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When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

theregister.com

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Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

#41

Post by tgtweak »

I think it's impressive for what it is: this level of complexity being reached by an ai-only workflow. Previously, anything of modest complexity required a lot of human guidance - and even with that had some serious shortcomings and crutches. If you extrapolate that the models themselves, the frameworks for inter-model workflows, the tooling available to the models and the hardware running them are all accelerating - it's not hard to envision where this will get to, and that this is a notable achievement particlarly when comparing with the amount of effort and resources put into what we currently see in a browser engine: many decades and countless millions of man-hours.

Fully agree that the original authors made some unsubstantiated and unqualified claims about what was done - which is sad, because it was still a huge accomplishment as i see it.

Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

#42

Post by simonw »

mrob wrote: post #37
storystarling wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That implies a throughput of around 16 million tokens per second. Since coding agent loops are inherently sequential—you have to wait for the inference to finish before the next step—that volume seems architecturally impossible. You're bound by latency, not just cost.

The original post claimed they were "running hundreds of concurrent agents": https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents

It was 2,000 concurrent agents at peak.

I'd still be surprised if that added up to "trillions" of tokens. A trillion is a very big number.

Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

#43

Post by iainctduncan »

antonvs wrote: post #36

FTA: > tools like Cursor can be genuinely helpful as glorified autocomplete and refactoring assistants That suggests a fairly strong anti-AI bias by the author. Anyone who thinks that this is all AI coding tools are today is not actually using them seriously. That's not to say that this exercise wasn't overhyped, but a more useful, less biased article that's not trying to push an agenda would look at what went right,…

No, it suggests the sarcasm that is the Registers in house style. See the page tagline.... "Biting the hand that feeds IT"

Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

#44

Post by mikkupikku »

simonw wrote: post #42
mrob wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original post claimed they were "running hundreds of concurrent agents": https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents

It was 2,000 concurrent agents at peak. I'd still be surprised if that added up to "trillions" of tokens. A trillion is a very big number.

16 million a second across 2000 agents would be 8000 tokens per second per agent. This doesn't seem right to me.

Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

#45

Post by cube00 »

drob518 wrote: post #19

You would think a CEO with a product that caters to developers would know that everyone was going to clone the repo and check his work. He just squandered a whole lot of credibility.

> He just squandered a whole lot of credibility.

I've yet to see anyone in this space be negatively impacted by their outlandish claims.

They release a new model or add extra sub agents and the slate is wiped clean.

Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

#46

Post by kibwen »

Our modern economy is nearly entirely built on useless bullshit, this is just what it looks like when the ouroboros starts devouring its own tail. It doesn't matter that the product doesn't work; the hype is the product. In our collective nihilism, we have productized faith itself.

Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

#47

Post by mikkupikku »

simonw wrote: post #40
tyre wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish your recent interview had pushed much harder on this. It came across as politely not wanting to bring up how poorly this really went, even for what the engineer intended. They were making claims without the level of rigor to back them up. There was an opportunity to learn some difficult lessons, but—and I don’t think this was your intention—it came across to me as kind of access journalism; not wanting to step…

I just don't think that's the case. The claims they made really weren't that extreme. In the blog post they said: > To test this system, we pointed it at an ambitious goal: building a web browser from scratch. The agents ran for close to a week, writing over 1 million lines of code across 1,000 files. You can explore the source code on GitHub. > Despite the codebase size, new agents can still understand it and make m…

> That's mostly accurate too, especially the "it kind of works" bit. You can take exception to "from-scratch" claim if you like. It's a tweet, the lack of nuance isn't particularly surprising.

> In the overall genre of CEO's over-hyping their company's achievements this is a pretty weak example

I kind of agree, but kind of not. The tweet isn't too bad when read from an experienced engineer perspective, but if we're being real then the target audience was probably meant to be technically clueless investors who don't and can't understand the nuance.

Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

#48

Post by pessimizer »

Every single high-profile story that shows up on the feeds about how LLMs are just about there and coders are doomed, if you actually read them and are a programmer, seems like a story about how LLMs are bad and generate trash code that rarely even looks superficially good and definitely doesn't work.

There was a story going around about LLMs making minesweeper clones, and they were all terrible in extremely dumb ways. The headline wasn't obvious, so I thought the take that people were getting from it is that AI is making the same dumb mistakes that it was making a year ago. Nope. It was people ranting about how coders are going to be out of a job next week. Meanwhile, none of them can do a minesweeper clone with like 50 working examples online, maybe 8 things you have to do right to be perfect, and 9000 articles about minesweeper and even mathematical papers about minesweeper to make everything about the game and its purpose perfectly clear. And then AI generates buttons that don't do anything and timers that don't stop.

Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

#49

Post by mrguyorama »

drob518 wrote: post #19

You would think a CEO with a product that caters to developers would know that everyone was going to clone the repo and check his work. He just squandered a whole lot of credibility.

His target reader is management, not developers.

Management already doesn't trust developers in any way. Why would they believe you, who are clearly just trying to save your job, over a big company who clearly is the future!

Or do you trust your management to make the right decision?

Re: When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype

#50

Post by mbac32768 »

pencilcode wrote: post #30

Just had my manager submit 3 PRs in a language he doesn’t understand (rust) and hasn’t ran or tested and is demanding quick reviews for hundreds of LoCs. These are tools but some people are clueless..

It's only fair you ask an LLM to review it for you.
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