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Comment by rowanG077 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you are supposed to multiple the number of agents with the time. After all a single human can run arbitrary number of agents. Still 1000000x speedup is a few order of magnitude too many imo.

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You have to multiply them, otherwise you would also have to compare the output of a company with a single developer with the output of a company with a thousand developers, after all a company can hire an arbitrary number of developers. Running a thousand agents in parallel for one hour is the same as running a thousand agents one after another for a total of a thousand hours.

Yes, but the cheap parallelism is (part of) the point he's making.

Parallelismen is not cheap, in the end it costs the same. It is one resource for a long time vs many resources for a short time.

Agent parallelism is cheap in the same way tapwater is cheap — that is, you pay exactly for what you use at a given moment, no more and no less.

Humans are a lot more expensive, it takes ~a year to find, interview, hire, onboard and offboard an employee, while an agent can be spun up for 10 seconds, do its work and vanish back into the ether.

Agents are lambda functions where humans are bare-metal servers that you have to rack yourself.

Sure, I completely agree with that, but we totally went off-topic. The questions was whether the correct measure is wall-clock time or compute-time and for that the difference in difficulty to add another agent or add another employee is irrelevant. And to reiterate my point, compute-time is what delivers the results and also is what you pay for, so that is what counts. That you can squeeze that compute-time into a shorter amount of wall-time by utilizing more resources in parallel is also important but unrelated to the fact that compute-time is what delivers the results.

We didn't go off topic at all. You introduced the analogy to hiring a large number of people. That is the right analogy. But the reason that the conclusion is different in the two cases is that it is much cheaper to run a large number of agents in parallel than it is to hire a large number of people. Your analogy illustrates the article's point rather than contradicting it.

But the difference is always there, hiring the first guy is more difficult by the same factor as running the first agent. The relevant comparisons are between one agent and a thousand agents (original setting) and between one guys and a thousand guys (analogy). In both cases the costs will be a thousand times higher and you can achieve a thousand times more in the same amount of time, so the correct measure is time times number guys or time times number agents. The difference between adding one guy and adding one agent is irrelevant for my point and that is also pretty obvious as that crosses the boundary between original setting and analogy.

You might want to make a separate point about the cost difference of getting more done by hiring more people or running more agents, but that is a different point.

No, the article is about what can be accomplished now vs what could be accomplished previously. That it is much cheaper to run thousands of agents at once than to have thousands of employees is directly relevant to that question.

But this part of the discussion is not about the article per se but the way I calculated things.

It is very cheap relative to hiring people (you introduced the analogy to a company hiring a large number of people).

Well not really. The point is "There are some things that are sped up by a very large factor, easily over 1000000x.", this is obviously referring to wall clock time. Not "agent time".

Yes companies/large groups of humans are sometimes also a lot faster at doing some things than a singular person. I'm not sure why that matters or what your point with that is.

That makes no sense, because then I could also just give the task to a million people working on it in parallel and the speed-up would disappear. You have to compare all the resources used and not pick an arbitrary one like wall-clock time because resource can often be traded for each other.

You could give the task to a million people but you could also give the task to a million people who each have their own swarm of agents.

I think it makes sense to focus on what one individual can do, and amount of time to do it.

No, because more agents also means more resources and hence more costs. A single agent is not the same as a thousand agents which is not the same as a million agents. You are essentially saying what can one human do with X amount of time and an infinite amount of money.

There are reasonable, practical limits to the agent power available to a given person.

If I'm sawing wood I could compare a knife to a handsaw, to an electric saw, to a table saw, to a team of woodworkers, to a factory, etc.

It would be totally reasonable to compare the amount of wood I'm able to saw by hand vs electric or any of the other methods.

The start of this discussion was that I multiplied wall-clock time and number of agents and someone argued that I should not have done this. It is of course reasonable to compare how much a human gets done in a certain amount of time vs what an agent gets done in that time. But if you start increasing the number of humans or agents, you have to take that into account. Running one agent for ten seconds is not the same as running a thousand agents for ten seconds - except for the completion time - but it is comparable to running one agent for ten thousand seconds.

You can do that? You have a million people ready to go? Whereas a singular person on a rich country salary can actually go out and start vast amounts of agents. I'm honestly perplexed by your argument. Most people would struggle to find even 5 people who will join them on a journey to build something that takes a long time. And you are just casually throwing out there "Well someone can just gather a million people".

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