I imagine this will be because a decent chunk of the IP in Codex is probably within its prompts, how they're built, and how they're sequenced and orchestrated, rather than in the codebase per se.

We had this discussion a few months ago where we talked about allowing people to choose an AI provider and provide their API key, thinking about enterprises with "preferred" (read: mandated) AI suppliers. We also wanted to offer the kind of very simple pricing that this is one way of enabling. But we realised pretty quickly that this would/could lead to leaking our back end prompts to customers and, although those prompts are only a part of the value add, if you could build a detailed trace of them then you'd be able to relatively easily reverse engineer a lot of what we're doing.

So we quickly dropped that idea.

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agumonkey 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm unable to understand how much value can be in low-definability non deterministic prompts. It feels like the kept the right divinity spell into a chest.

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hnlmorg 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don’t disagree with your divinity spell comparison but unfortunately there is a lot of value in the prompts because these spells are the “programming languages” of LLMs.

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agumonkey 4 hours ago | parent [-]

yeah i get it too, i'm just flabbergasted that this is today's market

it reminds me of the pre-vulkan game programming days.. drivers were black boxes, game developpers had to resort to magic tricks to do stuff, until everybody got fed up and wanted some logical ground to operate

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bartread 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's a brave new world, etc., isn't it?

One does find oneself slightly askance at one's own thinking sometimes, that's for sure.

But I suppose, is it really so different? I mean, back in the day moreso than now, a lot of the valuable IP in any system was in the design and specification of that system - the problems usually solved within the design and specificaion (use X algorithm, etc.) - and the code was "just" the implementation of those solutions.

So perhaps it's more of a regression in some ways: the value is in the specification (the prompt) once again.

Your point about stochastic behaviour is well made though, and there is no way to 100% guarantee or formally verify the behaviour of a system that relies on an underlying technology whose behaviour is fundamentally stochastic.

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oblio 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Further proof that this tech stack is immature and would have needed to bake for a more years.

In an ideal world this would have been public tech like ARPANET or WWW and there would have been 2-3 major iterations (until the equivalent of Claude 7-8) and only then would everyone have tried to build huge businesses on top of it.

I mean, sure, it's sort of usable, but the churn is insane. And we're burning the planet (and probably the economy, too) for it.

	▲	literalAardvark 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Compared to burgers, it's a rounding error

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embedding-shape 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> understand how much value can be in low-definability non deterministic prompts

When was the last time you used an LLM to evaluate how true those last part(s) still are?

I also love how you went from "I'm unable to understand" to "This is surely right", it's a good representation of the software ecosystem at large :)

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saidnooneever 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

the trick about agentic systems is definitely how to do the prompting. things like automation and sandboxing are trivial in comparisson. if you generally ask via API model directly you can see what basic answers it actually yields and how fine tuning prompts and refinements to output as well as adversarial prompts etc are important to get relatively solid results.

a lot of expertise of certain domains' workflows is needed to make it functional within that domain. some of this can be yielded via prompting too etc so its also baoance of how much to prompt it vs. how much of it you wanna let it reason over itself. (if you tell it too much i lock it into a path and if you tell too little it will give incomplete results )

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dmurray 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Perhaps AI providers should support this natively: the customer supplies the API key but doesn't get access to the transcripts.

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bartread 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't know how you'd enforce that unless it was something you could mandate at the level of the API call, and then the API call is rejected if the customer hasn't configured it for "no transcript".

It sort of feels like an area of friction even still.

	▲	dmurray 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I was thinking of an API key that was scoped both to a specific customer and a specific service provider (perhaps both have to do something to provision it). Billing goes to the customer, debug logs etc go to the service provider.