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Comment by theturtletalks | Hacker News Reader

Did I even mention AGI? All I’m saying is that we’re hitting a plateau with how good models are while harnesses are untapped potential. And with Pi, you can swap models like electricity companies. Yes for now, the electricity is better with some companies but this will stabilize.

And no I came up with the metaphor all on my own, send me the chat of you getting the LLM to come up with it. Why not argue based on merit instead of strawman and ad hominem attacks?

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I’m afraid it’s a terrible metaphor, starting with the fact that LLMs are nothing like electricity, and the relation of harnesses to them is nothing like that of electronics to electricity, save perhaps one is a prerequisite of the other.

Harnesses (and the concept of agents before them) presuppose competence in LLMs which simply doesn’t exist.

“Just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago, today I actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don’t think AI will transform in the next several years” - Andrew Ng

Is it just a coincidence that he works in the space and will directly benefit if this is true?

I didn’t come with the electricity idea, it was Sam Altman saying it will be like a utility down the line and metered[0]. What would the “electronics” be in your opinion?

0. https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-ai-utility-electr...

Altman is a salesman selling flimflam to people who should know better.

His idea of metering is predicated on the thing he’s selling being AGI, it is not, and all his predictions have turned to dust.

Also that isn’t how metaphors work - they illuminate by comparison, if the comparison is not close they are not useful.

If it is metered and like a utility, Sam Altman will not benefit alone. All the models will have plateaued and you can swap for any of them. Then the only differentiator is the harness.

I don’t believe in AGI, but that doesn’t mean I don’t find AI useful. I just understand that the correct harness can take them to the next level.

> presuppose competence in LLMs which simply doesn’t exist.

Then how do you explain the wild success at using them for development?

Guided by humans, code generators which have ingested the worlds’ code and can recognise and generate patterns can be useful tools. I wouldn’t personally qualify it as a wild success as we are early and there are significant downsides.

That doesn’t make them intelligent agents which think independently.

Would you like to see some of my own examples of wild success?

I have a system that entirely reverse engineers old arcade games. Creates semantic symbol mappings that were considered impossible just a couple years ago.

Granted, it took me a couple weeks to build the system.

From impossible to a couple weeks in just a couple years.

Would you like to see it or continue to pretend these things don't exist? Your call.

(It's finding the coolest stuff - the anti-tampering hacks they put into the old machines is fascinating.)

I’ve made my own arcade games with an LLM. It was fun though the code wasn’t great.

Mostly I felt they reproduced games from the training data, some with more examples available worked better than others.

I use them most days for work, and for that reason don’t trust them that much and certainly don’t worry or fantasise about AGI.

You were making some pretty strong statements about the usefulness of harnesses that seemed to me to be entirely detached from reality. Maybe I misunderstood you? Because I can provide evidence to correct that misconception.

Another of my projects is to incorporate Pixar's ideas from RenderMan into a 3d printer slicer. Displacement shaders, in a 3d printer, have never been done before. Would you like to see that? I had the idea 10 years ago but it was too tedious to implement. I have a working system now in just a couple weeks AGAIN.

Anyone claiming agents aren't profoundly useful is WRONG. If you disagree, please let's discuss it.

I’m pleased for you.

In my experience the use of agents and harnesses and other scaffolding around them doesn’t improve the performance of LLMs much, which is adequate for some tasks under supervision but nothing like general intelligence (or electricity for that matter). But good that it works for you.

OH - I think I understand now. You're like LeCun - dismissive of LLMs in all their forms. So of course agents can't lead to AGI, because LLMs just can't.

Which I've always found so strange. Language was always considered the pinnacle of the human mind - right up until we created LLMs. Now it's the world model - the things that animals always had and the thing we used to look down on.

From my perspective, language is still at the top. I'm not a fickle lover of the gaps.

> In my experience the use of agents and harnesses and other scaffolding around them doesn’t improve the performance of LLMs much

I have to say - that seems straight-up crazy to me. Would you mind digging into that discussion?

As just one example - in a harness I can ask an agent to confirm everything it says via a second sub agent - which dramatically improves the output. It almost entirely solves the problem of hallucinations. You don't see that as an improvement?

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