Hot take: If models can't be a moat, then perhaps hidden agents can be?

We've been practicing witchcraft incantations with system prompts and agent loops to squeeze out performance from the models we use. Things they couldn't do without additional context token repricing, or without additional steps of "reasoning".

Are we headed to a world where only open models give "raw" access to make our own clever system prompts and agents, and AI platform providers continue to improve behind hidden agent systems like o1? 🍓

A doodler and computerer. I like permissive/permissionless open source, smart contracts, p2p systems, room-scale VR, and NixOS.

shazow.net

Currently: WhatsABI

The model is becoming a primitive now and all the hard work is moving into the hidden agents workflows you mentioned, 100%. But as models become better I feel like some of those hidden agent flows would become obsolete and keep being moved back to the main model.