When I was writing Unreal Engine 1, my time was divided as follows:
- Around 30% went to seriously deep coding on hard problems: assembly language texture mappers, C++ BSP trees, data persistence, object oriented systems design, and networking.
- Around 70% was just typing and refactoring large bodies of code needed for a complete engine feature set. This was not hard, and while I was doing it my mind was mostly on the deeper coding topics, thinking and planning for what's next. It didn't feel much different from vibe coding today, except that it was just me typing code on an IBM Model M keyboard rather than prompting it and reviewing the results.
So, it has always seemed perfectly logical that we would rely on AI for that 70%, once the AI could do it with a similar quality standard as we could, which has never been perfection. It came as no surprise that, after a few years of AI model evolution, it was able to take the reigns on that 70% and free up programmers' time for more valuable tasks.
What's more of a surprise is the emergence of AI as a sort of insta-Carmack able to solve hard technical problems quite cleverly and often cleanly, and that it's able to reason about and work in complex 3D scenes both by operating the tools and by directly understanding the raw data files.
I abandoned assembly language in 1998 when out-of-order CPUs made much simpler C/C++ code faster, and never I missed it. If prompting through architectural documents, concept art, and design plans can transcend typing code and tweaking vertices, that will enable developers to spend their time on higher-level, higher value technical and creative tasks.
What matters is the end product, whether it's a game or an engine. Anything developers can do to try out more ideas and make better software and games faster is a win for everyone.
@FourEyedWiz Thanks for confirming. The Claude Code experience is so smooth and makes work enjoyable. I love that one can ask it about task status and get a response while other things run! It gets even better when SSH sessions communicate with local sessions to split work.
human: "god, why did you do that to integer multiplication?"
god: "do what?"
human: "nlogn. didn't you craft math to be elegant? beautiful?"
god: 'the fuck's a log?"
I am very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models, and think it is a real safety issue.
I completely agree with this take related to the “AI will create viruses that will kill us all” BS. But let me add my few cents, because I am really really angry!
I worked with one of the deadliest viruses in history, HIV, for two decades. I was one of the early scientists to engineer it, and engineered versions of HIV are now helping cancer patients. I understand the immune system that defends us against viruses extremely deeply. I have worked in high security biohazard labs.
I don’t have a PhD in AI, but I have been involved with AI since the early 90s and have been all in on AI for years.
People claiming that you can just make a virus in your garage, use AI to engineer it, and somehow build a virus that will kill everyone don’t know what the hell they are talking about!
Of course bioweapons are extremely dangerous. In fact, viruses and bacteria have killed more humans throughout history than almost anything else. HIV alone killed tens of millions of people, yet today, if you have access to effective medicines and take them properly, HIV is generally no longer a death sentence.
COVID-19 killed millions. Why doesn’t it kill at anything close to the same scale anymore? Not because the virus disappeared. It is still here. We developed collective defenses against it through our immune systems, prior exposure, vaccines, treatments, and better medical care.
And this is exactly the point.
The best way to fight biological threats, whether natural or synthetic, is to use AI to develop vaccines, treatments, antibodies, antivirals, and eventually engineer our immune system to create much stronger defenses against them.
By the way, it is already possible to make synthetic viruses. You don’t need some hypothetical superintelligent AI model to do that. We have had sophisticated molecular biology and genetic engineering for decades.
So how many people have actually died from synthetic viruses compared with natural viruses killing millions every year?
And if someday there really is an AI capable of making some unbelievable “supervirus,” then why the hell wouldn’t that same AI make it even easier to develop defenses against it?
Or cure diseases, for that matter?
Where is this damn superintelligence that has cured a single major disease?!
These AI companies and AI doomers keep talking like, “OMG, AI is going to become so unbelievably powerful that it could kill all of humanity!”
Then why is nobody asking the obvious question?
If your AI is already becoming this godlike, unbelievably powerful intelligence, why hasn’t it cured anything?
I mean ANYTHING.
Where is the cure for cancer?
Where is the cure for Alzheimer’s?
Where is the cure for aging?
Forget those. Where is the vaccine that prevents the common cold?
You are telling me this intelligence will soon be smart enough to engineer some magical virus capable of wiping out 8 billion people, defeating every immune system, every vaccine, every antiviral, every laboratory, every government, and the entire global biomedical community…
…but somehow it still can’t cure one disease?
I call that greatest intellectual dishonesty ever!
At least WE actually know how to cure things and save millions of lives with our supposedly stupid human intelligence compared with this future “superintelligence.”
Humans eradicated smallpox, which killed hundreds of millions of people throughout history.
We turned HIV from a almost certain death sentence into a manageable disease.
We developed vaccines in record time against COVID. If we had the same AI back then, would have saved millions more!
We engineer immune cells to kill cancer.
We developed antibiotics, antivirals, monoclonal antibodies, gene therapies, organ transplantation, and thousands of medicines.
We aren't fast enough but we did all of that with our ordinary human intelligence.
So imagine what actual superintelligence could do for medicine!
And here is the part that really makes me angry.
If you actually have, or are close to having, an AI capable of curing diseases and saving millions of lives, and you are deliberately slowing it down or refusing to make those capabilities available, then we also need to talk about the human cost of THAT decision, which you fearmongering people are going to be responsible for!
More than 150,000 people die every single day around the world.
Every. Single. Day. More than 90% from Cancer, heart disease, infections, aging. How many die because of AI? ZERO!
Talk about the people dying TODAY.
Talk about curing cancer.
Talk about stopping the next pandemic before it starts.
Talk about developing universal vaccines.
Talk about engineering our immune system so viruses become almost irrelevant.
Talk about curing genetic diseases.
Talk about reversing aging.
Talk about saving millions and eventually billions of lives.
Instead, we constantly hear this “AI WILL KILL US ALL!” crap, delivered with absolute certainty and with this smug smile on your faces in front of cameras, as though imagining a science fiction extinction scenarios.
I am actually angry about this. Each one of you causing a delay in AI advance every single day will be personally responsible for those 100 thousands deaths that could have been prevented!
Because if you truly believe intelligence is about to become this powerful, then the greatest question humanity should be asking is NOT:
“How could this intelligence hurt us?”
It should also be:
“WHY THE HELL AREN’T WE USING IT TO SAVE EVERYONE WE CAN?”
And if superintelligence really is coming, then make sure one of the first things we do with it is make humanity biologically damn near impossible to kill.
If you think that you were surprised, imagine how surprised the observer in the next layer up was watching you create your sim the exact same way they created theirs.
Now they have to cope with the probability that their reality is also just a projection on a 2D screen boundary emerging from organized quantum data.
Unreal all the way down.
Things just get weirder from now on. Very quickly.
e/acc ai/acc
We will give one banked reset for every day you don't have access to Astra on your paid ChatGPT plan, starting today. Team is moving mountains to give access as fast as we can.
First one will land in ~ 3 hours. There is still time to create your account if you don't have one.
Please write up a brief handoff document describing everything we've tried and what we are attempting to achieve so I can pass it along to another agent
Today we're also opening the weights for Muse Glimmer, a great 30B parameter dense model that can run locally. Soon we'll also release the weights for Muse Spark 1.2, our latest foundation model. Meta is a strong supporter of open source and I'm proud of these releases. Congrats to @alexandr_wang and the MSL team for all your great work on these models.
For anyone with endless ideas, this agent age is nirvana as those ideas are met with endless execution, endless exploration. I've never had has much fun working with computers as I do right now. What a time to be alive.
RAI-939 outperformed industry-leading aerospace material C103 by 125x.
In a head-to-head torch test, Purdue Applied Research Institute confirmed that Radical AI’s RAI-939 sample exhibited superior environmental survivability to C103.
C103 has been in use since the Apollo program, but its performance limitations and constrained supply have fueled a decades-long search for a replacement.
Our lab discovered that replacement in just 16 weeks.
Now, we aim to scale up production of the alloy to make bigger components.