I think they want the man and ideas behind the most useful AI tool thus far. Surprisingly, and OpenAI may see this - it is a developer tool.
OpenAI needs a popular consumer tool. Until my elderly mother is asking me how to install an AI assistant like OpenClaw, the same way she was asking me how to invest in the "new blockchains" a few years ago, we have not come close to market saturation.
OpenAI knows the market exists, but they need to educate the market. What they need is to turn OpenClaw into a project that my mother can use easily.
AGI is a messy term, so to be concise, we have the models that can do work. What we lack is orchestration, management, and workflows to use models effectively. Give it 5 years and those will be built and they could be built using the models we have today (Opus 4.6 at the time of this message).
Manual orchestration is a brittle crutch IMO - you don't get to the moon by using longer and longer ladders. A powerful model in theory should be able to self orchestrate with basic tools and environment. The thing is that it also might be as expensive as a human to run - from a tokens AND liability perspective.
For some concrete numbers, there are only four players over 50 years of age in the top 100 at the moment by live ratings[0]. They are ranked #13 (age 56), #89 (age 53), #95 (age 54), and #97 (age 57). In their primes these players were ranked #1, #10, #4, and #3 respectively.
Isn't he playing Chess960 because he started finding standard chess boring? And wasn't that why Fischer worked on it in the first place? Experts might get bored of it by the time they're 50.
The reason the top pros like chess960 is because they don’t need to spend hundreds of hours of opening preparation, they can just sit down and play.
Caruana (the guy who lost to Magnus), mused in a podcast that chess960 feels strange as a competitor because he doesn’t really prepare (because there are far too many openings to study) and said it feels like he’s getting paid for much less work.
There are 960 possible starting positions and the chosen one is known at the start of the tournament where players are given 15m to prepare. I have observed that GMs aren't surprised when they see the board. They usually go "ah it's this one with the opposite bishops" or something similar.
When a chess player means "no prep" it probably still means more prep than any normal person would consider reasonable, because what would require you to sit down and take notes, move pieces and memorize, they can just do in their head getting coffee by now. So yeah they recognize almost all the patterns, it's just harder justify spending 1 month on an opening you won't even be able to use, but they still know how to play certain patterns.
Oh, totally, I just wanted to highlight what beasts these players are and how wonderous it is to see them recognize so many starting positions that they already started showing familiarity despite how new the tournament format is.
There are a lot of confounding variables. Chief among them is someone at the top just wanting to get on with their life, start a family for instance, or basically anything other than study 12 hours a day.
It's hard to say it's cognitive decline for most of the people who just aren't working as hard at 40 as they were at 25.
If Chess960 or some other variant that doesn't involve as much rote work becomes sufficiently popular for long enough perhaps it will yield some valuable data about mental function versus age. At least a more holistic view than the studies we currently have.
For most people there is a cognitive decline with age, and chess is clearly a cognitive effort. Like with everything else: experience really matters, but you will simply be a bit less sharp over time and in a game where a tiny mistake can compound to a loss it really matters.
I don’t quite get what makes it Kubernetes for AI agents. Is the idea to pool hardware together to distribute AI agents tasking? Is the idea to sandbox agents in a safe runtime with configuration management? Is the idea something else entirely? Both? I couldn’t figure it out by the README alone.
Mostly the second, plus fleet management. Each agent runs in an isolated namespace with its own config, channels, and skills. You manage them declaratively like you would pods, but the unit of work is an AI agent instead of a container.
The Kubernetes analogy is about the operational model: clusters for org isolation, namespaces for team isolation, declarative deploys, central monitoring. Not about hardware scheduling.
I'll improve the README to make this clearer, good feedback.
It’s absolutely necessary to have ChatGPT.com blocked from ITAR/EAR regulated organizations, such as aerospace, defense, etc. I’m really shocked this wasn’t already the case.
Unfortunately it’s not so shocking anymore. The Secretary of Defense texting imminent war plans to a journalist in a Signal group kinda jumped the shark.
There’s something in a dead reply that's a popular enough myth that its worth responding to:
> Something every single soldier and officer learns is that the entire department was previously called the Department of War. It was repackaged after WW2 as the Department of Defense when invading countries half-way around the world began being sold to the public as 'defense.'
This is a weirdly common belief, but it is not true. Up through WWII, the US had two cabinet level military departments, instead of the current one. Those two departments were the Department of War, under which was the Army, and fhe Department of the Navy, under which was the Navy and Marine Corps.
This was changed by two laws in the late 1940s. The first, the National Security Act of 1947, among other things:
* Split the Air Force and Army from each other, splitting the Department of War into two new cabinet-level Departments, the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force.
* Created an additional cabinet level Secretary of Defense to coordinate the combined military structure, which it called the National Military Establishment.
This was followed by the National Security Amendments Act of 1949, which:
* removed the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force from the Cabinet and formally subordinated them to the Secretary of Defense
* renamed the National Military Establishment (which was frequently referred to by the inconveniently-pronounced, for its role, initialism NME) the Department of Defense (which conbined with the preceding point is the source of the unusual departments-within-a-department structure of the DoD.)
The Department of War did once exist, but it was never a name for the same thing as the Department of Defense. It was one of two coequal entities that were subsumed by the National Military Establishment, the only reason it still doesn't exist as a subordinate entity within the NME, now DoD, like the Department of the Navy does is that it was split in two.
It was always called the Department of War [1] from 1789 until 1947. At that point it was repackaged as the Department of Defense when we started framing invading countries half-way around the world as 'defense'. Prior to that rhetoric around war was far more honest. We tried to buy a sizable chunk of Texas from Mexico. They rejected our offer so we invaded and took it, because we wanted it.
It's only in 1947 and later that somehow invading countries half-way around the world and shipping weapons to anybody with a buck began being framed as 'defense' or somehow saving the world from whatever - tyrant, terror, communism, burdens of oil, and so on. So in many ways I think it would be far more apt to say that 'Department of Defense' is the cutesy name. They're not defending anything - nukes and geography take care of that, more or less, on their own.
> It was always called the Department of War [1] from 1789 until 1947.
No, what became the Department of Defense didn't exist from 1789 until 1947. The cabinet level Department of the Navy (current Department of the Navy) and the cabinet-level Department of War (later split into the current Department of the Army and Department of the Air Force) did, as separate, co-equal entities with no single civilian head over them beneath the President.
The National Military Establishment under the cabinet-level Secretary of Defense was created as a unified military structure in 1947 over both the Department of the Navy (which remained a cabinet-level department) and what had been the Department of War (which was split into the cabinet-level Departments of the Army and the Air Force). And in 1949 the three service departments were fully subordinated within the NME instead of being cabinet level, and the NME was renamed the Department of Defense (pribably not entirely because it was really awkward having the combined military organization use an initialism that sounded like “enemy”, but...)
All you are describing is a restructuring of which the Department of War had gone through repeatedly throughout its history. It's not like it had the same structure, or anything remotely like it, in 1942 as in 1789. The choice of the name was, as you observe, a choice. And it coincides exactly with the move away from public honesty in international relations and events.
You have things like WW1 being framed (at the time) as 'The War to End All Wars' but I think that was probably naivete whereas after we started calling war 'defense' we entered into the era of 'police actions' instead of wars, like the Korean War, and outright false flags such as the Gulf of Tonkin Incident for Vietnam. All the while the CIA was running around acting like a rabid chimp all across the world. It was entering into an era where deceiving the public became standard operating procedure, of which framing war as defense was but one typical aspect.
I believe we are now leaving that era, and I think that is a good thing for everybody.
> All you are describing is a restructuring of which the Department of War had gone through repeatedly throughout its history
No, from 1789 to 1947 there were two separate cabinet-level departments, War and Navy.
> It's not like it had the same structure, or anything remotely like it, in 1942 as in 1789
Internal to the two cabinet-level departments? Probably not.
At the cabinet level? There was exactly the same structure: the Department of War with the Army underneath it and the Department of the Navy with the Navy and Marine Corps.
The War Department did not become the Defense Department.
In 1947 War was split into Army and Air Force, and a fourth cabinet secretary, the Secretary of Defense was added, heading the combined National Military Establishment that was created over both what had been the War Department and what still was the Navy Department (all still cabinet level departments). In 1949, the three service secretaries (two of which headed parts of what had been the War Department) were formally subordinated to the Secretary of Defense and the NME was renamed the Department of Defense. The Department of War was direct predecessor to the Departments of the Army and Air Force, not the Department of Defense, which was a new level of coordination interposed between the President and the formerly organizationally-separated services.
This is inaccurate. The Department of War initially had oversight over the Navy as well. The separation of the Navy into a separate department (which did not even exist at the time when the War Department was created) was one of those many restructurings it went through, without ever having a name change until we entered the era of deception.
ITAR, yes, but there's no such thing as a person or organization that's not EAR-regulated. Everything exported from the US that's not covered by ITAR (State Department) is covered by EAR (Department of Commerce), even if only EAR99.
Sure. That doesn't mean denying access to ChatGPT though - the way I see it, the entire value proposition of Microsoft offering OpenAI models through Azure is to enable access to ChatGPT under contractual terms that make it appropriate for use in government and enterprise organizations, including those dealing with sensitive technology work.
I mean, they are all using O365 to run their day-to-day businesses anyway.
I used to work in a large technology multinational - not "tech industry", but proper industrial technology; the kind of corp that does everything, from dishwashers to oil rigs. It took nearly a year from OpenAI releasing GPT-4 to us having some form of access to this model for general work (coding and otherwise) internally, and from what I understand[0], it's just how long it took for the company to evaluate risks and iron out appropriate contractual agreements with Microsoft wrt. using generative models hosted on Azure. But they did it, which proves to me it's entirely possible, even in places where people are more worried about accidentally falling afoul of technology exports control than insider training.
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[0] - Purely observational, I had no access to any insider/sensitive information regarding this process.
Same here, tested a bunch and cursor has been given little noise and usually decent suggestions. In this case its on a react app, so other projects might not find it as good.
Awesome. This really sounds like it would fit into my life, too. For once I really hope someone can productionalize this pattern into a platform with tooling, and pay for only what it needed. As it stands this feels expensive, even if it the price of coffee.
OpenAI needs a popular consumer tool. Until my elderly mother is asking me how to install an AI assistant like OpenClaw, the same way she was asking me how to invest in the "new blockchains" a few years ago, we have not come close to market saturation.
OpenAI knows the market exists, but they need to educate the market. What they need is to turn OpenClaw into a project that my mother can use easily.