through their HN profile, works at Wunderkind, which is "pioneering a new category of AI agentic marketing".

So, the two people in here pushing messaging about how great and valuable AI is, and how it'll continue to get better, have their jobs/livelihood tied to AI and people continuing to pour money into AI.

It almost always turns out that way. The people protesting the loudest for some idea universally are somehow tied to profiting by convincing people of that idea. Not that that means they're wrong, of course. Just providing context.

Thanks. It's worthwhile context that I perhaps should have disclosed, but I don't think it affects my opinions in this thread.

My opinion was simply in reaction to an, IMO, nonsensical claim:

> AI is now as good as it's going to get

And it would have been the same no matter what* technology we're discussing.

* Ok, someone commented NFTs. But I never considered that a technology.

(Since it's in the thread now: my opinions are mine, not my employer's.)

My comment wasn’t about AI infra, my job, or broad societal changes. I write code for a living and worry about losing my job to AI like any other developer. I was just describing my experience with self-driving cars doing their thing. The key is whether the argument holds up on its merits. Pointing to someone’s job is background context, not a substitute for engaging with what they actually said.

and you didn't even mention the fact that they can now run on solar power instead of dinosaur fuel

quite a lot has changed with cars

doesn't really have anything to do with the future of AI, tho