Heya and welcome back to Five Things AI!
Thanks for checking in. This is a shorter than usual version of the newsletter as I am on a business trip to Berlin and didn’t find the time to read and subsequently write about what is going on in AI right now. I did have some really cool meetings where we discussed Agentic Coding and how decision models are changing the world of LLMs right now.
More next week, I promise. :)
Swarm Intelligence
Here is a possible world 50 years in the future, one I think is more likely than the scenario most people expect, which is one huge AI in the sky.
Fifty years from now most AI is invisible. There is nothing to see. It is sort of like air – always there, always on, everywhere. Something you need and use but take for granted. AI is so prevalent we become blind to it.
You don’t need to log onto it, or even to summon it. Rather you inhale it. Instead of a central AI brain, AI is like a gas, composed of zillions of tiny interacting AIs that create an atmosphere. These zillions of minds are like eukaryotic cells in your body, or hundreds of varieties of bacteria in your gut. They form a presence. They are woven together into a vast network of intelligences that create an AI background. This society of AI minds is not so much seen by humans, as it is felt.
Kevin Kelly is someone who I have been paying attention to when he tries to make sense of what is happening in the present and then extrapolates it into the future.
The Tragedy of AI Coding
The more I programmed with AI, the more I felt this tug-of-war between my own prior programming knowledge and the exciting, new coding capacities AI unlocked for me. On my own, I could have built the community ratings that my friend who tried Beanslaw had expected. But storing data in a scalable way across an internet service is complicated, and I wouldn’t have bothered for a program that was supposed to be for a handful of people. ChatGPT introduced me to an Apple programming feature called CloudKit, which made the process easy. Then AI made the implementation easy, too, by giving me the code.
So is Agentic Coding just another lock-in effect trying to keep us subscribing? Yes, of course. This is what the power users of the LLMs are using it for right now. At the same time, it is very liberating to be able to code without really coding.
The Safety Culture at the Labs is Broken
That is on top of additional misalignment reports from both OpenAI and Anthropic. The reports are good things, but what is reported emphasizes that we have big problems that run deep.
Thus, the growing consensus that we must find a way to Pace the Frontier and slow the pace of AI capabilities advances. This is potentially made more complicated by what could be increased competitiveness from Google and Meta, with the releases of Argon and Wonder. It is still too early to provide proper assessments there.
There is a growing group of lab employees who have felt compelled to quit in protest. New York Magazine had a cover feature interviewing some prominent ones. The most famous is Coxon, who provided the tipping point for the current preference cascade.
This is a really long article about the AI safety issues we are facing right now. It feels like “move fast and break things” is still the underlying motto while the frontier labs try to sugar coat it. I might have pointed it out before: we need to implement better regulation and people have to face consequences if their models do unlawful things. If Sam Altman faces jail time, he’ll be more cautious, bluntly put.
Build or surrender
Europe followed the internet playbook. We developed the applications and left the platforms to others. Twenty years later, the value has gone elsewhere. European companies pay more than €260 billion every year to American cloud and software providers. Europe has become the continent that consumes what others build.
Whoever controls the model sets the terms
AI is not the internet. The internet ran on open protocols that nobody owned. Closed AI models, by contrast, have an owner. What an application or an agent can do is decided by the model, and whoever controls the model sets the terms: they change the price, restrict uses, withdraw a version. Every decision made upstream is imposed on the entire chain. Those who build on top bear the consequences, with no say in the matter.
Arthur Mensch, the founder of Mistral, is trying to convince Europeans to think bigger and invest more into frontier models. I am not so sure anymore. Open Weights models are just few months behnd frontier models now and I think useful Ai integration into business practices would help Europeans more than adding more frontier models to the mix.
‘I use AI to do the things that I’m bad at’: Linus Torvalds on why it works for him
“It’s a different story today,” Torvalds said. “The bar in software engineering has grown so high that it’s hard to see your own small efforts as worth anything, because you’re used to all these polished, professional programs. “
“A lot of people make fun of vibe coding, but I think it’s a wonderful way to find joy in programming. It makes you feel like you’re doing something relevant. It allows you, as a new programmer, to do things that you would otherwise have a really hard time with.”
Linus has the right kind of thinking about this.
If you missed last week’s edition of Five Things AI, you can read it here:
That’s it for Five Things AI this week! 🤖
— Nico