AI Founder Discovers Great Circle Routes Exist, Claims Credit

Description

A LinkedIn post from James Hawkins (hedge honcho / co-CEO at PostHog) satirically claiming that 'agentic AI' created a more direct flight route from Los Angeles (LAX) to Paris (CDG). The map shows two routes: the 'normal (dumb) route' which is actually the great circle route (the mathematically shortest path on a sphere), and the 'ai-powered route' which is a straight line on the Mercator projection -- actually a longer path in reality. The post text reads: 'ai is incredible. i noticed the flight from los angeles to paris was extremely inefficient. using agentic ai i created a route that's much more direct. i estimate this will save airlines billions. anyone have contacts at delta?' This perfectly satirizes tech founders who confidently 'disrupt' industries without understanding basic domain knowledge

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AIHype AIHypeVsReality DunningKrugerEffect TechSatire Startup ReinventingTheWheel TechIndustrySatire MisunderstandingTechnology AITools DeveloperHumor

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick He literally just drew a straight line on a Mercator projection and called it AI -- which, to be fair, is also how most AI startups pitch their Series A

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

He literally just drew a straight line on a Mercator projection and called it AI -- which, to be fair, is also how most AI startups pitch their Series A
Anonymous

This AI was clearly trained on slides from a VC pitch deck, where all graphs are straight lines going up and to the right
Anonymous

Nothing says 'disrupting aviation' quite like rediscovering why we stopped using flat maps for navigation in the 16th century
Anonymous

When your AI optimization ignores that Earth isn't a flat Mercator projection - turns out the 'dumb' great circle route already solved this problem centuries ago with actual spherical geometry
Anonymous

Agentic AI optimizing on Mercator straight-lines: because haversine distance is for normies with spherical awareness
@ZmEYkA_3310 8mo

Shamelessly stolen meme 😭
@adm877 8mo

Pretty sure it's satire. Still funny though.
1. dev_meme 8mo
  
  Still supports my point And is main reason why people here in comments complaining about how bad is frontier llms
  
  @Agent1378 8mo
  
  6 years ago there were no such thing as chatgpt. Al these things that can be done with it - were just done manually. And now it's all here and people "are complaining". People are retarded idiots
  
  @purplesyringa 8mo
  
  at least that manual labor acted as a gatekeeping mechanism. people had to invest some work into research and would learn in the process, and nowadays anyone can claim an "invention" because an LLM told them they're the next Einstein
  
  @DerKnerd 8mo
  
  The problem is, that people just blindly believe what the Ai tells them
@Agent1378 8mo

I've asked LA to Paris. But at least it's not straight line
1. @hyena_stuff 8mo
  
  Ok, that got a laugh out of me, lol
@DerKnerd 8mo

Since AI was trained on the "wisdom" of the internet, certainly possible