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Magic AI Secures $117M to Build an AI Software Engineer

maginative.com

11–20 of 92 posts

Re: Magic AI Secures $117M to Build an AI Software Engineer

#11
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't worried until Google showed up with a 1M token context with 99.9% recall...

Some random team at Berkeley beat them to it by a couple days: https://largeworldmodel.github.io/ . It's just a matter of throwing compute at it, nothing fancy. OpenAI could probably do 1M token context too but they haven't yet found a way to make it profitable (neither have Google; the most they actually offer customers is 256k).

This brings a very interesting question: if you could have an AI software engineer today but it would cost you 1 trillion dollars, would you want and be able to afford it?

There is a reason why we still have people working at McDonald's even though fully automating it has been possible for a couple of decades now.

Re: Magic AI Secures $117M to Build an AI Software Engineer

#12
post #2

Maybe I'm naive, but I just don't feel threatened by this at all. As a software engineer, I'd love to have an AI engineer automate the boring stuff so I can work on higher-level architecture concerns.

If anything you should want the opposite. Most companies are fundamentally solving problems within a finite set of domains which could be represented with a finite set of "good" architectures.

The opinionated thing is how to implement these within the boundaries of the existing codebase, skills, etc.

Re: Magic AI Secures $117M to Build an AI Software Engineer

#14
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't worried until Google showed up with a 1M token context with 99.9% recall...

Some random team at Berkeley beat them to it by a couple days: https://largeworldmodel.github.io/ . It's just a matter of throwing compute at it, nothing fancy. OpenAI could probably do 1M token context too but they haven't yet found a way to make it profitable (neither have Google; the most they actually offer customers is 256k).

> It's just a matter of throwing compute at it, nothing fancy.

I read somewhere that there was a recent breakthrough that enabled this.

Even if it costs a lot to run inference with 1M token context, it is hard to imagine it would cost anywhere close to a software engineer salary.

Re: Magic AI Secures $117M to Build an AI Software Engineer

#15
post #2

Maybe I'm naive, but I just don't feel threatened by this at all. As a software engineer, I'd love to have an AI engineer automate the boring stuff so I can work on higher-level architecture concerns.

In reality you'll be the one figuring out the boring stuff that the AI can't do.

Re: Magic AI Secures $117M to Build an AI Software Engineer

#16
post #13

Just wait till the AI has to update npm packages. I think I’m safe.

Just wait until ai invents its own npm that people are no longer able to understand. Good luck with that.

But AI is trained on data that exists right now. The more likely scenario is that it builds its own npm that is similar to npm and still sucks.

Re: Magic AI Secures $117M to Build an AI Software Engineer

#17
post #2

Maybe I'm naive, but I just don't feel threatened by this at all. As a software engineer, I'd love to have an AI engineer automate the boring stuff so I can work on higher-level architecture concerns.

In reality you'll be the one figuring out the boring stuff that the AI can't do.

Yeah. Integrating the 99.9% correct code into already existing systems sounds like the software job of the future.

Re: Magic AI Secures $117M to Build an AI Software Engineer

#18
post #2

Maybe I'm naive, but I just don't feel threatened by this at all. As a software engineer, I'd love to have an AI engineer automate the boring stuff so I can work on higher-level architecture concerns.

You're already "inside". The danger with automation is that it can pull up the ladder of developing junior talent on nuts-and-bolts, especially if these platforms aren't accessible to students and small-time developers.

Re: Magic AI Secures $117M to Build an AI Software Engineer

#20
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some random team at Berkeley beat them to it by a couple days: https://largeworldmodel.github.io/ . It's just a matter of throwing compute at it, nothing fancy. OpenAI could probably do 1M token context too but they haven't yet found a way to make it profitable (neither have Google; the most they actually offer customers is 256k).

This brings a very interesting question: if you could have an AI software engineer today but it would cost you 1 trillion dollars, would you want and be able to afford it? There is a reason why we still have people working at McDonald's even though fully automating it has been possible for a couple of decades now.

> cost you 1 trillion dollars

How did you come up with this number? It seems pretty unrealistic.

> There is a reason why we still have people working at McDonald's even though fully automating it has been possible for a couple of decades now.

Maybe the low salary is the reason? If it is a bit more costly to automate certain aspects of manual labor, then the low salaries might remove the incentive to do so. This is not the case for software engineering.

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