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AI agents may soon surpass people as primary application users

zdnet.com

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

#31

Post by mptest »

babyent wrote: post #16
simonw wrote: 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.

Except AI is kinda already in everything from iphones to windows to google? Don't think that point holds well

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

#34

Post by EGreg »

ceroxylon wrote: post #33

It feels like that already, most of the accounts that try to interact with me are bots. Dead internet, etc.

So far it is confined to the Internet. You just wait til they train robots. It will be gradual and then all at once. Especially coordination and swarming behavior between drones etc. We are cooked as they say.

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

#35

Post by marxisttemp »

rixed wrote: post #28
bberenberg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Altman already spiraled down there: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain)

> World Network, originally Worldcoin, is a for-profit cryptocurrency project that uses iris biometrics developed by San Francisco- and Berlin-based Tools for Humanity. Founded in 2019 by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, Max Novendstern, and Alex Blania, it has accumulated $250 million in funding from venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures, as well as from Reid Hoffman.

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

#36

Post by jackvalentine »

great_psy wrote: post #10

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.

Unfortunately LOB apps often don’t have a useful API, nor do they have a vendor/support that is capable of supporting you in a timely manner even if they do.

RPA bridged the gap a bit for us.

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

#37

Post by cloudking »

ventoffreshair wrote: post #15

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.

What is the difference between an Agent and Function Calls?

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

#38

Post by gorgoiler »

bberenberg wrote: post #18
great_psy wrote: post #10

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.

And of course every user interface designed with anccessibility in mind will automatically become an API endpoint, or at the very least an interface that is much easier for machines to use.

This goes for aria- labelled forms, but also for button operated doors, tactile surfaces, and information printed in plain and clear English.

Robots must love public buildings! Many doors are labelled with a bright green sign using the human word for door (“exit”), most signs and switches are labelled in human binary (braille) and the designers of the building go out of their way to replace lots of pesky steps with nice ramps instead.

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

#39

Post by preommr »

great_psy wrote: post #10

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.

Because money.

End-user interfaces can be served ads, are intrinsically rate limited, and are often the main money source.

APIs make no ad revenue, can easily rack up expensive server costs, and are often a single third-party service that offer services to the rest of the customer base (bonus points for making you look bad if they implement a feature better).

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

#40

Post by hollowturtle »

mptest wrote: post #31
babyent wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Except AI is kinda already in everything from iphones to windows to google? Don't think that point holds well

Except has been pushed down into places where it does not make any sense just for the sake of riding the ai race. It’s like Clippy but integrated everywhere, eg in the chrome developer tools, nobody wanted it. On iPhone? I won’t be surprised if most users don’t use any generative ai feature at all. And other useful features were already inside the system but since they’re not “generative” they’re getting marketed as such or wrapped by a useless natural language prompt
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