All the more reason to focus on those service guarantees, integration, and lawyers while making the underlying model easily swappable to whoever’s winning the frontier model involution battle at the moment
IMO present technology is tailored for an experienced developer to give agents manageable tasks that can be one-shot. The marketing right now reminds me of the 90s when AskJeeves promised natural language search when the technology was fundamentally still stuck in keyword search, and learning to craft a search query for Google is today’s prompt engineering
Yeah, the neoclouds and hyperscalers are taking massive losses right now, self hosting is basically signing yourself up to do the same. There are philosophical reasons to do so but it’s a terrible economic decision
But those proofs are showing that the fundamental axioms (which are generally simple and elegant) are still enough to build a complex result.
I think of elegance as not having to add epicycles, not that everything in the system has to be simple.
Also, without a working theory the, the space of possible solutions is near infinite. LLMs manage to pluck out the space of comprehensible English strings from n-dimensional hell. Even if this is done with a black box of billions of parameters, it’s still elegance in the sense that such a space even exists and was found
This is the is/ought problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem) and it’s unclear whether an objective general solution to this even exists, especially constrained within the framework of language that LLMs are stuck in
There is an idea floating around that trade imbalances create global inequality (Trade Wars are Class Wars by Klein & Pettis) and the original sin was adopting the dollar as the reserve currency instead of something like Bancor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor)