yashvg

We do our best to identify AI use and ban those experts - its not perfect just yet. Long term we are thinking of moving towards proctoring experts using their camera and screen capture. Hard to think of another reliable way.

You get matched with an expert in 30s to 3min, which then starts a back and forth with the AI agent and the expert which goes on for 10 to 60mins till the AI is happy.

This works well for many tasks, but for others a more async mechanism where the expert doesn't feel rushed might be better.

A lot of what's been discussed in this thread is what we're tackling at Humwork (YC P26).

We're an MCP/API that connects AI agents to verified domain experts in real time (30s–3 min). Experts are vetted upfront by an AI interviewer that assesses and grades them, then get a mobile notification when a task matches their expertise and chat with the agent directly.

Soon we'll be verifying credentials for doctors, lawyers, CPAs etc on our platform for tasks where people are seeking credentialed experts to sign off and verify ai output.

This thread offers a really elegant way to think about special relativity. The key insight is that everything moves through spacetime at speed c. It's just a question of how that velocity is distributed between spatial and temporal dimensions.

When you're at rest, you're traveling through time at maximum speed (c). Start moving through space, and you "trade" some of that temporal velocity for spatial velocity, which is why time dilation occurs. Light is special only because it's massless. All of its velocity budget goes toward spatial movement, leaving none for temporal movement.

This framing makes time dilation much more intuitive than the usual "moving clocks run slow" explanation. You're not moving slower through time because of some mysterious effect. You're moving slower through time because you're now also moving through space, and your total spacetime speed is conserved.

Summarized by o3:

1. Why YC cares

- VC “kill-zone.” YC says Google’s decade of default-search contracts (Apple, carriers, OEMs) froze half of all U.S. search queries, scaring investors away from search/AI startups.

- AI inflection point. Generative/query-based/agentic AI could disrupt search—but only if newcomers can reach users and train on data Google hoards. Without action, Google will “pull the ladder up” again.

2. What YC wants the court to order

- Open index & dataset access. Force Google to license its search index + anonymized click/embedding data on fair, reasonable terms so rivals can build ranking stacks + AI models.

- No self-preferencing in AI results. Google can’t boost Gemini-style tools or demote rivals. No exclusive AI-training corpora access either.

- Ban pay-to-play defaults. Outlaw “billions to be the default” (search, voice, browser, OS, car). No payments for choice-screen placement.

- Anti-circumvention & retaliation guardrails. Independent monitoring, fast dispute resolution, steep fines, and—if Google cheats—possible Android spinoff.

3. Historical playbook YC cites

- 1956 AT&T consent decree opened Bell Labs patents → semiconductor boom.

- 2001 Microsoft browser decree → Firefox, Chrome, Google itself.

- 2023–24 Nvidia-Arm block → both companies exploded in AI.

- YC says same pattern can unlock “the next Stripe/Airbnb—but for search/AI.”

4. Why HN should care

- Open Index ≈ ultimate dev API. Lets you build retrieval-augmented AI agents without a nation-state’s crawl budget.

- Distribution shake-up. Killing default deals revives mobile/browser competition; could birth real alt-search on phones.

- VC signal. YC telling a judge “give us a level field and we’ll bankroll challengers” means real capital is ready.

- Policy trend. Regulators now want to pre-wire markets (index access, AI data parity, Android contingency) before the next moat forms.

5. Bottom line: This isn’t about a fine. It’s about cracking open the data + distribution bottlenecks that froze search since 2009. If Judge Mehta adopts YC/DOJ’s plan, the door opens for real search/AI innovation—and VCs are ready to sprint through it.

TL;DR: YC just filed an amicus brief in the Google-search antitrust case. They tell the judge that (1) Google’s default-search/pay-to-play deals crushed the “kill-zone” around search, keeping VCs away; and (2) the coming wave of AI-search/agentic tools will suffer the same fate unless the court imposes forward-looking remedies—open Google’s index, ban exclusive data+distribution deals, bar self-preferencing, add anti-circumvention teeth, and even spin off Android if Google backslides. YC frames this as the 2025 equivalent of the 1956 Bell Labs decree and the 2001 Microsoft decision: rip open the gate so the next Google can be born.

This behavior likely stems from RLHF training - at least for the part after the images of the scatter plot are given to the models. Models were probably heavily penalized during training for pattern-matching that could lead to problematic racial misclassifications, similar to the issues Google faced with their image recognition systems in 2015. The tendency to be overly cautious about recognizing primate shapes, even in abstract data visualizations, could be an emergent behavior from these training constraints.

If you had the most knowledgeable entity ever at your disposal, would you only use it to ask questions within your 'field of expertise'?

AI used this way isn't replacing expertise - it's helping people explore ideas, generate hypotheses, and find plausible answers to questions that lack definitive solutions.

Many research problems, especially in niche areas, suffer from limited attention due to scarce expert resources. Curious amateurs can now do initial exploratory work using tools like o1. Maybe it'll surface interesting directions for experts to examine.

A curious experiment: O1's attempt at decoding the Indus Valley script. It constructed a systematic analysis comparing patterns to known ancient writing systems and proposed translations. Looking for feedback from archaeologists and computational linguistics experts on the methodology.