Three issues, all compounding on each other, cause this. Poor foresight, overproduction, changes in youth drinking, and too much focus on small vintners.
There is a gut after production was ramped up during the COVID-19 pandemic. Everyone saw the trend line jump and assumed it wasn't a century-level event but a new trend that would last forever. Vines take a few years to start producing, if you swap or plant new acres you don't see the grapes for ~5 years. Which is now!
The US wine industry has tried for years to get younger drinkers. There is a strong relationship: the younger someone starts, the more time their palate has to develop, and the more likely they are to regularly buy more expensive wines.
The issue is they suck at it and regularly shoot themselves in the foot. I've seen party buses with kegs at tastings, which get people there but barely connect them to wine. Wineries are far, expensive (oh my god, tasting fees. They used to be excited you drove to them. They'd pour you anything. Now it's 2-3 bottles worth of $$ to walk in the door), and have special "rules" and social cues. The barrier to entry is high, and the old people who currently spend the money like it that way. So the audience is aging out.
There are 400-600 individual wineries in Sonoma and Napa. Each. Paso isn't far behind. It's just too many. How do you even choose the 2-6 you go to on a day trip to try them out? Let alone remember them in stores. There won't be consolidation like in other industries, because the brands of all the small fish are so diluted it's not worth acquiring.
There is a saying that "the best way to turn a large fortune into a small fortune is to buy a winery." And holy hell, did a ton of people do that. These small wineries don't make a profit, its a hobby for dozens to hundreds of people. They want the status, even if it costs them. So the market doesn't have clear signals for production and how to self-limit.
The fourth reason is that wineries don't grow grapes anymore. The industry is split into growers and vintners. Growers can take care of large agg with scale. Makers can choose à la carte what grapes they want that year. It's not a bad system and has enabled most of the smaller-scale wineries to launch without going totally bankrupt.
But now there are bag holders, and no one to buy their wares. If growers go out of business, there are no grapes to buy. Since Trump came in, they have already had issues getting labor. Costs have gone up, and no practical automation is available.
I believe there are separate issues with youth drinking, mostly around the risk involved in being inebriated and having a conversation or action come back to haunt you. Kids today live in a panopticon like my age never did. I can't say that I would be willing to open up the same way in today's environment.
Any custom harness for a problem shows that harness engineering is going away. Eventually models will introspect problems, then build custom harnesses tailored to that. Then use and modify the ephemeral harness as required.
Sol Ultra style is the path forward. The models are smart enough to self serve their tooling and processes. Given a problem they can figure it out and ask for directions when needed.
How is custom engineering the tooling from scratch for every task the best path forward? There will always be some engineered tools that are better than others even when re-made by the same models - not to mention the cost of starting from scratch every single time just seems wasteful with current token spend.
Does "don't re-invent the wheel" not apply to agents for some reason?
> Does "don't re-invent the wheel" not apply to agents for some reason?
Correct, the purpose of agents is to become the ultimate wheel so we humans can stop needing to reinvent the wheel. For it to do that it needs to know how to reinvent wheels.
And, just to be clear, "don't re-invent the wheel" is just for small teams, as a whole humanity needs to re-invent the wheel all the time to adapt to new situations. For every wheel your team shouldn't reinvent some other teams main job is to reinvent that wheel.
Humans (exhibiting "general intelligence") are tool builders; virtually all our capabilities stem from our ability to create and use tools - often extremely specialized to a task. Why would an artificial general intelligence be any different?
I think there is a chasm to cross. the model's training to be aware of the harness it is in, at the same time building probes and observation tool can help it to cross that chasm.
Still seem too soon for a model to have that ability to build a harness on its own, and swap its session to another harness in the same environment. Like a snake shedding its skin, but in this case its harness.
It's likely smart enough. It just needs to be told to do it and provided the ability to introspect it. How close could foundational models get to building this harness if explicitly prompted to?
We've only just started training models to use tools. Next, we'll train them to build them. Harness engineering is an ephemeral art.
Let's maybe say not experienced enough / insufficiently RL'ed then -- 5.6 Sol did not reach for a harness solution like this when it got only 13% or son AGI-3 recently. I agree it's interesting to find the point in the prompting when it could 'tip' and do this. I have no instinct for where that point is, except that it must be somewhere, because I bet the Schema Harness was not hardcoded.
Letting the provider decide for the harness is a terrible idea in my eyes. Outsourcing harnessing is giving up control over the AI and equivalent to abandoning your sovereignty. It is a regression to a pre-enlightenment era.
Any non-digital system you describe "as Code" is not a source of truth, but a Source of Hope. The code describes the intended state, something has to reconcile it with reality.
This is the same as having it in unstructured documents. Which means the auditing is still required funny enough.
So yes, this could be done. I'd love to see what run in the CI/CD for a change. When someone works on the wrong thing, or breaks compliance IRL, how do you backport it into this? "Alice is a software engineer, and created this SaaS account with her email when the company was founded. The admin email can not be changed and she has admin even though another role should control that"
Yes, this is ridiculous. Far too much chrun in this ecosystem. This decreases my confidence in this Mintlify company; given this, they seem like the type to randomly rugpull when they feel like it.
Yeah, I can understand where you're coming from. I guess there's balance to the extent that being overly stubborn is also not a great thing. Prioritization at an early stage startup is a tough task.
There is no world outside of a cult or hype bubble where a 6 day turnaround time from announcement to deprecation is acceptable for a standard.
Standards are something that multiple independent groups can build on and should be somewhat stable.
If this was labeled as experimental than maybe, although its crazy to waste time publishing if you are working on something that rapidly iterating. Its not though, because everyone in this AI boom is rushing to be the winner takes all, and is trying their best to signal to the crowd that they are that winner.
Nvidia sees the forest of the trees. The consequences of the US government buying steaks and Intel are that there will be Federal requirements for us companies using Intel. This is entirely about the foundry business. Nvidia is at risk when 100% of the production of its intellectual property occurs in Taiwan. They're more interested than anyone else in diversifying their foundry solutions. Intel has just been a terrible partner and totally disregards its customers. It's only because of the new strategic need for the US to have a foundry business that the government is saving until. NVIDIA is understandably supportive of this.
There is a gut after production was ramped up during the COVID-19 pandemic. Everyone saw the trend line jump and assumed it wasn't a century-level event but a new trend that would last forever. Vines take a few years to start producing, if you swap or plant new acres you don't see the grapes for ~5 years. Which is now!
The US wine industry has tried for years to get younger drinkers. There is a strong relationship: the younger someone starts, the more time their palate has to develop, and the more likely they are to regularly buy more expensive wines.
The issue is they suck at it and regularly shoot themselves in the foot. I've seen party buses with kegs at tastings, which get people there but barely connect them to wine. Wineries are far, expensive (oh my god, tasting fees. They used to be excited you drove to them. They'd pour you anything. Now it's 2-3 bottles worth of $$ to walk in the door), and have special "rules" and social cues. The barrier to entry is high, and the old people who currently spend the money like it that way. So the audience is aging out.
There are 400-600 individual wineries in Sonoma and Napa. Each. Paso isn't far behind. It's just too many. How do you even choose the 2-6 you go to on a day trip to try them out? Let alone remember them in stores. There won't be consolidation like in other industries, because the brands of all the small fish are so diluted it's not worth acquiring.
There is a saying that "the best way to turn a large fortune into a small fortune is to buy a winery." And holy hell, did a ton of people do that. These small wineries don't make a profit, its a hobby for dozens to hundreds of people. They want the status, even if it costs them. So the market doesn't have clear signals for production and how to self-limit.
The fourth reason is that wineries don't grow grapes anymore. The industry is split into growers and vintners. Growers can take care of large agg with scale. Makers can choose à la carte what grapes they want that year. It's not a bad system and has enabled most of the smaller-scale wineries to launch without going totally bankrupt.
But now there are bag holders, and no one to buy their wares. If growers go out of business, there are no grapes to buy. Since Trump came in, they have already had issues getting labor. Costs have gone up, and no practical automation is available.
I believe there are separate issues with youth drinking, mostly around the risk involved in being inebriated and having a conversation or action come back to haunt you. Kids today live in a panopticon like my age never did. I can't say that I would be willing to open up the same way in today's environment.