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vanuatuon The LLMentalist Effect (2023)

I don't think intelligence needs to take the shape of human-like intelligence, nor human-like data efficiency.

I'd argue they are intelligent entities, superhuman in some ways due to being run on silicon but extremely data inefficient with nonobvious failure modes.

vanuatuon The Claude Delusion

But deciding the next token is not a merely mechanical process. Even if the string of tokens from our swapped out humans ends up being syntactically incorrect, it's due to the combination of intelligently selected tokens. (Presumably intelligent human programmers seem to make syntactic errors)

vanuatuon I Don't Like LLMs

my take is that the human operator behind it was implied. give it a year and open source Fable / Astra models are running wild, what happens when a malicious group or nation state decides to let loose?

vanuatuon Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

I've seen it be very effective (moreso than human agents at resolving issues) but its extremely implementation sensitive, so you're more likely to encounter a bad one in the wild than a good one. There are voice agents picking up phones that the vast majority of people don't realize is an agent

vanuatuon Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

I think its the opposite, the grunt work is done by AI, the remaining skills are difficult to acquire and software engineers command a higher premium (but there may be less software engineers in aggregate)

vanuatuon The AI job market in 2026

I interview a lot of larping 'AI engineers' that either vibe coded a side project or were involved in low stakes pilots

Irl theres a short list of companies that actually build / apply ai at scale. for people trying to break in its usually not expected to have experience with it, just don't lie about it

vanuatuon The AI job market in 2026

ai slop article, but if you want to maximize earnings in any tech boom the best opportunities lie at the companies driving that boom.

vanuatuon The AI job market in 2026

I did by applying

most eng roles at frontier companies don't require prior experience specifically with AI, there's a ton of regular engineering work required to train / serve models

vanuatuon Mistral raises €3B

https://www.seangoedecke.com/ai-inference-is-obviously-profi...

https://www.mindstudio.ai/blog/anthropic-inference-margins-7...

its even higher depending on the model, how optimized it is, and the chips!

I wouldnt die on this hill

vanuatuon Mistral raises €3B

serving models is very profitable (70%+) but the issue is you need to invest in training the next iteration. but so far all of anthropics models have been profitable fully loaded

the vast majority of the labs revenue is from enterprise api usage (theres public sources from the information and ramp). but the risk there is customer concentration, where most of the revenue comes from other tech companies and a chunk of it is from foreign labs distilling

so i am drawing a conclusion that the labs' business model is good, maybe not as great as boosters think it is. if they make real progress on the biosciences like drug discovery that could turn it into an amazing business

vanuatuon Mistral raises €3B

Why are we using consumer prices when the vast majority of their revenue is from enterprise api usage?

vanuatuon Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

if you're going by anecdata, myself and a few of my colleagues (senior ics) switched jobs relatively easily for a solid pay increase within the last year. definitely easier than post-covid

engineering (hardware, software) and data center construction are going through a boom cycle right now and will eventually bust, and so on and so forth

vanuatuon Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

unironically the second scenario sounds better

vanuatuon Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive

I think this is Jevon's paradox playing out in full force, and I'm quite confident we'll continue to see the growth in well paid STEM jobs despite the anecdata in this thread (anecdotally my group of ICs on tech have all seen our comp grow a lot in the last few years)

Until we saturate the demand for software which may very well be infinite

vanuatuon GPT-6 Astra

large parts of ai research likely to be automated first

most swes don't work in jobs where they only work on bounded measurable tasks. there will probably be more "engineers" than ever

vanuatuon AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds

i mean the meta point is having "AI skills" is understanding the jagged frontier and operating accordingly

Given that we can keep making infinite abstractions with software if we actually saturate software demand with AI then I don't see why every other industry is cooked (robotics is downstream of software).

vanuatuon AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds

To be clear, I think young people need to learn traditional software engineering skills too (.. maybe having the wrong attitude towards it is even worse than the aptitude!) A junior with no foundational SWE skills will just become a meat wrapper. But thinking more about it I wouldn't discredit these "AI skills" so much. A lot of it is either using AI as a force multiplier or learning the specific skills around deploying it which I'd still categorize as 'AI skills'

building agents is just a completely different ballgame, theres a lot of infra and harness engineering around handling the nondeterministic behaviors that are nonobvious unless you've shipped agents at scale

vanuatuon AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds

You'd be surprised, I used to do a first round technical screen where we let the interviewee use any ai tool they want to build a simple api (and they can oneshot the problem if they just pasted it into any capable agent). I quite liked the problem, it was really a system design problem for senior+ but more algorithmic for junior/mid

The more senior the candidate the less they took advantage of the tools. Most commonly they would manually copy/paste error or syntax errors and then run out of time. One candidate only copy pasted his questions into google and used the AI overview

Junior candidates tended to be overly ai eager, a lot of them oneshotted the problem but were unable to explain any of the details

That being said I think 80% of the skills should come easily to a capable dev that is willing to put in the effort to learn and get used to managing agents. Building agents that perform work themselves is a lot harder (and still pretty unsolved)

vanuatuon AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds

- knowing what to prompt

- directing the model and knowing when its going off the rails

- verification

- setting up the right loops, harness, graphs around the models

economics still apply to hiring people. if all your competitors are using ai and there's market share to fight over and people still are a productivity positive vs. only ai, hiring will increase as we've seen recently with swes

vanuatuon The Vibe Tax

we should exercise critical thinking then

heaps of people on this site expect them to be omnipotent then claim it’s fake when it doesn’t read minds

vanuatuon What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

I think what a lot of people miss about jevon's paradox is the elasticity of demand of the underlying resource

textiles had jevons paradox, and many more textile workers were employed even when textile machines were being created, until we saturated the demand for cheap clothing in the world and then textile workers were kaput (same for farming, and horses)

software is currently undergoing jevons paradox, but it's very unknown how high the ceiling of demand for software is. web dev might be doomed, but software in general i think is probably limitless

Intelligence is also probably unbounded (atm software and intelligence are very closely tied together). its very possible token spend rides up the curve forever.

vanuatuon What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

You're right, computers are definitely the same speed as they were 20 years ago.

vanuatuon Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+

Should be easy to build a competitor in a week, pitch to some VCs then have them kingmake you to a $1B exit to another portco then!

vanuatuon Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+

You can go ahead and build it then, then sell it for only $100M to a competitor. Should be easy peasy

vanuatuon You Can't Copy Palantir

you can just state things without reading the article nowadays!

vanuatuon Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints

wonder how much of the ai CX hate is availability bias where people really notice it when it breaks but you never see the whole picture on total impact

it seems very implementation dependant, I know a startup with incredibly realistic voice agents that most people don’t detect is an ai that outperforms humans. But ai for CX seems like an easy project to do for companies looking to cut costs so the average agent a user encounters in the wild is poor quality

vanuatuon Interviewing Engineers in the AI Era: Lessons from a Year of Rebuilding

I used to think this was true until my company adopted a similar process, and the amount of very senior candidates who used it very ineffectively was highly surprising (eg staff candidate only using the default Google search AI), whereas the more junior candidates figured out you could one shot the problem but were unable to explain their code

vanuatuon Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users

but you can keep asking questions ad infinitum

very nontrivial problem knowing when to stop and making assumptions

vanuatuon Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users

intelligence is not omniscience though

vanuatuon Shopify says AI search is driving more traffic and sales, not replacing Google

gotta make it less obvious