Category: Uncategorized

A simple model of how the economy works is it’s some kind of rewards system. You do something good that other people will pay you for and you are then rewarded with money. You are a smart engineer and your boss gives you a raise, you’re a smart entrepreneur and VCs give you tons of money. That money entitles you to stuff, the idea being that there is only so much stuff, yachts, housing, fancy clothes, holidays, and you are rewarded for being good at something by being first in line to get that stuff in lieu of someone else getting it. And then we say that this encourages people to work hard and be smart, and that is good for society overall. This is perhaps true to a degree but it is in many ways the less interesting (and less important) part of what “the economy” is.

Instead, we should think of it as a preference aggregator. From the perspective of extraction of raw resources, we have a few fairly simple rules.

1. Some resources are genuinely scarce, such as oil and precious metals, and not only is extracting them hard but their deposits will not last forever, in some pure sense of what earth as a ball of rock in space can eventually provide.
2. Some resources seem scarce but really aren’t, like food. Arable land is limited but methods of growing more food with less water and land use do exist, and given that agriculture is a single-digit percentage of GDP, if we wanted to grow more food, we just could. The same is true of a lot of other things like most building materials, iron, cement, wood, many other consumer goods, and, yes, even housing.
3. Substitutes exist. There’s always talk of if scientific progress can develop new substitutes for some resource we use that we are worried about using (like cobalt for batteries or neodymium for magnets) but the issue is much less if the science can be done versus if there is economic incentive (preference) to find it (or just use something that’s marginally more expensive). Substitutes aren’t the only way either, designs can be made that just don’t incorporate certain materials, if only the economy wanted it to be that way.

Yes I know I’m anthropomorphizing the economy but bear with me, the point I’m trying to make is that people buy stuff and they buy what they need and thereafter what they want. What they want then influences what the economy produces and if you want a healthy economy you have to give people the power (money) to buy what they want and I know this all just demand-side economics but again, with me please, bear.

When we say we want “growth” we want more of those raw resources and we want those raw resources to be turned into cool useful stuff and we want that to be done in an efficient way in which we are not chucking silicon into the ocean (cough cough or data centers where they won’t get used cough). People go on and on about how to incentivize new businesses and ensure high employment and deregulation and subsidies but there is another perspective that I’ve already written about on this blog and it’s so good I’ll just copy it:

Imagine a world in which all work is automated. There’s still money, people, and stuff to be bought. There are companies, but they are AI run, with robotic workers and legal-entity owners (not owned by people). This isn’t the same idea as a post-scarcity economy, there are still limits on the amount of stuff that can be made and there are equilibriums to be found in balancing how much food we should grow vs how many yachts we should build. So, we still want an economy in this world, we want people to express what stuff they want, and then they buy that stuff and the free market makes more of that stuff if demand is high. The usual. Here’s the question: Where do the people get the money to buy things with?

“But we don’t live in that world!” I hear you cry. Indeed, even if AI could do every job no doubt some humans, lavishly wealthy and/or powerful, would be at the head of it all (private or government, someone is in charge¹). Still, we are heading in that direction and ultimately that is a good thing. People, by and large, don’t like working. Some work is very rewarding, and I do not doubt that many jobs would still get done by people who love them, even for no pay, if their other needs and wants were met. Many would still work less though, and some not at all, or do things that we would not today classify as “work”. With that in mind and with a historical perspective the measure of human progress and prosperity is largely a story of receiving more stuff for having done less work, and we can do that. More infrastructure can be built, more advanced farms, industries, cities, for a population that probably will be under control in the coming decades/centuries.²

The problem we need to solve then is a simple one: Where do the people get the money to buy things with? We discard the notion that the economy is some sort of rewards system and it becomes what it truly should be, a preference aggregator. Then, we just need to give people money somehow, let them buy stuff, and get some of that money back from the sellers of that stuff so we can give it to people again in one nice big circle. To give people money, we want a universal basic income (UBI). This kind of policy has been gaining popularity recently and it is so simple it hardly needs any explanation. You get money for existing. That’s it. Maybe you get some more if you have some particular need, like a disability, but you could also just have universal healthcare for that. Maybe you can also still work for a job for someone or some entity, that doesn’t sound so bad, I see no reason to make it illegal. To get money out of the “rest” of the economy, we need some sort of tax. We can’t just take all of a company’s money or profits since our industries will never be static, they’ll have to expand, shrink, make bets using extra cash and have a cushion if those bets are wrong. At some point though, in a fully automated world, it has to get back into the hands of people. If our legal entity constructions just accumulate wealth, the system will break just as badly as it is doing right now. Last time I wrote about this I leaned heavily on VAT as the solution, but to be honest I leave that problem to policy people that are smarter than me.

What I can’t get over is how obvious all of this seems to me these days. Everyone thinks of “the economy” as something else, something where work is an integral part and you get paid for good work. Of course, we still need good ideas, and so encouraging that through “reward” is a good thing, but when someone like Musk can say “cars, but they drive themselves” or “rockets, but they land themselves” and get a bajillion dollars I just think we are leaning way too heavily into the “rewards” side and are just forgetting that people need to buy stuff and they need money to buy that stuff and we are trying to automate away everything and that is not a bad idea per se but holy shit we need to think about how that society needs to be structured really really right now.

Discussion and comments over on: Hackernews.

1. Perhaps some decentralized system is possible but that does feel hard to even envision. I do encourage anyone to try though. ↩︎
2. I know I’m glossing over a lot of things here. The world may literally end because of war or climate change or societal collapse or whatever, but in terms of “can we build a society that gives people lots of stuff they want”, the argument I’m making is that it’s very possible but we need to rethink our economies. ↩︎

Last year I predicted there would be a significant (2008+) economic crash that year. The year is now 2026 and I was wrong. At the time my main argument was essentially this:

The unemployment rate just follows these smooth curves, covid was an exception, and it was due to jump again. Not very scientific I know. There was another important graph of course:

Where classically an inverted yield curve has been a recession predictor. This one is a little more involved, but essentially the US government borrows money and normally what makes sense is that the government needs to pay more money every year in interest if it wants to borrow the money for longer. If, for some reason, the market says “no actually we will take a lower fee if you take our money for longer” that is an inverted yield curve, and here that is shown by the difference between the interest on a 10 year loan and a 2 year loan being negative. Why this would predict market crashes is a complex topic and I encourage you to read around about it. It isn’t perfect of course, and one “feature” is that it isn’t “wrong” yet, at least unless we don’t get a crash within the next few years.

But come on.

It surely will be this year.

Here’s the current price of silver. Gold looks kinda similar (but smoother, I chose silver because it looks dramatic, but maybe it got you to read this further so that’s a win in my book). People buy precious metals when they might be worried about the value of fiat currencies, like, I don’t know, the dollar. Are people worried about the dollar?

To be honest I’m glad we are the ones getting out of that market first. Why might people be worried about the dollar?

Eh, I don’t know, there are lots of possible reasons and maybe you can think of some. The actual point is this:

1. US government debt has been a worry for a while. That worry doesn’t matter so long as people have faith in it, but it does matter insofar as it makes a possible debt crisis deeper. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
2. There are one or more bubbles in the stock market. Almost everyone agrees that AI is a bubble. It funds itself in a circular fashion, and capex cannot be recovered with profits any time soon, even with optimistic outlooks. Other stocks may also be well overvalued, with sky high PEs and nonsensical business models (meme stocks are just the worst offenders)

It feels as though all we need is a spark. And yet, many sparks seem to have come and gone. Big market moves, in stocks or yields, that have recovered. Tariff and invasion threats, protests, you name it, they might move the needle but it always seems to move back. So, perhaps we won? Perhaps we built our markets so stable that they are these days impervious? That sounds silly on its face, and the two reasons I’d actually give are:

1. Markets are just slower moving than ever before, big players just like to sit on their big piles of money, and it’s much easier to just assume the needle will go back and then everyone pats you on the back when it does. No client likes a skittish fund manager that ends up always being wrong
2. This is the 11th time that tariffs have happened, and it just isn’t surprising anymore.

Which is to say that no individual decision make want’s to be the first mover, so the market does not move.

A year ago there were a few signs. Right now, it feels like everything is primed to blow. Is that new? Do I always just feel that way? Am I just a broken clock that’s going to be right today? Maybe, but I damn well intend to be right at some point.

Comments & discussion over on Hackernews.

When I really got into writing code (big projects, or for work), I really started using libraries. For so many problems, there was already a library that would help me with it. From doing maths fast with numpy to padding strings with left-pad, there was almost always a library that could help. Even now half the time you want to integrate your app with some other application it ships its API as a small library of useful functions. As much as I do like writing code to solve difficult problems, the project manager in my head is telling me “don’t reinvent the wheel”, so naturally I use a lot of libraries.

My favorite libraries were always the ones that were nice to me. They would let me pass in data in lots of ways and specify tons of options.

They would check lots of things for me often, and early in their call stack so that when I inevitably did something wrong, the error message could contain lots of contextual information. Sometimes they’d even tell me what code to run!

I was taking all this in. And of course, I would also learn how all this is best done by reading the libraries’ code. I might read it to solve a particularly tricky bug, to get around some poor documentation, or perhaps just out of curiosity. There in the open source I could see just how library code looks, and it looks a certain way:

(This is the first bit of case handling in tqdm, a library that creates a little progress bar for your for loops.) Look at that! Check everything! Some if statements here, some type conversions there, exception handling, default values and assumptions galore. Don’t get me wrong, this is good code! Never have I been upset with the behavior of tqdm, it’s great. It works, it allows me to override what I need to, it gracefully handles what details it cannot work out itself.

So what’s a young coder such as myself to do? All these libraries I love have shown me the path forward. Sure, it’s a little extra work, but we do that work now to save us time in the future, no? Of the little other code I’m exposed to, it’s all bad and hard to read and so why not take inspiration from what is, to the untrained eye, the only way to write good stuff? We’re not building exactly the same type of programs as a library, but I’m still writing stuff that other devs will use and that’s kind of like a library. The choice seems obvious.¹

Libraries have an unfair advantage in this clash of perceptions though. Two of them, in fact.

1. They have hundreds if not thousands of users. These users will test edge cases for you, finding bugs faster. The ones you end up using in particular are popular just because they survived when other competing libraries didn’t. As such, it almost doesn’t matter how hard the library was to write or even maintain, the quality of the product is what won out.
2. They are overrepresented. How many of the lines of code in the world are in libraries, compared to how much of the code you have seen or interact with? This is a selection bias, most similar to the friendship paradox. They have many users, so many people have interacted with more library codebases than simple chance would allow.

It’s not just me. Over and over I see people leave university and their small script projects and start asking “what does real good code look like” and this is the direction they go.

But let’s say instead you’ve read this and think, OK, fine, most code isn’t like a library. But shouldn’t it still aspire to the same standard? It’s GOOD CODE!

YAGNI and YAGWI

The obvious first criticism is You Aren’t Gonna Need it (YAGNI). Those libraries are like that because disparate users really do have different use cases and even a small convenience can matter a lot if it affects many people. A few dozen people in your team including yourself just aren’t as important. Once your code is in production maybe that assertion you made really doesn’t serve much of a purpose. Sure, down the line it will probably need to be maintained and that assertion might make it easier to catch some edge case, but it’s not as likely as you think.

But there’s another reason: You Aren’t Gonna Want it. This means that writing library code may lead to a codebase as a whole that is actually worse, harder to maintain. What we are partially talking about here is the robustness principle: “be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others”. Specifically, about being liberal in what you accept. People have already written about how it isn’t always a good idea, but the gist of it is that when you allow for lots of different options and inputs, people are going to use them, and then you need to support them all, and that’s more effort than it is worth. If one of your colleagues asks “hey can you have the code take two lists instead of a dict I can’t be bothered to make it a dict” just say no. Their convenience is not worth it, at least not yet. Sometimes, sure, you’ve gotten the same unreadable error for the 20th time? Catch it earlier and make it readable. But the key is to build things when you truly need them. One day, if your code really solves some hard problem in a beautiful way, you can turn it into an actual library and distribute it to the world! By then, I assume you know what you are doing anyway.

So what does good code look like?

That’s pretty hard to answer. Lots of things matter for good code, this post is more about what not to do. But the core idea that “not writing library code” points to is: simplicity is valuable. We already mentioned YAGNI as a general concept but there are more good blog posts out there of things you can think about.

Let’s get more abstract

I want to put code on a spectrum, that ranges from “active” to “inactive”. Inactive isn’t the best name (sorry), it’s not meant to mean code that isn’t running or in use, it’s just not active.

There are two ways code can be “active”:

1. It’s being heavily maintained. New features, significant bug fixes, refactoring and the like. This is what we might call “active development”, it’s what we think about most naturally.
2. It’s regularly being called in a lot of new places. The code itself may not be changing much, but many developers are interacting with it for the first time, putting it through its paces regularly.

(There is arguably a third way, where users are putting code through its paces as they use an app in myriad ways, but for the purposes of this discussion it isn’t relevant)

The more active your code is, the more it will benefit from looking like library code. public facing actual library code is extremely active.

In general, code transitions over time from active to inactive. Unless you are actually writing a library, at first the code itself will no longer be under active development, and then later the code that uses your code won’t be under active development. At that point it begins to become inactive. Given that natural transition from active to inactive, in some sense, it might be optimal for code to start out as library code and slowly transition to being simple, static, no error checking and no frills code. Intuitively this makes sense: while people are developing on your code, give them nice error messages if they use your thing wrong. As soon as the program at large is “done” (insofar as that is possible for any code, another topic) then that input checking code doesn’t have as much value, perhaps less value than its cognitive weight. Actually doing this isn’t realistic though. We’re going to write it one way and that’s going to stay, or even go in the opposite direction as it accrues new frills and features. Oh well.

I didn’t have much more to add to that, it was just a final thought. Thanks for reading this, I hope it resonated a bit or at least was somewhat interesting.

1. There is also something to be said of straight complexity. Libraries are hard to read, because the do tend to be big. Lots of code, complex architectures and structures, the works. But If they are doing it, and they are popular and have great programmers maintaining them, why shouldn’t we all do the same? ↩︎

These are all garbage tier emotions. I never want to feel them and I don’t want people around me to feel them either.

What purpose do they serve??? Evolutionarily, I guess there are things we shouldn’t like and therefore avoid. “Opening this coconut thing is frustrating, stop doing it, you’re wasting your time” or whatever. “That person betrayed you and or your tribe, you should punish them the next chance you get, which should disincentivize people from being bad”. Sure. Except like, are these feelings really that useful anymore? In the modern age? Do we need to subject ourselves to an experience that shortens our lifespans, creates enemies, makes us give up and be miserable?

Nah. They suck. Nobody can convince me they’re worth it. Sure some extreme cases may exist but come on, I could do without them most of the time. 90% of the damn time I’m not even in a position to turn anger or whatever else into anything remotely useful. Wouldn’t it be genuinely wonderful if kind, good, happy content generated the most engagement? Maybe then these sucky emotions wouldn’t be magnified 100 times by all the rage bait we put on the internet?

“Oh but Wilson you sure do sound angry now, isn’t that a bit hypocritical huh?”. It’s manufactured. Irony. I’m playing it up to prove a point to myself and maybe it sounds funnier that way.

But also have you considered maybe I feel like resolving Poppers paradox of tolerance?? Being angry about being angry is the only thing I want to be angry about? Yeah, that makes me feel better about myself.

Maybe I should take up medication meditation.

Last year I created a fun little experiment where I asked a bunch of LLMs to rank 97 hackernews users using their comment history based on whether they would be good candidates for the role of “software engineer at google”. (yes yes, seems silly I know, you can read part 1 and part 2 but they are long).

In it, I had a persistent problem of bias. I had arranged the comments in an interleaved fashion like this:

Person one: What makes you think that?
Person two: When I was a lad I remember stories of when...
Person one: Great post! I particularly like the things and stuff
...

The users aren’t responding to each other, that’s just how I arranged the comments in the prompt. I didn’t give the model the users names for obvious reasons. Then the model says who it prefers, and using many pairwise comparisons we can come up with a ranking (similar to the way chess rankings work). However, I noticed an odd bias. Even though which user was named “Person one” in the prompt was random, the model still preferred whoever got the name “Person one” slightly more often than not (or for some models, preferred “Person Two”). This is dumb. There is no reason to prefer them for being called “Person One”. It should be considering things like, would they be a good colleague etc. In the end, I evaluated all my models across all 8000 games each played, including some dummy models like one that always chooses “Person One” and one that alphabetically ranks the users. I then compared the ratio of “Person One” as it converged across the games played. Here’s what that looks like:

The models should hover around that white dashed line. But they don’t. This isn’t just bad luck. The two tailed p-value is vanishingly small after 8000 games for this sort of result (except for the alphabetical model, understandably).

This was very frustrating and I tried a number things to reduce the bias (messing around with prompt formulation etc), but couldn’t get it much better. No matter. I pressed on and found interesting results anyways and wrote about them. The bias wasn’t that bad and, since the order was randomized, it becomes random error, diluted by a larger and larger number of games.

That bring us to today and as-yet unfinished work where I’m asking people (real ones, I promise) to rank TTS voices based on attractiveness.

What better way to do ranking than pairwise comparisons, I thought?

Guess what.

Go on. Guess.

Surprising? Ok, maybe not in retrospect. So what if humans who can’t distinguish two TTS voices have a bias toward the sample presented to them on the right hand side of the screen. Indeed, “preferring stuff on the right hand side” has even been studied [1].

And, I’ll admit, the TTS voices do sometimes sound pretty similar.

Still, to me, this is a little bit cathartic because a) I was quite frustrated by the LLM bias and b) some commentators also said this invalidates the results, which hurt a little. Of course, this bias is still bad, and highlights the need to have things like large sample sizes and randomization. I won’t go much further and get too abstract here, but if there’s another, broader takeaway you could have, it’s that a lot of the safeguards and policy we have to manage humans own unreliability may serve us well in managing the unreliability of AI systems too. Maybe. We’ll have to see.

References

[1] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-11328-003

The recent release of DeepSeek-R1 made a pretty big splash, breaking into the mainstream news cycle in a way that the steady model releases we’ve had for a couple years now did not do. The main focuses of these stories were that 1. it was cheap and 2. it was chinese, forcing the market to reconsider some of it’s sky-high valuations of certain tech stocks. However, there are other interesting things to consider.

What I was impressed by are the different ideas tested in the R1 paper. Epoch AI has an extremely good writeup that made it far more digestible for me, noting that there were a number of architectural improvements they’ve contributed (over multiple papers, not just R1). Many of these improvements are “intuitive in hindsight”, but I want to talk about one of the methods they use in particular. DeepSeek-R1 was trained by using a reinforcement learning algorithm which started with their classic style model, DeepSeek-V3. They gave it math and coding problems with exact solutions, encouraged it a tiny bit to reason (essentially to make sure it used the [think] and [/think] tokens), and then gave it a reward when it got the right answer. As one hackernews commentator put it “The real thing that surprises me (as a layman trying to get up to speed on this stuff) is that there’s no “trick” to it. It really just does seem to be a textbook application of RL to LLMs.”

One of the key challenges with this is having those exact solutions. Largely, we can only choose problems that have solutions you can compare against or check rigorously. For maths, it might be a number. For code, it may need to pass a runtime test. This is good but you can imagine a huge number of reasoning tasks (perhaps the most interesting ones) that don’t have clear answers. How best to run a particular business? What architecture, language and patterns should we use for a software project? What is the path forward for reasoning in LLMs? These are all questions you could ask deepseek, but how would you know what reward to give it? Well, what if we got deepseek to do it. Ask it, “How good is this answer?”

You can’t ask a model to train itself!

In the DeepSeek-R1 paper they write “We do not apply the outcome or process neural reward model in developing DeepSeek-R1-Zero, because we find that the neural reward model may suffer from reward hacking in the large-scale reinforcement learning process, and retraining the reward model needs additional training resources and it complicates the whole training pipeline” Which is, indeed, a challenge. We’ve talked a lot about how slop proliferating on the internet could lead to a poisoning of LLM training data. We’ve seen how models, even if they know they are wrong, can end up going in circles trying correct themselves. What could the models possibly teach themselves that which they don’t already know? Here are the two key challenges with this idea.

1. The model can’t teach itself new facts. If it doesn’t know something, judging its own reasoning process isn’t going to magically introduce those facts. It also can’t (in a simple implementation) test ideas to produce new facts.
2. The model might collapse or reward hack. This might mean that if the reward step begins to reward something meaningless like niceness, the model will just become nicer, not smarter.

The first is not actually that big of a deal. DeepSeeks own research shows that most of the necessary facts are already present in the model, and what it needed was a training process to recall, consider, and reason around the facts it already knows.

The second challenge is much more interesting. If you start with a somewhat competent model, you might expect that it would view a “nice” but poorly reasoned answer poorly, since it has low informational content. One would hope that this would only improve the scrutiny the model would give to answers over time. To reward hack, the model would have to engage in poor reasoning, since in the question we asked, we “wanted” a sincere answer. We as humans can look at two chains of thought and roughly say which contains substantively better reasoning. If the model can do the same, it might just be able to continue getting better at this. What I’m trying to get at is that there may be a “collapse threshold”

If the model starts out competent enough, it may be able to over time RL its way to being even better at reasoning, on basically any problem we give it.

Another important component that may make this work better is inference time compute. OpenAIs o3 has different compute levels corresponding to how much compute the model is given, essentially how long it is allowed to think for. You reasonably could give the reward step more compute than the problem step, on the basis that then you are trying to distill better reasoning into fewer reasoning tokens. This is very similar in idea to distillation of big models into smaller ones, but instead it is distilling long inference compute into short inference compute.

This will most likely reach some diminishing returns, unlike the naive graph I have, but we could augment the process with the ability to test. Lots of reasoning steps, both in solving and reward stages, could be “tested”, in that the model may want to search something or run some code. That may prove prohibitively slow, I’m not sure, but that might be mitigated by just asking the model to only reward tests that are necessary, and then both the problem and reward stages should end up learning to be lean in their usage of tests. It also still hinges on the model having a good intuition of what necessary searches means.

I’ve no idea if any of this actually works, I’ve only trained a few little toy models myself, and I’ve seen firsthand how they can collapse in all sorts of ways, but I do think ideas like this are worth trying. These are the ideas that are outside the reach of most research because they are premised on the fact that we can iterate on a huge and already very capable model. If it does work though, I do think it could lead to some significant improvements.

(This was originally written as an assignment for my masters studies, I thought it might be interesting, read at your own risk etc.)

Are we offsetting or accelerating the green transition?

Prices for green energy are coming down [1] and given an assumption that this trend will continue, the price of reliable green energy may fall below that of closed cycle gas generation (currently one of the cheapest options [2]). However, the question remains that if demand added from new AI generation continues to pressure electricity prices upwards, then the marginal advantage of green versus conventional energy may remain an issue. That’s to say, even if it is profitable to build a new solar plant and all the solar energy companies industries are booming, if it is still profitable to build a new gas turbine plant then the gas turbine plant manufacturers will keep doing that too. In this sense even if AI energy demand accelerates the construction of new green power, it offsets the green transition.

I personally believe that a combination of government action, corporate goodwill (yes, it does exist) and market forces will lead to satisfactory progress, but none of this is set in stone and we must carefully monitor it.

The way of the car or the plane?

How will our models look in future, and how will they be used? Will they go the way of the plane, big, expensive, built by one of two companies and where you rent a seat and get where you want to go. Or will they be more like cars, small, personalizable, affordable, ubiquitous? This question matters. For all of the faults of air travel, the incentive structure of large, expensive planes encourages extreme fuel efficiency for cost saving reasons. From 2002 to 2018, aircraft fuel efficiency rose 71% [3], compared with 29% for ground vehicles over the same period [4]. One could attribute this to the fact that the auto industry is more mature, but the general mechanism whereby economies of scale encourage greater efficiency is well known.

This means that if a small number of efficient, cloud based AI vendors can optimize their models to provide the vast majority of GenAI needs ends up being the norm, we may be better off energy-wise than if everyone has personal GenAI being finetuned constantly and running on dedicated hardware. Likely there will be a balance of both these possibilities, but it’s worth noting that currently the former is the only relevant case.

Will “agents” make this much, much worse?

Right now if you want to use AI there is usually a human involved. This means that you head over to ChatGPT and ask it a question, or maybe you receive an email that an LLM summarises. Perhaps an artist might use photoshop’s AI inpainting tools. Essentially, for most current inference tasks, GenAI is done under supervision. Here, humans short attention spans actually works in our favor for once. In an effort to improve inference speeds (and lower cost) model makers have developed new methods, most notably quantization, to do more with less. This incentive aligns with reducing energy consumption and is not only attributable to improving hardware [5]. However, looking forward this may not be the case.

“AI Agents” is a poorly defined term but for the purposes of this discussion I will be looking at the common attribute that they involve less or even no human “presence”. In essence they are allowed to operate in the background. Devin is a “software engineer” AI system [6] which you can only communicate with on slack. You ask it to do something and it goes off on its own, sometimes for a period of days, to try and achieve what you asked. No doubt it would be nicer for this process to be faster, but the pressure to optimize this is missing a component of human impatience.

Further still, if we give new CoT reasoning models like openai’s o3 more compute, they tend to give better answers [7]. If you are anyways running these models in the background, why not give them the “best” chance of coming up with a good answer? Given that sometimes these agents get stuck in loops [6], would we not want to do that since an agent getting into an action loop is also bad from both a cost and energy use perspective?

In summary, agents may bring about a significant change in what is prioritized in model development, and to my mind it will not be in favor of energy efficiency. That could couple with changes in how the average model is used, with more personalized finetuning negating the oft-used argument that “you only need to train them once”. This new energy usage being bad is premised on the fact that new demand will be partially filled by conventional energy, but as mentioned, the capacity of green energy isn’t just based on cost, but on comparative advantage.

References

[1] https://www.irena.org/Publications/2024/Sep/Renewable-Power-Generation-Costs-in-2023

[2] https://www.goldmansachs.com/pdfs/insights/goldman-sachs-research/the-push-for-the-green-data-center/aidatacenters.pdf

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1352231020305689

[4] https://www.lendingtree.com/auto/fuel-efficiency-study/

[5] https://openai.com/index/ai-and-efficiency/

[6] https://www.answer.ai/posts/2025-01-08-devin.html

[7] https://arcprize.org/blog/oai-o3-pub-breakthrough

I spent a few years designing and partially building a library used for the validation of front office models at a financial institution, and I thought it might be a good idea to write down what I learned during that time. It was my first ever big project and happened to some degree by accident, building something that I just thought was neat turned into a modest project with its own team. But before we get to all that, let’s first talk briefly about what model validation is.

What is Model Validation?

Whenever you trade financial instruments you end up with one half of a trade. You sold an option, so you hold onto a responsibility to fulfill your end of the option deal. If you buy a forward, you hold that forward until you either sell it or it matures. These holdings are important because at the end of the day someone may ask what all these things are worth. You may want to know what they are worth for many reasons, like, how much money do we expect to make on them? But a very common reason is “if we had to sell (or close out) it all right now, and have no holdings, what’s a fair price that we could ask for that people are willing to pay?”. This “fair value” is an important principle. It often ends up in the financial statements of the organization and it can be quite problematic when it is wrong.

So how do we get those fair values? Sometimes, it’s simple. If you own some publicly traded stock, just take the end of day price of that stock and multiply it with how much stock that you own. Other times, it’s really hard. You have some equity in a private startup that writes its financial statements on a napkin? Well, you’ll probably want a team of analysts and have them spend some time looking at just that company to understand how much that equity is worth to someone else. There is a middle ground too (which was our focus); a set of securities and derivatives for which the price can’t just be read off a website, but that don’t need a dedicated team of analysts. A simple example is an over-the-counter (OTC) forward with a custom expiry. Let’s say you have a client that wants to buy salmon futures like the ones on Fishpool, which normally expire at the start of every month. However, they would like to have it expire at the end of the month instead, let’s say that’s in 2.5 months time. “No problem” you say. Since you know the 2 month salmon futures price, and the 3 month price, the 2.5 month price should probably be somewhere in between those two. So you draw a line between those two prices and take the price half way, add your fee or spread, and give your client an offer. At the end of the day your boss comes over and asks hey, how are we going to put these into our end of day book? “well, just draw a line between these two points every day, take the halfway point, and use that” you say, and there we have our model.

Of course it doesn’t really look exactly like this, where both the trading decisions and the modelling can get a lot more complicated. Definitely no-one is drawing lines in sharpie on their Bloomberg terminal (I hope). We do it with code, and indeed, that modelling can get so complicated that it can make people uneasy; dozens of numbers go in, one comes out, how can we know it makes any sense? If you have a whole bunch of asset classes and a dozen models for each, keeping track of it all can be quite daunting. Usually, each model will have a significant amount of documentation that needs to go through review and approval before it can be used, but even then, how can you be sure that the code does what the paper says it does? What if you cant even read the code, because the software you use was sold to you by a company that really doesn’t want to show you that code? For this, you need open source trading and accounting software model validation.

There are a few different ways you can do model validation. You can read the model documentation, ponder it a bit, maybe even look at one or two actual trades in the system, and then write up a big document of what you think of it. This covers some bases but not all of them. Another method that we settled on is to take the entire book of trades, attempt to value them ourselves, and then compare those valuations to whatever the trading system spits out. You could do all of this in excel (and indeed, sometimes we did) but there are open source libraries that can help. We ended up using QuantLib and the Open Source Risk Engine (ORE), the latter of which is kindof a library extension of QuantLib, but we ended up using it as an executable that you’d feed XML’s of data into and get valuations out of.

What’s a model validation library?

So you could write up some scripts to pull together some data and feed that into a bunch of XMLs, but quickly we found that there’s both a lot of repetition and a lot of special cases. So, we wanted both some reusable components (like yield curves, instruments, volatility surfaces and the like) but still having the ability to modify and compose them to deal with unexpected complexity. What we wanted was a library!

In retrospect, whether building a library was a good idea vs some alternative is not something I am completely confident about. There are upsides and downsides as with all things, but by talking about them perhaps others and even myself in future can use the information.

Model validation for us was a big game of unknown unknowns. The nature of the work often meant reverse engineering a black box with poor documentation. When we had a theory, we would test it by running small variations of models against each other to see if they match the black box output, which meant both understanding our own code in detail and having it be stable.

We chose to work in python because prototyping was easy, (which was nice since at the time it was the only language I knew with any depth). This turned out to work quite well. It’s fairly easy to write readable python, even though we produced unreadable python in almost equal measure. But this improved over time, and readability was key. We were aware that if we didn’t write readable code, we would just end up with another black box running alongside the existing one. “Look, the black boxes agree with each other!” is not a very inspiring result. We also had a fairly high turnover, and that loss of institutional knowledge led to more weight being put on preserving that knowledge with our code. We became archeologists not only of the (sometimes abondonware) systems we were validating, but of our own work.

Anyways, here are some more of the things I learned. I’ll start with a finance-y one, and then some more software engineering-y ones

There is no market standard.

Part of our job was to make sure that all models were to some degree “market standard”. This means if everyone else trading european options uses black-scholes, you should be using black-scholes too. This is a good idea, since if you do actually want to close out your positions and call someone up and your models are the same, then you are likely to agree on a fair price. The sale that happens is likely to be close to what the books said it should sell for.

For the simple stuff, that is mostly true. But things rarely turned out simple. What if there aren’t many others trading that thing you trade? What if you are a large enough player that the price is pretty much whatever you say it is (within reason)? What if two perfectly reasonable modelling assumptions lead to different valuations? A lot of the time, these quibbles over market standard did not have much of an impact on the final valuation anyways. “It’s immaterial” gets bandied about a lot. Still, immaterial now may still be material under stress. High volatility during market turbulence is going to make your choice of interpolation method matter a lot more, for example.

So I guess the thing I learned is you really have to 1. consider things from first principles, what expectations are and how these valuations move and 2. Gather as many cases where models failed as possible, stressed cases, surprising cases, and write them down. You want to build an understanding of what might happen in the same way a trader would. This was hard for me as someone who was just a programmer in the risk department, and I wish I had done it better.

Hammers and nails.

In software engineering there are a lot of hammers. Your programming language will offer you lots and lots of tools, hammers, the number of which grows larger the more mature the language is. These are the packages, patterns, syntactic sugar and so on that is available to you to use in your project that ostensibly save you time and effort. There is a wonderful advantage of maturing alongside the language you use, meaning if you start a serious programming career and choose a new-ish language, your own experience will grow alongside the increasing tools available to you. The features will be added roughly at the same time as you are ready to grasp them, and most importantly you will understand why they were created. You may even be in a position to contribute some of these yourself. Jumping into a decades old language is the same as jumping into a decades old codebase. There are so many hammers and you have no idea why they are there. “Don’t use that pattern for that use case, it’s wrong” will be heard often, and it is a useful thing to learn, but it will for a long time feel dogmatic and unsatisfying. In our project I had a bit of both. Some things I used and realized I was probably using them wrong, here’s an example. In python you can use a decorator called @property like this:

class FinancialInstrument:
    ...
    @property
    def maturity(self):  # cannot take any arguments except self
        ...  # some calculations
        return some_value_we_need_to_calculate

Its a neat idea, you can write as complex code as you want but you pretend that there is no complexity, you can just get the value with financial_instrument.maturity. Thing is, that complexity is a risk. What if at some point you want to take an argument, meaning you want to be able to modify the way the maturity is calculated? Tough luck, everywhere else in your code all the callers assumed this was a simple, property like value. You have made a promise that this value is simple, when in fact you knew it was a bit complicated. In the end it was just a lack of foresight that meant we chose this path, essentially just to eliminate two brackets, and paid the price whenever we were wrong. It’s a hammer for the worlds tiniest nail.

This pattern of more and more hammers, by the way, may be a bit of a curse. We haven’t had that many generations of programmers and languages, but it does feel like all languages get harder and harder to get into until one day someone gets tired of it and makes a new language with whatever they think is the most important features and new coders flock to it since it is, for the time being, simple. Then, as it adopts new patterns and features and changes to accommodate all the different use cases it ends up inevitably being used for it becomes the same as all those that came before it. Even my favorite language, python, with one of its “zen of python” principles being “There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.” is gathering more hammers at an alarming rate. Reading the PEPs as they come out, I understand each of them in a vacuum, like them even, but I am increasingly believing that this is going to end with a complex system that maybe just doesn’t need to be that complex. I’ll be fine, I’ll understand most of it, but hopefully I’ll never look down on people who “should just learn it” without recognizing the advantage that I had.

It really is just about accidental and necessary complexity.

We’re engineers, and that means we solve problems. Not problems like, “what does the product need”, because that would fall within the purview of the higher ups. We solve practical problems.

Right?

Well, no. The value of any solution comes from solving real, hard problems. It encapsulates the necessary complexity. The product, taken as a whole, is inextricably linked to its own value proposition. How well it does that trickles all the way down into what parts of the code are necessary, and what is accidental. In our case, the necessary complexity was “how do we translate from one set of objects and data and modeling methods (our trading system) to another one (ORE).” There was then lots of times when we might be fighting our own code and realized that we could rewrite or even delete some part of it. This was unnecessary complexity, that we had introduced, that if we did not resolve would become the technical debt that would slowly rot the project.

Except, zoom out, earlier in this post I had made the tongue in cheek remark that what we really needed was open source trading and accounting software. I don’t know if that is possible, but if it is, the whole idea of model validation may, in a sense, be unnecessary complexity. Indeed, we couldn’t edit the source system APIs we were interfacing with, so when we saw something that we could make the reasonable guess was kindof dumb, unnecessary complexity, any code we wrote to work around it “inherited” that property, i.e it was also unnecessary. For example, if there are two variations of an instrument that in the source system are stored in two separate relational database tables, but you really truly believe it should have been just one table with an additional column. Then any code you write to handle those two tables will feel unnecessary. It’s tech debt you can’t fix, and it’s quite demoralizing.

All that is to say, unnecessary complexity trickles down. The higher up it is, the worse it will be, both because replacing it means more broken dependencies and lost work, but also because the demoralizing effect it has reaches more people, all of those who see it for what it is—inefficiency.

I also wrote about where complexity comes from, both the necessary and the unnecessary, in my first ever post Complexity Fills the Space it’s Given.

I don’t know if I could do it all again.

This post has at times sounded a bit cynical and worrisome, and in all honesty that’s a problem. When I started out naivety drove me to make a lot of mistakes, but at least it drove me. That motivation, that you are building something unique where the tradeoffs aren’t so important because it’s just such a good idea, is worth something, and as the project matured felt like I had lost some of that. My work became more careful, measured, of higher quality, but there was objectively less of it. Maybe it was more about the project and less about me, but I don’t know. I haven’t done a multi-year undertaking since. Maybe I’ll update this once I have.

I was talking recently to a friend about a video essayist I like, (Dan Olson of Folding Ideas) and when asked why I thought he was any good I pondered it for a moment and said “he has a lot of respect for complexity”. On reflection, I think that is one of the virtues I look for in new people I meet more generally. It’s not that we always have to be knees-deep in the details of a topic, but just being able to respect complexity, even that which you don’t understand, is something that I find admirable. Yet, over time, I feel we have lost a lot of our own respect for these people. Complexity is hard. Hard to work with, hard to remove if it’s unnecessary, but most of all hard to understand. We talk about complex subjects all the time. Medicine, politics, economics, sociology, morality and more. These are all deep topics that you can study your entire life, but everyone will end up talking about most of these, even quite often. So this isn’t just about academic papers and overly abstract hand-wavy blogposts like this one. I’m talking memes, news, thanksgiving dinner arguments, water cooler chats. We are constantly asking our brains to grasp at complex topics and distill down at least our own perception of them to something manageable.

We may be becoming worse at this. It’s not set in stone but the need to have quick and easy explanations for things, having peaked many centuries ago, has begun to rise again since the techno-optimistic days of only a few decades ago. That’s not been entirely without good reason, many things were promised then that have failed to materialize. From flying cars to world peace, some more sought than others. But the idea was that we would trust that society was heading in a good direction, and so these complex topics could be safely left to some group of people who would make it their life careers and so overall we would trust them to get the job done. Now, when many may challenge that notion of consistent progress of the world toward a brighter future, letting somebody else do it just doesn’t seem so right. Instead we now live in a time of doing your own research, of skepticism, but most of all, of the idea that understanding the full complexity of every topic that might cross your path is not only possible, but somehow, expected.

How did this happen?

Lots of people have spoken about the information age and what the internet has done for our perceptions of things. You can also look at geopolitical issues and point fingers to tensions or collapsing trust due to specific events. Even one can talk about how the improving lives we live can make us forget about both the value of what we have and the work it took to get there (I’m thinking of vaccines). All of these are valid contributing factors that others have covered, but I want to talk about one I love to talk about in general: Automation.

What does robots taking our jobs have anything to do with people’s respect for complexity? Well, it’s simple. One of the best ways of improving your understanding of something is proximity to it. Do you work in the steel industry? You probably get a better feel for how manufacturing works. Are you waitstaff? You’ll probably live the rest of your life being kind to servers. Does your friend you know work in an essential industry for the economy? You will over time develop a better idea of how much real complexity is involved in that thing. These are not useless anecdotal ideas if they allow you to give more respect for other areas you do not understand but believe are equally complex. Having a deeper understanding of a single value creating and complex system helps us put other such systems into context (at least, for most people). As we take these foundational industries like agriculture, manufacturing, engineering, construction, and automate them (or for that matter, move them overseas) we detach ourselves from real complexity and I think we lose something from that. Then, when we are trying to contextualize grocery prices, repair costs, bugs in our software, roadworks that seem to never end, we do a worse job. We likely get frustrated looking for an answer that may be many fathoms deep in the details. Now, it was never likely that your cousin who does road work might be in the car with you to explain the intricacies of asphalting, but almost as good is to simply have a respect for the complexity that is almost certainly involved. You don’t even need your cousin to tell you that.

We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. – Carl Sagan, 1995

What to do?

Am I implying that we should all get out our shovels and start little home gardens? Well, I don’t think that would be a bad idea, but notice that even people who do that may still not grasp the complexity of the global agriculture industry (in fact, people who grow their own gardens are more likely doing it because of a distrust of that industry). So, really, the gulf between subsistence farming and modern complex industries is to large to be crossed on its own.

Schools, then? Sadly, the education system itself suffers from the effects of this lack of respect. It does seem to currently be in a negative cycle, meaning less trust in teachers means less funding, which leads to less understanding kid’s and so on. However, juvenoia is a recurring theme across history so I’m inclined to be optimistic. This may just be part of the ebb and flow of trends and ideas. Still, clear answers don’t seem ahead of us

What? Don’t look at me like that? I didn’t promise you any solutions at the start of this text. It’s a complex problem, and it’d be genuinely ironic if I now gave you the fix-all solution. I have more respect for the problem than to try and do that in a blogpost. Still, it’s very easy to get worried about the rhetoric and the new developments in news and elsewhere that seem to all point to disaster, and wanting some comfort. If there’s merit to this theory above then another big question of our time, how much might AI disrupt human labor, will have even more riding on its outcome. All I can do is continue looking for those people who have that respect for complexity. Some find them boring, or indecisive, or just wrong for not buying into some extreme. I think those are dumb ideas. My trust in people rises immensely these days when they have the ability to sincerely say “I don’t know”. Being all-knowing shouldn’t be the coolest thing to be since, given that it’s impossible, anyone who comes off that way is, in a sense, lying. Respect for complexity? Now that is cool.