AI would be deployed to behave like the median doctor (at best - or maybe the lowest-common-denominator) to avoid blowing up costs with 99%-likely-to-turn-up-nothing hunts for super-rare conditions.
Today you can try to cajole your human doctor into listening more, or ordering more tests, or considering things you heard online or from acquaintances. AI will be guided to take that into account less because a doctor being more sympathetic and bypassing "standard practice" is an expense caused by humanity that the machine can be trained to avoid.
Today you can go across town and try your luck with another doctor. If it's all AI, you'll just repeat your story to the same basic model and get the same basic dismissal.
The problem arose from trying to make people behave like machines in order to save money. Making a machine behave like a machine ain't gonna help.
You need to shift the goal from "saving money" to "helping people." AI doesn't do that.
Nah AI can easily be programmed to be much more patient and investigate edge cases and figure out personalized solutions thoroughly and provide bespoke service. This problem would be solved, though of course there are other issues with biases of the bureaucracies.
OpenAI doesn't lack investment capital. What they still don't have is a good source of high quality clinical data. And this isn't just a matter of buying access to deidentified patient charts from some large health system. Most clinical data quality is kind of crap so using it directly for model training produces garbage output. You need an extensive cleansing and normalization pipeline designed by human clinicians who understand the data at a deep level.
Absolutely true, but is there a system that works perfectly that I can use now that has all that that isn't AI?
In the absence of such a thing OpenAI is already quite good, some theoretical perfect shouldn't be trotted out as a counter if it doesn't actually exist.
How? I'd expect them to already have standardized lists of the most useful next thing to investigate given what's already known, and a modern "AI" would actually be worse at that than some sort of solver engine with a database of costs/risks (for tests) and conditional probabilities.
Maybe if they're still using (digitized versions of) paper flowcharts things could be improved, but the most powerful tech should be old-school stuff rather than modern "AI".
No normal person would actually be able to use a specialized solver database, the woman in this story would already be dead before the guy figures out that such a thing exists and manage to make an account. https://x.com/deedydas/status/1933370776264323164
LLMs already work fantastically with pretty good UX.
> My continued shareholding isn't just a matter of financial confidence—it's a statement of faith in what HP can become when the right leadership applies systematic thinking to innovation decisions.
I strongly felt like it was ChatGPT and suddenly my interest in the article plummeted.
Seems like a strawman... I don't know anyone who thinks they "will be on top" and beat the AI, it's more of a let's just make as much money as we can for now before AGI ruins us all.
I did 30 novels a year in highschool, it's nothing crazy. Though tbf kids do have more free time than working adults, I think it would really only drop if you become parents though.
Lol I always laugh when I see people talk up Dostoevsky and any 19th century writer. It's 2025 now and literature has improved in depth and characterization as much as any other field.
I don't like Dostoevsky but this is an insane take. Art doesn't just "get better" over time and depth and characterisation isn't everything either. Homer's Odyssey is still an incredible and fulfilling read. Literature is not some kind of engineering discipline though a lot of new writers seem to be almost like analytic philosophers in that they think newer = better while having some kind of sterile and formalistic understanding of art
depth and characterization isn't everything but it's the discussion chosen by the OP, he seemed to imply that Dostoevsky had the best psychological interiority and "multiple scales of experience".
You’re nuts. I read “Crime and Punishment” a couple years ago, and went in knowing literally nothing about it except that it was famous.
It was astonishingly good. It felt fresh, modern, and claustrophobically suspenseful in a way I wouldn’t have believed possible for a book that age.
If you don’t like it, fine. Preferences are a thing and we don’t all have to enjoy the same stuff. But to dismiss it as obsolete or out of touch is madness. It’s a classic for a reason.
Along those lines, I read “Moby Dick” last year for the first time. Now I’m annoyed with everyone who led me to imagine it as some dusty tome to slog through. It’s hilarious. Ishmael’s a sarcastic smartass with a lot to say.
Some of the classic are classics for a reason, ya know?
I might've conveyed myself poorly. Never said Dostoevsky wasn't great or not a relevant read! I was just reacting to the OP who seemed to say it's still the best ever. But we've improved everything, art, kites, the wheel. It's the same for literature, but you do have to get pretty deep into lit to see though.
The main criticism for I have for Dostoevsky is that he's overdramatic. Yes it's great fun fiction and a vast improvement over the simpler, more idealized writing of much of his era, but some of the angst of his characters is simply cultural. He has a lot of religious influence in his work (which don't appeal to me as an atheist) and their struggles for the human soul is a symptom of his time. A Buddhist might say, just calm the fuck down man. Most people don't react to horrible situations by "crashing out", but via coping and rationalization and making the best of their situation, that's how you get consistent improvement and accrue generational uplift.
Later writers like Virginia Woolf is able to better integrate a variety of responses to suffering, post modernists like Tao Lin even gets overly detached (everyone hates post modernists). But I think the best novel about the human condition ever written, which handles the drama, but realistically, is probably by Elena Ferrante in 2011. I'm not highlighting any underrated work here lol, it's widely acclaimed, including called the best book of the 21st century by the NYT.
Alright, I see what you mean now. Thanks for the explanation! Whether or not I agree, that’s a lot more nuanced than my earlier interpretation of your opinion.
I like the religious lens of his work, though. I don’t personally identify with it, especially his particular brand of it, but that’s part of the work’s appeal to me. Similarly, I’m not an existentialist but it was neat to see the world that way through “L'Étranger” (even though Camus rejected the label).
But I do want to push back against the idea that we know vastly more about human nature today than in the 1800s. We’ve been formally studying western philosophy, intently and seriously, for at least 2,500 years. On a timeline between Plato and today, “C&P” was written 94% of the way to the finish line. We might have better models of some details now, but we’ve had a pretty solid knowledge of the fundamentals for an awfully long time. By analogy, Monet didn’t know jack about quantum physics, but he famously explored the subtleties of the appearance of light in nature.
I surely don’t want to take the position that older = better, either. You’re right: we’re still learning, practicing, and getting better! There’s still an awful lot of gold to be found in earlier works, though.
> Most people don't react to horrible situations by "crashing out", but via coping and rationalization and making the best of their situation, that's how you get consistent improvement and accrue generational uplift.
Most people I've known do not react rationally to horrible situations. Or even to good situations.
I think what is easy to overlook with Dostoevsky is that although he is arguably the inventor of the psychological novel, the characters in his novels are largely representatives of the impact of ideologies on the lives and psyches of real people or the impact of the psyches (as impacted themselves by their life experiences) on their choice of ideology. The taking of ideologies to their logical conclusion in his character's lives is what results in "hysterical characters".
I think to argue that Dostoevsky is not among the best psychological novelists is to slightly misunderstand what he was trying to achieve.
You're right. I think it's extremely cultural to Christianity. The notion of suffering for your sins, and when bad things happen you ought to try to feel it as much as possible instead of working on pain mitigation. This is definitely how a lot of people approach life and it makes sense for his characters. But IMO coping and rationalization strategies are built into every human, a lot of angst is performative and communicative rather than "soulful". They do it because they want to be a good religious boy and communicate devoutness. I honestly don't think he gets that. When his characters perform pain he treats it as evidence of the soul’s torment which doesn't resonate with me since I don't believe in the soul.
What's a good novel from the last 20 years? Genuine question. Looking back at everything I've read, it all has been older than that. I don't really pay attention to novel news so it's more like I only read stuff I've heard about in the past.
I am absolutely not trying to sustain the other commenter's claim that modern fiction is better lol. I also don't tend to stay on top of contemporary fiction, a lot of stuff gets hyped and well reviewed but just isn't that great. Or it had a lot of resonance for the specific time it was written that lessens as time passes. And of course the extreme selection bias, not all good books "survive" but most of the ones that do are good on at least some qualities.
But there is definitely still excellent fiction being written now. The last sumurai by helen dewitt, or the gray house by mariam petrosyan I would place with the likes of middlemarch and anna karenina.
>literature has improved in depth and characterization as much as any other field.
It hasn't.
1. Many fields experiencing development over the past century or two are much newer than literature, which might as well be a synonym for thought. During that time, those newer fields were, or currently are, in their early rapid-growth phase.
2. Literature is deeply on the subjective side of "fields", so it's a lot easier to argue that it has changed, rather than that it has improved.
Weird take - how exactly could literature improve "in depth and characterization"? What new "technology" has been made available to authors that enables them to create deeper characters?
Not OP, but breadth and depth of understanding about psychology have improved dramatically and exposure to diverse viewpoints thanks to hyper connectedness likely make it possible to go deeper.
In my opinion, all the best art expresses the "unknown knowns" of the human, i.e., the unconscious that has not been brought to light. Art is an expression of what is really true but not known. Knowing about it doesn't make it easier to express. To bring up the old trope, the curtains are never just blue, not in the sense that the artist is always putting in some conscious meaning, but that the choice of blue says something about the artist's human feeling even if they didn't intend it
> breadth and depth of understanding about psychology have improved dramatically
Provide one tiny bit of evidence for this. Do you seriously think that Shakespeare (for e.g.) did not have a profound understanding of human psychology?
not who you are replying to - but:
Shakespeare was limited by the number of interactions he had with humans. He did not have the internet.
We also have neurology as a science now. So that's one bit of evidence for the claim.
Of course Shakespeare had a profound understanding of human nature. And of course he did not have the working vocabulary and knowledge base of modern psychology which has been built up over time by many humans working together. Two things can be true.
> not who you are replying to - but: Shakespeare was limited by the number of interactions he had with humans. He did not have the internet.
The internet may increase the number of interactions, but decreases their quality.
Looking at most online interactions it looks to me that people show less empathy and understanding than they do IRL.
> Of course Shakespeare had a profound understanding of human nature. And of course he did not have the working vocabulary and knowledge base of modern psychology which has been built up over time by many humans working together. Two things can be true.
Does that help write better books. If the claim was true the best fiction would be written by psychologists and neurologists. Is it?
I think that knowledge is on the wrong side (for writing fiction) of Chesterton's distinction (in a work of fiction - I cannot remember which Fr Brown story) between understanding someone from the inside with empathy and from the outside with analysis.
Hard disagree. I made an analogy in another reply to Monet not knowing quantum physics. Lacking that information didn’t deter his famous explorations of light effects.
Humans are great at figuring out how things behave before we have a great model of why they do it. And by Shakespeare’s time, we had a pretty good grasp on practical human psychology, even if we had less understanding of the mechanisms behind it.
We are excellent at figuring things out. We get better at it over time, as we grow our collective knowledge base.
I agree that we are great at figuring out things before we have a model of why things work. And we have a mountain of context to work from already. Shakespeare wasn't an idiot, and he wasn't in a vacuum but his 'context window' was 'smaller' than a lot of people today(quotes because dubious terminology).
Art is improving. Science is improving. human understanding, and communication of that understanding is improving too. That is my point.
I won't argue against that at all. Someday we're going to have someone with Shakespeare's brilliance and modern foundations, and I can't wait to see what that looks like.
(And maybe we already do have that person. I'm shamefully out of date with modern literature.)
> Of course Shakespeare had a profound understanding of human nature. And of course he did not have the working vocabulary and knowledge base of modern psychology which has been built up over time by many humans working together. Two things can be true.
Yes, but this doesn't prove that a modern author could produce a better text than a historically great author, which was the original line of thought. Or is there a specific modern text that you have in mind that proves the point?
Then every text book is an example of this measure of better improving over time...
How about 'more representative of the human experience'... (or enjoy/like more)
Then we measure how well a human relates to a book: which is taste, a subjective quality that is notoriously hard to measure in any meaningful way. This measure becomes not a single measure, but a collective measure against the sum of humans who interact with it: an untenable standard - and biased towards the present anyway - which doesn't give charity to your position.
...So how do you measure a book to be 'better'? That's the neat part: you don't. You can measure what you 'like' more, you can measure 'features'... but we probably won't even agree on what makes a book 'better'. We like what we like, and most of us have a hard time even explaining why we like something.
The conflicts in his plays just aren't that profound, you know? Compared to modern "psychological turmoil" it's relatively simplistic, something like Macbeth's "ambition vs morality".
Modern writers pull in more layers of depth, explain the ebbs and flows of motivations and identities through social forces and work more with complex ideas like self-deception and rationalization. Shakespeare's characters are generally reliable narrators in a way that later lit tends not to be.
We know the Stack Auth team well, and we really respect what they're up to! We have a really high opinion of them. I'd be curious how they'd assess the comparison.
First, of course you can often use either of our two products in many cases. We do compete!
Second, I think we focus on subtly different customers. There are cases where they're a better fit and cases where I'd assess us to be a better fit. For example, Stack Auth is pretty closely aligned to the Next.js ecosystem. They're really quite strong at serving Next.js. They also have a billing and payments product that's likely interesting to companies with a heavy self-service motion. On the other hand, Tesseral serves only B2B software, and we're not as focused on Next.js (SDK currently in the works). If, for instance, you have a Go backend and sell large enterprise-y deals, we're probably a better fit.
But this will probably evolve over time. I'd expect this comparison to be outdated within a few months.
Overall, I expect our companies will drift in slightly different directions over time. We're both very early stage companies that have focused on pretty foundational features so far.
> For example, Stack Auth is pretty closely aligned to the Next.js ecosystem
Please for the love of god don't get sucked into the trap of building front end code for frameworks. Make it work with a 5 line static HTML file and a <script> tag, then build wrappers if you think they make sense.
Right now we offer prebuilt pages you can redirect to, as well as SDKs your clientside JavaScript can talk to if you want to reskin. Said SDKs are glorified cURL wrappers, and our prebuilt pages are built using them too.
We trained it on over a dozen languages, with a bias towards Typescript and Python. We've seen it work on Markdown pretty well, but you could try it on plaintext too -- curious to hear how that goes
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