As the use of agentic artificial intelligence increases in nearly every industry, there exists a widening attack surface. It is necessary to monitor agents to ensure that agents are acting in a way that is aligned with the users intent. Auditing an agent's network traffic provides a clear record of the agent interactions. This work presents a novel approach to monitoring the network traffic of agentic systems using complex valued hypersparse traffic matrices by integrating DBOS (DataBase OS), the OneSparse PostgreSQL database, and the GraphBLAS math library. To develop these concepts an agentic simulator was constructed, allowing a varying numbers of AI agents to collectively survey a virtual environment using different strategies. The resulting network traffic matrices enable easy monitoring of the AI agents.
Just wondering why holy books like Bible and Bhagavad Gita are included but not Tanakh and Quran? Is there any selection bias in the algoritm since all the popular holy books for main world's religions are frequently mentioned and recommended in HN.
> All of the wheat types Grossi had previously seen grew only one such ear. But the tall wheat grew a full seven ears, always in the same pattern: a long one with six shorties bunched up around it like little fingers. Even the kernels themselves were bigger than those of average wheat. And unlike the typical pale-yellow wheat kernels, they came in a rainbow of colors—yellow, black, red, white and even green, sometimes all on the same stem. Grossi, a grain farmer his whole life, had never seen anything like it. “I thought it was a freak of nature,” he says. He couldn’t find a mention of it in agricultural books.
Thanks for sharing the story about this ancient wheat but I recall reading about this highly productive type of grains not in agriculture books but in holy books.
Fun facts, this type of miracle grain is mentioned in Abrahamic religions holy books namely Bible (Old Testament) and Quran.
In Surah Al-Baqarah (2:261), "The example of those who spend their wealth in the cause of Allah is that of a grain that sprouts into seven ears, each bearing one hundred grains. And Allah multiplies ˹the reward even more˺ to whoever He wills. For Allah is All-Bountiful, All-Knowing."
In the Book of Genesis (Genesis 41:5), "He fell asleep again and had a second dream: Seven heads of grain, healthy and good, were growing on a single stalk."
This exact multiplication of deeds described in the Quran demonstrates the 700-to-1 ratio represents the actual biological maximum yield for that specific ancient wheat variety under optimal conditions.
All this while I thought the description is metaphorical allegory, but it seems originated from real grains of wheat phenomenon.
The scriptures specifically mentioned "sanabila" a type of grain with multiple ears branching out from a single stalk unlike rice paddy that's grow ears differently.
Another fun facts, in Arabic the word "sabil" meaning providing freely flowing water to travellers, and sanabila share the same root word, most probably derived from this very verse, because charity in Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic is sadaqa.
Please note the only Quran in Chapter of Al- Baqarah (Female Cow) mentioned the analogy of multiplications for doing good deeds [1].
The other verses, one verse inside Bible in Chapter Genesis and two verses inside Quran in Chapter Yusuf (Joseph) refer to Egypt Pharaoh's or King's dream, respectively. This led to the introduction of the brilliant economic policy that saved Egypt kingdom from the severe famine that effect other sorrounding kingdoms at the time as per Yusuf's advice based on the correct interpretation of the King's dream [2],[3],[4]. Yusuf later become one of the appointed ministers of Egypt from the very humble beginning of a slave boy, and brought along other Jews to start migrating to Egypt.
Apparently Quran is more accurate since during prophet Yusuf time Egyptian rulers are called King not Pharaoh yet. Only later stage of Egyption Kingdom during Musa (Moses) time, Quran correctly refer to Pharaoh (meaning owner or king of great house) not King.
Thanks, I probably skipped the subsequent paragraphs while browsing and reading due to multiple ads intersperse in between the articles. Anyway great finding of the ancient wheat species, and the mention of this miracle seven grains ears in Quran are more profound with several occurances in different contexts and analogies.
The previous correspondent hinted at it but it seems you didn't pick up on this: the article literally says in the next paragraphs that the farmer read about it in the Bible.
Am I missing something, if you a paid subscriber, LLM service providers OpenAI/Google/etc by default will not trained on your input data unless explicitly allowed by the users.
If this is not enabled by default then it need to be the default policy within EU by the enforcement of GPDR, for example.
>We would need all the intellect in the world to get the interface narrow enough to be usable,
It seems Dijkstra is describing potential calability of LLM model trained on published collective human knowledge enabled by the Internet
>and, in view of the history of mankind, it may not be overly pessimistic to guess that to do the job well enough would require again a few thousand years
Since the article was written in 1978 (about 50 years ago) and from the time the computing resources of CPU and RAM has increased exponentially until the LLM first appeared in 2020s, it seems the thousand of years prediction is merely several decades accelerated by the rapid advances of computer and communication systems technology spearheaded by companies like Nvidia.
Fun facts, Abrahamic religions that are based on the Bible and Quran both claiming human are made from clay [1],[2].
In Hebrew name Adam, the very first human, comes from the word adamah, which means "ground," "soil," or "red clay".
In Arabic Adam, comes from the word adeem, means the surface of the earth or dust, reflecting the Islamic and Abrahamic tradition that Adam was created from the clay or dust of the ground.
By extension in Hebrew and Arabic the word Adam also means mankind and humanity.
In Chinese mythology, human beings were also created from clay. The goddess Nüwa first came to an empty river bank and spent much time carefully crafting a set of figures, then got tired, and rushed together a bunch of clay piles using a length of corded rope. The first group of clay figures were the nobility, while the latter were the commoners.
Very cool, thanks for that. I was vaguely aware that clay metaphors were important in several religions, and I thought about looking into it and maybe finding a nice quote for the article, but didn't have the time (I accept suggestions, though!)
History has shown that a very potent tool can improved and changed industry entirely for the better. People now seems to be more negative than when atomic bomb was invented.
Looked what happened when crane was invented and not only more houses are built faster but also high rise building suddenly become feasible with more human being employed in the construction industry than ever.
> Why so negative? History has shown that a very potent tool can improved and changed industry entirely for the better.
AI isn't like any other historical tool or technology. Its qualitatively different. Flint axes or waterwheels or a plasma torches dont just suddenly appear everywhere, and then start getting rapidly (and likely recursively) better at the thing they do. While also mimicking innate human characteristics like complex language.
> Flint axes or waterwheels or a plasma torches dont just suddenly appear everywhere, and then start getting rapidly (and likely recursively) better at the thing they do.
Trains. Building railroads made everything faster, including building faster trains, which facilitated making cars and trucks, which facilitated airplanes, etc.
Fairly sure that even today if you memory wipe all knowledge of trains and train building (including road trains, like in Australia) and vaporize all railroads, locomotives, rail wagons, train stations, etc, it would set us back 50 years.
AI, computers, electricity, steam power, basic tools, and even fire all enabled in a dramatically faster rates of change compared to the immediately preceding era. You could also argue all also mimic certain human (or more broadly, animal) characteristics. I don't see what is truly unique to AI here. I'm not sure AI is even qualitatively unique from the computer, just the technology taken to it's logical conclusion.
Fundamentally I don't think "tool" is the right word for whatever generative AI is. Tools are normally designed with intention for a specific purpose, but AI systems are trained or grown.
To use an analogy, you can use a goat as a lawnmower - it'll keep the grass down for you. You could maybe even train it so it keeps it a specific length, but it's a goat - there's always a chance it will jump the fence or headbutt you or something else. It's an animal, not a tool. You can use AI as a tool, but that doesn't make it a tool.
Yes AI is arguably still software, but we have never seen programs with anything close to this level of flexibility and adaptability in software.
As another analogy, there's nothing special about neurons- their characteristics are broadly known and researchers have been able to simulate small numbers of them in computer models. However, when you have enough of them in the right structure, complex behaviours are possible which are never exhibited at the lower levels. There's nothing majorly different between the neurons in brains of a chimp and a human, but the capabilities and meta-capabilities are wildly different.
I think we see a similar step-change with generative AI systems.
Cranes were invented like 3000 BC, and their first known use in construction is in 600 BC. I can't think of a much slower development than the invention of cranes leading to the construction of high rise buildings
I feel like the power loom is a better comparison. It put hand weavers out of business over a short timespan, while revolutionizing how clothing is produced. It certainly empowered a lot of jobs surrounding clothing, until clothing was completely commoditization and is now a lot less well designed simply as a function of clothing as a category being a much cheaper product now
The fear of the atomic bomb is relatively instant (at "best") or as bad as finding out you have cancer. if you die, you die. You won't even perceive the pain. if you don't die, you do your day-to-day until some sickness hits you from radiation and then die.
The fear of AI is one that does (and already has, in many cases) in fact change your day-to-day. And given how the increasing economic disparity is going, it will not be one that changes the day to day for most people for the better. No one is positive because the current societal rate of change for most people is negative.
AI is a catalyst and will only accelerate what is already happening (since it fundamentally does not create nor open up new forms of labor). So it's clear why people who feel their day-to-day will get worse are not optimistic.
The crane is a poor analogy to a general purpose thinking machine that is intended to replace human effort and reasoning at all levels of abstraction in all cognitive endeavors.
I'm a fairly heavy user of LLMs [1] but i'm probably in the "AI is just a tool" camp.
Are you of the view that LLMs have more potential than the internet? The internet has been around for so long that it's had time to have actual impact and yet it barely shows up in GDP. It still has so much untapped potential even yet. LLMs are too new to have amassed much impact yet, certainly not on the scale of the internet. But they have lots of potential still untapped. I just don't see how we get to even 5% GDP impact with them (either positive or negative). But i could be in a blind spot, genuinely curious to learn another view point.
[1] I've built all sorts with them. I've built various ML models but the only LLM i've built was effectively following a tutorial, nanochat
The AI of today is just a tool, albeit a very powerful one. But I don't think it's a big step for it to reach a level where the majority of humans will be unable to to meaningfully contribute to the economy ten years from now.
I think computers, internet and AI - all of them have impact - but they consume it by converting it into new structure. The benefits are in the infra not handed out to us individually. We might not see large changes on individual level, or the displaced work is replaced by management work for the automations and raising baselines push us to do more. We now have data centers, fiber backbone, GPUs, models, apps and open source projects, yet we still only have 24 hours a day.
I keep seeing this argument. But isn’t the inverse true as well - if you extrapolate from the past movement of the ball, you will see it going way farther than it will actually go because of friction, wind, someone catching it, etc.? It seems reasonable to look at where the tech is right now if it helps you understand fundamental constraints. A person witnessing the first flight as a child and the moon landing in adulthood might expect FTL travel for their children if they didn’t understand physics.
> Are you of the view that LLMs have more potential than the internet?
Yes, it's not even close. There are lots of entire fields that will be wiped out by AI. Financial advisors for example. Good luck if you're a translator or a proof reader.
The world is slow so I expect it to take some time, depending on the field.
Today I started vibe coding a replacement for a piece of software whose licensing cost is on the order of $100k/year/seat. It's going scarily well. I'm scared.
> Looked what happened when crane was invented and not only more houses are built faster but also high rise building suddenly become feasible with more human being employed in the construction industry than ever.
New inventions eventually benefiting the society has always been accompanied by new jobs being created on top of those inventions, a culture of trust built upon mastering those inventions and a market being formulated around demand and supply cycle for those inventions. It is different now[1], because we neither see incentives being created for humans to operate/manage AI-led jobs (because utilizing such a thing is far more unfavorable than outsourcing due to economic incentives, duh) nor a foreseeable market stability for ever such thing to occur.
Are you sure we don't see AI operating roles grow?
Afaik the SWE roles that are being cutoff are mainly at the companies (faangs) shuffling the investments to GPUs and the rest of the economy (in the US) is not hiring because it's basically in a recession due to other economical reasons.
Anedoctiically I see the opposite in my neck of the woods and I have more work than before because of LLM since I basically transitioned to build LLM infrastructure
> People now seems to be more negative than when atomic bomb was invented.
When the atomic bomb was invented they didn’t hand one for free to everyone, and no one had access to sending their thoughts to everyone else in world.
> Looked what happened when crane was invented
That is a terrible comparison with no useful parallels. You can’t in god faith suggest something is going to have a desired effect because something completely unrelated did too. You could just as well have compared it to asbestos.
Please check this interview with Lewis Nicolle who created his own game engine with Dlang for his new game Art of Reflection, and why Dlang very much suitable for game engine development [1],[2].
>Coconuts grew in their native Maldives, in India, and perhaps parts of western Africa and the Middle East
None of the countries mentioned have coconut as native, its originated from the Malay Archipelago (East Indies) area. The common name for coconut from Philippines to Hawaii across the Pacific islands is nyiur/niu, and most probably brought along to Polynesian islands by the early settlements who speaks Malayo-Polynesian or Austronesian languages.
Fun facts, coconut name is a misnomer and it's originated from the Portugese, one of the first European in contact with coconut who thought it's a form of nut but actually it belongs to drupe or stone fruit family [1]. Specifically coconut is from the palm family and its fruit is mainly the kernel. Oil palm has similar kernel fruit but it's native to Africa.
[1] Nightmare Fruit: How the Coconut Got Its Name.
As the use of agentic artificial intelligence increases in nearly every industry, there exists a widening attack surface. It is necessary to monitor agents to ensure that agents are acting in a way that is aligned with the users intent. Auditing an agent's network traffic provides a clear record of the agent interactions. This work presents a novel approach to monitoring the network traffic of agentic systems using complex valued hypersparse traffic matrices by integrating DBOS (DataBase OS), the OneSparse PostgreSQL database, and the GraphBLAS math library. To develop these concepts an agentic simulator was constructed, allowing a varying numbers of AI agents to collectively survey a virtual environment using different strategies. The resulting network traffic matrices enable easy monitoring of the AI agents.
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