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AI agents may soon surpass people as primary application users

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Re: AI agents may soon surpass people as primary application users

#21

AI Agents will be the death of the AI hype. Nobody knows what is a agent. Is running a scraping script an agent? Is something that constructs code on itself based on plain english requirement an agent? What comes aftet agent? Nobody knows. It's like the hype of chatbot LLMs circa '21-23.

An AI agent is an LLM attached to some external tool.

That's it.

What people are confused about is what groups of agents are, how they are managed and how they interact with each other.

They are confused because no one is building real multi-agent systems in the open which work.

Trying to build multi-step logical LLMs with the paltry memory we have today is about as effective as trying to play 8k video on a Intel 8008.

All the attention is on the LLMs themselves, which is the same thing as being excited about a CPU in 1970. Sure they are amazing engineering, but you will need another layer on top to make them actually useful.

Historically it was apple that first got the software right. We are now waiting for the first company to get a multi-agent system right - but again thanks to the tiny memories we have because of NVidia it will have to run in the data center, or it will be a decade away.

Re: AI agents may soon surpass people as primary application users

#22

My guess is 2026 to 2030... - ChatGPT releases a phone where the Lock Screen UI is like a FaceTime call with ur AI agent (can skin ur agent /assistant to however u want). H.E.R. The movie in ur pocket who does everything for u - All business will have their own agents and ur personal assistant / agent interfaces with them to get things done for you. I guess your agent could interface with your friends agent when they…

I think we'll have HUDs like Meta's Orion, with always monitoring AI agents, before long.

Re: AI agents may soon surpass people as primary application users

#23
post #4
post #2

3 Fronts are mentioned: 1. Agentic systems 2. Digital core 3. Generative UI Generative UI seems interesting to note as it's presented here as a way to create personalized UIs. Which means... that Generative AI creates a UI for each user? What are the implications of such a world? How does support work with this? How does a knowledge base get created to educate customers? How do you have a standardized way of discussi…

Yes! The simplest and most direct and useful implementation Generative UI is to have a settings / form react to the context — e.g. an email form, or a bunch of sliders. I have a zod-based form schema, and set of forms and schemas. If there's a new schema (e.g. if I want to add name and comments) I can just have the AI generate and save a new schema, and the UI will know how to handle the changes. This makes updating…

sounds like a bike shedder's dream.

While i think it's possible that contextualized UX has value, it's seem way too easy for builders to go ham doing what they love: building more things.

i'm a cursor LLM editor convert. Pretty amazing. Thing is, being capable of building N versions of a thing doesn't mean it's a good idea. Technical debt has gone up dramatically on a team of 2.

And its not realistic that higher iteration velocity will yield the greatest version. easy to say but you need data and users to test through all of them. that's not happening in real life.

Re: AI agents may soon surpass people as primary application users

#24

We focused so much on how that we didn’t stop to ask why. We already have an interface for agents, we call that an API. Why do we need to have AI click buttons, that eventually call an API. Just skip the middle layer and go straight to an API that does everything that system is capable of doing.

People know this. But most actually useful software built for humans doesn't have a good programmatic API. So computer use is the only way to connect AI agents to that software. And that's where a lot of the true (medium-term) financial gain will be - automating tasks on tools that are poorly built or just old but are still valuable.

Re: AI agents may soon surpass people as primary application users

#25
post #4
post #2

3 Fronts are mentioned: 1. Agentic systems 2. Digital core 3. Generative UI Generative UI seems interesting to note as it's presented here as a way to create personalized UIs. Which means... that Generative AI creates a UI for each user? What are the implications of such a world? How does support work with this? How does a knowledge base get created to educate customers? How do you have a standardized way of discussi…

Yes! The simplest and most direct and useful implementation Generative UI is to have a settings / form react to the context — e.g. an email form, or a bunch of sliders. I have a zod-based form schema, and set of forms and schemas. If there's a new schema (e.g. if I want to add name and comments) I can just have the AI generate and save a new schema, and the UI will know how to handle the changes. This makes updating…

you are not taking the concept far enough

gen UI could look like a completely custom interface integrating hundreds of apps to one. that is if an Agentic system is completely multi-modal it can collect all digital information the user owns (in a safe way ofc)

but that means when an agent generates a ui it is JUST to make decisions on the data is has access too. E.g. new email received asking for a file and a small change, agent finds the file and makes the change, then a UI is generated confirming the correct file and changes.

this is what generative ui looks like to me, far off, but definitely in the future.

Re: AI agents may soon surpass people as primary application users

#28

We focused so much on how that we didn’t stop to ask why. We already have an interface for agents, we call that an API. Why do we need to have AI click buttons, that eventually call an API. Just skip the middle layer and go straight to an API that does everything that system is capable of doing.

I think everyone agrees with you. The issue is who is building API first interfaces? The value an agent provides here is that it moves control from the publisher to the consumer (in the technical sense). “Twitter doesn’t want to let me access via an API? That’s fine, my browser/agent will automatically automate what I want it to do for me in the UI.” Is a major shift in how we interface with other services.

Come especially handy to work around the increasingly user hostile captchas, ironically. I expect this arm race to spiral down quickly into some form of mandatory biometric check, the dream come true of our security obsessed insecure rulers.

Re: AI agents may soon surpass people as primary application users

#29
post #16
post #7

The Accenture report this is based on looks like science fiction to me. https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/technology/technolo... (links to a PDF which is horrible to read on mobile, I guess Accenture don't think any of their target audience spend work time away from a laptop) It talks about "trust" a LOT, which indicates they expect a robust solution to LLM security and reliability (see prompt injection) soon.…

Remember when blockchain was going to be used in everything? Now we have AI + the ever favorite avatars.

Don't forget The Metaverse.

Re: AI agents may soon surpass people as primary application users

#30

AI Agents will be the death of the AI hype. Nobody knows what is a agent. Is running a scraping script an agent? Is something that constructs code on itself based on plain english requirement an agent? What comes aftet agent? Nobody knows. It's like the hype of chatbot LLMs circa '21-23.

A few weeks ago, Anthropic published what seemed to me to be a level-headed discussion of agents:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/building-effective-agents

Simon Willison had some valuable comments about that article:

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/20/building-effective-age...

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