Rajeev Jain

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.

This morning at NeurIPS, Rich Sutton reminded us that we need continual learning to reach AGI. This afternoon, Ali Behrouz presented a Google poster paper, Nested Learning, which provides new ideas on the path to continual learning. I recorded the 40 minute talk as it might be useful for some researchers in the audience. For the rest of us, I subscribe to Andrej Karpathy's suspicion that it will take a 5-10 papers like this to move us to AGI from where we are now, just like it took about 10 papers to move from 2012's AlexNet to ChatGPT. At the very end, I ask Ali how far along to continual learning this represents. Full paper link below, as well as a YouTube link. ps. sorry about the first 2 minutes of bad audio since there were 2 idiots standing beside me have a conversation right in front of this presenter in a rather packed poster presentation. Honestly, tamp down your egos guys and show come common courtesy!

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