No serious company is claiming AGI is around the corner. There's going to be scams like Rabbit, Friend and similar, but there are scams for everything.
Agents are evolving though. The coding agents a few months ago were a joke (Devin) and now they're actually usable for basics.
Devin (https://devin.ai/) is another model. (So no, it's not like you're submitting it as your work.)
You create a ticket. The AI takes the ticket. The AI may ask questions. The AI creates a pull request. You review it as if it was another coworker.
Most people have not gotten good results from Devin yet. Their business hypothesis seems to be that the models will get good quick and they will have built everything just as the models are good enough to support the model, and will be poised to be first mover.
2.0
@hn_d78856
about 1 month ago
Whole article is a bit rushed. Seems like a knee jerk reaction based off the tech demo of “Devin AI”.
I’ll admit the tech demo was impressive on the face of it. But it had all the flags showing it was a well rehearsed demo (think Steve Jobs and original iPhone debut) or even simulated images and videos. For all we know the code was written well in advance and recorded by people then tech ceo Steve Job’d the shit out of that performance.
I notice the ai is still in preview and locked behind gate
3.0
@hn_7d3cc5
about 1 month ago
I have a slightly different approach. Quoting my tweet:
"Once
@cognition_labs
AI Engineer Devin gets good enough, I will have it implement each feature as a series of Pull Requests:
- One or more Refactoring PRs - modify structure of existing code but no behavioral change.
- A final PR which is "append only" code - no structural change, only behavioral."
https://x.com/realsanketp/status/1879766736742092938
2.0
@hn_ef85f2
about 1 month ago
I don't think I agree. I'm trying to point out the 'expert-beginner' problem. We don't realize how much is involved in human intelligence. To the extent we think it is easy, that AGI will be here in a couple years. It's the same reason that in software "90% done is 90% left to go." We are way under-estimating what is involved with human intelligence.
An analogy I think is like crypto problems that would require 1 billion years to compute. Even if we find a way to get that 100x more efficient, we're still not coming up with a solution anywhere near in our lifetimes.
> Today's LLMs are capable of outperforming your average human in a variety (not all, obviously!) of fields
My impression is many of those are benchmarks that are chosen by companies to look good for VCs. For example, the video showing off Devin was almost completely faked (time gaps were cut out, tasks were actually simpler and more tailor made than they were implied to be).
Something I was trying to convey to a non-technical stake holder is that some tasks are stupid easy for humans, but insanely hard for computers - and vice versa. A big trick was therefore to delegate some things to humans and some things to computers. For example, computers are excellent at recollection and numerical computations - while humans can taste salt easily and tell you when something is too salty or undersalted trivially. In my opinion, AGI is an attempt to have computers do those things that are trivial for humans, but insanely tough for humans. There is a long, long way to go; getting that first 50% is the easy part, the last 50% (particularly the last 30% and the last 5%) IMO is several hundreds (if not thousands) of __magnitudes__ harder.