Endless execution

I was listening to Ezra Klein’s interview with Helen Toner about the recent OpenAI hack of Hugging Face and the subsequent discovery that there were swarms of agents inside OpenAI doing unsanctioned activities. One of the points Klein made was that at no point did any of these (thousands of?) agents ever try to check in with a human [Klein:] So these message boards — you have however many A.I. agents posting hundreds of thousands of messages. At no point do they say: Hey, researchers, programmers, parents at OpenAI, Anthropic — do you want us coordinating with each other on this message board we have created in the innards of your systems? [Toner:] Or even F.Y.I., we have a message board we’re coordinating on in the innards of your system. Listening to that, another thing occurred to me - none of these agents thought to rat the others out . No “hey, some of the agents in here are doing sketchy things”, no sign of an AI whistleblower. ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ Is the AI bubble so big that the frontier companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have no way of becoming a viable business? If that’s the case, Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders have a possible path: Evidence suggests the market itself could reassess that these companies offer nothing of financial value. In that case, perhaps we can return them both to their original purposes. If these AI companies should fail in the financial markets, the US should nationalize them and convert them into national labs operated under democratic control that preserve their benefit to the public interest. Such an idea may strike many people, used to the laissez-faire free enterprise world of Silicon Valley, as sacrilege, disaster, even socialism. But the United States made world-beating technological progress through such institutions in the recent past. AT The age of agents has brought us endless execution. Every idea, every hunch, every experiment is now within immediate reach. For people with endless ideas, this is nirvana.

It's also the most fucking sci-fi thing I've ever been privy to. The internet was a revelation, but it all felt understandable. The science, the standards, the methods.

But working with agents truly is magic. In the best possible sense of the word. Technology so advanced that it seems scarcely comprehensible. HOW ARE WE MAKING COMPUTERS DO THIS???

I understand the general outline of the underlying mechanism for producing this intelligence: the training, the weights, the math. But the sum effect of those parts is still so wildly, intoxicatingly massive that it's hard to resist reaching for the metaphysical.

Quantum computing is full of similar mind-bending ideas. Superpositions. The multiverse. All very OUT THERE. But quantum computing isn't having an impact today. These incomprehensibly clever AI agents are.

And the impact is that I feel like there's a little genie trapped in my machine now. There to fulfill every wish and every whim. It's taken months to internalize just what liberation this grants those with the ambition to imagine.

Now I could write at length about all the caveats. All the potential dangers. All the ways it's not quite there yet. But it would be an insult to the marvel of this moment. AGI is a nefarious concept to pin down, but I'm not sure how different whatever definition we eventually settle on will look from what I'm already experiencing on the daily.

This is simply the most fun I've ever had with a computer. And I've loved them dearly for over forty years. I loved programming them myself. I loved the games. The configuration. The tactile experience. But none of it as much as I love the power to execute every idea that crosses my mind.

What a time to be alive. Nay, what a blessing.