meowface

I'd be shocked if a single org goes backwards and decides "okay, let's remove the LLM agent systems we asked everyone to use".

Organizations may switch harnesses and may even switch providers, but LLM adoption is only going to monotonically increase. This dumb behavior is not some intrinsic property, and the models are getting smarter and more useful every ~4 months.

Sort of, but one has to be pragmatic.

Opus 4.6's coding ability is nowhere near as good as Opus 5.5's. Some model next year will almost certainly be significantly better at coding (and planning, and designing, and ideating) than Opus 5.5.

You're narrowly focused on writing code. What about when they can run entire firms themselves, better than the average human CEO could? What about when we have models way, way, way better than Opus 4.6 and 5.5?

The point is we will eventually very likely have AI systems that can do everything. Everything. Anything and everything a human can do with - or even without - a computer, and then better than anything or everything a human can do, including in terms of creativity and innovation and novelty and insight. Obviously I don't know when that might possibly be, and it's not happening next year or something, but you can't just pretend like we hit the cap on the technology.

Yes.

They're certainly correlated, even if one might quibble about the coefficient.

Yes, but their balance sheet seems fine to me.

I am actually somewhat bearish on adoption/propagation. I would be expecting much larger numbers than these if I were bullish on it.

Not if Anthropic consistently stays 6+ months ahead of all labs besides OpenAI.

I am just imagining Anthropic (and OpenAI) employees reading these comments and laughing at the rank ignorance of the commentariat.

If we assume LLMs will continue to advance at a pretty rapid pace (relative to the current rate of advancement; so, same or faster), all these numbers look good to me.

Some people just start out with wanting LLMs/AI/Anthropic to fail or be scams and consistently try to fit any new evidence pegs into those unchanging hypothesis-shaped holes. This group ideologically despised LLMs from the start and needs them to be fake.

I think it is probably going to happen with LLMs, and I'd bet on it.

As said: 1 - 2 years, not current ones.

Yes, but I said 1 - 2 years, not current LLMs.

I would guess in a matter of 1 - 2 years, a random amateur vibe coding a brand new DB will get much better reliability and correctness guarantees than whatever this is. This is just pure laziness.

I'm sure they do. Just not necessarily for Turnstile.

I don't trust Facebook or Zuckerberg, but I also don't really care about my own personal privacy from large corporations. I will use whatever is best/cheapest, generally. And I say this as someone who hates advertising and adtech.

They're wrong. They're right about it being cope, but the cope is not from people in fear.

The people who feel fear about AI taking their jobs or doing worse things are not coping. They're saying all this is real and impressive and that that is why they are terrified.

The people saying it's bad and lies and they stole the answer and a million other things are just in tribal mode throwing whatever at the wall to defer to the pre-existing conclusion that AI is a corporate hoax. AI would have to be real to fear it in this professional and existential way, but they know it's fake, so they're not afraid.

It's sometimes done with more subtlety, like "it just comes up with some proofs by connecting existing things, it is not producing new insights, it's not creative or truly generating ideas". Which may be partly true. The denialism is shifted into refusing to acknowledge that within 20, or 2, years it probably will be producing new insights.

The reality is both are true. The code artifact on the disk and the idea object in the brain should both be treated as contingent, relative, and incomplete, and unvertain.

Prolonged conversations with humans and AIs about both ideas and code is very useful.

Good post. I like this example:

>Say you want to draw a perfect picture of an owl. You have this beautiful image of it in your mind. But you can’t draw very well, and in this analogy the drawing is the code. So what comes out is a stick-figure owl that’s barely recognizable as an owl.

>In the code-is-the-source-of-truth version, that stick figure is now the authoritative artifact. We analyze it, document it, take notes on its proportions, and spend a whole bunch of time iterating on it. We’re running in circles around a bad drawing.

My only disagreement with the post is over whether articulating is is the main bottleneck. Right now, there are still issues and oversights humans would tend not to make even if you have model context and documentation accurately and clearly capturing your full intent.

Each year will decrease the rate of this, but software engineering will probably need until maybe 2030 until we've crossed a threshold towards solely being product managers/designers. This advice still applies today, but you do need more wrangling on top.

Thiel, unlike many of these other figures, is genuinely insightful. He also has one of the best investment track records. And he knew to back Trump in 2016, not back him in 2020, back him in 2024. He's one of the rare "right-wing intellectuals" who's a genuine intellectual.

The core issue with him, in my view, is his openly anti-democratic views.

He identifies as a libertarian, yet finds democracy loathsome and either wants a monarch or finds it strategically useful to fund and support initiatives that increase the chance of there being increasingly monarchical leaders in places like the US. I don't think that is a moral ideology, and I also think it is generally not a good one for achieving positive outcomes for a majority of people.

There are genuine critiques of democracy and its tendency towards shallow populism ruling everything, but, as usual, the meme defense is the correct defense; it's better than alternatives, like permanent "rule by 'CEO-monarch'".

I bite the bullet on this one by saying we should in fact do something about that. All of it. And we will, when we can. Probably before 2400.

It should be a tiered system, IMO.

1) Where possible, don't test in animals.

2) When testing in animals, first ensure that there is reasonable confidence the risk and severity of harm from the testing will be minimal. Only begin initial in vivo testing after this has first been achieved.

3) For test animals that are or aren't harmed, allow them to live happy, (relatively) normal, natural lives. Don't end their life early unnecessarily, with exceptions for humane euthanasia if the testing has unexpectedly caused significant, persistent suffering. Treat them as a pet owner would treat their beloved pet rat.

Some may consider it extreme, but, in my view, in an ideal world, people would treat testing in animals almost like testing in humans. The researcher should first ask "would I feel comfortable testing this in a voluntary human test subject?" Non-human animals would still be the first line of testing, since harm/death in a rat/mouse/chimpanzee is less morally bad than in a human, but I think this should be the mindset.

Hmm, but is it not the case a much larger model could potentially reason more in latent space, depending on how it's set up?

I thought a looped transformer is in fact reasoning more in latent space, though "reasoning" in a somewhat different way from the standard reasoning token approach.

Trustworthiness arguments aside:

You're saying you think there might be machine demigods in 50 years, but that one shouldn't use the pace of AI advances today to update positively on the probability of that?

For agentic coding, Claude Code with the latest Fable or Opus is still just better. That's what people care most about.

Unless Gemini CLI greatly improves and Argon works well in it, this probably won't make a dent in the coding market.

Let's check in in 50 years and see which of us was right.

Also check out this thread: https://x.com/tszzl/status/2109822082024656927

I trust him more after those two statements, yes. One would need to be an especially ridiculous populist to misinterpret those statements in a way where one would place less trust in him as a result.

I did negatively update based on reports of colleagues saying he has a tendency to be deceptive, though.

The current pace of advancement and the fact that fresh writing data will likely not be a requirement at all to continue accelerating. The pretraining paradigm no longer needs this.

It's not a certainty by any means, but to act flabbergasted at the thought of the existence of ASI by 2070, in 2026, on a tech site, is just silly.

That likely would not be exactly how it plays out. It would be a rogue or misaligned AI that the companies completely lose control of or that a different actor evilly misuses.

But, yes, there should probably be laws that make it so if you summon a demon that causes a mass casualty event you face criminal penalties.