I feel like you're taking it somewhat personally as a statement on ability or intelligence levels. It's really just about the scale difference and the access to that infrastructure. That is what enables that class to look at and think about problems differently.
Having 10,000 (or more) agents working for months on a problem is categorically different from the type of usage most people are familiar with. The complexity explodes to a point that requires the "archaeology" he mentions for people to even try to understand what's going on.
This is the key insight. Those capabilities are currently limited to frontier labs and literally cost them millions of dollars to achieve. But as we well know, computing costs and algorithms are optimized rapidly and soon those capabilities will be more widespread. We are at an inflection point where we can design systems that are able to go and do things that we don't fully understand, and they will handily outpace our forensic bandwidth.
> But as we well know, computing costs and algorithms are optimized rapidly and soon those capabilities will be more widespread. We are at an inflection point
It seems we’re perpetually in this state.
As far as I can tell, we seem to keep moving past states and redefining them while we do.
Chess, ok, Go, ok, doing new math, ok, breaking out of sandboxes and hacking public-facing infrastructure, ok...
Still waiting for the initial results from the first state to "land"...
I hear you, but also, "a broken clock is right twice a day." And really, there are people still alive who have more or less witnessed the entire rise of the machines.