Special Projects (2016)

The secret to success for OpenAI, Anthropic and labs is the vision that they saw 10 years back and kept working on it. We're in awe of how models like GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 are performing today, but it's important to understand that they've been working on this before we knew about AI.

The next big thing is Robots and some stealth company building today is going to be a trillion-dollar giant in few years time.

Discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12181881 (235 points, 197 comments)

A complex simulation with many long-lived agents: We’re interested in building a very large simulation with lots of different agents in it that can interact with each other, learn over a long period of time, discover language, and accomplish a rich variety of goals.

This sounds rather like the plot to Greg Egan's "Crystal Nights" (2008)

https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/CRYSTAL/Crystal.html

> Authors: Ilya Sutskever, Dario Amodei, Sam Altman

Only one remains at OpenAI.

> Build an agent to win online programming competitions. A program that can write other programs would be, for obvious reasons, very powerful.

Interesting that Anthropic led the way here.

Its really impressive that they stuck to their vision over the long term. This is difficult and more challenging than it sounds.

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