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

maginative.com

51–60 of 92 posts

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

#51
post #41

We shouldn't be surprised when capital tries to eat its children. It'd probably be best if we all learned some agriculture and opted for simpler lives, rebuilt our social capital (aka community) and learned to do leisure like sane people. The rat race has never thanked anyone for participating, not even software engineers.

Opting-out isn't an option when capital becomes capable of deploying (robotic or human) cops and soldiers to any point on earth in 30 minutes. At that point, the real power rests with whoever (or whatever) decides how to allocate capital and those who've opted out live and die only at their whim. Note that legal and political frameworks only need to be neutralized, not eliminated, for this to be effective. One can neutralize the legal system by injecting complexity and pricing out ordinary people from using it, and share small amounts of capital with legal leadership. One can neutralize the political framework by spending considerable capital on manufacturing consent, and improving return on that investment with technology.

Of course, such a solution isn't impossible. It may be that such a village, if left alone by circumstance and/or because it has an insider champion, may create such psychologically healthy and intellectually talented people that they may eventually challenge the greater status quo. Sounds like the premise of a YA mild dystopia novel!

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

#52
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.

It's the same reason that for 80 years after the invention of the commercial icemaker in 1842, the American ice-harvesting industry produced more frozen water than manufacturing plants. And the ice trade did not exist until 1806.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade

It was more economical to send people out to cut ice from a lake in Maine and ship it by rail to Chicago than it was to just freeze water from a local supply. It was also more reliable since the technology was mature, versus ice plants that often broke down when meatpackers needed a consistent supply.

There's no reason why this won't be the case for AI unless semiconductor manufacturing continues its exponential performance/cost growth. The demand for technologically obsolete goods and services do not instantly disappear when a superior product enters the market.

Human software engineers right now are more reliable than AIs for most price-points. This is true for most industries in which machine learning is present.

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

#53
post #38
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT4, as smart and impressive as it is, starts forgetting or confusing key instructions with as few as 500 tokens (in my experimentation). Practically speaking the advertised 32k context window could be a few orders of magnitude smaller depending on what you're asking it to do!

Did you see the Gemini 1.5 1M token demo? They upload the three.js library and ask it to make changes, which it does successfully and pretty quickly. I want LLMs to fail at my profession as much as everyone at risk of losing their jobs, but unless Google is lying, things are looking pretty grim. https://youtu.be/SSnsmqIj1MI?si=N0zYY_Zbbfz3KRWK

Yeah, LLMs seem exceptionally good at summarizing large amounts of structured data with a prompt at the end, like that YT demonstrates.

If you have a back-and-forth conversation, with the previous conversation chunks prepended as context to the next interaction, it will rapidly lose track of where you instructed it to spend its attention.

The manner in which the context is used seems to make a huge difference.

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

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, so it will be super fast/cheap to build more companies.

The people and skillsets to successfully run a company have little overlap with strong software engineers. It happens, but no where near the numbers of engineers out there. Plus if you kill off many engineers jobs, who is left to buy your products?

Let's go all back to trade school. I hear that plumbers and electricians are making a killing nowadays.

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

#55
post #44
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you see the Gemini 1.5 1M token demo? They upload the three.js library and ask it to make changes, which it does successfully and pretty quickly. I want LLMs to fail at my profession as much as everyone at risk of losing their jobs, but unless Google is lying, things are looking pretty grim. https://youtu.be/SSnsmqIj1MI?si=N0zYY_Zbbfz3KRWK

I didn't see Gemini, I saw other demos only to learn later on that they were staged.

Google seems to have learned from that demo this time and made very plain and upfront demos.

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

#56
post #49

Yeah, lets imagine that magic: Prompt: AI, production is down. Fix it. AI: working... 3 days later. CEO: Hey, dear contractor, our Production is down for 3 days - can you fix it ? Contactor: Sure, give me $500/hour and within 3 weeks it might work again. You know, you have 10mio SLOC, 1mio npm dependencies so it will take a 'bit' longer... Yes, its bit oversimplified, but imagine it ;)

It's easy to imagine because it already happened in the mid-late 00s with the first attempt at software dev cost reduction when companies tried outsourcing to cheap, underqualified labor in India, Bangladesh, etc.

Being the person who comes in to salvage a software disaster is a hell of a different career than a greenfield cloud startup dev or FAANG proto-pusher, but it can be extremely profitable. and yes, I suspect the demand for that type of software expert will be on the rise.

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

#57
post #20
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

Beyond the snark, this is basically it. It's the same reason the Roman Empire, despite all its technological prowess, never tried hard to automate relatively low-hanging-fruit tasks: because slaves were cheap, plentiful, and more flexible ("reprogrammable") than anything mechanical could ever be.

If it costs $1m p/y to run a machine that cooks burgers and fries, or $30k for an employee who can do that _and_ cover something else when someone else is ill, it's a no-brainer. But businesses had to discover that the hard way; until the 80s, most people were still convinced automation would win everywhere, because it had won (and won big) in manufacturing. A combination of factors, from the '80s onwards, made labor costs effectively fall, which created our reality where certain jobs are so cheap that automating them makes no sense.

The "problem" is that, in certain regions, software development costs reached a point where automation looks very, very appealing. If a machine costs 500k p/y to replace a few 150k p/y SWEs without all those pesky employment complications, businesses will happily choose "AWS AI CloudDeveloper"...

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

#58
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.

I don’t think you’re naive.

Providing detailed instructions to computers to accomplish human/business objectives is the hard part about being a programmer.

But the level of abstraction has been increasing. It started as physically flipping switches then machine code then assembly then structured programming then object oriented programming and so on.

I remember during the 1990s with objects and VB custom controls people were talking that businesses would just hire a bunch of high school students to work part time just snapping components together like Legos.

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

#60
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many architecture does a company need? Realistically if they succeed you'll be unemployed.

I mean, yes, but also management is a wayyy less skilled job that’s far easier to automate. That goes away shortly after we get a competent AI engineer. Business analysts are also incredibly vulnerable - why have a middle man if the machine understands your requirements in English/French/whatever?

> I mean, yes, but also management is a wayyy less skilled job that’s far easier to automate.

This is a pretty wild take. The job that is 99% dealing with human interactions is easier to automate than the job where you make a computer do what you want?

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