You should delay engineering-heavy research in light of R&D automation

tl;dr: LLMs rapidly improving at software engineering and math means lots of projects are better off as Google Docs until your AI agent intern can implement them.

tl;dr: LLMs rapidly improving at software engineering and math means lots of projects are better off as Google Docs until your AI agent intern can implement them. Writing research code has gotten a lot faster over the past few years. Since 2021 and OpenAI Codex, new models and tools such as Cursor built around them have saved myself more and more time on coding every year. This trend is accelerating fast: AI agents using Claude-3.5-Sonnet and o1-preview can do tasks that take ML researchers up to 2 hours of coding. This is without considering newer models such as o3, which do 70% on…

related reading

• When AI builds itself \ Anthropicanthropic.com
• Will AI R&D Automation Cause a Software Intelligence Explosion?forethought.org
• The machines are fine. I'm worried about us.ergosphere.blog
• A History of the Future, 2025-2040 — LessWronglesswrong.com
• My picture of the present in AI — LessWronglesswrong.com
• AI Timelines — LessWronglesswrong.com
• AI is removing the middle class of software engineeringblog.florianherrengt.com
• My picture of the present in AI - by Ryan Greenblattblog.redwoodresearch.org
• How to keep thinkingseangoedecke.com
• blog/2024.09.impact.md at main · okhat/blog · GitHubgithub.com
• Import AI 455: AI systems are about to start building themselves.importai.substack.com
• How to fully automate software engineering | Mechanize, Inc.mechanize.work