In this role you will:
- Design and build agentic AI systems that analyze, generate, and validate...
- Build agentic architectures that compose specialized AI agents dynamically...
- Build AI-driven continuous validation frameworks powered by agentic workflows and large language models that autonomously manage...
This is invoicing? If ever there was a domain that was purely deterministic, you'd hope it was invoicing.
When I was at AWS, they famously required an extensive "CoE", correction of errors, or post-mortem, in an instance of over-charging a customer $0.26.
The idea is that if we can make small billing mistakes like that, we can make large billing mistakes, and need to invest in the correctness of the systems powering billing.
I have great respect for the engineering culture within AWS during those times. I am glad to have left before seeing it degrade and decline.
I severely doubt the world ever gets to such a point that the entire world melts into AI hallucination. And token consumption depends on so many other things, it's not all that deterministic either.
I’m not so sure about that. I can see a real rationale for creating sanity checks using AI to more quickly/proactively catch pathological billing issues before they become HN nightmare stories. They wouldn’t replace billing code, but there are many ways that stupid customer mistakes can cause real costs to Amazon that either have to be refunded and absorbed by Amazon or paid by the customer causing a negative opinion of AWS. If a billing AI watching costs in realtime could detect, say, a lambda loop in the first 10 min and either alert the customer or kill it, that would make AWS feel a lot safer to use. Enumerating these conditions and fixing them individually is a task that Amazon has proven incapable of achieving. An AI watchdog layer might be the perfect shortcut to addressing all of these problems at once. Because it’s well-trodden territory that AWS has so many multi-thousand dollar foot guns that make it really scary to use as a hobbyist or small business on a tight budget.
> I can see a real rationale for creating sanity checks using AI to more quickly/proactively catch pathological billing issues before they become HN nightmare stories
Right, so invoicing is still a deterministic problem. You can bolt whatever on but in the end it's just product x price x units
This is exactly the sort of thing that’s not possible, though. An AI will not be able to detect a “lambda loop” because it will look exactly like a “successful lambda rollout”. This sort of watchdog would just as likely shut down the wrong things and make AWS feel a lot less safe.
It doesn’t matter which domain it is, AI should be utilized at anomaly / patterns detection and prototyping, with goal of a prototype to become coded as discovered pathway.
I don’t understand why companies still place AI in their system at authority-forming level, if anything it should sit at least behind single guard / validator that is explicitly coded and tested, never in front of presentation layer.
Probably not actually. Transferring one kilobyte across a network link has such a low value that the billing costs of aggregating it cost more than the revenue.
So instead you take a probabilistic approach - charge the user for a megabyte of data transfer 0.1% of the time, and bill nothing 99.9% of the time.
Now the typical cost is the same, the users bill is probably accurate to the cent, but you have divided the number of billing records by 1000.
I don't know how cloud services count usage, but this is certainly not true for telco. I manage several fleets of hundreds/thousands of SIM cards (mostly IoT/M2M applications), and almost every provider counts the data traffic per byte. Different business and use case, I know, but still.
Laws like that are just going to give rise to new tortured wording. You're buying a revocable license to view the content under certain conditions. It was already in that territory even with physical media; that's what region locking is. Likewise, if bitrot set in and your disc became unplayable, the distributor didn't send you a new one. You never had a perpetual, irrevocable, and otherwise unrestricted license to view that content.
I'm not saying that it is not worth trying to fix this, but now that the technology enables content owners to more fully control your access, they're not going to be keen to relax that only to leave that money on the table.
What? "You never had a license" - no, of course not, that's not what buying is. You had a phonograph record or whatever, and it didn't get replaced when worn out in the same way that the shoe manufacturer doesn't replace your worn out shoes which you have bought. Region locking, what about it? It's interference with ownership too.
Things you can buy have to be accurately described as what you actually get, so "buy this" ought to be an accurate description of what the deal actually is, too.
I don't have the answer, but I wonder if they are considered a utility and operate on utility easements. Then we have to look at the county and state, too.
On the other side, I've read they operate a considerable number of private installations, too. Even that is suspect, too, in that there is existing case law affirming that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in "the whole of their public movements."
Can they? Does anyone know the terms of these contracts? Does flock just look the other way if a licensee just gives away the data to some other entity without getting a fee for it? I can see arguments on both sides from flock's perspective, i.e., revenue vs lock-in.
Everyone is motivated. It seems to me that Anthropic went out fishing for something to blow up. As Ray puts it: "Management eagerly approved the Rust rewrite option because it was a great marketing opportunity to showcase their new Fable model, Anthropic already uses Rust, and Zig is openly against using Anthropic’s products." Sounds spot on.
Others have pointed to some plausible technical benefits from the port, namely that it forces an enumeration of unsafe code boundaries. There's probably something to that, but the big idea is that Anthropic bet that its models could do a big job, and they needed to both demonstrate that and make hay of it. Everything aligned. They did the port. The artisans might call it slop, but it runs, they did it like 2 weeks, and they stuck it to the guy that shuns AI.
If you're the type of manager who picks farming out work to a body shop with 100 unskilled workers instead of hiring 2 legitimate FTEs, then this is speaking your language.
I didn't say or imply that it did. I just don't believe that the decision to port bun was based on innate technical merits of zig vs rust. I also don't think that it is entirely meritless, as I mentioned, because now that there's a par rewrite, there is clear delineation of the areas that need to be ported to safe rust. Still, does anyone really think that this would have happened without Anthropic's provocation?
I see it like this: Anthropic saw an opportunity to make a splash. Jarred made it happen without directly disparaging zig, but the implication is that zig couldn't cut it. Andrew made it more personal.
I don't understand how a port is a "provocation." That's a very cynical and transactional way of thinking about open source.
(As for Anthropic's motivation: only they know. But I suspect that they saw Zig's AI policy as a potentially existential risk, and moved to de-risk their position. That is a technical decision, just not one rooted in the merits of any particular language.)
By provocation, I mean what motivated the port. I'm not suggesting that it was "provocative" like with intent to bother the zig team. That's why I ask if anyone thinks that bun would be ported to rust if not for the Anthropic deal. I doubt it, and I think that's why it took everyone by surprise.
Regarding zig becoming a risk: that's a reasonable line of thinking that I hadn't considered. I don't know how likely it is that zig will fail to progress and fall behind as a language compared to others that are assisted with AI, but it's a possibility.
> OpenAI invented a technique in July 2022 whereby its system would insert terms reflecting diversity (like “Black,” “female,” or “Asian”) into image-generation prompts in a way that was hidden from the user.
> Google’s Gemini system seems to do something similar, taking a user’s image-generation prompt (the instruction, such as “make a painting of the founding fathers”) and inserting terms for racial and gender diversity, such as “South Asian” or “non-binary” into the prompt
It seems then that their objective is to superficially increase the diversity of results, to avoid bad PR, rather than actually neutralising harmful and untruthful biases of the input data.
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