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This feels like the chimpanzee with a power drill. An agent is honestly just brute-force search, but guided.

Human-driven research is also brute-force but with a more efficient search strategy. One can think of a parameter that represents research-search-space-navigation efficiency. RL-trained agents will inevitably optimize for that parameter. I agree with your statement insomuch as the value of that efficiency parameter is lower for agents than humans today.

It's really hard to imagine that they __won't__ exceed the human value for that efficiency parameter rather soon given that 1. there are plenty of scalar value functions that can represent research efficiency, of which a subset will result in robust training, and 2. that AI labs have a massive incentive to increase their research efficiency overall, along with billions of dollars and really good human researchers working on the problem.


>Human-driven research is also brute-force but with a more efficient search strategy

No it's not. Is there anything to back that up? There's a creative aspect to human research that I've yet to see with gen AI. All it does is regurgitate stuff and get some "new" ideas via the latent space of the distribution it models. But a generative model cannot by definition create anything new. Just estimate its data well enough that it can sample it well enough to fake novelty.


Your "brute-force search, but guided" feels like oxymoron. How does it differ from "guided search"?

Is there anything in the research space that doesn't fit "brute-force search, but guided"?

All of science is "gather inputs, make hypothesis, test, analyse" on repeat.

There's plenty to critique in the particular guidance approach, but the overall method is the same.


Except the power drill isn't being used to make a better chimpanzee.

The post says Slurm supports gang scheduling, k8s doesn't (out of the box).


Take a look at SkyPilot. Good for running these batch workloads. You can use spot instances to save costs.


To massively increase the reliability to get GPUs, you can use something like SkyPilot (https://github.com/skypilot-org/skypilot) to fall back across regions, clouds, or GPU choices. E.g.,

$ sky launch --gpus H100

will fall back across GCP regions, AWS, your clusters, etc. There are options to say try either H100 or H200 or A100 or <insert>.

Essentially the way you deal with it is to increase the infra search space.


Related: https://skyplane.org/en/latest/ (mentioned in OP)

From what I know this idea underpins a few FAANG-level companies' data transfer systems. OP's value = a simple implementation of the idea that's OSS and applied to AI.


Congrats on the API launch (from SkyPilot)!


Thanks! We used SkyPilot (an open source cloud GPU worker management tool) to help out with both our small (single node) and large (many node) training runs.


If you want to use your own GPUs or cloud accounts but with a great dev experience, see SkyPilot.


Now just need a Waymo invite code :)



https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/07/13/ai-startu...

> Its revenue run rate has spiked this year and now sits at around $30 million to $50 million, three sources said — with one noting that it had more that tripled compared to the start of the year.


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