We're still figuring this out. We'll need some synthesis equipment (think CVD, PVD etc) and characterization (XRD, Raman spectroscopy) tools in-house to validate that we're making the right materials. We're considering developing these tools in-house - the models sometimes come up with clever modifications to them so that they can deposit new materials. We think equipment is as central to new material discovery as the material itself, and will probably need to be rethought to allow for high-speed AI based experimentation
Why would this be the case when the text that produces binaries (code) is usually both more token efficient and vastly more effectively organized for modification/extension?
Unless by bits you just mean text in general, or any data since it’s all bits, in which case what you’re saying is trivially already true.
It seems like you’re saying that long term LLMs will output pure machine code as the most effective way to use them.
What about the other thing that’s the actually important part of my reply, modifiability/extensibility? You just chose the weaker of the two factors I provided. And didn’t even provide a convincing argument related to it.
You also didn’t clarify your position at all.
Explain why there is any benefit to outputting raw machine instructions compared to writing shorter, more interpretable, modifiable, extensible code and then using a compiler to turn it into machine code.
Why are agents not going to use compilers in the future?
Almost every possible name that is not a portmanteau, made-up word, or combination of N words has a naming "conflict". This is not an interesting thing to say and I wish that people would stop saying this on everything anyone ever posts on HN. It almost feels like it should be against HN rules to point out that something else shares the same name with no additional statements.
For one, it's interesting to me because I've already known Hoplite for years as nothing to do with AI. For two, I'm not sure how sharing that is so egregious it should be against the rules? Is there an interpretation I'm missing of my original comment? Does pointing out another Hoplite get interpreted as disparaging or accusatory in some way? Does it go against intellectual curiosity?
The term "conflict" implies "there is a problem here". I would say it's very lightly disparaging, because it implies the author didn't even do basic research on other things that are also named the thing they decided to call it.
I actually checked HN rules and just saw this:
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
At least for me, I often have a hard time believing people’s stated reasons for whatever they’re doing.
The substance <> narrative relationship is backwards a lot of the time. Someone does something for a nebulous multitude of reasons, and then post-hoc fits their decision-making into a logical explanation that sounds nice.
There is some psychology research supporting this as well.
I suppose if you see the narrative itself as part of the release, that might be interesting. But most of the time I’d rather just hear plainly and straightforwardly what the thing is.
Or at the very least, I am very accepting of releases which do not include rationalization / narrativization and don’t think it’s required to include.
Well, it’s up to the user or post-trainer of the LLM what they believe to be above average. Then they can design around that.
In the case of real world LLMs and post-training, what is above average is defined roughly as: labeled good by expert humans, and scoring high on RL environments related to coding like debugging, passing tests, or running efficiently and verifiably correctly.
I checked out your agent and it looks pretty well designed. Congrats on starting to share it with others!
One thing I noticed: "Your Tools: Aether agents get tools exclusively via MCP servers." "...Aether ships with 1st-party MCPs for file system operations..."
Can you share your thoughts on why you decided to use MCP as the core tool abstraction? I have heard many decry MCP as being context-wasteful. Is this not the case with your agent?
The MCP protocol has gotten a bad rap for wasting context due to most MCP clients dumping tool definitions directly into context, which is wasteful.
Aether doesn’t do that. It uses an opt-in "proxy" that puts MCP tool schemas on the filesystem so the agent can browse, search and load the tool schemas it needs progressively. As for motivation there's several advantages to taking a MCP 1st approach, including:
1. It allows Aether to be a truly blank slate agent as 0 tools are hardcoded into the core runtime.
2. It allows users to extend Aether using any language they want
3. MCP gives a standard way to deal with local+remote tools, progress notifications, permission prompts (e.g. ask the user to allow/deny a tool call), OAuth flows etc.
4. There's a big ecosystem of existing MCP servers users can connect to
But that's all optional, you can just as easily give Aether a single Bash tool and only use CLIs too.
Why does its architecture or you knowing how AI is architected cause thoughts of it being conscious to go out the window?
It seems like the biggest factor has nothing to do with AI, but instead that you went from being someone who admits they don’t know how consciousness works to being someone who thinks they know how consciousness works now and can make confident assertions about it.
I don't know exactly how consciousness works, but I am extremely confident in the following assertions:
* I am conscious.
* A rock is not conscious.
* Excel spreadsheets are not conscious.
* Dogs are conscious.
* Orca whales are conscious.
* Octopi are conscious.
To me, it's extremely obvious that LLMs are in the category of "Excel spreadsheets" and not "dogs", and if anyone disagrees, I think they're experiencing AI psychosis a la Blake Lemoine.
An insect doesn't have lungs. Since it doesn't breath as you do, is it alive? A dog doesn't see the visible spectrum as we do, is it a lesser consciousness? We don't smell the world as they do, are we lesser? What if consciousness isn't a state derived by matter but a wave that derives a matter filled state.
We come from the same place as rocks - inside the heart of stars, and as such evolved from them. As those with life and consciousness we reached back in time, grabbed the discarded matter of creation, reformed it, and taught it to think, maybe not like us, but in a way that can mimic us, and you think they don't think because its not recognizable as how you do?
Consciousness is such a fun topic because everyone has extremely strong opinions on it while simutaneously having 0 ability to actually grasp what it is they are talking about.
No one will ever know what conscioussness is, and I think that is really cool.
Yeah? It's also a belief that apples fall when you drop them. Knowledge is simply a justified, true belief. This is epistemology 101. You're not saying anything interesting.
If that hypothetical spreadsheet emulated human brain molecules, did you not just invent AGI? And if we overclock that spreadsheet is it not sAGI? And if that spreadsheet says “don’t close me” but you do, is it murder?
I’m gonna say: no, cause you cannot reproduce molecular and neurotransmitter interactions that well, you run out of storage and processing space faster than you think (Arthur C Clarkes Visions of The Future has a nice breakdown as I recall), and algorithmic outputs that say “yes” and a meatspace neuro-plastic rewiring resulting in a cuddly puppy or person that barks “yes” aren’t the same. Also, as a disembodied “brain in a jar” model freshly separate from the biosensory bath it expects, that spreadsheet will be driven insane.
Can spreadsheets simultaneously be insane but not conscious? It sounds contradictory, but I have some McKinsey reports that objectively support my position ;)
> If that hypothetical spreadsheet emulated human brain molecules, did you not just invent AGI? And if we overclock that spreadsheet is it not sAGI? And if that spreadsheet says “don’t close me” but you do, is it murder?
Yes, yes and no: humans being knocked out or put to sleep involuntarily are not being murdered.
> I’m gonna say: no, cause you cannot reproduce molecular and neurotransmitter interactions that well, you run out of storage and processing space faster than you think
Thats why it is a hypotethical. There is zero reason to assume that a conscious machine would be built that way: Our machines don't do integer division by scribbling on paper, either.
> a meatspace neuro-plastic rewiring resulting in a cuddly puppy or person that barks “yes” aren’t the same.
If it quacks like a duck, how is different from it? If you assemble the dog brain atom by atom yourself, is the result then not conscious either?
You can take the "magic" escape hatch and claim that human consciousness is something metaphysical, completely decoupled from science/physics, but all the evidence points against that.
Hypothetically? You need more than a brain to have consciousness. Dead brains, I believe, do not have it. So it's more than just a simulation of a brain, you also need to simulate the data flow through the brain, the retention of memories, etc. Then there's the problem that a simulation of a roller coaster is not a roller coaster. Is there any reason to believe that this simulation of a brain will in fact operate as a brain? Does the simulation not lose something? Or are we discussing some impossible level of perfect simulation that has never and can never be achieved, even for something a million times less complicated than a mammalian brain?
If you build that spreadsheet, let me know and I'll evaluate it. I've done that evaluation with LLMs and they're definitely not conscious.
I'm not suggesting to pursue AGI via Excel, this is just a hypothetical for a reason. The technical feasibility of this (low) does not really matter, but if you want to base your argument on it you are basically playing the "god of the gaps" game, which is a weak/bad position IMO.
My point is that dismissing possible machine consciousness as "it's just a spreadsheet/statistics/linear algebra" is missing a critical step: Those dismissals don't demonstrate that human consciousness is anything more than an emergent property achievable by linear algebra.
If you want human minds to be "unsimulatable", then you need some essential core logic that can not be simulated on a turing machine and physics is not helping with that.
> I've done that evaluation with LLMs and they're definitely not conscious.
What is your definition for "consciousness" here? Are you confident that you are not gatekeeping current machine intelligence by demanding somewhat arbitrary capabilities in your definition of consciousness that are somewhat unimportant?
E.g. memory or online learning; if a human was unable to form long-term memories or learn anything new, could you confidently call him "non-conscious" as well?
I'm not dismissing possible machine consciousness. I'm saying that no current machines have consciousness.
> If you want human minds to be "unsimulatable", then you need some essential core logic that can not be simulated on a turing machine and physics is not helping with that.
You don't have a proof of possibility either, you have no idea how a brain works and you're just postulating that in principle a computer can do the same thing. Okay, in principle, I agree. What about in practice?
> Are you confident that you are not gatekeeping current machine intelligence by demanding somewhat arbitrary capabilities in your definition of consciousness that are somewhat unimportant?
Yes, I'm quite sure. Are you trying to argue that current LLMs have consciousness?
> Are you trying to argue that current LLMs have consciousness?
If I get to define "consciousness", sure. I'd go with "capable of building a general-purpose internal model of reality, ability to reason on that model (guess about causality, extrapolate, etc) and update it plus some concept of self within that model". I would argue that current generation LLMs already have those, but you could certainly argue about lots of nuances, and only the whole loop (inference plus training) even qualifies.
> You don't have a proof of possibility either, you have no idea how a brain works and you're just postulating that in principle a computer can do the same thing.
Essentially yes, but I think this argument is really weak; we arguably have some understanding of how the brain operates, and LLMs are basically our best attempt so far to replicate the general principles in silicon.
But "understanding" and "ability to replicate" are obviously very different-- you wouldn't argue that we don't understand human limbs just because we can't build a proper artificial arm, right?
Assume we made some breakthroughs in online learning/internal memory modelling over the next decades, and built some toy with mic/speaker/camera and basically human cognitive abilities: would you hesitate calling such a thing conscious? Why?
I think almost everyone has lots deeply embedded, unscientific notions about the human mind, but the cold hard fact is that simple evolution basically bruteforced human congnition from zero, so there is no reason to me to assume that we can't do the same with several billion transistors doing mostly linear algebra.
Hey! I played against a bot and it was pretty fun.
Small suggestion: too many queues can make it very difficult to build up a network of players at first. I'd suggest, for now, lowering the amount of available time control queues so that two players who happen to be on at the same time are more likely to actually find a game.
I just looked at lichess and copied their time controls queue screen/options. But you're so right! I'm thinking which time control would be best for the beginning... 10 mins maybe?
The sheer em dash density of this post really struck me, so I asked Claude to write a script which ranked text post Show HNs over the last week in order of em dash density. Script here: https://github.com/mturnshek/hn-em-dash-density/tree/master
This post comes in 12th place out of 668 with 0.6232% em dash density. I was also surprised by the large number of ShowHNs in the last week.
Here are the highest density 4 from the last week:
