My feeling is that building agent with agent will be the first stable & mature software development pattern emerging. I reached that in several forward-looking induction:
1. If agent is continuing the path to trivialize software development, which appears the case given LLMs can generate better quality code than humans almost for free & instantly given the right context, then using agent to develop software is going to happen, but that destroys the whole software industry as writing software is marginally free, that break the foundations of software industry
2. To continue making agent a commercially viable thing, it needs to develop more valuable artifacts. Then specialized agent will be the more valuable thing than software, as they offer a higher-level of output than existing software. And because the natural jagged pattern of LLM capability, one can use frontier model to develop domain-specialized agents with 1/10 the running cost. So agent writing agents makes economical sense.
3. In terms of knowledge, building agents is like managing highly-skilled team of humans to work on highly-unpredicatble requirements, just like companies are built on top of the thesis that a group of human offer better value than one do that themselves, a team building agents essientially can produce specialized agents for other company to mix & match & optimize, sot that also makes economical sense.
4. Engineering-wise building agents with agent essentially is a different skill patterns than building software with agents, It's like the difference between building commercial software vs building hobby software. That makes engineering sense to have agents building agent as the dominant pattern of software development.
Modern worlds are led by traumatized, through pathological education and media propaganda, with a undertone of those being hurt and damaged to fear for others suffering the same (while they subconsciously are aware that their suffering is actually their own misfortune that are not actually shared to 90% of the population).
I am still feeling that the overall goodness is still the dominant the human trajectory. Even the traumatized leaders know instinctually when they are close to a sane & happy person. The force of life's energy seems inescapable, like the quantum fabrics that waves everyone's whole existence.
From what I understand from physics, matters are there, nothing can be created. A vague memory of quantum physics hints matters out of vacuum, but my affirmation of that thought is less firm than the classic preservation laws.
Given the trending-to-zero software writing cost, a local self-contained source code management tool would be natural for delivering software, i.e., software becomes an agent with specialized code as its harness (in addition to its default ones) source control would be one default tool for the agentic software to manage its own evolution.
Evidences: 10 years ago, when I interviewed Baidu AI with Andrew Ng and Dario, Dario is the kind of person is pure-hearted to the point being ideological. Given Dario's successful career so far, that essence has gradually grown into a conviction, and surrounded by a purposely built team which amplifies his ideology.
Humans are very convenient creature, a rare few small fraction of them are no doubt the master of convenience: they morph their mental manifold without a hint of contradiction in their own mental mechanisms.
These things are layered. They are great scientists, smart people, etc.
Things change when you’re running a business like Anthropic, especially as the CEO. You have a responsibility to shareholders, and you just need to play the game.
Anthropic chose a great angle: focus on professionals / enterprise, safety, etc. Those can both be done by a genuine desire to make great technology, and for business purposes require you to position yourself in a bit “better” way than reality.
Just look at what their strategy is with Mythos, it’s almost perfection: the “it’s not ready to be released to the public” angle hits all the marks: they care about responsibility / safety, they have “the best” model, and “LLMs are dangerous, but we, as the guardians, can be trusted”. This also helps the industry as a whole with regulation: if they’re being constrained, China will develop even more dangerous models.
This is a result of how smart people treat business, it’s PR perfection, especially given how much the whole industry is talking about it.
(Yes, they fail in other PR areas, but that’s a different discussion)
Marketing is always intentional at this scale. If you think Anthropic didn't put a lot of time and effort into Glasswing as a marketing effort I think you're misunderstanding how these organizations work and how they win.
Mythos put Anthropic back into the White House’s good graces. It also branded Anthropic as badass, something their softener image probably needed to win government contracts.
Maybe it wasn’t marketing. But the product’s configuration, and how Anthropic talked about and released it, sure as hell played beautifully. (The timing, while Musk and Altman are distracted with each other, also couldn’t have been better.)
I'm not sure if that distinction is important, since what you've described less charitably synonymous with the phrase "Dario is delusional, and has surrounded himself with yes-men, so outlandish marketing gets published as a side effect".
Whether the person doing the marketing was sincere about it or not is immaterial, since marketing is experienced almost entirely by the people consuming it, and not the people communicating it. What matters is if the audience is sincerely concerned by the message, and it's transparently the case that they were sincerely concerned by it.
All your evidences can be exactly true, and he genuinely believes that Anthropic "winning" the AI race is the best outcome for humanity even with a little subterfuge including marketing to the current administration. If I genuinely thought I needed to do something to secure humanity, there's little I wouldn't do to achieve it.
That's an odd definition of "intentional". Evolution has filtered for people with certain views and the marketing has just emerged from their actions. ... So?
A deadly virus (naturally occurring one let's say) wasn't created intentionally. Evolution selected for it. It's still bad and kills people. Doesn't make it nice because of lack of intention.
I think that's a reasonable analysis, but it's very different than the one that's usually implied by "marketing". Most people I see talking about Dario and his "marketing" go on to express confusion or frustration on why he would decide to message this way, ignoring what I (and perhaps you?) consider to be the obvious answer that he believes it's true.
Isn't this why this statement should be taken seriously?
But your statement implies the opposite, which is to ignore Larry Fink's warning. That appears irrational.
This is a man who's dedicated his life to enriching passive investors. The people building AI are working hard to push the frontiers of science and technology. They deserve to get rich. Because they're creating new wealth for all of us. Yet for some reason Larry Fink views this as a problem. That tells you all you need to know. His loyalty is to the idle ruling class that's so incompetent they need him to manage their wealth. Blackrock is a business that charges people a fee to take control of their shareholder voting rights basically, which is a power he's abused for years. Financial people don't build anything. Yet somehow the system gives him the authority to dictate decisions for the people who do. That system needs to change.
> Because they're creating new wealth for all of us
Let's not give them too much credit here. They are aiming to capture the vast majority of that wealth for themselves, the rest of us are going to be fucked
If you believe in AI hype (which you seem to) you should acknowledge the passive investors are the ones funding the massive data center buildouts, infrastructure investment, and paying for R&D that has not yet proven profitable.
This may make you sad, but the system exists to allocate capital to projects like this. And without large financial institutions and concentrated wealth, none of that would happen.
This is an overly charitable take on the role of AI companies.
A more realistic view would be that they shamelessly plundered the work of millions of people, used it to destroy the livelihood of the original creators, while making a profit for themselves out of this collective nightmare.
I am thinking if this can be a low-level substrate for composing dumb LLMs into smart swarm, theoretically:
1. A whole with disparate parts (smart and dumb components) are almost always more cost-effective to reach a given target of performance
2. With that, a whole with disparate parts, are almost always more performant with the same cost
A few inspiration:
1. Human body is intelligent composed of so diverse parts
2. Swarm intelligence of insects and small animals are certainly beyond current understanding
The cost and speed of this thing is on point to make such a whole composed diverse parts possible.
It seems that AI finally give the space to true pure-blood system software systems to unleash their potential.
Pretty much all morn software tooling, removing the parts that aim at appeal to humans, becomes much more reliable tools. But it's not clear if the performance will be better or not.
1. If agent is continuing the path to trivialize software development, which appears the case given LLMs can generate better quality code than humans almost for free & instantly given the right context, then using agent to develop software is going to happen, but that destroys the whole software industry as writing software is marginally free, that break the foundations of software industry
2. To continue making agent a commercially viable thing, it needs to develop more valuable artifacts. Then specialized agent will be the more valuable thing than software, as they offer a higher-level of output than existing software. And because the natural jagged pattern of LLM capability, one can use frontier model to develop domain-specialized agents with 1/10 the running cost. So agent writing agents makes economical sense.
3. In terms of knowledge, building agents is like managing highly-skilled team of humans to work on highly-unpredicatble requirements, just like companies are built on top of the thesis that a group of human offer better value than one do that themselves, a team building agents essientially can produce specialized agents for other company to mix & match & optimize, sot that also makes economical sense.
4. Engineering-wise building agents with agent essentially is a different skill patterns than building software with agents, It's like the difference between building commercial software vs building hobby software. That makes engineering sense to have agents building agent as the dominant pattern of software development.
WDYT?
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