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Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
61–70 of 80 posts
Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
#62They're ALL bullshit and there's a technical reason why. Your rube goldberg contraption that you put together for your borderline-fradulent pitch deck is NOT an assembly-line nor is it a product anyone's gonna buy. Why? Because cosine similarity search mathematically sucks a* , large context windows, while better, are nowhere close to being fast and practical ( maybe with a small exception of the generic sounding 1M…
"Agents do not exist yet, they will sooner or later" Which definition of agents are you using there?
> an automated tool doing a complex ammount of steps that you'd normally expect an average-ish worker to do for you on a RELIABLE rate basis. I.E. Doing your taxes like your accountant or 10 year old hopefully does.
Seems to be the definition they're using. Which is a high bar, in my opinion - but it does illustrate the difficulty current systems will have in meeting an exceptionally high bar of quality (human-grade).
Defining it this way and exploring percentage task failure compared to typical (expert?) human doing the same work is valuable insight, in my opinion.
On the other hand, you can define agents as anything that does tool calling, but then it's trivial to create an agent but still non-trivial to meet expectations of the typical consumer because you aren't observing their failure rates.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
#63I know of many, many LLM systems in production system, since that's what I've been helping companies build since the start of the year. Mostly it's pretty rote automation work but the cost savings are incredible. Agentic workflows are a much higher bar that are just barely starting to work. I can't speak to their efficacy but here's a few of the ones that are sort of starter-level agents that I've started seeing some…
Cost saving as in...? Hopefully not saving through making human employees redundant.
Before farming technology like tractors, 97% of people worked the fields on come capacity. Now it’s the inverse. Technology frees human potential from drudgery.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Love that. Reminds me of a time I was asked to build a "machine learning algorithm" driven recommendation system... and eventually I realized that delivering a recommendation system based on one big BM25 search query was fine, and the people asking for it to use "machine learning" didn't actually understand or care about the difference.
Haha yes, the LLM era is "data science is the hottest new job" all over again. I guess everything with an algorithm in it is AI if you look at it from enough of a distance...
I like to call it “Artificial AI”.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
#65An anecote that helps you maybe: I do contracting work, we're building a text-to-sql automated business analyst. It's quite well-rounded: it tries to recover from errors, allows automatic creation of appropriate visualisations, has a generic "faq" component to help the user understand how to use the tool. The tool is available to some 10.000 b2b users. It's just a bunch of prompts conditionally slapped together in a…
Is the tool public? We are looking for a solid text to sql tool that works with Athena.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
#66As a side note, while I know of several language model based systems that have been deployed in companies, some companies don't want to talk about it: 1. Its still perceived as an issue of competitive advantage 2. There is a serious concern about backlash. The public's response to finding out that companies have used AI has often not been good (or even reasonable) -- particularly if there was worker replacement relat…
There is a very simple and obvious definition: it's agentic if it uses tool calls to accomplish a task. This is the only one that makes sense. People want to conflate it with their random vague conceptions of AGI or ASI or make some kind of vague requirement for a certain level of autonomy, but that doesn't make sense. An agent is an agent and an autonomous agent is an autonomous agent, but a fully autonomous agent i…
That's not the definition I see most people using. Plenty of tool calling going on purely to structure an output, which could also be achieved by prompting.
For me, agentic means that at least at some stage, one model is prompting another model.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
#67As a side note, while I know of several language model based systems that have been deployed in companies, some companies don't want to talk about it: 1. Its still perceived as an issue of competitive advantage 2. There is a serious concern about backlash. The public's response to finding out that companies have used AI has often not been good (or even reasonable) -- particularly if there was worker replacement relat…
Very accurate. So much of succesful (from company PoV) real-world LLM use is about replacing employees. HN is still far too skeptical about how much this is in fact happening and is likely to accelerate.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
#68An anecote that helps you maybe: I do contracting work, we're building a text-to-sql automated business analyst. It's quite well-rounded: it tries to recover from errors, allows automatic creation of appropriate visualisations, has a generic "faq" component to help the user understand how to use the tool. The tool is available to some 10.000 b2b users. It's just a bunch of prompts conditionally slapped together in a…
Am I the only one who finds these types of comments arrogant? I mean, we get it, you know better and have been doing this for a long time and so forth...Sometimes I feel like it's just about relativizing whatever tech is popular right now. Just to come back two years later and say "oh well I've been telling people about this cool tech two years ago!"
100% agree. I'm not sure what they're trying to convey even.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
#69As a side note, while I know of several language model based systems that have been deployed in companies, some companies don't want to talk about it: 1. Its still perceived as an issue of competitive advantage 2. There is a serious concern about backlash. The public's response to finding out that companies have used AI has often not been good (or even reasonable) -- particularly if there was worker replacement relat…
This is exactly it except also, the use cases are so constrained as to be hardly using LLMs at all.
Re: Ask HN: Examples of agentic LLM systems in production?
#70IMO "Agents" are a marketing term, they are simply software that use LLMs somewhere in the backend. Often daisy chained into a series of operations that may involve additional LLM calls or calls to other internal/external services. One we've been using for meeting notes + action items works quite well https://fireflies.ai
"Agentic" could argued to be nearer to "having agency" or having their own motives and ways to enact them. (see eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(sociology) "One's agency is one's independent capability or ability to act on one's will").