Facts, I was able to code a personal self improving harness in a weekend (something a bit more similar to Hermes or OpenClaw at the time but with a more expansive set of features for my use cases and requirements) and it works great for 90% of the tasks I would use Claude Code or Codex (now ChatGPT App) for, with the remaining 10% being able to be implemented with a few more prompts from within the harness itself.
For this reason alone I would also argue that the idea about an agent harness being sticky is a non-starter long-term.
Off-topic somewhat, but NYT once tried to convince their readers to call Elizabeth Holmes "Liz" and not send her to jail after her fraud conviction. The implication being that it was a highly paid puff piece. They lost a lot of credibility with me that day.
With all due respect, that's bullshit. Here is the article in question: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/07/business/elizabeth-holmes.... NYT is not "trying to convince their readers to call Elizabeth Holmes "Liz"". If anything, the author is quite clear that it is Elizabeth Holmes trying to convince you that she is just "Liz", and if anything I think the author does quite a good job outlining her serious crimes, and the fact that even people close to her find her to be duplicitous and that she shouldn't be trusted.
I think it's fair to ask whether Holmes would have been presented in such a soft light if she weren't a young, blonde, and still apparently rich by her husband, woman. But I think saying that the NYT is trying to convince their readers not to send her to jail is just a total mischaracterization of that article.
I've just read it in full and, while I think / agree it is probably still too generous and soft on her, you are quite right about it.
I'm thinking I must have been caught up in some of the commentary around it at the time it came out (I had recently read Carreyrou's book and had gone down a bit of a rabbit hole about her and Theranos), and when I did see it I read the headline and the first few paragraphs, looked at the image, and then closed the page in disgust.
Reading through the rest of it it does come across very differently, and was an interesting read. Thanks for replying about it.
Yeah I had a big lol when I read “just don’t let people declare bankruptcy for 7 years after graduation” - how in the world could this be good public policy?
It was expressed in a strange way but I assume what they meant was that if the former student goes bankrupt within the 7-year period then the student loan is not cancelled.
Why would it be better to not allow the debt discharged ever? That is the current situation. 7 years as a limit is better policy than "you owe this forever no matter what"
Some of us keep the worthwhile trash alive forever. This laptop is gonna be twenty years old soon and it's too comfortable of a machine to be tossed to ewaste.
This is 1000% not their (Google's) aim. The position they are in is due much more to their organisational laziness and incompetence than it is any grand strategy.
> Google wants its AI to be pervasive in everyone's daily life.
Google wants nothing more than the world to remain stuck in 2000 - 2020 where search was king. Their organisational inertia will fight its AI progress every step of the way and this very well explains why they are not leading the AI pack despite inventing the technology.
I mean, I'm sure there are people within Google who are behaving as though they can keep the dream of the 00s alive in Mountain View, but there's also a whole bunch of people doing work at the frontier in AI. Google has a large lead in hardware, they have the smartest very small models, they have among the most efficient large models (I'd wager their margins on Gemini 3.5 Flash inference are absurd). They have among the best image, video, and audio models, going in every direction (generating, editing, understanding).
Viewed from a consumer lens, the AI the average person interacts with daily, Google seems like the clear leader, especially after locking in Apple as a customer for iPhones.
Why lol? Because you don't like Elon? XAI has continued to stay within a few months of leading edge, and now suddenly they'll just never do it again, despite doing it literally today?
Culture. XAI employs were bragging about spending all weekend at the office. Many tweet that they have been fired after 8 months. Some get fired right before their first big stock vest.
The team is mostly H1Bs. Do you think they don’t have every incentive to benchmax? Do you think top tier talent wants to work there?
> hence Google paying SpaceX hundreds of millions of dollars a month to SpaceX for capacity there.
I don't think that necessarily follows. It could just be old fashioned capacity issues, for example. If nothing else nvidia are able to charge an insane markup on their AI chips at the moment so even if google TPUs aren't competitive in a pure performance sense they are surely competitive from a pricing perspective.
For this reason alone I would also argue that the idea about an agent harness being sticky is a non-starter long-term.
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