Igor Soarez

Dad x2. Engineer building on my own terms, or failing at it, mostly. Consulting by day, indie projects by night. AI agent infra.

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

We still don't grasp LLMs. That's evident in our choice of words to anthropomorphize what's really just a statistical model.

We don't understand what the existence of a large statistical language model implies. It does not imply intelligence, but it’s something easily confound-able with it.

The training corpus was human written, with thought and intelligence, so the output is a sort of mirror of humans, of how we write and reason to some extent. the mirror is confusing because people have never seen that kind of mirror before. Once you identify these models as mirrors or the text they are given, problems like "sycophancy" and "hallucinations", described in these anthropomorphized terms sound silly.

Once you identify these models as mirrors or the text they are given, problems like "sycophancy" and "hallucinations", described in these anthropomorphized terms sound silly.

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

“never expected” 😆 🙉

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

Inference will never be free or even negligibly cheap. Everyone will get a token budget.

➤ Productivity gains from tokens are hard to attribute.
➤ Consumption is easy to scale.
➤ Waste is nearly invisible. You don't know where to cut.

That's all you need for a price floor.

Tokens will forever be a scarce resource you need to allocate consciously, much like old problems: headcount for managers, capital for investments, ad budget for marketers.

Tokens won’t be different. You need a performance-adjusted budget.

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

In a previous era, I often made a big deal about deleting unnecessary bits in a project repository. “What’s the big deal? It’s not harmful” — but it is, like clutter on a work table.

I’m glad there’s now a bigger imperative: it costs tokens and increases perplexity!

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

This won’t last. They’ll need adjustable, per division and per employee budgets

[Negligible Capital @negligible_cap]

*UBER SETS $1,500 MONTHLY CAP ON SOME AI CODING TOOLS FOR STAFF

$UBER officially reeling in the Claude budget after blowing their AI budget earlier this year.

Undoubtedly more companies to follow

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

dealers know better than getting high on their own supply

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

I can now probably say this:

Two months ago, inside Anthropic someone suggested building a token leaderboard.

A heated internal debate followed and the decision was made to *never* ever do it… because several people inside Anthropic simply thought ahead of the consequences

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

@mitchellh How’s this different from a ceo or director or anyone who hires or employs subject matter experts outside their own domain?

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

This what collapse looks like. Societal culture collapse.

Every thought, trend, what you assume is mutually assumed gets pushed and compressed toward the statistical model.

A worldwide echo chamber worthy of a black mirror episode.

Alpha comes from the ability to disconnect.

[Armin Ronacher ⇌ @mitsuhiko]

This is such a good post. https://t.co/IdmAnh18Nt

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

engineers are realizing that any serious work requires LLM use to work *slower*

orgs are still scrambling to answer “what are we getting back from all this AI spend?”

unproven but generally accepted answer is “faster” or “more”

but the direction to look is “higher quality”

[zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ @zooko]

Good post!

“Using AI to write better code more slowly”: https://t.co/H6gieYNfai

This is what I've been doing with my smalloc project. Wrote all the (core) code myself while asking AIs to teach me about stuff, and now I'm repeatedly asking AIs to “Find more bugs in this.”.

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

Inference will never be free or even negligibly cheap. Everyone will get a token budget.

➤ Productivity gains from tokens are hard to attribute.
➤ Consumption is easy to scale.
➤ Waste is nearly invisible. You don't know where to cut.

That's all you need for a price floor.

Tokens will forever be a scarce resource you need to allocate consciously, much like old problems: headcount for managers, capital for investments, ad budget for marketers.

Tokens won’t be different. You need a performance-adjusted budget.

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

@yacineMTB It looks like the way it works you just need to make a lot more to avoid having to pay them.

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

Hang on to your ears. When even the most hyped innovators start to U-turn, you know a correction is looming. Maybe a welcome breeze for laggard adopters

[george hotz archive @geohotarchive]

The Eternal Sloptember https://t.co/kFIW7LNhNd

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

Jiujitsu is very inclusive. No fancy credentials or rich parents needed. Friends made from all sorts of backgrounds.

6yrs ago I first heard locker-room crypto trade talk. Plumbers, dentists w/ strong opinions. Was a clear sign.

Today people were raving about Cerebras’s IPO.

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

👀

Vet any creator profile on X with an automated team of experts.

Check engagement quality, patterns, reach (ability to break through the algorithm), promotion style, and check for red flags,

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

The ultimate botnet. Built in the open, installed voluntarily, often by paying customers.

[OpenAI Developers @OpenAIDevs]

Codex anywhere and everywhere, all the time.

Now your Mac doesn’t have to be unlocked for Codex to use your computer.

From your phone, Codex can securely use apps on your Mac, even when the screen is off and locked.

https://t.co/PCGK4i7FSF

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

It's tough out there for inference pipeline builders:

* Groq - vulture-gutted, tiny limits & fewer models
* Cerebras - cut down to 2 models post IPO
* Together - raising prices
* DeepInfra - still unreliable latency

Hope SambaNova & Fireworks stay off this list.

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

@cpinto @rodriscoll If everything ticks along - the retail investors, or even taxpayers

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

The writing’s bright on the wall.

[Jeff Bezos @JeffBezos]

Thank you. The important part is zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. Best way to put money in someone’s pocket is to not take it out in the first place. Bottom half is only 3% of total tax revenue. But it’s very meaningful to that person. Zero it out.

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

Didn't like the answer? Just keep prompting.

Sad reality: sycophancy isn't a marketing play, it's the feature you want even if you say otherwise.

We may get less polarized but increasingly delusional.

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

@davicorn @Fastmail Thanks for sharing. What’s the lifetime on that cookie? Defeats the point of automation if every/most time I use it I end up having to open the browser and click around to extract credentials. Not to mention the reliance on private (i.e. unstable) APIs here.

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

Dear @Fastmail , when can we get support for programmatic management of Sieve rules?

[Igor Soarez @igorsoarez]

@Fastmail