after watching the Fire Red playthrough by Fable, i can say it is still far away from AGI. it ran charizard the whole way thru, almost over-leveled it for the badges it had, used it to fight water pokemon, under-leveled every other pokemon. so basically 9 yr old me.
A Pixel Is Not A Little Square,
A Pixel Is Not A Little Square,
A Pixel Is Not A Little Square!
(And a Voxel is Not a Little Cube)
Technical Memo 6
Alvy Ray Smith
July 17, 1995
parents: "move out"
girlfriend: “quit being such a loser”
boss: "work harder"
claude: "uber for dogs (the dogs are the drivers) is a great idea, you should absolutely pursue it"
Coding is basically the pinnacle of what you could reasonably automate with AI, and yet we still need human engineers to oversee agents for them to be effective.
The AI models are trained on an incredible amount of sophisticated code. The users are highly technical and can use the latest tools quickly. The work is “verifiable” because you can test an app. The outcomes are often removed from the quality of the code (you can have sloppy code but the app can still work). And the context for the agent is often already digitized and sitting in the codebase.
That’s an incredible amount of benefits that AI coding agents get to work with. Some of those apply to knowledge work, but most don’t in areas where the work needs to be fully reviewed to be useful, or where data isn’t as abundantly digitized. This makes the job for agents in knowledge work more complicated.
So if with all of that, engineers still remain in very high demand, the risks are going to be less than what’s perceived for other areas of knowledge work. Agents will let people do far more than they did before, but the people don’t go away.
I think having this new adversarial thing so ingrained on our envs but not actively trying to harm us is great. now we're all gonna start taking more attention into things like this
YouTubers be like “wake up at 4am and run, that’s alpha!” No, it’s not. Look at apex predators; they’re all lazy. Bears hibernate, lions sleep all day. You know who wakes up at 4am and runs? Squirrels.
asking people to read ai-generated text is offensive.
this is not because ai text is intrinsically bad. rather, the author has not paid a cost to write the text himself. this cost is a credible signal he finds its communication important.
so: not paying that cost is telling
If you have a small problem, you have a problem forever. If you have a big problem, soon, you have no problem.
A friend told me this 15 years ago. And it is relevant now. I am very bullish for the future of software reliability.
We finally have a problem big enough to fix.