Also ignoring the fact that without AI many of these offerings would be pricier, lower quality, or just nonexistent.
The usual counterargument is “well I would gladly pay more for man-made art!” which is a fair personal preference, but judging by the market most people clearly disagree, and businesses aren't obligated to cater to your niche.
I'd love a world where people have choice. Instead we're left with all the shit the general population deems sufficient, and everything just gets worse and worse.
You can choose to spend money elsewhere or you can choose to start your own business and promote it as you see fit. How much more power would you deem sufficient?
I don't understand this dialogue, which seems to repeat with every result of this sort. Of course this is interesting! And of course the answer tells us something! And of course we also want to understand where it came from! None of this is in contradiction!
Knowing the answer to Fermat’s Last Theorem wasn’t valuable. But the pursuit of it led to many developments in other fields of mathematics that were valuable (where value is measured in terms of $).
Knowing the answer is valuable, but it's not everything. We also want to understand why. The four-color theorem has a computer proof, so we know it's true, but we learned much less from that than we do from a human-understandable proof.
Many of the OpenAI results can be made human-understandable, so it's better than the four-color theorem example.
> If knowing the answer is not valuable then asking the question wasn’t valuable to begin with.
Let's say it's possible to know an alien civilization exists 100 million light years away from their waste heat. But that's all we know and it's unlikely we'll ever interact with them.
Was the question of whether we're alone still "valuable"? Wouldn't a lot of philosophy and even some physics fail to meet your definition of valuable?
I disagree. We climb mountains for the sake of it, and the rest of the world benefits because the gear improves and makes adjacent, non-for-the-sake-of-it activities safer.
We chase open problems for the sake of it, and others sometimes support us in doing so because the paths we pave along the way end up being useful for them for adjacent purposes. If you get the answer for free, you might have scratched the itch, but nothing was built for others to use, no fodder was found for the next great question.
Nobody pays mathematicians for solving famous problems. Famous problems are how mathematicians orient themselves while they do the other things that they're paid for (maintaining a useful community, mostly). All this does is deprive them of a navigational tool.
Often a problem is important because we have no idea how to solve it, which means we need to develop new machinery to solve it. That new machinery can then be used to do things we couldn't do before. Stimulating the development of that machinery is the most important part of the problem.
You should remember that mathematicians and programmers working for a company have different jobs with very different goals.
This is such a short sighted take. Number theory was considered beautifully useless for centuries, and now it’s the backbone of the cryptography that secures every bank transaction. We don't know where the pursuit of knowledge will take us.
Thinking in such a utilitarian way feels like a flavor of Meditations on Moloch.[1] Just look at how short-term, quarter-to-quarter thinking is affecting the economy and the lived experience of every human on earth. It’s horrible.
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This is such a short sighted take. Number theory was considered beautifully useless for centuries, and now it’s the backbone of the cryptography that secures every bank transaction
If you refer to RSA or Diffie-Hellman: the number theory that it is based on is from 17th to at most 19th century, i.e. it precedes modern number theory.
I do consider modern number theory to be fascinating and do claim that many results from it could have huge applications in society, but the argument that parts of modern asymmetric cryptography is based on number theory is rather an argument that we don't need any number theory research anymore because these insanely old results that are used in cryptography have already been known for centuries - so no new research is necessary. :-(
We didn't know what investigations were going to lead to RSA or Diffie-Hellman and any particular breakthrough is standing on a mountain of prior work that didn't have an obvious application but nonetheless was necessary to get to a breakthrough.
Honestly I can't believe I even need to state this. Its literally how science works..
> Imagine a programmer telling their boss it’s not about working software it’s about the journey of writing the code. Good luck getting hired.
Your formulation is a little bit exaggerated, but I (and many, though far from all, programmers) would agree with the following more "tame" formulation:
Getting software to solve a business problem in an elegant and maintainable way means that we got the abstractions right. Similarly, if a software can easily and elegantly be modified to cope with new business problems, it is also a strong sign that we got the abstractions right. In this sense, the business problems that the software solves are indeed just waypoints on the journey of finding the proper elegant abstractions for putting the business problems into code.
Turning these novel insights about "good" abstractions into code and programming languages enables the team to iterate faster and generate business value faster. So, appreciating that it indeed all about the journey means a commitment towards an approach to accelerate the rate with which the team can turn business insights into code and code into business value.
I know that many managers do hate such a formulation, but I stand behind it.
If you were a math grad student, would you rather your advisor be telling you to LLM maxx your ideas or working with you and giving you ideas on your thesis personally? I know my answer.
To say that we must have people that know how to X, because otherwise no one will be able to teach how to X, is kind of circular reasoning. Why is X important to begin with? What’s its inherent value to society?
I could address your situation in several ways and it would be a long discussion that a quick soundbite wouldn’t really satisfy. But at the very least, your argument is one of the arguments I would use to question the privatization of pure math by LLM companies. Pure math has little value to society so AI companies should consider not getting involved when they aren’t really making life better for anyone and are possibly harming young academics.
But to give a brief answer to your question directly: In my view, and I think many if they really thought about it, the point of life is to overcome. If there is an AI that spits out the answer to questions that don’t directly impact human wellbeing instead of letting humans explore the answer at our own pace, we should question whether that AI is worth keeping around or at least relying on too much.
Obviously the question is more nuanced when it comes to math, because even pure math can have applications to understanding reality and improving human wellbeing.
So the question then becomes what do we do with the AI when it can both improve our wellbeing and remove meaning from our lives? Is a life without struggle worth a life without meaning? Personally I don’t think so, so I think we have to optimize all of the benefits of AI while essentially taking a harsh stance against all the harms. Currently the main harm is to education, and that’s why I think we should question and probably even disallow its use by students still working to demonstrate their skills.
This is very well motivated. It's a bit like letting a combine for knowledge loose on that which made life satisfying. Having the answer isn't necessarily going to move anything forward. I also think that OpenAI is making a strategic mistake here: they are competing with their customers. That's something businesses usually only do when they are ready to ditch those customers.
the assumption is that training llms is greater than training individuals. llms may lead to their own "breakthroughs" but so have many people without the use of llms. is the thinking that we'd be dependent on llms and so we are now forced to be only able to discover what llms find discoverable? sounds like a loss
> Imagine a programmer telling their boss it’s not about working software it’s about the journey of writing the code. Good luck getting hired.
Imagine the next version of Claude Code or Codex no longer hands you source code and instead turns a natural language prompt directly into a compiled binary that passes the test suite. Would this programmer's boss ship the binary straight to production and dispense with the company's git repo altogether? After all, the goal at the end of the day is shipped software that produces value, not human-readable source code.
Responding to GP, I know people that de facto work this way and absolutely hire on those rare occasions they are looking. They create substantial value as a byproduct of their quest for beauty in complexity.
On the git thing, it turns out LLMs write better systems when constrained into the same patterns that make human teams write better systems - git and the chance to safely experiment en route to the ultimate solution being key. As well as modularity, iterative design and implementation, tests, documents, etc.
It’s interesting how all of these problems are due to misaligned incentives.
Unpopular opinion: cities should be private, for-profit corporations. Leasing land from the government and charging subscription fees. Like a very big hotel.
Do you not have a bladder? Do you never leave home for longer than a few hours? Are you aware that some people may have smaller bladders or produce more urine for various reasons?
If anything, toilets aren't discussed nearly enough. There is a huge lack of public toilets pretty much everywhere in the world.
Yes, most people have to use a toilet occasionally?
I can personally attest that having mild gi issues can make most of Europe a bit of a hellscape, with their expensive and simultaneously gross toilets. As an Australian I never appreciated clean public toilets before going there.
Congratulations on being in the top (guess) 5% of humans in this potentially very embarrassing regard. But please maintain a discretely charitable attitude toward the many who are less fortunate than you.
For web services, what is the point of MCP or even a skill when modern agents can just find API docs on their own and use it?
I think in this day and age agents no longer need official 3P integrations, they can just use whatever API is already available (and in some cases even the UI).
The advantage of MCP is that it provides an integration layer, bringing a welcome level of simplicity. I regularly use Jira with an MCP connector linked to Claude this not only provides access to data from Jira, but more importantly allows the AI to analyze that data, all without the need to set up a formal project involving an API... it only takes 4 clicks.
Figuring out the quirks of each api is a waste in tokens but I agree once you decide on a specific integration it makes sense to use an api.
Still, mcp means you don’t need to figure out the quirks.
Net, I think mcp is extremely good for resource constrained circumstances. I add mcp servers to many of my own applications and it’s an automatic productivity boost.
As a bonus, when I want to automate the integration I literally make my automations use mcp.
The thing that mostly makes MCP more token efficient is that its methods usually have good documentation/examples and smaller surface area, so it’s easier for the agent to navigate. But this can (and should) also be applied to the API itself...
The other thing is discoverability, but I’m not sure a simple web search would be significantly less efficient.
I just don't see why I would use any other API, including for programmatic access, rather than one optimized for agents. Do you have an example of where a custom API is better?
My custom MCP server for example handles long running tasks by returning a handle that can be cancelled/queried. This is done in a generic way that all agents can deal with and needed no special instructions.
I think of the mcp as another UI. You have your human UI and your robot UI and the API serves both. Makes sense when the actions you want the agent to make are not exactly 1:1 mapping to an endpoint.
But yeah of course an agent can usually figure out how to use your API, can just take more time and tokens.
We run AI inside VMs that are only given tightly controlled access to our internal servers. Routing calls through MCPs that only allow specific access lets us keep things secure for servers that don't allow that fine control through the API.
If you are talking about take a screen shot, analyze move the window a bit, take another screenshot, move the window, repeat until they have seen enough of the map to make a decision, then decide what to click on, issue order.... this could absolutely be done. It's very similar to how LLM's have driven a car on a safe track.
But right now the response time would be so slow that the bot would not be close to competitive except with the most low level players. Especially because its hard to click on things that are moving at the same time as well.
Sometime soon, I'd like to see an LLM be competitive using only computer vision, mouse movement, and locked into a human possible number of actions per minute.
I think we want to move beyond code based bots asking the LLMs to try to train a custom neural net, in a limited time + compute, to play StarCraft BW is probably the most promising direction
I am considering an experiment where the task is to try to win by adversarially targeting Pluto (a high profile self play based RL model)
Even the most powerful frontier models on SOTA hardware are not fast enough for starcraft, which generally involves multiple informed decisions per second at peak moments.
You can train a specialized model for this, but a frontier model is ill-fitting.
Doesn’t this suggest that the results seen in the OP are merely copying strategies it has seen in other bots (code in the training data), and not actually the agent developing its strategy?
Basically yes, but the space of "AI for RTS and videogames" likely goes well beyond Starcraft, so there's probably a lot of unique programming techniques these frontier models can apply for writing AI bots that haven't been done yet.
This is a straight up misrepresentation. The user posts occasionally about Israel, which garners engagement and replies (in some cases from actual trolls who job is searching for mentions of Israel), but most of their top level comments are about mundane technology.
You’ve been here for a year and believe there is no organized campaigning over middle eastern politics? So much so that you think it’s obvious nobody would be monitoring front page articles, with no evidence? I’m trusting but I disagree here based on my own experience reading the articles which rapidly drop off for… various reasons.
There is an ENORMOUS "defend Israel online" industry, usually using all Jewish people as human shields for the middle eastern regime. Emissary, RiseApp, Report It, to name a few.
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