Joe Cole - e/acc

Q: How are job postings for software engineers rising rapidly despite AI agents automating coding? A: Because there’s far more code to manage than ever before. We’re already seeing a 14x YoY increase in GitHub commits, and it’s accelerating. AI has dramatically lowered the cost of writing code, so it’s now being used across far more businesses, applications, and use cases. We’re at the beginning of a massive productivity boom driven by the proliferation of bespoke software throughout the entire economy. Coding has been AI’s breakout use case this year. The fact that it’s increased demand for software engineers — rather than decreased it — should call into question the entire “AI will cause mass job loss” narrative.

friend's brother has been on a mormon mission for the past two years, with no internet access other than weekly family calls, and is about to come back and start a CS degree. this is going to feel like waking up from a coma.

Your RL post-training may be sabotaging your LLM’s test-time scaling! Conventional RL pretends that you can collapse all reward signals *upfront* into a single *scalar reward*. We introduce Vector Policy Optimization (VPO), which natively maximizes *vector-valued* rewards, boosting test time search performance, even on the original scalar.

I suspect math will be like Chess and Go due to verifiability. The period of fruitful collaboration between humans and AI will be short (i.e. a few years or less, not a decade). Progress in math will be jagged, with harder to formalize fields coming last, but I suspect this jaggedness will be compressed in time -- I expect superhuman performance at (nearly?) all areas of math within a few years (a few = 2-3?). AIs will also be better at asking pure math questions than humans, and will quickly develop theories beyond human comprehension. Human theorists will have a recreational comparative advantage over other humans in understanding these theories, but AIs will be better at communicating these theories to applied researchers. Pure mathematicians will need to become applied researchers to do productive work, until applied research is also automated. Confidence level for prediction: 50-65% for gist, 40-50% for all above claims being correct.

Since joining OpenAI the amount of congressional staffers that've (very kindly and politely) reached out abt careers in AI/tech from offices whose Reps/Senators rail against AI/tech/infra is...notable. Tbc, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that and I'm always happy to chat and help people connect with opportunities/networking etc. I didn't agree with the electeds I worked for on everything either, but the divisions there feel a lot wider than on most issues.