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Autogen: Enable next-gen large language model applications

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Re: Autogen: Enable next-gen large language model applications

#11
post #4

A question for people researching LLMs and their capabilities: Is there any reason to believe that the interaction of multiple agents (using the same model) will yield some emergent property that is beyond the capabilities of the agent model? I'm not working with LLMs, but my intuition is that whatever these multi agent setups come up with could also be achieved by a single agent just talking to itself, as they all a…

It's possible that they can only "wear so many hats" at the same time.

Re: Autogen: Enable next-gen large language model applications

#12
post #3

Are these 'safer' than using langchain-based agents that directly execute (arbitrary!) Python code? That was always my main issue with langchain

i noticed autogen creates a new docker container each time code is executed by agents (default behaviour, can be turned off), so it's safe as you think docker is safe

Re: Autogen: Enable next-gen large language model applications

#13
Have been working with this and very impressed so far - it’s a step ahead of LangChain agents and seems to be receiving more attention/development than LangChain was interested in committing to agents.

FWIW the “group research” and “chess” examples from the notebooks folder in their repo have been the best for explaining the utility of this tech to others - the meme generator does a good job showing functions stripped down but misses a lot of the important bits

Re: Autogen: Enable next-gen large language model applications

#14
post #4

A question for people researching LLMs and their capabilities: Is there any reason to believe that the interaction of multiple agents (using the same model) will yield some emergent property that is beyond the capabilities of the agent model? I'm not working with LLMs, but my intuition is that whatever these multi agent setups come up with could also be achieved by a single agent just talking to itself, as they all a…

From my experience it's a modularization technique. It makes it easier to reason about and improve the system. For example, instead of one big model capable of doing anything, you can separate the system into specialized subsystems with different prompts and improve them over time.

Re: Autogen: Enable next-gen large language model applications

#18

Unless I'm missing something, how is this library different from prompting a single chatbot: "Write a dialog in which A, B, and C, each playing a different role, have a conversation and do something D"?

Maybe it depends on the model but I find you'll get a different result if you say "write a dialog in which, A, B, and C talk about D" versus "read what A said and reply as B". The latter will result in each participant talking longer.

Re: Autogen: Enable next-gen large language model applications

#19
post #7
post #2

Is Microsoft chronically incapable of coming up with original names?

It isn't too bad; naming stuff is always hard. If the Microsoft marketers knew about it then I would expect to see Azure™ Gen.NET™ Live™.

Did they give up on ONE?

Re: Autogen: Enable next-gen large language model applications

#20
post #5
post #4

A question for people researching LLMs and their capabilities: Is there any reason to believe that the interaction of multiple agents (using the same model) will yield some emergent property that is beyond the capabilities of the agent model? I'm not working with LLMs, but my intuition is that whatever these multi agent setups come up with could also be achieved by a single agent just talking to itself, as they all a…

Since a single inference is limited by context length, a multiple agents model is able to process more context at each steps of the reasoning chain, which might improve the overall quality. However, given how easy it is getting to fine tune models, it's likely that multi-agent models will make a lot of sense to split the workload and assign each part to a specialized agent.

I think this is right inline with the utility of multi agent models. Whether distributing tasks to specialized agents trained on domain knowledge or collaborating with context aware agents. I think the context is where we are going to find limitations early on especially when models are expected to work on live data. Rather than constantly retraining a model, you leverage a model that is already primed through in-context learning based on previous interactions and relevant data.
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