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HyperAgents: Self-referential self-improving agents

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Re: HyperAgents: Self-referential self-improving agents

#61

Post by Pausanias »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #27
ilaksh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a feedback loop. I've always felt that the most important part of engineering was feedback loops. Maybe nature is the greatest engineer ever?

The most important part of engineering is problem-solving, which feedback loops don't necessarily do. The reason we are here as engineers is: 2.5 billion years ago, the earth made cyanobacteria, which flourished, then flooded the earth with toxic oxygen, killing almost all life on the planet. The initial feedback loop didn't solve a problem, it destroyed a use case. That's not a solution to a problem that an engineer…

This process worked so spectacularly well that it eventually created human consciousness and the very concept of engineering... but I would never design a system that way because it killed version 1.0.

Re: HyperAgents: Self-referential self-improving agents

#63

Post by luma »

Jerrrrrrrry wrote: post #47
zoogeny wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> eventually an awareness would develop I am not sure how this is a necessary conclusion to the premises you provide.

Awareness would be any form of agency, goal seeking, or loss minimizing. As Briggs–Rauscher reactions can eventually lead to Belousov–Zhabotinsky reactions, the system can maintain homeostasis with its environment (and continuing to oscillate) by varying reactants in a loss minimizing fashion. This loss minimizing would be done during scarcity to limp towards an abundance phase. This is the mechanism that hypothetica…

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the work from the lab of Mike Levin at Tufts but I'm betting you'll find it interesting if not. Here's a taste https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6923654/

While I disagree with your notion that this is explicity due to gravity, the rest of your argument seems to align with some of this lab's work. Learning can be demonstrated on scales as low as a few molecules, way below what we would normally call "life".

Re: HyperAgents: Self-referential self-improving agents

#65

Post by iamandoni »

lukebuehler wrote: post #19
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #9

The paper is here - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.19461 This, IMO is the biggest insight into where we're at and where we're going: > Because both evaluation and self-modification are coding tasks, gains in coding ability can translate into gains in self-improvement ability. There's a thing that I've noticed early into LLMs: once they unlock one capability, you can use that capability to compose stuff and improve on oth…

Agree. It's code all the way down. The key is to give agents a substrate where they can code up new capabilities and then compose them meaningfully and safely. Larger composition, though, starts to run into typical software design problems, like dependency graphs, shared state, how to upgrade, etc. I've been working on this front for over two years now too: https://github.com/smartcomputer-ai/agent-os/

> Larger composition, though, starts to run into typical software design problems

I've been seeing the same thing. Where agents are great solving the immediate task, but as changes compound they run into software & architectural design problems. I created https://github.com/andonimichael/arxitect to help at least have coding agents self reflect on their software design. But I really like your approach to self-modification and improving the agent itself instead of just teaching it another skill in it's context.

Re: HyperAgents: Self-referential self-improving agents

#66

Post by FrustratedMonky »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #9

The paper is here - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.19461 This, IMO is the biggest insight into where we're at and where we're going: > Because both evaluation and self-modification are coding tasks, gains in coding ability can translate into gains in self-improvement ability. There's a thing that I've noticed early into LLMs: once they unlock one capability, you can use that capability to compose stuff and improve on oth…

IF they are self modifying. Is there also a big risk, that they cause a bug, to dumb themselves down, break themselves. How do they get back? Are they able to restore a backup of themselves, if a self modification is bad.

Or, are there two. One is modifying the other, observing results, before self applying.

Re: HyperAgents: Self-referential self-improving agents

#68

Post by dataviz1000 »

lukebuehler wrote: post #19
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #9

The paper is here - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.19461 This, IMO is the biggest insight into where we're at and where we're going: > Because both evaluation and self-modification are coding tasks, gains in coding ability can translate into gains in self-improvement ability. There's a thing that I've noticed early into LLMs: once they unlock one capability, you can use that capability to compose stuff and improve on oth…

Agree. It's code all the way down. The key is to give agents a substrate where they can code up new capabilities and then compose them meaningfully and safely. Larger composition, though, starts to run into typical software design problems, like dependency graphs, shared state, how to upgrade, etc. I've been working on this front for over two years now too: https://github.com/smartcomputer-ai/agent-os/

I’ve been working with Claude Code to create copies of itself using git worktrees, run an iteration and then update its instructions. It can reverse engineer every website I tested it on. I kept updating the instructions then started asking Claude to update itself. Then asked if could figure out who to iterate unsupervised. https://github.com/adam-s/intercept?tab=readme-ov-file#the-s...

Re: HyperAgents: Self-referential self-improving agents

#70

Post by [deleted] »

iamandoni wrote: post #65
lukebuehler wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. It's code all the way down. The key is to give agents a substrate where they can code up new capabilities and then compose them meaningfully and safely. Larger composition, though, starts to run into typical software design problems, like dependency graphs, shared state, how to upgrade, etc. I've been working on this front for over two years now too: https://github.com/smartcomputer-ai/agent-os/

> Larger composition, though, starts to run into typical software design problems I've been seeing the same thing. Where agents are great solving the immediate task, but as changes compound they run into software & architectural design problems. I created https://github.com/andonimichael/arxitect to help at least have coding agents self reflect on their software design. But I really like your approach to self-modific…

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