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Summary provided by summarization of the YouTube transcript, generated by ChatGPT, reviewed by Andy For the full show notes check out the blog at Video Game Tango! --- https://www.videogametango.com --- Indiana Jones Game and High PC Requirements The guys expressed enthusiasm for the upcoming Indiana Jones game, but the discussion quickly shifted to concerns over its demanding PC specs. The game requires an Intel i7 10700K or Ryzen 5 3600, 16–32GB of RAM, and high-end GPUs like the RTX 2060 or RX 6600, even for minimum settings. For ultra settings, players would need top-tier GPUs like the RTX 4080. The high system requirements are seen as indicative of poor optimization. Comparisons were drawn to Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2, with Red Dead praised for its visuals and optimization despite being older. Frustration was voiced about the increasing trend of prioritizing hardware power over optimization. Blizzard Updates – Warcraft and WoW Additional updates from Blizzard included news about Warcraft 1 & 2 remakes and player housing in World of Warcraft. Warcraft 1 & 2 are being remastered with higher resolutions and updated art. However, the original versions are being removed from platforms like GOG, sparking criticism. Blizzard announced that World of Warcraft would finally introduce long-requested player housing, although details are scarce. The discussion touched on GOG's legacy of successful optimization and their approach to preserving classic games for modern audiences. Updates on AAA Gaming Bubble and Laura Frier's Commentary Laura Frier, a former executive in the gaming industry, was discussed for her YouTube videos analyzing the AAA gaming space. Her videos touch on key issues like the mismanagement of major projects, "toxic positivity", and the industry's inability to align with gamer feedback. She criticizes AAA studios for not listening to gamers and instead relying on overly positive reviews from gaming media. The conversation also delved into societal issues like backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in gaming. Toxic masculinity and resistance to changes in the gaming industry were highlighted as ongoing challenges. Ubisoft's Decline and X Defiant Cancellation The guys discussed Ubisoft's decision to discontinue development on X Defiant, a free-to-play first-person shooter, due to poor market performance and profitability concerns. Ubisoft also shut down production studios in San Francisco, Osaka, and Sydney, with layoffs affecting 150 employees. The company's ongoing struggles were attributed to over-reliance on the games-as-a-service model, which is unpopular with many gamers. Broader criticism of Ubisoft included the underwhelming performance of Star Wars Outlaws and declining investor confidence, with their stock losing half its value in 2023. Intel's New Graphics Cards (Battle Mage Series) Intel's upcoming line of Arc graphics cards, code-named Battle Mage, was introduced as a potential disruptor in the graphics card market. The B570 and B580 models aim to compete with Nvidia's RTX 4060 at significantly lower prices. The B580 could offer a 10–40% performance boost over the RTX 4060 while being $100–$150 cheaper. These cards are targeted at the mid-tier budget market, making PC gaming more accessible. The guys expressed hope for Intel's success to increase competition in the GPU space and lower inflated prices. Indie Game Spotlight – Gnomes A unique indie game called Gnomes was highlighted for its creative mix of gameplay styles. Gnomes is a tower-defense game with roguelike elements and strategic resource management. Players build gnome villages while defending against waves of invading goblins. The game features a modular map system, synergies between different upgrades, and quirky aesthetics. Gameplay blends elements of Lemmings (UI), Loop Hero (strategic loop mechanics), and Luck Be a Landlord (meta-progression and upgrades). The guys praised the game's demo for its balance, fun mechanics, and whimsical vibe. They encouraged players to try the free demo available on Steam and speculated on a release within the coming months. Broader Gaming Industry Trends and Community Plans The discussion concluded with reflections on the gaming industry's struggles with innovation, reliance on PR over quality, and the need for more competition. The guys expressed nostalgia for the golden age of gaming when the market offered more diverse and polished titles. They plan to stream the PC Gaming Show on December 5th and the Game Awards on December 12th. Social games like Jackbox may be hosted during the holidays for friends and community members alike!
My guests today are Chetan Puttagunta and Modest Proposal. Chetan is a General Partner at venture firm Benchmark, while Modest Proposal is an anonymous guest who manages a large pool of capital in the public markets. Both are good friends and frequent guests on the show, but this is the first time they have appeared together. And the timing couldn't be better - we might be witnessing a pivotal shift in AI development as leading labs hit scaling limits and transition from pre-training to test-time compute. Together, we explore how this change could democratize AI development while reshaping the investment landscape across both public and private markets. Please enjoy this discussion with Chetan Puttagunta and Modest Proposal. My guests today For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Ramp. Ramp's mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Ramp is the fastest growing FinTech company in history and it's backed by more of my favorite past guests (at least 16 of them!) than probably any other company I'm aware of. It's also notable that many best-in-class businesses use Ramp—companies like Airbnb, Anduril, and Shopify, as well as investors like Sequoia Capital and Vista Equity. They use Ramp to manage their spending, automate tedious financial processes, and reinvest saved dollars and hours into growth. At Colossus and Positive Sum, we use Ramp for exactly the same reason. Go to Ramp.com/invest to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. – This episode is brought to you by Alphasense. AlphaSense has completely transformed the research process with cutting-edge AI technology and a vast collection of top-tier, reliable business content. Imagine completing your research five to ten times faster with search that delivers the most relevant results, helping you make high-conviction decisions with confidence. AlphaSense provides access to over 300 million premium documents, including company filings, earnings reports, press releases, and more from public and private companies. Invest Like the Best listeners can get a free trial now at Alpha-Sense.com/Invest and experience firsthand how AlphaSense and Tegas help you make smarter decisions faster. ----- Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com). Show Notes: (00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like the Best (00:05:30) Introduction to LLM Scaling Challenges (00:07:25) Synthetic Data and Test Time Compute (00:08:53) Implications of Test Time Compute (00:11:19) Public Tech Companies and AI Investments (00:16:58) Small Teams and Open Source Models (00:29:02) Strategic Positioning of Major AI Players (00:35:49) AGI and Future Prospects (00:46:50) AI Application Layer and Investment Opportunities (00:54:18) The Paradigm Shift in AI Reasoning (00:55:34) Investing in AI-Powered Solutions (00:58:46) Economic Impacts of AI Advancements (01:00:19) The Future of AI and Model Stability (01:02:52) Private Market Valuations and Compute Costs (01:05:05) Infrastructure and Utilization in AI (01:12:50) The Role of Hyperscalers and GPUs (01:18:02) The Evolution of AI Applications (01:27:56) Philosophical Questions on AGI and ASI (01:34:31) The Importance of Innovation Hubs
-Freaking sweet playstations startups are back: https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/2/24311112/playstation-30th-anniversary-psx-boot-sequence-ps5-update -MS asks GoG to delist Warcraft I-II: https://www.ign.com/articles/gog-delisting-warcraft-1-and-2-at-blizzards-request-but-promises-continued-support-and-a-discount-in-the-meantime -Game pickups during the sales -Intel is launching new GPUs: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/12/intel-targets-budget-friendly-1440p-gaming-with-249-and-219-arc-b500-gpus/ -Riot Games tightening the ToS. Off Platform conduct. https://www.gamesindustry.biz/riot-games-to-issue-penalties-for-off-platform-conduct -Ok… so have you seen Arcane on Netflix? https://www.gamesradar.com/entertainment/animation-shows/arcane-producer-has-the-final-say-on-explaining-the-netflix-shows-usd250-million-budget-we-are-a-game-company-we-didnt-lease-out-the-work/ Lando: Playing Slay the Spire!
In a world increasingly driven by AI access to high-powered computing is seeing unprecedented demand. Host Keith Townsend is joined by Dell Technologies' Director of Product Management, Saurabh Kapoor and Hot Aisle's CEO, Jon Stevens for this episode of Six Five On The Road at SC24. They share thoughts on empowering businesses with scalable custom supercomputing solutions. Tune in for more on
BLOCKBUSTER NEWS FROM INTEL Intel announces Arc B-series GPUs!!! CEO Pat Gelsinger "retires," but was really forced out by the board of directors Why? Theories include too-slow progress, major partner bailing on foundry, disagreements over keeping x86 design and foundry, etc. Windows All Quiet on the Windows Front No Insider builds last week. Thanks Thanksgiving! Today, a new Canary build with Win32 app updating in the Store Patch Tuesday is next week - this will be a big one The rest of December will be quiet too Microsoft: TPM 2.0 is "non-negotiable" in Windows And now, a long-threatened change: Watermark on the desktop of unsupported PCs PC sales slid 1.5 percent in Q3 after two quarters of "growth"/flat sales Samsung is killing DeX Phone Link is the new Dex. Interesting, given the partnership with Microsoft Plus, Google is FINALLY adding desktop capabilities to Android. This should have always come from the platform maker AI, Cloud FTC is investigating Microsoft for cloud licensing too - And about 16 other things apparently Microsoft: SHE HIT ME FIRST! Spotify Wrapped 2024 uses Notebook LM to create a personalized podcast for each customer OpenAI is solving the biggest problem with AI... its lack of advertising! The Browser Company's next browser is called Dia and it's all about AI. Does it have a chance? Xbox Xbox Year in Review is live Indiana Jones and more is coming to Game Pass in the first half of December Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is getting big reliability updates. Hopefully, Boeing is helping out here For some reason, Sony announces that it sold 160 million PlayStation 2 consoles Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Get out of the basement App pick of the week: Google Drive RunAs Radio this week: A SysAdmin Christmas with Rick Claus and Joey Snow Brown liquor pick of the week: Dewar's 8 Year Old Caribbean Smooth Rum Cask Finish Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: 1password.com/windowsweekly Melissa.com/twit veeam.com uscloud.com
BLOCKBUSTER NEWS FROM INTEL Intel announces Arc B-series GPUs!!! CEO Pat Gelsinger "retires," but was really forced out by the board of directors Why? Theories include too-slow progress, major partner bailing on foundry, disagreements over keeping x86 design and foundry, etc. Windows All Quiet on the Windows Front No Insider builds last week. Thanks Thanksgiving! Today, a new Canary build with Win32 app updating in the Store Patch Tuesday is next week - this will be a big one The rest of December will be quiet too Microsoft: TPM 2.0 is "non-negotiable" in Windows And now, a long-threatened change: Watermark on the desktop of unsupported PCs PC sales slid 1.5 percent in Q3 after two quarters of "growth"/flat sales Samsung is killing DeX Phone Link is the new Dex. Interesting, given the partnership with Microsoft Plus, Google is FINALLY adding desktop capabilities to Android. This should have always come from the platform maker AI, Cloud FTC is investigating Microsoft for cloud licensing too - And about 16 other things apparently Microsoft: SHE HIT ME FIRST! Spotify Wrapped 2024 uses Notebook LM to create a personalized podcast for each customer OpenAI is solving the biggest problem with AI... its lack of advertising! The Browser Company's next browser is called Dia and it's all about AI. Does it have a chance? Xbox Xbox Year in Review is live Indiana Jones and more is coming to Game Pass in the first half of December Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is getting big reliability updates. Hopefully, Boeing is helping out here For some reason, Sony announces that it sold 160 million PlayStation 2 consoles Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Get out of the basement App pick of the week: Google Drive RunAs Radio this week: A SysAdmin Christmas with Rick Claus and Joey Snow Brown liquor pick of the week: Dewar's 8 Year Old Caribbean Smooth Rum Cask Finish Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: 1password.com/windowsweekly Melissa.com/twit veeam.com uscloud.com
BLOCKBUSTER NEWS FROM INTEL Intel announces Arc B-series GPUs!!! CEO Pat Gelsinger "retires," but was really forced out by the board of directors Why? Theories include too-slow progress, major partner bailing on foundry, disagreements over keeping x86 design and foundry, etc. Windows All Quiet on the Windows Front No Insider builds last week. Thanks Thanksgiving! Today, a new Canary build with Win32 app updating in the Store Patch Tuesday is next week - this will be a big one The rest of December will be quiet too Microsoft: TPM 2.0 is "non-negotiable" in Windows And now, a long-threatened change: Watermark on the desktop of unsupported PCs PC sales slid 1.5 percent in Q3 after two quarters of "growth"/flat sales Samsung is killing DeX Phone Link is the new Dex. Interesting, given the partnership with Microsoft Plus, Google is FINALLY adding desktop capabilities to Android. This should have always come from the platform maker AI, Cloud FTC is investigating Microsoft for cloud licensing too - And about 16 other things apparently Microsoft: SHE HIT ME FIRST! Spotify Wrapped 2024 uses Notebook LM to create a personalized podcast for each customer OpenAI is solving the biggest problem with AI... its lack of advertising! The Browser Company's next browser is called Dia and it's all about AI. Does it have a chance? Xbox Xbox Year in Review is live Indiana Jones and more is coming to Game Pass in the first half of December Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is getting big reliability updates. Hopefully, Boeing is helping out here For some reason, Sony announces that it sold 160 million PlayStation 2 consoles Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Get out of the basement App pick of the week: Google Drive RunAs Radio this week: A SysAdmin Christmas with Rick Claus and Joey Snow Brown liquor pick of the week: Dewar's 8 Year Old Caribbean Smooth Rum Cask Finish Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: 1password.com/windowsweekly Melissa.com/twit veeam.com uscloud.com
BLOCKBUSTER NEWS FROM INTEL Intel announces Arc B-series GPUs!!! CEO Pat Gelsinger "retires," but was really forced out by the board of directors Why? Theories include too-slow progress, major partner bailing on foundry, disagreements over keeping x86 design and foundry, etc. Windows All Quiet on the Windows Front No Insider builds last week. Thanks Thanksgiving! Today, a new Canary build with Win32 app updating in the Store Patch Tuesday is next week - this will be a big one The rest of December will be quiet too Microsoft: TPM 2.0 is "non-negotiable" in Windows And now, a long-threatened change: Watermark on the desktop of unsupported PCs PC sales slid 1.5 percent in Q3 after two quarters of "growth"/flat sales Samsung is killing DeX Phone Link is the new Dex. Interesting, given the partnership with Microsoft Plus, Google is FINALLY adding desktop capabilities to Android. This should have always come from the platform maker AI, Cloud FTC is investigating Microsoft for cloud licensing too - And about 16 other things apparently Microsoft: SHE HIT ME FIRST! Spotify Wrapped 2024 uses Notebook LM to create a personalized podcast for each customer OpenAI is solving the biggest problem with AI... its lack of advertising! The Browser Company's next browser is called Dia and it's all about AI. Does it have a chance? Xbox Xbox Year in Review is live Indiana Jones and more is coming to Game Pass in the first half of December Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is getting big reliability updates. Hopefully, Boeing is helping out here For some reason, Sony announces that it sold 160 million PlayStation 2 consoles Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Get out of the basement App pick of the week: Google Drive RunAs Radio this week: A SysAdmin Christmas with Rick Claus and Joey Snow Brown liquor pick of the week: Dewar's 8 Year Old Caribbean Smooth Rum Cask Finish Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: 1password.com/windowsweekly Melissa.com/twit veeam.com uscloud.com
Marvell (MRVL) soared to a new all-time high after posting a strong earnings beat and guidance. William Kerwin says the company has established an optimal chip portfolio for GPUs, while David Nicholson notes accelerating data center and custom silicon revenue. They also weigh where the rising A.I. star stands compared to giants like Nvidia (NVDA). ======== Schwab Network ======== Empowering every investor and trader, every market day. Subscribe to the Market Minute newsletter - https://schwabnetwork.com/subscribe Download the iOS app - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/schwab-network/id1460719185 Download the Amazon Fire Tv App - https://www.amazon.com/TD-Ameritrade-Network/dp/B07KRD76C7 Watch on Sling - https://watch.sling.com/1/asset/191928615bd8d47686f94682aefaa007/watch Watch on Vizio - https://www.vizio.com/en/watchfreeplus-explore Watch on DistroTV - https://www.distro.tv/live/schwab-network/ Follow us on X – https://twitter.com/schwabnetwork Follow us on Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/schwabnetwork Follow us on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/schwab-network/ About Schwab Network - https://schwabnetwork.com/about
BLOCKBUSTER NEWS FROM INTEL Intel announces Arc B-series GPUs!!! CEO Pat Gelsinger "retires," but was really forced out by the board of directors Why? Theories include too-slow progress, major partner bailing on foundry, disagreements over keeping x86 design and foundry, etc. Windows All Quiet on the Windows Front No Insider builds last week. Thanks Thanksgiving! Today, a new Canary build with Win32 app updating in the Store Patch Tuesday is next week - this will be a big one The rest of December will be quiet too Microsoft: TPM 2.0 is "non-negotiable" in Windows And now, a long-threatened change: Watermark on the desktop of unsupported PCs PC sales slid 1.5 percent in Q3 after two quarters of "growth"/flat sales Samsung is killing DeX Phone Link is the new Dex. Interesting, given the partnership with Microsoft Plus, Google is FINALLY adding desktop capabilities to Android. This should have always come from the platform maker AI, Cloud FTC is investigating Microsoft for cloud licensing too - And about 16 other things apparently Microsoft: SHE HIT ME FIRST! Spotify Wrapped 2024 uses Notebook LM to create a personalized podcast for each customer OpenAI is solving the biggest problem with AI... its lack of advertising! The Browser Company's next browser is called Dia and it's all about AI. Does it have a chance? Xbox Xbox Year in Review is live Indiana Jones and more is coming to Game Pass in the first half of December Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is getting big reliability updates. Hopefully, Boeing is helping out here For some reason, Sony announces that it sold 160 million PlayStation 2 consoles Tips and Picks Tip of the week: Get out of the basement App pick of the week: Google Drive RunAs Radio this week: A SysAdmin Christmas with Rick Claus and Joey Snow Brown liquor pick of the week: Dewar's 8 Year Old Caribbean Smooth Rum Cask Finish Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Get episodes ad-free with Club TWiT at https://twit.tv/clubtwit Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Sponsors: 1password.com/windowsweekly Melissa.com/twit veeam.com uscloud.com
AI Unraveled: Latest AI News & Trends, Master GPT, Gemini, Generative AI, LLMs, Prompting, GPT Store
A Daily Chronicle of AI Innovations on December 03rd 2024
AI Unraveled: Latest AI News & Trends, Master GPT, Gemini, Generative AI, LLMs, Prompting, GPT Store
A Daily Chronicle of AI Innovations on December 02nd 2024
The full schedule for Latent Space LIVE! at NeurIPS has been announced, featuring Best of 2024 overview talks for the AI Startup Landscape, Computer Vision, Open Models, Transformers Killers, Synthetic Data, Agents, and Scaling, and speakers from Sarah Guo of Conviction, Roboflow, AI2/Meta, Recursal/Together, HuggingFace, OpenHands and SemiAnalysis. Join us for the IRL event/Livestream! Alessio will also be holding a meetup at AWS Re:Invent in Las Vegas this Wednesday. See our new Events page for dates of AI Engineer Summit, Singapore, and World's Fair in 2025. LAST CALL for questions for our big 2024 recap episode! Submit questions and messages on Speakpipe here for a chance to appear on the show!When we first observed that GPT Wrappers are Good, Actually, we did not even have Bolt on our radar. Since we recorded our Anthropic episode discussing building Agents with the new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Bolt.new (by Stackblitz) has easily cleared the $8m ARR bar, repeating and accelerating its initial $4m feat.There are very many AI code generators and VS Code forks out there, but Bolt probably broke through initially because of its incredible zero shot low effort app generation:But as we explain in the pod, Bolt also emphasized deploy (Netlify)/ backend (Supabase)/ fullstack capabilities on top of Stackblitz's existing WebContainer full-WASM-powered-developer-environment-in-the-browser tech. Since then, the team has been shipping like mad (with weekly office hours), with bugfixing, full screen, multi-device, long context, diff based edits (using speculative decoding like we covered in Inference, Fast and Slow).All of this has captured the imagination of low/no code builders like Greg Isenberg and many others on YouTube/TikTok/Reddit/X/Linkedin etc:Just as with Fireworks, our relationship with Bolt/Stackblitz goes a bit deeper than normal - swyx advised the launch and got a front row seat to this epic journey, as well as demoed it with Realtime Voice at the recent OpenAI Dev Day. So we are very proud to be the first/closest to tell the full open story of Bolt/Stackblitz!Flow Engineering + Qodo/AlphaCodium UpdateIn year 2 of the pod we have been on a roll getting former guests to return as guest cohosts (Harrison Chase, Aman Sanger, Jon Frankle), and it was a pleasure to catch Itamar Friedman back on the pod, giving us an update on all things Qodo and Testing Agents from our last catchup a year and a half ago:Qodo (they renamed in September) went viral in early January this year with AlphaCodium (paper here, code here) beating DeepMind's AlphaCode with high efficiency:With a simple problem solving code agent:* The first step is to have the model reason about the problem. They describe it using bullet points and focus on the goal, inputs, outputs, rules, constraints, and any other relevant details.* Then, they make the model reason about the public tests and come up with an explanation of why the input leads to that particular output. * The model generates two to three potential solutions in text and ranks them in terms of correctness, simplicity, and robustness. * Then, it generates more diverse tests for the problem, covering cases not part of the original public tests. * Iteratively, pick a solution, generate the code, and run it on a few test cases. * If the tests fail, improve the code and repeat the process until the code passes every test.swyx has previously written similar thoughts on types vs tests for putting bounds on program behavior, but AlphaCodium extends this to AI generated tests and code.More recently, Itamar has also shown that AlphaCodium's techniques also extend well to the o1 models:Making Flow Engineering a useful technique to improve code model performance on every model. This is something we see AI Engineers uniquely well positioned to do compared to ML Engineers/Researchers.Full Video PodcastLike and subscribe!Show Notes* Itamar* Qodo* First episode* Eric* Bolt* StackBlitz* Thinkster* AlphaCodium* WebContainersChapters* 00:00:00 Introductions & Updates* 00:06:01 Generic vs. Specific AI Agents* 00:07:40 Maintaining vs Creating with AI* 00:17:46 Human vs Agent Computer Interfaces* 00:20:15 Why Docker doesn't work for Bolt* 00:24:23 Creating Testing and Code Review Loops* 00:28:07 Bolt's Task Breakdown Flow* 00:31:04 AI in Complex Enterprise Environments* 00:41:43 AlphaCodium* 00:44:39 Strategies for Breaking Down Complex Tasks* 00:45:22 Building in Open Source* 00:50:35 Choosing a product as a founder* 00:59:03 Reflections on Bolt Success* 01:06:07 Building a B2C GTM* 01:18:11 AI Capabilities and Pricing Tiers* 01:20:28 What makes Bolt unique* 01:23:07 Future Growth and Product Development* 01:29:06 Competitive Landscape in AI Engineering* 01:30:01 Advice to Founders and Embracing AI* 01:32:20 Having a baby and completing an Iron ManTranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Smol.ai.Swyx [00:00:12]: Hey, and today we're still in our sort of makeshift in-between studio, but we're very delighted to have a former returning guest host, Itamar. Welcome back.Itamar [00:00:21]: Great to be here after a year or more. Yeah, a year and a half.Swyx [00:00:24]: You're one of our earliest guests on Agents. Now you're CEO co-founder of Kodo. Right. Which has just been renamed. You also raised a $40 million Series A, and we can get caught up on everything, but we're also delighted to have our new guest, Eric. Welcome.Eric [00:00:42]: Thank you. Excited to be here. Should I say Bolt or StackBlitz?Swyx [00:00:45]: Like, is it like its own company now or?Eric [00:00:47]: Yeah. Bolt's definitely bolt.new. That's the thing that we're probably the most known for, I imagine, at this point.Swyx [00:00:54]: Which is ridiculous to say because you were working at StackBlitz for so long.Eric [00:00:57]: Yeah. I mean, within a week, we were doing like double the amount of traffic. And StackBlitz had been online for seven years, and we were like, what? But anyways, yeah. So we're StackBlitz, the company behind bolt.new. If you've heard of bolt.new, that's our stuff. Yeah.Swyx [00:01:12]: Yeah.Itamar [00:01:13]: Excellent. I see, by the way, that the founder mode, you need to know to capture opportunities. So kudos on doing that, right? You're working on some technology, and then suddenly you can exploit that to a new world. Yeah.Eric [00:01:24]: Totally. And I think, well, not to jump, but 100%, I mean, a couple of months ago, we had the idea for Bolt earlier this year, but we haven't really shared this too much publicly. But we actually had tried to build it with some of those state-of-the-art models back in January, February, you can kind of imagine which, and they just weren't good enough to actually do the code generation where the code was accurate and it was fast and whatever have you without a ton of like rag, but then there was like issues with that. So we put it on the shelf and then we got kind of a sneak peek of some of the new models that have come out in the past couple of months now. And so once we saw that, once we actually saw the code gen from it, we were like, oh my God, like, okay, we can build a product around this. And so that was really the impetus of us building the thing. But with that, it was StackBlitz, the core StackBlitz product the past seven years has been an IDE for developers. So the entire user experience flow we've built up just didn't make sense. And so when we kind of went out to build Bolt, we just thought, you know, if we were inventing our product today, what would the interface look like given what is now possible with the AI code gen? And so there's definitely a lot of conversations we had internally, but you know, just kind of when we logically laid it out, we were like, yeah, I think it makes sense to just greenfield a new thing and let's see what happens. If it works great, then we'll figure it out. If it doesn't work great, then it'll get deleted at some point. So that's kind of how it actually came to be.Swyx [00:02:49]: I'll mention your background a little bit. You were also founder of Thinkster before you started StackBlitz. So both of you are second time founders. Both of you have sort of re-founded your company recently. Yours was more of a rename. I think a slightly different direction as well. And then we can talk about both. Maybe just chronologically, should we get caught up on where Kodo is first and then you know, just like what people should know since the last pod? Sure.Itamar [00:03:12]: The last pod was two months after we launched and we basically had the vision that we talked about. The idea that software development is about specification, test and code, etc. We are more on the testing part as in essence, we think that if you solve testing, you solve software development. The beautiful chart that we'll put up on screen. And testing is a really big field, like there are many dimensions, unit testing, the level of the component, how big it is, how large it is. And then there is like different type of testing, is it regression or smoke or whatever. So back then we only had like one ID extension with unit tests as in focus. One and a half year later, first ID extension supports more type of testing as context aware. We index local, local repos, but also 10,000s of repos for Fortune 500 companies. We have another agent, another tool that is called, the pure agent is the open source and the commercial one is CodoMerge. And then we have another open source called CoverAgent, which is not yet a commercial product coming very soon. It's very impressive. It could be that already people are approving automated pull requests that they don't even aware in really big open sources. So once we have enough of these, we will also launch another agent. So for the first one and a half year, what we did is grew in our offering and mostly on the side of, does this code actually works, testing, code review, et cetera. And we believe that's the critical milestone that needs to be achieved to actually have the AI engineer for enterprise software. And then like for the first year was everything bottom up, getting to 1 million installation. 2024, that was 2023, 2024 was starting to monetize, to feel like how it is to make the first buck. So we did the teams offering, it went well with a thousand of teams, et cetera. And then we started like just a few months ago to do enterprise with everything you need, which is a lot of things that discussed in the last post that was just released by Codelm. So that's how we call it at Codelm. Just opening the brackets, our company name was Codelm AI, and we renamed to Codo and we call our models Codelm. So back to my point, so we started Enterprise Motion and already have multiple Fortune 100 companies. And then with that, we raised a series of $40 million. And what's exciting about it is that enables us to develop more agents. That's our focus. I think it's very different. We're not coming very soon with an ID or something like that.Swyx [00:06:01]: You don't want to fork this code?Itamar [00:06:03]: Maybe we'll fork JetBrains or something just to be different.Swyx [00:06:08]: I noticed that, you know, I think the promise of general purpose agents has kind of died. Like everyone is doing kind of what you're doing. There's Codogen, Codomerge, and then there's a third one. What's the name of it?Itamar [00:06:17]: Yeah. Codocover. Cover. Which is like a commercial version of a cover agent. It's coming soon.Swyx [00:06:23]: Yeah. It's very similar with factory AI, also doing like droids. They all have special purpose doing things, but people don't really want general purpose agents. Right. The last time you were here, we talked about AutoGBT, the biggest thing of 2023. This year, not really relevant anymore. And I think it's mostly just because when you give me a general purpose agent, I don't know what to do with it.Eric [00:06:42]: Yeah.Itamar [00:06:43]: I totally agree with that. We're seeing it for a while and I think it will stay like that despite the computer use, et cetera, that supposedly can just replace us. You can just like prompt it to be, hey, now be a QA or be a QA person or a developer. I still think that there's a few reasons why you see like a dedicated agent. Again, I'm a bit more focused, like my head is more on complex software for big teams and enterprise, et cetera. And even think about permissions and what are the data sources and just the same way you manage permissions for users. Developers, you probably want to have dedicated guardrails and dedicated approvals for agents. I intentionally like touched a point on not many people think about. And of course, then what you can think of, like maybe there's different tools, tool use, et cetera. But just the first point by itself is a good reason why you want to have different agents.Alessio [00:07:40]: Just to compare that with Bot.new, you're almost focused on like the application is very complex and now you need better tools to kind of manage it and build on top of it. On Bot.new, it's almost like I was using it the other day. There's basically like, hey, look, I'm just trying to get started. You know, I'm not very opinionated on like how you're going to implement this. Like this is what I want to do. And you build a beautiful app with it. What people ask as the next step, you know, going back to like the general versus like specific, have you had people say, hey, you know, this is great to start, but then I want a specific Bot.new dot whatever else to do a more vertical integration and kind of like development or what's the, what do people say?Eric [00:08:18]: Yeah. I think, I think you kind of hit the, hit it head on, which is, you know, kind of the way that we've, we've kind of talked about internally is it's like people are using Bolt to go from like 0.0 to 1.0, like that's like kind of the biggest unlock that Bolt has versus most other things out there. I mean, I think that's kind of what's, what's very unique about Bolt. I think the, you know, the working on like existing enterprise applications is, I mean, it's crazy important because, you know, there's a, you look, when you look at the fortune 500, I mean, these code bases, some of these have been around for 20, 30 plus years. And so it's important to be going from, you know, 101.3 to 101.4, et cetera. I think for us, so what's been actually pretty interesting is we see there's kind of two different users for us that are coming in and it's very distinct. It's like people that are developers already. And then there's people that have never really written software and more if they have, it's been very, very minimal. And so in the first camp, what these developers are doing, like to go from zero to one, they're coming to Bolt and then they're ejecting the thing to get up or just downloading it and, you know, opening cursor, like whatever to, to, you know, keep iterating on the thing. And sometimes they'll bring it back to Bolt to like add in a huge piece of functionality or something. Right. But for the people that don't know how to code, they're actually just, they, they live in this thing. And that was one of the weird things when we launched is, you know, within a day of us being online, one of the most popular YouTube videos, and there's been a ton since, which was, you know, there's like, oh, Bolt is the cursor killer. And I originally saw the headlines and I was like, thanks for the views. I mean, I don't know. This doesn't make sense to me. That's not, that's not what we kind of thought.Swyx [00:09:44]: It's how YouTubers talk to each other. Well, everything kills everything else.Eric [00:09:47]: Totally. But what blew my mind was that there was any comparison because it's like cursor is a, is a local IDE product. But when, when we actually kind of dug into it and we, and we have people that are using our product saying this, I'm not using cursor. And I was like, what? And it turns out there are hundreds of thousands of people that we have seen that we're using cursor and we're trying to build apps with that where they're not traditional software does, but we're heavily leaning on the AI. And as you can imagine, it is very complicated, right? To do that with cursor. So when Bolt came out, they're like, wow, this thing's amazing because it kind of inverts the complexity where it's like, you know, it's not an IDE, it's, it's a, it's a chat-based sort of interface that we have. So that's kind of the split, which is rather interesting. We've had like the first startups now launch off of Bolt entirely where this, you know, tomorrow I'm doing a live stream with this guy named Paul, who he's built an entire CRM using this thing and you know, with backend, et cetera. And people have made their first money on the internet period, you know, launching this with Stripe or whatever have you. So that's, that's kind of the two main, the two main categories of folks that we see using Bolt though.Itamar [00:10:51]: I agree that I don't understand the comparison. It doesn't make sense to me. I think like we have like two type of families of tools. One is like we re-imagine the software development. I think Bolt is there and I think like a cursor is more like a evolution of what we already have. It's like taking the IDE and it's, it's amazing and it's okay, let's, let's adapt the IDE to an era where LLMs can do a lot for us. And Bolt is more like, okay, let's rethink everything totally. And I think we see a few tools there, like maybe Vercel, Veo and maybe Repl.it in that area. And then in the area of let's expedite, let's change, let's, let's progress with what we already have. You can see Cursor and Kodo, but we're different between ourselves, Cursor and Kodo, but definitely I think that comparison doesn't make sense.Alessio [00:11:42]: And just to set the context, this is not a Twitter demo. You've made 4 million of revenue in four weeks. So this is, this is actually working, you know, it's not a, what, what do you think that is? Like, there's been so many people demoing coding agents on Twitter and then it doesn't really work. And then you guys were just like, here you go, it's live, go use it, pay us for it. You know, is there anything in the development that was like interesting and maybe how that compares to building your own agents?Eric [00:12:08]: We had no idea, honestly, like we, we, we've been pretty blown away and, and things have just kind of continued to grow faster since then. We're like, oh, today is week six. So I, I kind of came back to the point you just made, right, where it's, you, you kind of outlined, it's like, there's kind of this new market of like kind of rethinking the software development and then there's heavily augmenting existing developers. I think that, you know, both of which are, you know, AI code gen being extremely good, it's allowed existing developers, it's allowing existing developers to camera out software far faster than they could have ever before, right? It's like the ultimate power tool for an existing developer. But this code gen stuff is now so good. And then, and we saw this over the past, you know, from the beginning of the year when we tried to first build, it's actually lowered the barrier to people that, that aren't traditionally software engineers. But the kind of the key thing is if you kind of think about it from, imagine you've never written software before, right? My co-founder and I, he and I grew up down the street from each other in Chicago. We learned how to code when we were 13 together and we've been building stuff ever since. And this is back in like the mid 2000s or whatever, you know, there was nothing for free to learn from online on the internet and how to code. For our 13th birthdays, we asked our parents for, you know, O'Reilly books cause you couldn't get this at the library, right? And so instead of like an Xbox, we got, you know, programming books. But the hardest part for everyone learning to code is getting an environment set up locally, you know? And so when we built StackBlitz, like kind of the key thesis, like seven years ago, the insight we had was that, Hey, it seems like the browser has a lot of new APIs like WebAssembly and service workers, et cetera, where you could actually write an operating system that ran inside the browser that could boot in milliseconds. And you, you know, basically there's this missing capability of the web. Like the web should be able to build apps for the web, right? You should be able to build the web on the web. Every other platform has that, Visual Studio for Windows, Xcode for Mac. The web has no built in primitive for this. And so just like our built in kind of like nerd instinct on this was like, that seems like a huge hole and it's, you know, it will be very valuable or like, you know, very valuable problem to solve. So if you want to set up that environments, you know, this is what we spent the past seven years doing. And the reality is existing developers have running locally. They already know how to set up that environment. So the problem isn't as acute for them. When we put Bolt online, we took that technology called WebContainer and married it with these, you know, state of the art frontier models. And the people that have the most pain with getting stuff set up locally is people that don't code. I think that's been, you know, really the big explosive reason is no one else has been trying to make dev environments work inside of a browser tab, you know, for the past if since ever, other than basically our company, largely because there wasn't an immediate demand or need. So I think we kind of find ourselves at the right place at the right time. And again, for this market of people that don't know how to write software, you would kind of expect that you should be able to do this without downloading something to your computer in the same way that, hey, I don't have to download Photoshop now to make designs because there's Figma. I don't have to download Word because there's, you know, Google Docs. They're kind of looking at this as that sort of thing, right? Which was kind of the, you know, our impetus and kind of vision from the get-go. But you know, the code gen, the AI code gen stuff that's come out has just been, you know, an order of magnitude multiplier on how magic that is, right? So that's kind of my best distillation of like, what is going on here, you know?Alessio [00:15:21]: And you can deploy too, right?Eric [00:15:22]: Yeah.Alessio [00:15:23]: Yeah.Eric [00:15:24]: And so that's, what's really cool is it's, you know, we have deployment built in with Netlify and this is actually, I think, Sean, you actually built this at Netlify when you were there. Yeah. It's one of the most brilliant integrations actually, because, you know, effectively the API that Sean built, maybe you can speak to it, but like as a provider, we can just effectively give files to Netlify without the user even logging in and they have a live website. And if they want to keep, hold onto it, they can click a link and claim it to their Netlify account. But it basically is just this really magic experience because when you come to Bolt, you say, I want a website. Like my mom, 70, 71 years old, made her first website, you know, on the internet two weeks ago, right? It was about her nursing days.Swyx [00:16:03]: Oh, that's fantastic though. It wouldn't have been made.Eric [00:16:06]: A hundred percent. Cause even in, you know, when we've had a lot of people building personal, like deeply personal stuff, like in the first week we launched this, the sales guy from the East Coast, you know, replied to a tweet of mine and he said, thank you so much for building this to your team. His daughter has a medical condition and so for her to travel, she has to like line up donors or something, you know, so ahead of time. And so he actually used Bolt to make a website to do that, to actually go and send it to folks in the region she was going to travel to ahead of time. I was really touched by it, but I also thought like, why, you know, why didn't he use like Wix or Squarespace? Right? I mean, this is, this is a solved problem, quote unquote, right? And then when I thought, I actually use Squarespace for my, for my, uh, the wedding website for my wife and I, like back in 2021, so I'm familiar, you know, it was, it was faster. I know how to code. I was like, this is faster. Right. And I thought back and I was like, there's a whole interface you have to learn how to use. And it's actually not that simple. There's like a million things you can configure in that thing. When you come to Bolt, there's a, there's a text box. You just say, I need a, I need a wedding website. Here's the date. Here's where it is. And here's a photo of me and my wife, put it somewhere relevant. It's actually the simplest way. And that's what my, when my mom came, she said, uh, I'm Pat Simons. I was a nurse in the seventies, you know, and like, here's the things I did and a website came out. So coming back to why is this such a, I think, why are we seeing this sort of growth? It's, this is the simplest interface I think maybe ever created to actually build it, a deploy a website. And then that website, my mom made, she's like, okay, this looks great. And there's, there's one button, you just click it, deploy, and it's live and you can buy a domain name, attach it to it. And you know, it's as simple as it gets, it's getting even simpler with some of the stuff we're working on. But anyways, so that's, it's, it's, uh, it's been really interesting to see some of the usage like that.Swyx [00:17:46]: I can offer my perspective. So I, you know, I probably should have disclosed a little bit that, uh, I'm a, uh, stack list investor.Alessio [00:17:53]: Canceled the episode. I know, I know. Don't play it now. Pause.Eric actually reached out to ShowMeBolt before the launch. And we, you know, we talked a lot about, like, the framing of, of what we're going to talk about how we marketed the thing, but also, like, what we're So that's what Bolt was going to need, like a whole sort of infrastructure.swyx: Netlify, I was a maintainer but I won't take claim for the anonymous upload. That's actually the origin story of Netlify. We can have Matt Billman talk about it, but that was [00:18:00] how Netlify started. You could drag and drop your zip file or folder from your desktop onto a website, it would have a live URL with no sign in.swyx: And so that was the origin story of Netlify. And it just persists to today. And it's just like it's really nice, interesting that both Bolt and CognitionDevIn and a bunch of other sort of agent type startups, they all use Netlify to deploy because of this one feature. They don't really care about the other features.swyx: But, but just because it's easy for computers to use and talk to it, like if you build an interface for computers specifically, that it's easy for them to Navigate, then they will be used in agents. And I think that's a learning that a lot of developer tools companies are having. That's my bolt launch story and now if I say all that stuff.swyx: And I just wanted to come back to, like, the Webcontainers things, right? Like, I think you put a lot of weight on the technical modes. I think you also are just like, very good at product. So you've, you've like, built a better agent than a lot of people, the rest of us, including myself, who have tried to build these things, and we didn't get as far as you did.swyx: Don't shortchange yourself on products. But I think specifically [00:19:00] on, on infra, on like the sandboxing, like this is a thing that people really want. Alessio has Bax E2B, which we'll have on at some point, talking about like the sort of the server full side. But yours is, you know, inside of the browser, serverless.swyx: It doesn't cost you anything to serve one person versus a million people. It doesn't, doesn't cost you anything. I think that's interesting. I think in theory, we should be able to like run tests because you can run the full backend. Like, you can run Git, you can run Node, you can run maybe Python someday.swyx: We talked about this. But ideally, you should be able to have a fully gentic loop, running code, seeing the errors, correcting code, and just kind of self healing, right? Like, I mean, isn't that the dream?Eric: Totally.swyx: Yeah,Eric: totally. At least in bold, we've got, we've got a good amount of that today. I mean, there's a lot more for us to do, but one of the nice things, because like in web container, you know, there's a lot of kind of stuff you go Google like, you know, turn docker container into wasm.Eric: You'll find a lot of stuff out there that will do that. The problem is it's very big, it's slow, and that ruins the experience. And so what we ended up doing is just writing an operating system from [00:20:00] scratch that was just purpose built to, you know, run in a browser tab. And the reason being is, you know, Docker 2 awesome things will give you an image that's like out 60 to 100 megabits, you know, maybe more, you know, and our, our OS, you know, kind of clocks in, I think, I think we're in like a, maybe, maybe a megabyte or less or something like that.Eric: I mean, it's, it's, you know, really, really, you know, stripped down.swyx: This is basically the task involved is I understand that it's. Mapping every single, single Linux call to some kind of web, web assembly implementation,Eric: but more or less, and, and then there's a lot of things actually, like when you're looking at a dev environment, there's a lot of things that you don't need that a traditional OS is gonna have, right?Eric: Like, you know audio drivers or you like, there's just like, there's just tons of things. Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. That goes . Yeah. You can just kind, you can, you can kind of tos them. Or alternatively, what you can do is you can actually be the nice thing. And this is, this kind of comes back to the origins of browsers, which is, you know, they're, they're at the beginning of the web and, you know, the late nineties, there was two very different kind of visions for the web where Alan Kay vehemently [00:21:00] disagree with the idea that should be document based, which is, you know, Tim Berners Lee, you know, that, and that's kind of what ended up winning, winning was this document based kind of browsing documents on the web thing.Eric: Alan Kay, he's got this like very famous quote where he said, you know, you want web browsers to be mini operating systems. They should download little mini binaries and execute with like a little mini virtualized operating system in there. And what's kind of interesting about the history, not to geek out on this aspect, what's kind of interesting about the history is both of those folks ended up being right.Eric: Documents were actually the pragmatic way that the web worked. Was, you know, became the most ubiquitous platform in the world to the degree now that this is why WebAssembly has been invented is that we're doing, we need to do more low level things in a browser, same thing with WebGPU, et cetera. And so all these APIs, you know, to build an operating system came to the browser.Eric: And that was actually the realization we had in 2017 was, holy heck, like you can actually, you know, service workers, which were designed for allowing your app to work offline. That was the kind of the key one where it was like, wait a second, you can actually now run. Web servers within a [00:22:00] browser, like you can run a server that you open up.Eric: That's wild. Like full Node. js. Full Node. js. Like that capability. Like, I can have a URL that's programmatically controlled. By a web application itself, boom. Like the web can build the web. The primitive is there. Everyone at the time, like we talked to people that like worked on, you know Chrome and V8 and they were like, uhhhh.Eric: You know, like I don't know. But it's one of those things you just kind of have to go do it to find out. So we spent a couple of years, you know, working on it and yeah. And, and, and got to work in back in 2021 is when we kind of put the first like data of web container online. Butswyx: in partnership with Google, right?swyx: Like Google actually had to help you get over the finish line with stuff.Eric: A hundred percent, because well, you know, over the years of when we were doing the R and D on the thing. Kind of the biggest challenge, the two ways that you can kind of test how powerful and capable a platform are, the two types of applications are one, video games, right, because they're just very compute intensive, a lot of calculations that have to happen, right?Eric: The second one are IDEs, because you're talking about actually virtualizing the actual [00:23:00] runtime environment you are in to actually build apps on top of it, which requires sophisticated capabilities, a lot of access to data. You know, a good amount of compute power, right, to effectively, you know, building app in app sort of thing.Eric: So those, those are the stress tests. So if your platform is missing stuff, those are the things where you find out. Those are, those are the people building games and IDEs. They're the ones filing bugs on operating system level stuff. And for us, browser level stuff.Eric [00:23:47]: yeah, what ended up happening is we were just hammering, you know, the Chromium bug tracker, and they're like, who are these guys? Yeah. And, and they were amazing because I mean, just making Chrome DevTools be able to debug, I mean, it's, it's not, it wasn't originally built right for debugging an operating system, right? They've been phenomenal working with us and just kind of really pushing the limits, but that it's a rising tide that's kind of lifted all boats because now there's a lot of different types of applications that you can debug with Chrome Dev Tools that are running a browser that runs more reliably because just the stress testing that, that we and, you know, games that are coming to the web are kind of pushing as well, but.Itamar [00:24:23]: That's awesome. About the testing, I think like most, let's say coding assistant from different kinds will need this loop of testing. And even I would add code review to some, to some extent that you mentioned. How is testing different from code review? Code review could be, for example, PR review, like a code review that is done at the point of when you want to merge branches. But I would say that code review, for example, checks best practices, maintainability, and so on. It's not just like CI, but more than CI. And testing is like a more like checking functionality, et cetera. So it's different. We call, by the way, all of these together code integrity, but that's a different story. Just to go back to the, to the testing and specifically. Yeah. It's, it's, it's since the first slide. Yeah. We're consistent. So if we go back to the testing, I think like, it's not surprising that for us testing is important and for Bolt it's testing important, but I want to shed some light on a different perspective of it. Like let's think about autonomous driving. Those startups that are doing autonomous driving for highway and autonomous driving for the city. And I think like we saw the autonomous of the highway much faster and reaching to a level, I don't know, four or so much faster than those in the city. Now, in both cases, you need testing and quote unquote testing, you know, verifying validation that you're doing the right thing on the road and you're reading and et cetera. But it's probably like so different in the city that it could be like actually different technology. And I claim that we're seeing something similar here. So when you're building the next Wix, and if I was them, I was like looking at you and being a bit scared. That's what you're disrupting, what you just said. Then basically, I would say that, for example, the UX UI is freaking important. And because you're you're more aiming for the end user. In this case, maybe it's an end user that doesn't know how to develop for developers. It's also important. But let alone those that do not know to develop, they need a slick UI UX. And I think like that's one reason, for example, I think Cursor have like really good technology. I don't know the underlying what's under the hood, but at least what they're saying. But I think also their UX UI is great. It's a lot because they did their own ID. While if you're aiming for the city AI, suddenly like there's a lot of testing and code review technology that it's not necessarily like that important. For example, let's talk about integration tests. Probably like a lot of what you're building involved at the moment is isolated applications. Maybe the vision or the end game is maybe like having one solution for everything. It could be that eventually the highway companies will go into the city and the other way around. But at the beginning, there is a difference. And integration tests are a good example. I guess they're a bit less important. And when you think about enterprise software, they're really important. So to recap, like I think like the idea of looping and verifying your test and verifying your code in different ways, testing or code review, et cetera, seems to be important in the highway AI and the city AI, but in different ways and different like critical for the city, even more and more variety. Actually, I was looking to ask you like what kind of loops you guys are doing. For example, when I'm using Bolt and I'm enjoying it a lot, then I do see like sometimes you're trying to catch the errors and fix them. And also, I noticed that you're breaking down tasks into smaller ones and then et cetera, which is already a common notion for a year ago. But it seems like you're doing it really well. So if you're willing to share anything about it.Eric [00:28:07]: Yeah, yeah. I realized I never actually hit the punchline of what I was saying before. I mentioned the point about us kind of writing an operating system from scratch because what ended up being important about that is that to your point, it's actually a very, like compared to like a, you know, if you're like running cursor on anyone's machine, you kind of don't know what you're dealing with, with the OS you're running on. There could be an error happens. It could be like a million different things, right? There could be some config. There could be, it could be God knows what, right? The thing with WebConnect is because we wrote the entire thing from scratch. It's actually a unified image basically. And we can instrument it at any level that we think is going to be useful, which is exactly what we did when we started building Bolt is we instrumented stuff at like the process level, at the runtime level, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Stuff that would just be not impossible to do on local, but to do that in a way that works across any operating system, whatever is, I mean, would just be insanely, you know, insanely difficult to do right and reliably. And that's what you saw when you've used Bolt is that when an error actually will occur, whether it's in the build process or the actual web application itself is failing or anything kind of in between, you can actually capture those errors. And today it's a very primitive way of how we've implemented it largely because the product just didn't exist 90 days ago. So we're like, we got some work ahead of us and we got to hire some more a little bit, but basically we present and we say, Hey, this is, here's kind of the things that went wrong. There's a fix it button and then a ignore button, and then you can just hit fix it. And then we take all that telemetry through our agent, you run it through our agent and say, kind of, here's the state of the application. Here's kind of the errors that we got from Node.js or the browser or whatever, and like dah, dah, dah, dah. And it can take a crack at actually solving it. And it's actually pretty darn good at being able to do that. That's kind of been a, you know, closing the loop and having it be a reliable kind of base has seemed to be a pretty big upgrade over doing stuff locally, just because I think that's a pretty key ingredient of it. And yeah, I think breaking things down into smaller tasks, like that's, that's kind of a key part of our agent. I think like Claude did a really good job with artifacts. I think, you know, us and kind of everyone else has, has kind of taken their approach of like actually breaking out certain tasks in a certain order into, you know, kind of a concrete way. And, and so actually the core of Bolt, I know we actually made open source. So you can actually go and check out like the system prompts and et cetera, and you can run it locally and whatever have you. So anyone that's interested in this stuff, I'd highly recommend taking a look at. There's not a lot of like stuff that's like open source in this realm. It's, that was one of the fun things that we've we thought would be cool to do. And people, people seem to like it. I mean, there's a lot of forks and people adding different models and stuff. So it's been cool to see.Swyx [00:30:41]: Yeah. I'm happy to add, I added real-time voice for my opening day demo and it was really fun to hack with. So thank you for doing that. Yeah. Thank you. I'm going to steal your code.Eric [00:30:52]: Because I want that.Swyx [00:30:52]: It's funny because I built on top of the fork of Bolt.new that already has the multi LLM thing. And so you just told me you're going to merge that in. So then you're going to merge two layers of forks down into this thing. So it'll be fun.Eric [00:31:03]: Heck yeah.Alessio [00:31:04]: Just to touch on like the environment, Itamar, you maybe go into the most complicated environments that even the people that work there don't know how to run. How much of an impact does that have on your performance? Like, you know, it's most of the work you're doing actually figuring out environment and like the libraries, because I'm sure they're using outdated version of languages, they're using outdated libraries, they're using forks that have not been on the public internet before. How much of the work that you're doing is like there versus like at the LLM level?Itamar [00:31:32]: One of the reasons I was asking about, you know, what are the steps to break things down, because it really matters. Like, what's the tech stack? How complicated the software is? It's hard to figure it out when you're dealing with the real world, any environment of enterprise as a city, when I'm like, while maybe sometimes like, I think you do enable like in Bolt, like to install stuff, but it's quite a like controlled environment. And that's a good thing to do, because then you narrow down and it's easier to make things work. So definitely, there are two dimensions, I think, actually spaces. One is the fact just like installing our software without yet like doing anything, making it work, just installing it because we work with enterprise and Fortune 500, etc. Many of them want on prem solution.Swyx [00:32:22]: So you have how many deployment options?Itamar [00:32:24]: Basically, we had, we did a metric metrics, say 96 options, because, you know, they're different dimensions. Like, for example, one dimension, we connect to your code management system to your Git. So are you having like GitHub, GitLab? Subversion? Is it like on cloud or deployed on prem? Just an example. Which model agree to use its APIs or ours? Like we have our Is it TestGPT? Yeah, when we started with TestGPT, it was a huge mistake name. It was cool back then, but I don't think it's a good idea to name a model after someone else's model. Anyway, that's my opinion. So we gotSwyx [00:33:02]: I'm interested in these learnings, like things that you change your mind on.Itamar [00:33:06]: Eventually, when you're building a company, you're building a brand and you want to create your own brand. By the way, when I thought about Bolt.new, I also thought about if it's not a problem, because when I think about Bolt, I do think about like a couple of companies that are already called this way.Swyx [00:33:19]: Curse companies. You could call it Codium just to...Itamar [00:33:24]: Okay, thank you. Touche. Touche.Eric [00:33:27]: Yeah, you got to imagine the board meeting before we launched Bolt, one of our investors, you can imagine they're like, are you sure? Because from the investment side, it's kind of a famous, very notorious Bolt. And they're like, are you sure you want to go with that name? Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.Itamar [00:33:43]: At this point, we have actually four models. There is a model for autocomplete. There's a model for the chat. There is a model dedicated for more for code review. And there is a model that is for code embedding. Actually, you might notice that there isn't a good code embedding model out there. Can you name one? Like dedicated for code?Swyx [00:34:04]: There's code indexing, and then you can do sort of like the hide for code. And then you can embed the descriptions of the code.Itamar [00:34:12]: Yeah, but you do see a lot of type of models that are dedicated for embedding and for different spaces, different fields, etc. And I'm not aware. And I know that if you go to the bedrock, try to find like there's a few code embedding models, but none of them are specialized for code.Swyx [00:34:31]: Is there a benchmark that you would tell us to pay attention to?Itamar [00:34:34]: Yeah, so it's coming. Wait for that. Anyway, we have our models. And just to go back to the 96 option of deployment. So I'm closing the brackets for us. So one is like dimensional, like what Git deployment you have, like what models do you agree to use? Dotter could be like if it's air-gapped completely, or you want VPC, and then you have Azure, GCP, and AWS, which is different. Do you use Kubernetes or do not? Because we want to exploit that. There are companies that do not do that, etc. I guess you know what I mean. So that's one thing. And considering that we are dealing with one of all four enterprises, we needed to deal with that. So you asked me about how complicated it is to solve that complex code. I said, it's just a deployment part. And then now to the software, we see a lot of different challenges. For example, some companies, they did actually a good job to build a lot of microservices. Let's not get to if it's good or not, but let's first assume that it is a good thing. A lot of microservices, each one of them has their own repo. And now you have tens of thousands of repos. And you as a developer want to develop something. And I remember me coming to a corporate for the first time. I don't know where to look at, like where to find things. So just doing a good indexing for that is like a challenge. And moreover, the regular indexing, the one that you can find, we wrote a few blogs on that. By the way, we also have some open source, different than yours, but actually three and growing. Then it doesn't work. You need to let the tech leads and the companies influence your indexing. For example, Mark with different repos with different colors. This is a high quality repo. This is a lower quality repo. This is a repo that we want to deprecate. This is a repo we want to grow, etc. And let that be part of your indexing. And only then things actually work for enterprise and they don't get to a fatigue of, oh, this is awesome. Oh, but I'm starting, it's annoying me. I think Copilot is an amazing tool, but I'm quoting others, meaning GitHub Copilot, that they see not so good retention of GitHub Copilot and enterprise. Ooh, spicy. Yeah. I saw snapshots of people and we have customers that are Copilot users as well. And also I saw research, some of them is public by the way, between 38 to 50% retention for users using Copilot and enterprise. So it's not so good. By the way, I don't think it's that bad, but it's not so good. So I think that's a reason because, yeah, it helps you auto-complete, but then, and especially if you're working on your repo alone, but if it's need that context of remote repos that you're code-based, that's hard. So to make things work, there's a lot of work on that, like giving the controllability for the tech leads, for the developer platform or developer experience department in the organization to influence how things are working. A short example, because if you have like really old legacy code, probably some of it is not so good anymore. If you just fine tune on these code base, then there is a bias to repeat those mistakes or old practices, etc. So you need, for example, as I mentioned, to influence that. For example, in Coda, you can have a markdown of best practices by the tech leads and Coda will include that and relate to that and will not offer suggestions that are not according to the best practices, just as an example. So that's just a short list of things that you need to do in order to deal with, like you mentioned, the 100.1 to 100.2 version of software. I just want to say what you're doing is extremelyEric [00:38:32]: impressive because it's very difficult. I mean, the business of Stackplus, kind of before bulk came online, we sold a version of our IDE that went on-prem. So I understand what you're saying about the difficulty of getting stuff just working on-prem. Holy heck. I mean, that is extremely hard. I guess the question I have for you is, I mean, we were just doing that with kind of Kubernetes-based stuff, but the spread of Fortune 500 companies that you're working with, how are they doing the inference for this? Are you kind of plugging into Azure's OpenAI stuff and AWS's Bedrock, you know, Cloud stuff? Or are they just like running stuff on GPUs? Like, what is that? How are these folks approaching that? Because, man, what we saw on the enterprise side, I mean, I got to imagine that that's a huge challenge. Everything you said and more, like,Itamar [00:39:15]: for example, like someone could be, and I don't think any of these is bad. Like, they made their decision. Like, for example, some people, they're, I want only AWS and VPC on AWS, no matter what. And then they, some of them, like there is a subset, I will say, I'm willing to take models only for from Bedrock and not ours. And we have a problem because there is no good code embedding model on Bedrock. And that's part of what we're doing now with AWS to solve that. We solve it in a different way. But if you are willing to run on AWS VPC, but run your run models on GPUs or inferentia, like the new version of the more coming out, then our models can run on that. But everything you said is right. Like, we see like on-prem deployment where they have their own GPUs. We see Azure where you're using OpenAI Azure. We see cases where you're running on GCP and they want OpenAI. Like this cross, like a case, although there is Gemini or even Sonnet, I think is available on GCP, just an example. So all the options, that's part of the challenge. I admit that we thought about it, but it was even more complicated. And it took us a few months to actually, that metrics that I mentioned, to start clicking each one of the blocks there. A few months is impressive. I mean,Eric [00:40:35]: honestly, just that's okay. Every one of these enterprises is, their networking is different. Just everything's different. Every single one is different. I see you understand. Yeah. So that just cannot be understated. That it is, that's extremely impressive. Hats off.Itamar [00:40:50]: It could be, by the way, like, for example, oh, we're only AWS, but our GitHub enterprise is on-prem. Oh, we forgot. So we need like a private link or whatever, like every time like that. It's not, and you do need to think about it if you want to work with an enterprise. And it's important. Like I understand like their, I respect their point of view.Swyx [00:41:10]: And this primarily impacts your architecture, your tech choices. Like you have to, you can't choose some vendors because...Itamar [00:41:15]: Yeah, definitely. To be frank, it makes us hard for a startup because it means that we want, we want everyone to enjoy all the variety of models. By the way, it was hard for us with our technology. I want to open a bracket, like a window. I guess you're familiar with our Alpha Codium, which is an open source.Eric [00:41:33]: We got to go over that. Yeah. So I'll do that quickly.Itamar [00:41:36]: Yeah. A pin in that. Yeah. Actually, we didn't have it in the last episode. So, so, okay.Swyx [00:41:41]: Okay. We'll come back to that later, but let's talk about...Itamar [00:41:43]: Yeah. So, so just like shortly, and then we can double click on Alpha Codium. But Alpha Codium is a open source tool. You can go and try it and lets you compete on CodeForce. This is a website and a competition and actually reach a master level level, like 95% with a click of a button. You don't need to do anything. And part of what we did there is taking a problem and breaking it to different, like smaller blocks. And then the models are doing a much better job. Like we all know it by now that taking small tasks and solving them, by the way, even O1, which is supposed to be able to do system two thinking like Greg from OpenAI like hinted, is doing better on these kinds of problems. But still, it's very useful to break it down for O1, despite O1 being able to think by itself. And that's what we presented like just a month ago, OpenAI released that now they are doing 93 percentile with O1 IOI left and International Olympiad of Formation. Sorry, I forgot. Exactly. I told you I forgot. And we took their O1 preview with Alpha Codium and did better. Like it just shows like, and there is a big difference between the preview and the IOI. It shows like that these models are not still system two thinkers, and there is a big difference. So maybe they're not complete system two. Yeah, they need some guidance. I call them system 1.5. We can, we can have it. I thought about it. Like, you know, I care about this philosophy stuff. And I think like we didn't see it even close to a system two thinking. I can elaborate later. But closing the brackets, like we take Alpha Codium and as our principle of thinking, we take tasks and break them down to smaller tasks. And then we want to exploit the best model to solve them. So I want to enable anyone to enjoy O1 and SONET and Gemini 1.5, etc. But at the same time, I need to develop my own models as well, because some of the Fortune 500 want to have all air gapped or whatever. So that's a challenge. Now you need to support so many models. And to some extent, I would say that the flow engineering, the breaking down to two different blocks is a necessity for us. Why? Because when you take a big block, a big problem, you need a very different prompt for each one of the models to actually work. But when you take a big problem and break it into small tasks, we can talk how we do that, then the prompt matters less. What I want to say, like all this, like as a startup trying to do different deployment, getting all the juice that you can get from models, etc. is a big problem. And one need to think about it. And one of our mitigation is that process of taking tasks and breaking them down. That's why I'm really interested to know how you guys are doing it. And part of what we do is also open source. So you can see.Swyx [00:44:39]: There's a lot in there. But yeah, flow over prompt. I do believe that that does make sense. I feel like there's a lot that both of you can sort of exchange notes on breaking down problems. And I just want you guys to just go for it. This is fun to watch.Eric [00:44:55]: Yeah. I mean, what's super interesting is the context you're working in is, because for us too with Bolt, we've started thinking because our kind of existing business line was going behind the firewall, right? We were like, how do we do this? Adding the inference aspect on, we're like, okay, how does... Because I mean, there's not a lot of prior art, right? I mean, this is all new. This is all new. So I definitely am going to have a lot of questions for you.Itamar [00:45:17]: I'm here. We're very open, by the way. We have a paper on a blog or like whatever.Swyx [00:45:22]: The Alphacodeum, GitHub, and we'll put all this in the show notes.Itamar [00:45:25]: Yeah. And even the new results of O1, we published it.Eric [00:45:29]: I love that. And I also just, I think spiritually, I like your approach of being transparent. Because I think there's a lot of hype-ium around AI stuff. And a lot of it is, it's just like, you have these companies that are just kind of keep their stuff closed source and then just max hype it, but then it's kind of nothing. And I think it kind of gives a bad rep to the incredible stuff that's actually happening here. And so I think it's stuff like what you're doing where, I mean, true merit and you're cracking open actual code for others to learn from and use. That strikes me as the right approach. And it's great to hear that you're making such incredible progress.Itamar [00:46:02]: I have something to share about the open source. Most of our tools are, we have an open source version and then a premium pro version. But it's not an easy decision to do that. I actually wanted to ask you about your strategy, but I think in your case, there is, in my opinion, relatively a good strategy where a lot of parts of open source, but then you have the deployment and the environment, which is not right if I get it correctly. And then there's a clear, almost hugging face model. Yeah, you can do that, but why should you try to deploy it yourself, deploy it with us? But in our case, and I'm not sure you're not going to hit also some competitors, and I guess you are. I wanted to ask you, for example, on some of them. In our case, one day we looked on one of our competitors that is doing code review. We're a platform. We have the code review, the testing, et cetera, spread over the ID to get. And in each agent, we have a few startups or a big incumbents that are doing only that. So we noticed one of our competitors having not only a very similar UI of our open source, but actually even our typo. And you sit there and you're kind of like, yeah, we're not that good. We don't use enough Grammarly or whatever. And we had a couple of these and we saw it there. And then it's a challenge. And I want to ask you, Bald is doing so well, and then you open source it. So I think I know what my answer was. I gave it before, but still interestingEric [00:47:29]: to hear what you think. GeoHot said back, I don't know who he was up to at this exact moment, but I think on comma AI, all that stuff's open source. And someone had asked him, why is this open source? And he's like, if you're not actually confident that you can go and crush it and build the best thing, then yeah, you should probably keep your stuff closed source. He said something akin to that. I'm probably kind of butchering it, but I thought it was kind of a really good point. And that's not to say that you should just open source everything, because for obvious reasons, there's kind of strategic things you have to kind of take in mind. But I actually think a pretty liberal approach, as liberal as you kind of can be, it can really make a lot of sense. Because that is so validating that one of your competitors is taking your stuff and they're like, yeah, let's just kind of tweak the styles. I mean, clearly, right? I think it's kind of healthy because it keeps, I'm sure back at HQ that day when you saw that, you're like, oh, all right, well, we have to grind even harder to make sure we stay ahead. And so I think it's actually a very useful, motivating thing for the teams. Because you might feel this period of comfort. I think a lot of companies will have this period of comfort where they're not feeling the competition and one day they get disrupted. So kind of putting stuff out there and letting people push it forces you to face reality soon, right? And actually feel that incrementally so you can kind of adjust course. And that's for us, the open source version of Bolt has had a lot of features people have been begging us for, like persisting chat messages and checkpoints and stuff. Within the first week, that stuff was landed in the open source versions. And they're like, why can't you ship this? It's in the open, so people have forked it. And we're like, we're trying to keep our servers and GPUs online. But it's been great because the folks in the community did a great job, kept us on our toes. And we've got to know most of these folks too at this point that have been building these things. And so it actually was very instructive. Like, okay, well, if we're going to go kind of land this, there's some UX patterns we can kind of look at and the code is open source to this stuff. What's great about these, what's not. So anyways, NetNet, I think it's awesome. I think from a competitive point of view for us, I think in particular, what's interesting is the core technology of WebContainer going. And I think that right now, there's really nothing that's kind of on par with that. And we also, we have a business of, because WebContainer runs in your browser, but to make it work, you have to install stuff from NPM. You have to make cores bypass requests, like connected databases, which all require server-side proxying or acceleration. And so we actually sell WebContainer as a service. One of the core reasons we open-sourced kind of the core components of Bolt when we launched was that we think that there's going to be a lot more of these AI, in-your-browser AI co-gen experiences, kind of like what Anthropic did with Artifacts and Clod. By the way, Artifacts uses WebContainers. Not yet. No, yeah. Should I strike that? I think that they've got their own thing at the moment, but there's been a lot of interest in WebContainers from folks doing things in that sort of realm and in the AI labs and startups and everything in between. So I think there'll be, I imagine, over the coming months, there'll be lots of things being announced to folks kind of adopting it. But yeah, I think effectively...Swyx [00:50:35]: Okay, I'll say this. If you're a large model lab and you want to build sandbox environments inside of your chat app, you should call Eric.Itamar [00:50:43]: But wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I have a question about that. I think OpenAI, they felt that people are not using their model as they would want to. So they built ChatGPT. But I would say that ChatGPT now defines OpenAI. I know they're doing a lot of business from their APIs, but still, is this how you think? Isn't Bolt.new your business now? Why don't you focus on that instead of the...Swyx [00:51:16]: What's your advice as a founder?Eric [00:51:18]: You're right. And so going into it, we, candidly, we were like, Bolt.new, this thing is super cool. We think people are stoked. We think people will be stoked. But we were like, maybe that's allowed. Best case scenario, after month one, we'd be mind blown if we added a couple hundred K of error or something. And we were like, but we think there's probably going to be an immediate huge business. Because there was some early poll on folks wanting to put WebContainer into their product offerings, kind of similar to what Bolt is doing or whatever. We were actually prepared for the inverse outcome here. But I mean, well, I guess we've seen poll on both. But I mean, what's happened with Bolt, and you're right, it's actually the same strategy as like OpenAI or Anthropic, where we have our ChatGPT to OpenAI's APIs is Bolt to WebContainer. And so we've kind of taken that same approach. And we're seeing, I guess, some of the similar results, except right now, the revenue side is extremely lopsided to Bolt.Itamar [00:52:16]: I think if you ask me what's my advice, I think you have three options. One is to focus on Bolt. The other is to focus on the WebContainer. The third is to raise one billion dollars and do them both. I'm serious. I think otherwise, you need to choose. And if you raise enough money, and I think it's big bucks, because you're going to be chased by competitors. And I think it will be challenging to do both. And maybe you can. I don't know. We do see these numbers right now, raising above $100 million, even without havingEric [00:52:49]: a product. You can see these. It's excellent advice. And I think what's been amazing, but also kind of challenging is we're trying to forecast, okay, well, where are these things going? I mean, in the initial weeks, I think us and all the investors in the company that we're sharing this with, it was like, this is cool. Okay, we added 500k. Wow, that's crazy. Wow, we're at a million now. Most things, you have this kind of the tech crunch launch of initiation and then the thing of sorrow. And if there's going to be a downtrend, it's just not coming yet. Now that we're kind of looking ahead, we're six weeks in. So now we're getting enough confidence in our convictions to go, okay, this se
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This Weekly in AI: Nov 23- Nov 30th 2024
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Is AI truly slowing down, or are we witnessing its next evolution?For business leaders, the debate around scaling laws, reasoning models, and AGI isn't just academic—it's a matter of future-proofing your business strategy. Are the days of GPU-heavy training behind us, or are we on the cusp of a revolution in AI thinking?In this week's News episode of Leveraging AI, Isar Meitis breaks down the buzz surrounding "thinking models," test-time compute, and the escalating rivalry among AI powerhouses like OpenAI, Google, and Alibaba. From the rise of reasoning models to the implications for enterprise AI adoption, you'll gain actionable insights to position your organization ahead of the curve.In this session, you'll discover:Why the latest "thinking models" may redefine how AI solves problems.The truth behind claims of diminishing returns in scaling laws.How companies like Alibaba and startups like Fireworks AI are disrupting OpenAI's dominance.The business implications of AI's test-time compute innovations.What C-Suite leaders must do to adapt as enterprises outpace smaller firms in AI adoption.Understand the nuanced debate on AGI timelines and what it means for your business.How reasoning models are reshaping AI without relying on massive GPUs.Let's keep exploring, implementing, and leading in AI together. See you next week!About Leveraging AI The Ultimate AI Course for Business People: https://multiplai.ai/ai-course/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@Multiplai_AI/ Connect with Isar Meitis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/isarmeitis/ Free AI Consultation: https://multiplai.ai/book-a-call/ Join our Live Sessions, AI Hangouts and newsletter: https://services.multiplai.ai/events If you've enjoyed or benefited from some of the insights of this episode, leave us a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform, and let us know what you learned, found helpful, or liked most about this show!
Episode 54: YouTube turned us Spanish! Also, we do a full recap on the state of ray tracing for PC gaming right now, looking back to the original RTX 20 series GPUs to how things are going now. Has Nvidia simply used ray tracing to upsell you on a more expensive graphics card?CHAPTERS00:00 - Intro00:40 - YouTube Turned us Spanish13:50 - Ray Tracing, Where Does it Stand Right Now?34:20 - Ray Tracing vs High Refresh Rate42:27 - Ray Tracing is About the Upsell53:41 - We Expected Ray Tracing to be Better By Now58:09 - The Chicken and the Egg1:03:44 - The Future of Ray Tracing1:24:23 - Updates From Our Boring LivesSUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCASTAudio: https://shows.acast.com/the-hardware-unboxed-podcastVideo: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqT8Vb3jweH6_tj2SarErfwSUPPORT US DIRECTLYPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/hardwareunboxedFloatplane: https://www.floatplane.com/channel/HardwareUnboxedLINKSYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Hardwareunboxed/Twitter: https://twitter.com/HardwareUnboxedBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/hardwareunboxed.bsky.social Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Microsoft Ignite 2024 nadchodzi, a Patoarchitekci już zacierają ręce! Czy AI zawładnie światem IT? Czy serverless GPUs w Container Apps to przyszłość? Czas na technologiczny rollercoaster! Azure AI, Kubernetes Fleet Manager, i zaawansowane usługi sieciowe - to tylko wierzchołek góry lodowej. Copilot wkracza do akcji, a Logic Apps flirtują z OpenAI. Czy twój DevOps jest gotowy na tę rewolucję? Nie bądź jak Azure Stack HCI - nie czekaj na kolejny rebranding! Włącz Patoarchitektów i dowiedz się, jak przetrwać w świecie Microsoft Ignite 2024. Twój kod Ci podziękuje! A teraz nie ma co się obijać!
Our 190th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris. Note from Andrey: this one is coming out a bit later than planned, apologies! Next one will be coming out sooner. Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/. Sponsors: The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence In this episode: * OpenAI's pitch for a $100 billion data center and AI strategy plan outlines infrastructure and regulatory needs, emphasizing AI's foundational role akin to electricity. * Google's Gemini model challenges OpenAI's dominance, showing strong performance in chatbot arenas alongside generative AI advancements. * DeepMind's AlphaFold3 gets open-sourced for academic use, while new chips from NVIDIA and Google show significant performance boosts. * Anthropic and TSMC updates highlight strategic funding, regulation influences, and the complex dynamics of AI hardware and international policy. If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form. Timestamps + Links: (00:00:00) Intro / Banter (00:02:44) News Preview (00:03:34) Sponsor Break Tools & Apps (00:04:36) OpenAI, Google and Anthropic Are Struggling to Build More Advanced AI (00:16:22) OpenAI Nears Launch of AI Agent Tool to Automate Tasks for Users (00:19:14) Google drops new Gemini model and it goes straight to the top of the LLM leaderboard (00:19:14) Chinese AI startup takes aim at OpenAI's Sora with image-to-video tool launch (00:20:04) Introducing the Forge Reasoning API Beta and Nous Chat: An Evolution in LLM Inference Applications & Business (00:23:47) OpenAI Discusses AI Data Center That Could Cost $100 Billion (00:26:48) Elon Musk's massive AI data center gets unlocked — xAI gets approved for 150MW of power, enabling all 100,000 GPUs to run concurrently (00:29:34) Newest Google and Nvidia Chips Speed AI Training (00:34:45) Ex-OpenAI CTO Murati's New Team Takes Shape (00:34:45) Amazon Discussing New Multibillion-Dollar Investment in Anthropic Projects & Open Source (00:37:52) Google DeepMind open-sources AlphaFold 3, ushering in a new era for drug discovery and molecular biology (00:41:29) Near plans to build world's largest 1.4T parameter open-source AI model Research & Advancements (00:45:38) The Super Weight in Large Language Models (00:55:42) Compositional Abilities Emerge Multiplicatively: Exploring Diffusion Models on a Synthetic Task (01:03:47) Mixture-of-Transformers: A Sparse and Scalable Architecture for Multi-Modal Foundation Models (01:08:14) Contextualized Evaluations: Taking the Guesswork Out of Language Model Evaluations Policy & Safety (01:11:14) The Code of Practice for general-purpose AI offers a unique opportunity for the EU (01:15:38) Three Sketches of ASL-4 Safety Case Components (01:23:05) U.S Department of Commerce finalizes $6.6 billion CHIPS Act funding for TSMC Fab 21 Arizona site , TSMC cannot make 2nm chips abroad now: MOEA (01:26:21) OpenAI to present plans for U.S. AI strategy and an alliance to compete with China (01:30:42) OpenAI loses another lead safety researcher, Lilian Weng (01:33:00) Outro
We have announced our first speaker, friend of the show Dylan Patel, and topic slates for Latent Space LIVE! at NeurIPS. Sign up for IRL/Livestream and to debate!We are still taking questions for our next big recap episode! Submit questions and messages on Speakpipe here for a chance to appear on the show!The vibe shift we observed in July - in favor of Claude 3.5 Sonnet, first introduced in June — has been remarkably long lived and persistent, surviving multiple subsequent updates of 4o, o1 and Gemini versions, for Anthropic's Claude to end 2024 as the preferred model for AI Engineers and even being the exclusive choice for new code agents like bolt.new (our next guest on the pod!), which unlocked so much performance from Claude Sonnet that it went from $0 to $4m ARR in 4 weeks when it launched last month.Anthropic has now raised an additional $4b from Amazon and made an incredibly well received update of Claude 3.5 Sonnet (and Haiku), making significant improvements in performance over its predecessors:Solving SWE-BenchAs part of the October Sonnet release, Anthropic teased a blink-and-you'll miss it result:The updated Claude 3.5 Sonnet shows wide-ranging improvements on industry benchmarks, with particularly strong gains in agentic coding and tool use tasks. On coding, it improves performance on SWE-bench Verified from 33.4% to 49.0%, scoring higher than all publicly available models—including reasoning models like OpenAI o1-preview and specialized systems designed for agentic coding. It also improves performance on TAU-bench, an agentic tool use task, from 62.6% to 69.2% in the retail domain, and from 36.0% to 46.0% in the more challenging airline domain. The new Claude 3.5 Sonnet offers these advancements at the same price and speed as its predecessor.This was followed up by a blogpost a week later from today's guest, Erik Schluntz, the engineer who implemented and scored this SOTA result using a simple, non-overengineered version of the SWE-Agent framework (you can see the submissions here). We have previously covered the SWE-Bench story extensively:* Speaking with SWEBench/SWEAgent authors at ICLR* Speaking with Cosine Genie, the previous SOTA (43.8%) on SWEBench Verified (with brief update at DevDay 2024)* Speaking with Shunyu Yao on SWEBench and the ReAct paradigm driving SWE-AgentOne of the notable inclusions in this blogpost are the tools that Erik decided to give Claude, e.g. the “Edit Tool”:The tools teased in the SWEBench submission/blogpost were then polished up and released with Computer Use…And you can also see even more computer use tools given in the new Model Context Protocol servers:Claude Computer UseBecause it is one of the best received AI releases of the year, we recommend watching the 2 minute Computer Use intro (and related demos) in its entirety:Eric also worked on Claude's function calling, tool use, and computer use APIs, so we discuss that in the episode.Erik [00:53:39]: With computer use, just give the thing a browser that's logged into what you want to integrate with, and it's going to work immediately. And I see that reduction in friction as being incredibly exciting. Imagine a customer support team where, okay, hey, you got this customer support bot, but you need to go integrate it with all these things. And you don't have any engineers on your customer support team. But if you can just give the thing a browser that's logged into your systems that you need it to have access to, now, suddenly, in one day, you could be up and rolling with a fully integrated customer service bot that could go do all the actions you care about. So I think that's the most exciting thing for me about computer use, is reducing that friction of integrations to almost zero.As you'll see, this is very top of mind for Erik as a former Robotics founder who's company basically used robots to interface with human physical systems like elevators.Full Video episodePlease like and subscribe!Show Notes* Eric Schluntz* “Raising the bar on SWE-Bench Verified”* Cobalt Robotics* SWE-Bench* SWE-Bench Verified* Human Eval & other benchmarks* Anthropic Workbench* Aider* Cursor* Fireworks AI* E2B* Amanda Askell* Toyota Research* Physical Intelligence (Pi)* Chelsea Finn* Josh Albrecht* Eric Jang* 1X* Dust* Cosine Episode* Bolt* Adept Episode* TauBench* LMSys EpisodeTimestamps* [00:00:00] Introductions* [00:03:39] What is SWE-Bench?* [00:12:22] SWE-Bench vs HumanEval vs others* [00:15:21] SWE-Agent architecture and runtime* [00:21:18] Do you need code indexing?* [00:24:50] Giving the agent tools* [00:27:47] Sandboxing for coding agents* [00:29:16] Why not write tests?* [00:30:31] Redesigning engineering tools for LLMs* [00:35:53] Multi-agent systems* [00:37:52] Why XML so good?* [00:42:57] Thoughts on agent frameworks* [00:45:12] How many turns can an agent do?* [00:47:12] Using multiple model types* [00:51:40] Computer use and agent use cases* [00:59:04] State of AI robotics* [01:04:24] Robotics in manufacturing* [01:05:01] Hardware challenges in robotics* [01:09:21] Is self-driving a good business?TranscriptAlessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners. And today we're in the new studio with my usual co-host, Shawn from Smol AI.Swyx [00:00:14]: Hey, and today we're very blessed to have Erik Schluntz from Anthropic with us. Welcome.Erik [00:00:19]: Hi, thanks very much. I'm Erik Schluntz. I'm a member of technical staff at Anthropic, working on tool use, computer use, and Swebench.Swyx [00:00:27]: Yeah. Well, how did you get into just the whole AI journey? I think you spent some time at SpaceX as well? Yeah. And robotics. Yeah. There's a lot of overlap between like the robotics people and the AI people, and maybe like there's some interlap or interest between language models for robots right now. Maybe just a little bit of background on how you got to where you are. Yeah, sure.Erik [00:00:50]: I was at SpaceX a long time ago, but before joining Anthropic, I was the CTO and co-founder of Cobalt Robotics. We built security and inspection robots. These are sort of five foot tall robots that would patrol through an office building or a warehouse looking for anything out of the ordinary. Very friendly, no tasers or anything. We would just sort of call a remote operator if we saw anything. We have about 100 of those out in the world, and had a team of about 100. We actually got acquired about six months ago, but I had left Cobalt about a year ago now, because I was starting to get a lot more excited about AI. I had been writing a lot of my code with things like Copilot, and I was like, wow, this is actually really cool. If you had told me 10 years ago that AI would be writing a lot of my code, I would say, hey, I think that's AGI. And so I kind of realized that we had passed this level, like, wow, this is actually really useful for engineering work. That got me a lot more excited about AI and learning about large language models. So I ended up taking a sabbatical and then doing a lot of reading and research myself and decided, hey, I want to go be at the core of this and joined Anthropic.Alessio [00:01:53]: And why Anthropic? Did you consider other labs? Did you consider maybe some of the robotics companies?Erik [00:02:00]: So I think at the time I was a little burnt out of robotics, and so also for the rest of this, any sort of negative things I say about robotics or hardware is coming from a place of burnout, and I reserve my right to change my opinion in a few years. Yeah, I looked around, but ultimately I knew a lot of people that I really trusted and I thought were incredibly smart at Anthropic, and I think that was the big deciding factor to come there. I was like, hey, this team's amazing. They're not just brilliant, but sort of like the most nice and kind people that I know, and so I just felt like I could be a really good culture fit. And ultimately, I do care a lot about AI safety and making sure that I don't want to build something that's used for bad purposes, and I felt like the best chance of that was joining Anthropic.Alessio [00:02:39]: And from the outside, these labs kind of look like huge organizations that have these obscureSwyx [00:02:44]: ways to organize.Alessio [00:02:45]: How did you get, you joined Anthropic, did you already know you were going to work on of the stuff you publish or you kind of join and then you figure out where you land? I think people are always curious to learn more.Erik [00:02:57]: Yeah, I've been very happy that Anthropic is very bottoms up and sort of very sort of receptive to whatever your interests are. And so I joined sort of being very transparent of like, hey, I'm most excited about code generation and AI that can actually go out and sort of touch the world or sort of help people build things. And, you know, those weren't my initial initial projects. I also came in and said, hey, I want to do the most valuable possible thing for this company and help Anthropic succeed. And, you know, like, let me find the balance of those. So I was working on lots of things at the beginning, you know, function calling, tool use. And then sort of as it became more and more relevant, I was like, oh, hey, like, let's it's time to go work on encoding agents and sort of started looking at SWE-Bench as sort of a really good benchmark for that.Swyx [00:03:39]: So let's get right into SWE-Bench. That's one of the many claims to fame. I feel like there's just been a series of releases related with Cloud 3.5 Sonnet around about two or three months ago, 3.5 Sonnet came out and it was it was a step ahead in terms of a lot of people immediately fell in love with it for coding. And then last month you released a new updated version of Cloud Sonnet. We're not going to talk about the training for that because that's still confidential. But I think Anthropic's done a really good job, like applying the model to different things. So you took the lead on SWE-Bench, but then also we're going to talk a little bit about computer use later on. So maybe just give us a context about why you looked at SWE-Bench Verified and you actually came up with a whole system for building agents that would maximally use the model well. Yeah.Erik [00:04:28]: So I'm on a sub team called Product Research. And basically the idea of product research is to really understand what end customers care about and want in the models and then work to try to make that happen. So we're not focused on sort of these more abstract general benchmarks like math problems or MMLU, but we really care about finding the things that are really valuable and making sure the models are great at those. And so because I've been interested in coding agents, I knew that this would be a really valuable thing. And I knew there were a lot of startups and our customers trying to build coding agents with our models. And so I said, hey, this is going to be a really good benchmark to be able to measure that and do well on it. And I wasn't the first person at Anthropic to find SWE-Bench, and there are lots of people that already knew about it and had done some internal efforts on it. It fell to me to sort of both implement the benchmark, which is very tricky, and then also to sort of make sure we had an agent and basically like a reference agent, maybe I'd call it, that could do very well on it. Ultimately, we want to provide how we implemented that reference agent so that people can build their own agents on top of our system and get sort of the most out of it as possible. So with this blog post we released on SWE-Bench, we released the exact tools and the prompt that we gave the model to be able to do well.Swyx [00:05:46]: For people who don't know, who maybe haven't dived into SWE-Bench, I think the general perception is they're like tasks that a software engineer could do. I feel like that's an inaccurate description because it is basically, one, it's a subset of like 12 repos. It's everything they could find that every issue with like a matching commit that could be tested. So that's not every commit. And then SWE-Bench verified is further manually filtered by OpenAI. Is that an accurate description and anything you'd change about that? Yes.Erik [00:06:14]: SWE-Bench is, it certainly is a subset of all tasks. It's first of all, it's only Python repos, so already fairly limited there. And it's just 12 of these popular open source repos. And yes, it's only ones where there were tests that passed at the beginning and also new tests that were introduced that test the new feature that's added. So it is, I think, a very limited subset of real engineering tasks. But I think it's also very valuable because even though it's a subset, it is true engineering tasks. And I think a lot of other benchmarks are really kind of these much more artificial setups of even if they're related to coding, they're more like coding interview style questions or puzzles that I think are very different from day-to-day what you end up doing. I don't know how frequently you all get to use recursion in your day-to-day job, but whenever I do, it's like a treat. And I think it's almost comical, and a lot of people joke about this in the industry, is how different interview questions are.Swyx [00:07:13]: Dynamic programming. Yeah, exactly.Erik [00:07:15]: Like, you code. From the day-to-day job. But I think one of the most interesting things about SWE-Bench is that all these other benchmarks are usually just isolated puzzles, and you're starting from scratch. Whereas SWE-Bench, you're starting in the context of an entire repository. And so it adds this entirely new dimension to the problem of finding the relevant files. And this is a huge part of real engineering, is it's actually pretty rare that you're starting something totally greenfield. You need to go and figure out where in a codebase you're going to make a change and understand how your work is going to interact with the rest of the systems. And I think SWE-Bench does a really good job of presenting that problem.Alessio [00:07:51]: Why do we still use human eval? It's like 92%, I think. I don't even know if you can actually get to 100% because some of the data is not actuallySwyx [00:07:59]: solvable.Alessio [00:08:00]: Do you see benchmarks like that, they should just get sunsetted? Because when you look at the model releases, it's like, oh, it's like 92% instead of like 89%, 90% on human eval versus, you know, SWE-Bench verified is you have 49%, right? Which is like, before 45% was state of the art, but maybe like six months ago it was like 30%, something like that. So is that a benchmark that you think is going to replace human eval, or do you think they're just going to run in parallel?Erik [00:08:27]: I think there's still need for sort of many different varied evals. Like sometimes you do really care about just sort of greenfield code generation. And so I don't think that everything needs to go to sort of an agentic setup.Swyx [00:08:39]: It would be very expensive to implement.Erik [00:08:41]: The other thing I was going to say is that SWE-Bench is certainly hard to implement and expensive to run because each task, you have to parse, you know, a lot of the repo to understand where to put your code. And a lot of times you take many tries of writing code, running it, editing it. It can use a lot of tokens compared to something like human eval. So I think there's definitely a space for these more traditional coding evals that are sort of easy to implement, quick to run, and do get you some signal. Maybe hopefully there's just sort of harder versions of human eval that get created.Alessio [00:09:14]: How do we get SWE-Bench verified to 92%? Do you think that's something where it's like line of sight to it, or it's like, you know, we need a whole lot of things to go right? Yeah, yeah.Erik [00:09:23]: And actually, maybe I'll start with SWE-Bench versus SWE-Bench verified, which is I think something I missed earlier. So SWE-Bench is, as we described, this big set of tasks that were scraped.Swyx [00:09:33]: Like 12,000 or something?Erik [00:09:34]: Yeah, I think it's 2,000 in the final set. But a lot of those, even though a human did them, they're actually impossible given the information that comes with the task. The most classic example of this is the test looks for a very specific error string. You know, like assert message equals error, something, something, something. And unless you know that's exactly what you're looking for, there's no way the model is going to write that exact same error message, and so the tests are going to fail. So SWE-Bench verified was actually made in partnership with OpenAI, and they hired humans to go review all these tasks and pick out a subset to try to remove any obstacle like this that would make the tasks impossible. So in theory, all of these tasks should be fully doable by the model. And they also had humans grade how difficult they thought the problems would be. Between less than 15 minutes, I think 15 minutes to an hour, an hour to four hours, and greater than four hours. So that's kind of this interesting sort of how big the problem is as well. To get to SWE-Bench verified to 90%, actually, maybe I'll also start off with some of the remaining failures that I see when running our model on SWE-Bench. I'd say the biggest cases are the model sort of operates at the wrong level of abstraction. And what I mean by that is the model puts in maybe a smaller band-aid when really the task is asking for a bigger refactor. And some of those, you know, is the model's fault, but a lot of times if you're just sort of seeing the GitHub issue, it's not exactly clear which way you should do. So even though these tasks are possible, there's still some ambiguity in how the tasks are described. That being said, I think in general, language models frequently will produce a smaller diff when possible, rather than trying to do a big refactor. I think another area, at least the agent we created, didn't have any multimodal abilities, even though our models are very good at vision. So I think that's just a missed opportunity. And if I read through some of the traces, there's some funny things where, especially the tasks on matplotlib, which is a graphing library, the test script will save an image and the model will just say, okay, it looks great, you know, without looking at it. So there's certainly extra juice to squeeze there of just making sure the model really understands all the sides of the input that it's given, including multimodal. But yeah, I think like getting to 92%. So this is something that I have not looked at, but I'm very curious about. I want someone to look at, like, what is the union of all of the different tasks that have been solved by at least one attempt at SWE-Bench Verified. There's a ton of submissions to the benchmark, and so I'd be really curious to see how many of those 500 tasks at least someone has solved. And I think, you know, there's probably a bunch that none of the attempts have ever solved. And I think it'd be interesting to look at those and say, hey, is there some problem with these? Like, are these impossible? Or are they just really hard and only a human could do them?Swyx [00:12:22]: Yeah, like specifically, is there a category of problems that are still unreachable by any LLM agent? Yeah, yeah. And I think there definitely are.Erik [00:12:28]: The question is, are those fairly inaccessible or are they just impossible because of the descriptions? But I think certainly some of the tasks, especially the ones that the human graders reviewed as like taking longer than four hours are extremely difficult. I think we got a few of them right, but not very many at all in the benchmark.Swyx [00:12:49]: And did those take less than four hours?Erik [00:12:51]: They certainly did less than, yeah, than four hours.Swyx [00:12:54]: Is there a correlation of length of time with like human estimated time? You know what I mean? Or do we have sort of more of X paradox type situations where it's something super easy for a model, but hard for a human?Erik [00:13:06]: I actually haven't done the stats on that, but I think that'd be really interesting to see of like how many tokens does it take and how is that correlated with difficulty? What is the likelihood of success with difficulty? I think actually a really interesting thing that I saw, one of my coworkers who was also working on this named Simon, he was focusing just specifically on the very hard problems, the ones that are said to take longer than four hours. And he ended up sort of creating a much more detailed prompt than I used. And he got a higher score on the most difficult subset of problems, but a lower score overall on the whole benchmark. And the prompt that I made, which is sort of much more simple and bare bones, got a higher score on the overall benchmark, but lower score on the really hard problems. And I think some of that is the really detailed prompt made the model sort of overcomplicate a lot of the easy problems, because honestly, a lot of the suite bench problems, they really do just ask for a bandaid where it's like, hey, this crashes if this is none, and really all you need to do is put a check if none. And so sometimes trying to make the model think really deeply, it'll think in circles and overcomplicate something, which certainly human engineers are capable of as well. But I think there's some interesting thing of the best prompt for hard problems might not be the best prompt for easy problems.Alessio [00:14:19]: How do we fix that? Are you supposed to fix it at the model level? How do I know what prompt I'm supposed to use?Swyx [00:14:25]: Yeah.Erik [00:14:26]: And I'll say this was a very small effect size, and so I think this isn't worth obsessing over. I would say that as people are building systems around agents, I think the more you can separate out the different kinds of work the agent needs to do, the better you can tailor a prompt for that task. And I think that also creates a lot of like, for instance, if you were trying to make an agent that could both solve hard programming tasks, and it could just write quick test files for something that someone else had already made, the best way to do those two tasks might be very different prompts. I see a lot of people build systems where they first sort of have a classification, and then route the problem to two different prompts. And that's sort of a very effective thing, because one, it makes the two different prompts much simpler and smaller, and it means you can have someone work on one of the prompts without any risk of affecting the other tasks. So it creates like a nice separation of concerns. Yeah.Alessio [00:15:21]: And the other model behavior thing you mentioned, they prefer to generate like shorter diffs. Why is that? Like, is there a way? I think that's maybe like the lazy model question that people have is like, why are you not just generating the whole code instead of telling me to implement it?Swyx [00:15:36]: Are you saving tokens? Yeah, exactly. It's like conspiracy theory. Yeah. Yeah.Erik [00:15:41]: Yeah. So there's two different things there. One is like the, I'd say maybe like doing the easier solution rather than the hard solution. And I'd say the second one, I think what you're talking about is like the lazy model is like when the model says like dot, dot, dot, code remains the same.Swyx [00:15:52]: Code goes here. Yeah. I'm like, thanks, dude.Erik [00:15:55]: But honestly, like that just comes as like people on the internet will do stuff like that. And like, dude, if you're talking to a friend and you ask them like to give you some example code, they would definitely do that. They're not going to reroll the whole thing. And so I think that's just a matter of like, you know, sometimes you actually do just, just want like the relevant changes. And so I think it's, this is something where a lot of times like, you know, the models aren't good at mind reading of like which one you want. So I think that like the more explicit you can be in prompting to say, Hey, you know, give me the entire thing, no, no elisions versus just give me the relevant changes. And that's something, you know, we want to make the models always better at following those kinds of instructions.Swyx [00:16:32]: I'll drop a couple of references here. We're recording this like a day after Dario, Lex Friedman just dropped his five hour pod with Dario and Amanda and the rest of the crew. And Dario actually made this interesting observation that like, we actually don't want, we complain about models being too chatty in text and then not chatty enough in code. And so like getting that right is kind of a awkward bar because, you know, you, you don't want it to yap in its responses, but then you also want it to be complete in, in code. And then sometimes it's not complete. Sometimes you just want it to diff, which is something that Enthopic has also released with a, you know, like the, the fast edit stuff that you guys did. And then the other thing I wanted to also double back on is the prompting stuff. You said, you said it was a small effect, but it was a noticeable effect in terms of like picking a prompt. I think we'll go into suite agent in a little bit, but I kind of reject the fact that, you know, you need to choose one prompt and like have your whole performance be predicated on that one prompt. I think something that Enthopic has done really well is meta prompting, prompting for a prompt. And so why can't you just develop a meta prompt for, for all the other prompts? And you know, if it's a simple task, make a simple prompt, if it's a hard task, make a hard prompt. Obviously I'm probably hand-waving a little bit, but I will definitely ask people to try the Enthopic Workbench meta prompting system if they haven't tried it yet. I went to the Build Day recently at Enthopic HQ, and it's the closest I've felt to an AGI, like learning how to operate itself that, yeah, it's, it's, it's really magical.Erik [00:17:57]: Yeah, no, Claude is great at writing prompts for Claude.Swyx [00:18:00]: Right, so meta prompting. Yeah, yeah.Erik [00:18:02]: The way I think about this is that humans, even like very smart humans still use sort of checklists and use sort of scaffolding for themselves. Surgeons will still have checklists, even though they're incredible experts. And certainly, you know, a very senior engineer needs less structure than a junior engineer, but there still is some of that structure that you want to keep. And so I always try to anthropomorphize the models and try to think about for a human sort of what is the equivalent. And that's sort of, you know, how I think about these things is how much instruction would you give a human with the same task? And do you, would you need to give them a lot of instruction or a little bit of instruction?Alessio [00:18:36]: Let's talk about the agent architecture maybe. So first, runtime, you let it run until it thinks it's done or it reaches 200k context window.Swyx [00:18:45]: How did you come up? What's up with that?Erik [00:18:47]: Yeah.Swyx [00:18:48]: Yeah.Erik [00:18:49]: I mean, this, so I'd say that a lot of previous agent work built sort of these very hard coded and rigid workflows where the model is sort of pushed through certain flows of steps. And I think to some extent, you know, that's needed with smaller models and models that are less smart. But one of the things that we really wanted to explore was like, let's really give Claude the reins here and not force Claude to do anything, but let Claude decide, you know, how it should approach the problem, what steps it should do. And so really, you know, what we did is like the most extreme version of this is just give it some tools that it can call and it's able to keep calling the tools, keep thinking, and then yeah, keep doing that until it thinks it's done. And that's sort of the most, the most minimal agent framework that we came up with. And I think that works very well. I think especially the new Sonnet 3.5 is very, very good at self-correction, has a lot of like grit. Claude will try things that fail and then try, you know, come back and sort of try different approaches. And I think that's something that you didn't see in a lot of previous models. Some of the existing agent frameworks that I looked at, they had whole systems built to try to detect loops and see, oh, is the model doing the same thing, you know, more than three times, then we have to pull it out. And I think like the smarter the models are, the less you need that kind of extra scaffolding. So yeah, just giving the model tools and letting it keep sample and call tools until it thinks it's done was the most minimal framework that we could think of. And so that's what we did.Alessio [00:20:18]: So you're not pruning like bad paths from the context. If it tries to do something, it fails. You just burn all these tokens.Swyx [00:20:25]: Yes.Erik [00:20:26]: I would say the downside of this is that this is sort of a very token expensive way to doSwyx [00:20:29]: this. But still, it's very common to prune bad paths because models get stuck. Yeah.Erik [00:20:35]: But I'd say that, yeah, 3.5 is not getting stuck as much as previous models. And so, yeah, we wanted to at least just try the most minimal thing. Now, I would say that, you know, this is definitely an area of future research, especially if we talk about these problems that are going to take a human more than four hours. Those might be things where we're going to need to go prune bad paths to let the model be able to accomplish this task within 200k tokens. So certainly I think there's like future research to be done in that area, but it's not necessary to do well on these benchmarks.Swyx [00:21:06]: Another thing I always have questions about on context window things, there's a mini cottage industry of code indexers that have sprung up for large code bases, like the ones in SweetBench. You didn't need them? We didn't.Erik [00:21:18]: And I think I'd say there's like two reasons for this. One is like SweetBench specific and the other is a more general thing. The more general thing is that I think Sonnet is very good at what we call agentic search. And what this basically means is letting the model decide how to search for something. It gets the results and then it can decide, should it keep searching or is it done? Does it have everything it needs? So if you read through a lot of the traces of the SweetBench, the model is calling tools to view directories, list out things, view files. And it will do a few of those until it feels like it's found the file where the bug is. And then it will start working on that file. And I think like, again, this is all, everything we did was about just giving Claude the full reins. So there's no hard-coded system. There's no search system that you're relying on getting the correct files into context. This just totally lets Claude do it.Swyx [00:22:11]: Or embedding things into a vector database. Exactly. Oops. No, no.Erik [00:22:17]: This is very, very token expensive. And so certainly, and it also takes many, many turns. And so certainly if you want to do something in a single turn, you need to do RAG and just push stuff into the first prompt.Alessio [00:22:28]: And just to make it clear, it's using the Bash tool, basically doing LS, looking at files and then doing CAD for the following context. It can do that.Erik [00:22:35]: But it's file editing tool also has a command in it called view that can view a directory. It's very similar to LS, but it just sort of has some nice sort of quality of life improvements. So I think it'll only do an LS sort of two directories deep so that the model doesn't get overwhelmed if it does this on a huge file. I would say actually we did more engineering of the tools than the overall prompt. But the one other thing I want to say about this agentic search is that for SWE-Bench specifically, a lot of the tasks are bug reports, which means they have a stack trace in them. And that means right in that first prompt, it tells you where to go. And so I think this is a very easy case for the model to find the right files versus if you're using this as a general coding assistant where there isn't a stack trace or you're asking it to insert a new feature, I think there it's much harder to know which files to look at. And that might be an area where you would need to do more of this exhaustive search where an agentic search would take way too long.Swyx [00:23:33]: As someone who spent the last few years in the JS world, it'd be interesting to see SWE-Bench JS because these stack traces are useless because of so much virtualization that we do. So they're very, very disconnected with where the code problems are actually appearing.Erik [00:23:50]: That makes me feel better about my limited front-end experience, as I've always struggled with that problem.Swyx [00:23:55]: It's not your fault. We've gotten ourselves into a very, very complicated situation. And I'm not sure it's entirely needed. But if you talk to our friends at Vercel, they will say it is.Erik [00:24:04]: I will say SWE-Bench just released SWE-Bench Multimodal, which I believe is either entirely JavaScript or largely JavaScript. And it's entirely things that have visual components of them.Swyx [00:24:15]: Are you going to tackle that? We will see.Erik [00:24:17]: I think it's on the list and there's interest, but no guarantees yet.Swyx [00:24:20]: Just as a side note, it occurs to me that every model lab, including Enthopic, but the others as well, you should have your own SWE-Bench, whatever your bug tracker tool. This is a general methodology that you can use to track progress, I guess.Erik [00:24:34]: Yeah, sort of running on our own internal code base.Swyx [00:24:36]: Yeah, that's a fun idea.Alessio [00:24:37]: Since you spend so much time on the tool design, so you have this edit tool that can make changes and whatnot. Any learnings from that that you wish the AI IDEs would take in? Is there some special way to look at files, feed them in?Erik [00:24:50]: I would say the core of that tool is string replace. And so we did a few different experiments with different ways to specify how to edit a file. And string replace, basically, the model has to write out the existing version of the string and then a new version, and that just gets swapped in. We found that to be the most reliable way to do these edits. Other things that we tried were having the model directly write a diff, having the model fully regenerate files. That one is actually the most accurate, but it takes so many tokens, and if you're in a very big file, it's cost prohibitive. There's basically a lot of different ways to represent the same task. And they actually have pretty big differences in terms of model accuracy. I think Eider, they have a really good blog where they explore some of these different methods for editing files, and they post results about them, which I think is interesting. But I think this is a really good example of the broader idea that you need to iterate on tools rather than just a prompt. And I think a lot of people, when they make tools for an LLM, they kind of treat it like they're just writing an API for a computer, and it's sort of very minimal. It's sort of just the bare bones of what you'd need, and honestly, it's so hard for the models to use those. Again, I come back to anthropomorphizing these models. Imagine you're a developer, and you just read this for the very first time, and you're trying to use it. You can do so much better than just sort of the bare API spec of what you'd often see. Include examples in the description. Include really detailed explanations of how things work. And I think that, again, also think about what is the easiest way for the model to represent the change that it wants to make. For file editing, as an example, writing a diff is actually... Let's take the most extreme example. You want the model to literally write a patch file. I think patch files have at the very beginning numbers of how many total lines change. That means before the model has actually written the edit, it needs to decide how many numbers or how many lines are going to change.Swyx [00:26:52]: Don't quote me on that.Erik [00:26:54]: I think it's something like that, but I don't know if that's exactly the diff format. But you can certainly have formats that are much easier to express without messing up than others. And I like to think about how much human effort goes into designing human interfaces for things. It's incredible. This is entirely what FrontEnd is about, is creating better interfaces to kind of do the same things. And I think that same amount of attention and effort needs to go into creating agent computer interfaces.Swyx [00:27:19]: It's a topic we've discussed, ACI or whatever that looks like. I would also shout out that I think you released some of these toolings as part of computer use as well. And people really liked it. It's all open source if people want to check it out. I'm curious if there's an environment element that complements the tools. So how do you... Do you have a sandbox? Is it just Docker? Because that can be slow or resource intensive. Do you have anything else that you would recommend?Erik [00:27:47]: I don't think I can talk about sort of public details or about private details about how we implement our sandboxing. But obviously, we need to have sort of safe, secure, and fast sandboxes for training for the models to be able to practice writing code and working in an environment.Swyx [00:28:03]: I'm aware of a few startups working on agent sandboxing. E2B is a close friend of ours that Alessio has led around in, but also I think there's others where they're focusing on snapshotting memory so that it can do time travel for debugging. Computer use where you can control the mouse or keyboard or something like that. Whereas here, I think that the kinds of tools that we offer are very, very limited to coding agent work cases like bash, edit, you know, stuff like that. Yeah.Erik [00:28:30]: I think the computer use demo that we released is an extension of that. It has the same bash and edit tools, but it also has the computer tool that lets it get screenshots and move the mouse and keyboard. Yeah. So I definitely think there's sort of more general tools there. And again, the tools we released as part of SweetBench were, I'd say they're very specific for like editing files and doing bash, but at the same time, that's actually very general if you think about it. Like anything that you would do on a command line or like editing files, you can do with those tools. And so we do want those tools to feel like any sort of computer terminal work could be done with those same tools rather than making tools that were like very specific for SweetBench like run tests as its own tool, for instance. Yeah.Swyx [00:29:15]: You had a question about tests.Alessio [00:29:16]: Yeah, exactly. I saw there's no test writer tool. Is it because it generates the code and then you're running it against SweetBench anyway, so it doesn't really need to write the test or?Swyx [00:29:26]: Yeah.Erik [00:29:27]: So this is one of the interesting things about SweetBench is that the tests that the model's output is graded on are hidden from it. That's basically so that the model can't cheat by looking at the tests and writing the exact solution. And I'd say typically the model, the first thing it does is it usually writes a little script to reproduce the error. And again, most SweetBench tasks are like, hey, here's a bug that I found. I run this and I get this error. So the first thing the model does is try to reproduce that. So it's kind of been rerunning that script as a mini test. But yeah, sometimes the model will like accidentally introduce a bug that breaks some other tests and it doesn't know about that.Alessio [00:30:05]: And should we be redesigning any tools? We kind of talked about this and like having more examples, but I'm thinking even things of like Q as a query parameter in many APIs, it's like easier for the model to like re-query than read the Q. I'm sure it learned the Q by this point, but like, is there anything you've seen like building this where it's like, hey, if I were to redesign some CLI tools, some API tool, I would like change the way structure to make it better for LLMs?Erik [00:30:31]: I don't think I've thought enough about that off the top of my head, but certainly like just making everything more human friendly, like having like more detailed documentation and examples. I think examples are really good in things like descriptions, like so many, like just using the Linux command line, like how many times I do like dash dash help or look at the man page or something. It's like, just give me one example of like how I actually use this. Like I don't want to go read through a hundred flags. Just give me the most common example. But again, so you know, things that would be useful for a human, I think are also very useful for a model.Swyx [00:31:03]: Yeah. I mean, there's one thing that you cannot give to code agents that is useful for human is this access to the internet. I wonder how to design that in, because one of the issues that I also had with just the idea of a suite bench is that you can't do follow up questions. You can't like look around for similar implementations. These are all things that I do when I try to fix code and we don't do that. It's not, it wouldn't be fair, like it'd be too easy to cheat, but then also it's kind of not being fair to these agents because they're not operating in a real world situation. Like if I had a real world agent, of course I'm giving it access to the internet because I'm not trying to pass a benchmark. I don't have a question in there more, more just like, I feel like the most obvious tool access to the internet is not being used.Erik [00:31:47]: I think that that's really important for humans, but honestly the models have so much general knowledge from pre-training that it's, it's like less important for them. I feel like versioning, you know, if you're working on a newer thing that was like, they came after the knowledge cutoff, then yes, I think that's very important. I think actually this, this is like a broader problem that there is a divergence between Sweebench and like what customers will actually care about who are working on a coding agent for real use. And I think one of those there is like internet access and being able to like, how do you pull in outside information? I think another one is like, if you have a real coding agent, you don't want to have it start on a task and like spin its wheels for hours because you gave it a bad prompt. You want it to come back immediately and ask follow up questions and like really make sure it has a very detailed understanding of what to do, then go off for a few hours and do work. So I think that like real tasks are going to be much more interactive with the agent rather than this kind of like one shot system. And right now there's no benchmark that, that measures that. And maybe I think it'd be interesting to have some benchmark that is more interactive. I don't know if you're familiar with TauBench, but it's a, it's a customer service benchmark where there's basically one LLM that's playing the user or the customer that's getting support and another LLM that's playing the support agent and they interact and try to resolve the issue.Swyx [00:33:08]: Yeah. We talked to the LMSIS guys. Awesome. And they also did MTBench for people listening along. So maybe we need MTSWE-Bench. Sure. Yeah.Erik [00:33:16]: So maybe, you know, you could have something where like before the SWE-Bench task starts, you have like a few back and forths with kind of like the, the author who can answer follow up questions about what they want the task to do. And of course you'd need to do that where it doesn't cheat and like just get the exact, the exact thing out of the human or out of the sort of user. But I think that would be a really interesting thing to see. If you look at sort of existing agent work, like a Repl.it's coding agent, I think one of the really great UX things they do is like first having the agent create a plan and then having the human approve that plan or give feedback. I think for agents in general, like having a planning step at the beginning, one, just having that plan will improve performance on the downstream task just because it's kind of like a bigger chain of thought, but also it's just such a better UX. It's way easier for a human to iterate on a plan with a model rather than iterating on the full task that sort of has a much slower time through each loop. If the human has approved this implementation plan, I think it makes the end result a lot more sort of auditable and trustable. So I think there's a lot of things sort of outside of SweetBench that will be very important for real agent usage in the world. Yeah.Swyx [00:34:27]: I will say also, there's a couple of comments on names that you dropped. Copilot also does the plan stage before it writes code. I feel like those approaches have generally been less Twitter successful because it's not prompt to code, it's prompt plan code. You know, so there's a little bit of friction in there, but it's not much. Like it's, it actually, it's, it, you get a lot for what it's worth. I also like the way that Devin does it, where you can sort of edit the plan as it goes along. And then the other thing with Repl.it, we had a, we hosted a sort of dev day pregame with Repl.it and they also commented about multi-agents. So like having two agents kind of bounce off of each other. I think it's a similar approach to what you're talking about with kind of the few shot example, just as in the prompts of clarifying what the agent wants. But typically I think this would be implemented as a tool calling another agent, like a sub-agent I don't know if you explored that, do you like that idea?Erik [00:35:20]: I haven't explored this enough, but I've definitely heard of people having good success with this. Of almost like basically having a few different sort of personas of agents, even if they're all the same LLM. I think this is one thing with multi-agent that a lot of people will kind of get confused by is they think it has to be different models behind each thing. But really it's sort of usually the same, the same model with different prompts. And yet having one, having them have different personas to kind of bring different sort of thoughts and priorities to the table. I've seen that work very well and sort of create a much more thorough and thought outSwyx [00:35:53]: response.Erik [00:35:53]: I think the downside is just that it adds a lot of complexity and it adds a lot of extra tokens. So I think it depends what you care about. If you want a plan that's very thorough and detailed, I think it's great. If you want a really quick, just like write this function, you know, you probably don't want to do that and have like a bunch of different calls before it does this.Alessio [00:36:11]: And just talking about the prompt, why are XML tags so good in Cloud? I think initially people were like, oh, maybe you're just getting lucky with XML. But I saw obviously you use them in your own agent prompts, so they must work. And why is it so model specific to your family?Erik [00:36:26]: Yeah, I think that there's, again, I'm not sure how much I can say, but I think there's historical reasons that internally we've preferred XML. I think also the one broader thing I'll say is that if you look at certain kinds of outputs, there is overhead to outputting in JSON. If you're trying to output code in JSON, there's a lot of extra escaping that needs to be done, and that actually hurts model performance across the board. Versus if you're in just a single XML tag, there's none of that sort of escaping thatSwyx [00:36:58]: needs to happen.Erik [00:36:58]: That being said, I haven't tried having it write HTML and XML, which maybe then you start running into weird escaping things there. I'm not sure. But yeah, I'd say that's some historical reasons, and there's less overhead of escaping.Swyx [00:37:12]: I use XML in other models as well, and it's just a really nice way to make sure that the thing that ends is tied to the thing that starts. That's the only way to do code fences where you're pretty sure example one start, example one end, that is one cohesive unit.Alessio [00:37:30]: Because the braces are nondescriptive. Yeah, exactly.Swyx [00:37:33]: That would be my simple reason. XML is good for everyone, not just Cloud. Cloud was just the first one to popularize it, I think.Erik [00:37:39]: I do definitely prefer to read XML than read JSON.Alessio [00:37:43]: Any other details that are maybe underappreciated? I know, for example, you had the absolute paths versus relative. Any other fun nuggets?Erik [00:37:52]: I think that's a good sort of anecdote to mention about iterating on tools. Like I said, spend time prompt engineering your tools, and don't just write the prompt, but write the tool, and then actually give it to the model and read a bunch of transcripts about how the model tries to use the tool. I think by doing that, you will find areas where the model misunderstands a tool or makes mistakes, and then basically change the tool to make it foolproof. There's this Japanese term, pokayoke, about making tools mistake-proof. You know, the classic idea is you can have a plug that can fit either way, and that's dangerous, or you can make it asymmetric so that it can't fit this way, it has to go like this, and that's a better tool because you can't use it the wrong way. So for this example of absolute paths, one of the things that we saw while testing these tools is, oh, if the model has done CD and moved to a different directory, it would often get confused when trying to use the tool because it's now in a different directory, and so the paths aren't lining up. So we said, oh, well, let's just force the tool to always require an absolute path, and then that's easy for the model to understand. It knows sort of where it is. It knows where the files are. And then once we have it always giving absolute paths, it never messes up even, like, no matter where it is because it just, if you're using an absolute path, it doesn't matter whereSwyx [00:39:13]: you are.Erik [00:39:13]: So iterations like that, you know, let us make the tool foolproof for the model. I'd say there's other categories of things where we see, oh, if the model, you know, opens vim, like, you know, it's never going to return. And so the tool is stuck.Swyx [00:39:28]: Did it get stuck? Yeah. Get out of vim. What?Erik [00:39:31]: Well, because the tool is, like, it just text in, text out. It's not interactive. So it's not like the model doesn't know how to get out of vim. It's that the way that the tool is, like, hooked up to the computer is not interactive. Yes, I mean, there is the meme of no one knows how to get out of vim. You know, basically, we just added instructions in the tool of, like, hey, don't launch commands that don't return.Swyx [00:39:54]: Yeah, like, don't launch vim.Erik [00:39:55]: Don't launch whatever. If you do need to do something, you know, put an ampersand after it to launch it in the background. And so, like, just, you know, putting kind of instructions like that just right in the description for the tool really helps the model. And I think, like, that's an underutilized space of prompt engineering, where, like, people might try to do that in the overall prompt, but just put that in the tool itself so the model knows that it's, like, for this tool, this is what's relevant.Swyx [00:40:20]: You said you worked on the function calling and tool use before you actually started this vBench work, right? Was there any surprises? Because you basically went from creator of that API to user of that API. Any surprises or changes you would make now that you have extensively dog-fooded in a state-of-the-art agent?Erik [00:40:39]: I want us to make, like, maybe, like, a little bit less verbose SDK. I think some way, like, right now, it just takes, I think we sort of force people to do the best practices of writing out sort of these full JSON schemas, but it would be really nice if you could just pass in a Python function as a tool. I think that could be something nice.Swyx [00:40:58]: I think that there's a lot of, like, Python- There's helper libraries. ... structure, you know. I don't know if there's anyone else that is specializing for Anthropic. Maybe Jeremy Howard's and Simon Willis's stuff. They all have Cloud-specific stuff that they are working on. Cloudette. Cloudette, exactly. I also wanted to spend a little bit of time with SuiteAgent. It seems like a very general framework. Like, is there a reason you picked it apart from it's the same authors as vBench, or?Erik [00:41:21]: The main thing we wanted to go with was the same authors as vBench, so it just felt sort of like the safest, most neutral option. And it was, you know, very high quality. It was very easy to modify, to work with. I would say it also actually, their underlying framework is sort of this, it's like, youSwyx [00:41:39]: know, think, act, observe.Erik [00:41:40]: That they kind of go through this loop, which is like a little bit more hard-coded than what we wanted to do, but it's still very close. That's still very general. So it felt like a good match as sort of the starting point for our agent. And we had already sort of worked with and talked with the SWE-Bench people directly, so it felt nice to just have, you know, we already know the authors. This will be easy to work with.Swyx [00:42:00]: I'll share a little bit of like, this all seems disconnected, but once you figure out the people and where they go to school, it all makes sense. So it's all Princeton. Yeah, the SWE-Bench and SuiteAgent.Erik [00:42:11]: It's a group out of Princeton.Swyx [00:42:12]: Yeah, and we had Shun Yu on the pod, and he came up with the React paradigm, and that's think, act, observe. That's all React. So they're all friends. Yep, yeah, exactly.Erik [00:42:22]: And you know, if you actually read our traces of our submission, you can actually see like think, act, observe in our logs. And we just didn't even change the printing code. So it's like doing still function calls under the hood, and the model can do sort of multiple function calls in a row without thinking in between if it wants to. But yeah, so a lot of similarities and a lot of things we inherited from SuiteAgent just as a starting point for the framework.Alessio [00:42:47]: Any thoughts about other agent frameworks? I think there's, you know, the whole gamut from very simple to like very complex.Swyx [00:42:53]: Autogen, CooEI, LandGraph. Yeah, yeah.Erik [00:42:56]: I think I haven't explored a lot of them in detail. I would say with agent frameworks in general, they can certainly save you some like boilerplate. But I think there's actually this like downside of making agents too easy, where you end up very quickly like building a much more complex system than you need. And suddenly, you know, instead of having one prompt, you have five agents that are talking to each other and doing a dialogue. And it's like, because the framework made that 10 lines to do, you end up building something that's way too complex. So I think I would actually caution people to like try to start without these frameworks if you can, because you'll be closer to the raw prompts and be able to sort of directly understand what's going on. I think a lot of times these frameworks also, by trying to make everything feel really magical, you end up sort of really hiding what the actual prompt and output of the model is, and that can make it much harder to debug. So certainly these things have a place, and I think they do really help at getting rid of boilerplate, but they come with this cost of obfuscating what's really happening and making it too easy to very quickly add a lot of complexity. So yeah, I would recommend people to like try it from scratch, and it's like not that bad.Alessio [00:44:08]: Would you rather have like a framework of tools? Do you almost see like, hey, it's maybe easier to get tools that are already well curated, like the ones that you build, if I had an easy way to get the best tool from you, andSwyx [00:44:21]: like you maintain the definition?Alessio [00:44:22]: Or yeah, any thoughts on how you want to formalize tool sharing?Erik [00:44:26]: Yeah, I think that's something that we're certainly interested in exploring, and I think there is space for sort of these general tools that will be very broadly applicable. But at the same time, most people that are building on these, they do have much more specific things that they're trying to do. You know, I think that might be useful for hobbyists and demos, but the ultimate end applications are going to be bespoke. And so we just want to make sure that the model's great at any tool that it uses. But certainly something we're exploring.Alessio [00:44:52]: So everything bespoke, no frameworks, no anything.Swyx [00:44:55]: Just for now, for now.Erik [00:44:56]: Yeah, I would say that like the best thing I've seen is people building up from like, build some good util functions, and then you can use those as building blocks. Yeah, yeah.Alessio [00:45:05]: I have a utils folder, or like all these scripts. My framework is like def, call, and tropic. And then I just put all the defaults.Swyx [00:45:12]: Yeah, exactly. There's a startup hidden in every utils folder, you know? No, totally not. Like, if you use it enough, like it's a startup, you know? At some point. I'm kind of curious, is there a maximum length of turns that it took? Like, what was the longest run? I actually don't.Erik [00:45:27]: I mean, it had basically infinite turns until it ran into a 200k context. I should have looked this up. I don't know. And so for some of those failed cases where it eventually ran out of context, I mean, it was over 100 turns. I'm trying to remember like the longest successful run, but I think it was definitely over 100 turns that some of the times.Swyx [00:45:48]: Which is not that much. It's a coffee break. Yeah.Erik [00:45:52]: But certainly, you know, these things can be a lot of turns. And I think that's because some of these things are really hard, where it's going to take, you know, many tries to do it. And if you think about like, think about a task that takes a human four hours to do. Think about how many different files you read, and like times you edit a file in four hours. That's a lot more than 100.Alessio [00:46:10]: How many times you open Twitter because you get distracted. But if you had a lot more compute, what's kind of like the return on the extra compute now? So like, you know, if you had thousands of turns or like whatever, like how much better would it get?Erik [00:46:23]: Yeah, this I don't know. And I think this is, I think sort of one of the open areas of research in general with agents is memory and sort of how do you have something that can do work beyond its context length where you're just purely appending. So you mentioned earlier things like pruning bad paths. I think there's a lot of interesting work around there. Can you just roll back but summarize, hey, don't go down this path? There be dragons. Yeah, I think that's very interesting that you could have something that that uses way more tokens without ever using at a time more than 200k. So I think that's very interesting. I think the biggest thing is like, can you make the model sort of losslessly summarize what it's learned from trying different approaches and bring things back? I think that's sort of the big challenge.Swyx [00:47:11]: What about different models?Alessio [00:47:12]: So you have Haiku, which is like, you know, cheaper. So you're like, well, what if I have a Haiku to do a lot of these smaller things and then put it back up?Erik [00:47:20]: I think Cursor might have said that they actually have a separate model for file editing.Swyx [00:47:25]: I'm trying to remember.Erik [00:47:25]: I think they were on maybe the Lex Fridman podcast where they said they have a bigger model, like write what the code should be and then a different model, like apply it. So I think there's a lot of interesting room for stuff like that. Yeah, fast supply.Swyx [00:47:37]: We actually did a pod with Fireworks that they worked with on. It's speculative decoding.Erik [00:47:41]: But I think there's also really interesting things about like, you know, paring down input tokens as well, especially sometimes the models trying to read like a 10,000 line file. That's a lot of tokens. And most of it is actually not going to be relevant. I think it'd be really interesting to like delegate that to Haiku. Haiku read this file and just pull out the most relevant functions. And then, you know, Sonnet reads just those and you save 90% on tokens. I think there's a lot of really interesting room for things like that. And again, we were just trying to do sort of the simplest, most minimal thing and show that it works. I'm really hoping that people, sort of the agent community builds things like that on top of our models. That's, again, why we released these tools. We're not going to go and do lots more submissions to SWE-Bench and try to prompt engineer this and build a bigger system. We want people to like the ecosystem to do that on top of our models. But yeah, so I think that's a really interesting one.Swyx [00:48:32]: It turns out, I think you did do 3.5 Haiku with your tools and it scored a 40.6. Yes.Erik [00:48:38]: So it did very well. It itself is actually very smart, which is great. But we haven't done any experiments with this combination of the two models. But yeah, I think that's one of the exciting things is that how well Haiku 3.5 did on SWE-Bench shows that sort of even our smallest, fastest model is very good at sort of thinking agentically and working on hard problems. Like it's not just sort of for writing simple text anymore.Alessio [00:49:02]: And I know you're not going to talk about it, but like Sonnet is not even supposed to be the best model, you know? Like Opus, it's kind of like we left it at three back in the corner intro. At some point, I'm sure the new Opus will come out. And if you had Opus Plus on it, that sounds very, very good.Swyx [00:49:19]: There's a run with SuiteAgent plus Opus, but that's the official SWE-Bench guys doing it.Erik [00:49:24]: That was the older, you know, 3.0.Swyx [00:49:25]: You didn't do yours. Yeah. Okay. Did you want to? I mean, you could just change the model name.Erik [00:49:31]: I think we didn't submit it, but I think we included it in our model card.Swyx [00:49:35]: Okay.Erik [00:49:35]: We included the score as a comparison. Yeah.Swyx [00:49:38]: Yeah.Erik [00:49:38]: And Sonnet and Haiku, actually, I think the new ones, they both outperformed the original Opus. Yeah. I did see that.Swyx [00:49:44]: Yeah. It's a little bit hard to find. Yeah.Erik [00:49:47]: It's not an exciting score, so we didn't feel like they need to submit it to the benchmark.Swyx [00:49:52]: We can cut over to computer use if we're okay with moving on to topics on this, if anything else. I think we're good.Erik [00:49:58]: I'm trying to think if there's anything else SWE-Bench related.Swyx [00:50:02]: It doesn't have to be also just specifically SWE-Bench, but just your thoughts on building agents, because you are one of the few people that have reached this leaderboard on building a coding agent. This is the state of the art. It's surprisingly not that hard to reach with some good principles. Right. There's obviously a ton of low-hanging fruit that we covered. Your thoughts on if you were to build a coding agent startup, what next?Erik [00:50:24]: I think the really interesting question for me, for all the startups out there, is this kind of divergence between the benchmarks and what real customers will want. So I'm curious, maybe the next time you have a coding agent startup on the podcast, you should ask them that. What are the differences that they're starting to make? Tomorrow.Swyx [00:50:40]: Oh, perfect, perfect. Yeah.Erik [00:50:41]: I'm actually very curious what they will see, because I also have seen, I feel like it's slowed down a little bit if I don't see the startups submitting to SWE-Bench that much anymore.Swyx [00:50:52]: Because of the traces, the trace. So we had Cosign on, they had a 50-something on full, on SWE-Bench full, which is the hardest one, and they were rejected because they didn't want to submit their traces. Yep. IP, you know? Yeah, that makes sense, that makes sense. Actually, tomorrow we're talking to Bolt, which is a cloud customer. You guys actually published a case study with them. I assume you weren't involved with that, but they were very happy with Cloud. Cool. One of the biggest launches of the year. Yeah, totally. We actually happened to b