Engineering Ideas

Ethics, safety of artificial intelligence, the science behind intelligence and decision-making, as well as the development of organizations and communities, along with methodological approaches.

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Articles

Architecture theory and the hourglass model

Jan 7, 2025 | engineeringideas.substack.com | Roman Leventov

Everyone is talking about AI agent architectures, frameworks, and protocols at the moment. Let me apply John Doyle’s architecture theory lens to this topic, as well as Micah Beck’s hourglass model (2019). In this first post in this series, I present the key ideas from the architecture theory and the hourglass model. In the next post, I will apply these ideas in the domain AI agents. The two core concepts in John Doyle’s architecture theory are levels and layers.
Differential knowledge interconnection

Oct 12, 2024 | engineeringideas.substack.com | Roman Leventov

This post is a reply to Eugene Kirpichov's post on Linkedin.
Table transfer protocols: improved Arrow Flight and alternative to Iceberg

Sep 6, 2024 | engineeringideas.substack.com | Roman Leventov

This article is the ultimate one in the five-piece series:1. “The future of OLAP table storage is not Iceberg” argues for why object storage-based open table formats: Apache Iceberg, Apache Hudi, and Delta Lake, although they may completely cover all analytical querying needs for some data teams, impose several significant limitations and inefficiencies for some OLAP use cases, and therefore shouldn’t be trumpeted as the “future” of columnar table storage. 2.
Table Write protocol for interop between diverse OLAP databases and processing engines

Sep 4, 2024 | engineeringideas.substack.com | Roman Leventov

In the previous article, I argued that there is an opportunity for creating a new family of protocols: table transfer protocols, namely Table Read and Table Write protocols to address the M x N interoperability problem between OLAP, timeseries, vector, and search databases on the one hand and data processing/query and ML engines on the other hand.
simplicity/acc: Why We Must End Human Programming Jobs

Jul 15, 2024 | engineeringideas.substack.com | Roman Leventov

Software engineers often gravitate towards projects with minimal non-software components and minimal direct interaction with the real world. This tendency, akin to searching for lost keys under a streetlight, stems from their desire to avoid real-world bottlenecks and business risks that can leave them feeling idle or powerless to influence the fate of the product they are working on.
Gaia Network: An Illustrated Primer

Jan 24, 2024 | engineeringideas.substack.com | Roman Leventov

This post is primarily written by Rafael Kaufmann, my contributions were minimal. Warning: a long read!In our first LW post on the Gaia Network, we framed it as a solution to the challenges of building safe, transformative AI. However, the true potential of Gaia as a “world-wide web of causal models” goes far beyond that, and in fact, justifying it in terms of its value to other use cases is key to showing its viability for AI safety.
Gaia Network: a practical, incremental pathway to Open Agency Architecture

Dec 20, 2023 | engineeringideas.substack.com | Roman Leventov

Co-written with Rafael Kaufmann. This article has been originally published on LessWrong. The Open Agency Architecture (OAA) proposal by Davidad has been gaining traction as a conceptual architecture to allow humanity to benefit from the nearly boundless upsides of AI while rigorously limiting its risks.
Goal alignment without alignment on epistemology, ethics, and science is futile

Apr 7, 2023 | engineeringideas.substack.com | Roman Leventov

I start to suspect that the concepts of "goals" or "pursuits", and, therefore, "goal alignment" or "goal (mis)generalisation" are not very important. In Active Inference ontology, the concepts of predictions (of the future states of the world) and plans (i.e., {s_1, a_1, s_2, a_2, ...} sequences, where s_i are predicted states of the world, and a_i are planned actions) are much more important than "goals".
Will people be motivated to learn difficult disciplines and skills without economic incentive?

Mar 19, 2023 | engineeringideas.substack.com | Roman Leventov

In a recent interview with ABC news, Sam Altman emphasised multiple times that he sees individual AI tutoring as one of the greatest applications of AI:However, I’m very sceptical that this individual tutoring technology will be widely used in developed countries, and in developing countries one generation down the line. Apart from the engaging tutor, learning cognitively demanding disciplines and skills requires motivation.
Comments on Anthropic's AI safety strategy

Mar 10, 2023 | engineeringideas.substack.com | Roman Leventov

Anthropic has published its AI Safety strategy: “Core Views on AI Safety: When, Why, What, and How”. Overall, I like the posted strategy much more than OpenAI’s (in the form of Sam Altman’s post) and Conjecture’s. I like that the strategy takes some top-down factors into account, namely the scenario breakdown. Things that still seem to me missing or mistaken in the presented strategy:A static view on alignment, as a “problem to solve” rather than a continuous, never-ending, dynamical process.