quantumHazer

Yeah the owl ""animation"" is terrible, I bet they could have found better examples? If it wasn't the case I don't know what to think

Like most AI image or video generation tools, they produce results that look good at first glance, but the more you watch, the more flaws and sloppiness you notice, and they really lack storytelling

CTO of an AI agents company (which has worked with AI labs) says agents works fine. Nothing new under the sun.

So we are rebranding the same idea every four months and call it a breakthrough?

I fear it’s not really evolutionary algorithms in the typical sense.

Yep

https://research.google/blog/accelerating-scientific-breakth...

Cool, but don't get me wrong, isn't this essentially similar to Google's Co-Scientist, where multiple models are in a loop, passing context back and forth validating things? At its core, it's still a system of LLMs, which is impressive in execution but not fundamentally new.

LLMs are undoubtedly useful at tasks like code "optimisation" and detecting patterns or redundancies that humans might overlook, but this announcement feels like another polished, hypey blog post from Google.

What's also becoming increasingly confusing is their use of the "Alpha" branding. Originally, it was for breakthroughs like AlphaGo or AlphaFold, where there was a clear leap in performance and methodology. Now it's being applied to systems that, while sophisticated, don't really rise to the same level of impact.

edit: I missed the evaluator in my description, but an evaluation method is applied also in Co-Scientist:

"The AI co-scientist leverages test-time compute scaling to iteratively reason, evolve, and improve outputs. Key reasoning steps include self-play–based scientific debate for novel hypothesis generation, ranking tournaments for hypothesis comparison, and an "evolution" process for quality improvement."[0]

[0]: https://research.google/blog/accelerating-scientific-breakth...

How do you judge? Are you an expert in four different and complex fields? I'm not saying that LLMs are useless anyway, I'm just curious to know how you can judge a report as "undergraduate level".

> Food production is a class case where once productivity is high enough you simply get fewer farmers.

Yes, but.

There are more jobs in other fields that are adjacent to food production, particularly in distribution. Middle class does not existed and retail workers are now a large percentage of workers in most parts of the world.

Is this a solo/personal project? If it is is indeed very cool.

Is OP the blog’s author? Because in the post the author said that the purpose of the project is to show why NN are truly special and I wanted a more articulate view of why he/she thinks that? Good work anyway!

Though 13 is totally the average!

Shifting from addressing the substance to referencing a personal remark like my joke about “burning out” from AI hype doesn't strength your argument. I expected more from someone in “EA/rationalism”. In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised when substantive critique about presentation format gets poisoned with a personal comment rather than discussing the actual points about how scientific information is communicated. The medium is indeed the message. Bye.

> ...It is in a format that resembles a published article because it is going to be a published article? "This is a preprint of a chapter that will appear in the book Designing an Intelligence, published by MIT Press." on the first page.

It doesn't make any difference and doesn't invalidate my critique. It appears to be a science communication book, so it could easily be a web page. Even if it was a LaTeXish PDF there were multiple ways to not making it a PDF that resembles a scientific article, there's a precise choice being made about how to communicate. The medium is the message.

> A history of RL from DQN to AlphaProof/LLM computer use in Gemini is not 'generic', and could not be.

History of RL is not 'generic' and is indeed really interesting, I look forward to reading Sutton's book! But the graph in the PDF is. The y-axis is ill-defined because

1. it combines different technologies (DQN, AlphaGo, GPT models) on a single continuum implying direct comparison.

2. the evergreen hypester future trajectory toward "superhuman intelligence"

I will not comment further on the graph, it's not a interesting visualization in my opinion and only serves the author's purpose for the narrative of "feeling the AGI (through RL)” There would be more interesting way of plotting this information for a general public. I agree that is harsh from me that it doesn’t provide value. Maybe it provides value to people who want to explore RL now, but again, the medium is the message, and this format is clearly saying out loud “look at me, I’m a paper, trust me.”

I’m not American and American politics is not at the center of the world. I’m just asking.

Why not use a blog dot google dot com domain or whatever? Why choose a format that resembles a published article instead?

As for the graph, it’s too generic, it doesn’t provide any real value, other than a certain pseudo-appeal reminiscent of paper-style visuals. In my humble opinion, it’s designed to mislead people who fall for hype, much like some of Google’s recent pseudo-scientific blog posts on machine learning.

I have deep respect for Sutton and his work, but this kind of things are a hard pass for me.

I’m not saying that the tool is useless, I was confuting your argument about being a project WITHOUT docs. LLM can write passable docs, but obviously can write better docs of project well documented in training data. And this example is probably in training data as of April 2025

The example you made has, in fact, a documentation

https://docs.browser-use.com/introduction

Is it me or this is yet another PR stunt masked as a serious article with LaTeX and all the fancy things? The graph doesn’t even make sense.

I’m burning out from all this hypester type of thing, it’s really really tiring.

Is it related with policies from the US administration?

All I will say is that she is the CFO of a company that want to sell """agentic""" swe models.

edit: typo.

sometimes here I miss the downvote of reddit. it could be useful for not letting this type of things on front page. maybe a little too harsh but I've had enough of vibe coding and this sort of projects that are copies of a old GitHub repo of the Programming-101 project from some freshman in Minnesota

if something is done for yourself by yourself is not challenging by definition IMO

As a student, I use LLMs as little as possible and try to rely on books whenever possible. I sometimes ask LLMs questions about things that don't click, and I fact-check their responses. For coding, I'm doing the same. I'm just raw dogging the code like a caveman because I have no corporate deadlines, and I can code whatever I want. Sometimes I get stuck on something and ask an LLM for help, always using the web interface rather than IDEs like Cursor or Windsurf. Occasionally, I let the LLMs write some boilerplate for boring things, but it's really rare and I tend not to use them too much. This isn't due to Luddism but because I want to learn, and I don't want slop in my way.

Universities still teach you calculus and real analysis even though Wolfram Alpha exists. It boils down to your willing to learn something. An LLM can't understand things for you. I'm "early genz" and I write code without llm because I find data structure and algorithm very interesting and I want to learn the concepts not because I'm in love with the syntax of C or Rust (I love the syntax of C btw).

who said that personalised, infinite content generation is a good thing? I watch movies and listen to music because I want to be challenged in some way. I don’t want tailored content that prevents me from exploring new territory and keeps me trapped in a personalised echo chamber.

Sorry, you're right lol. I'm just accustomed to other major lab gazillions of hours of training.

really impressive work considering the reported size of the model and training hours.

OpenAI should have called Wide Research (but it's not as catchy). In all my tests in things I have some expertise it seems to provide a wide range of information but it never goes really deep. It lacks understanding of what is more valuable and what not.

Very good article.

The founder of generalagents even says that they want free humans from digital labor. I can’t stand these takes. Leave my computer to me!

Respectfully his understanding of LLMs have nothing to do with the paper you linked.