51–54 of 54 posts
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Exactly, you know AI Agents will ultimately be "just make it work, I don't care how", so why don't we just stop the game and make that?
Try replacing "AI Agentic Workflow" with "just make it work, I don't care how" in your startup's pitchdeck, and tell us how many VCs replied back ;)
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I would say the situation for "agent" is about 10,000 times worse than it is for "set," since all the definitions for set are essentially different ways to make Frege / Cantor more rigorous. The underlying scientific concept hasn't actually changed that much: "belonging to a set and a few certain operations are primitives, join these primitives with formal logic." This is the idea behind a famous intro book, Paul Hal…
> By this definition, Jupiter is an agent. Is it? What task was it designed to carry out autonomously? Where are the inputs and the logic hiding? > for dishonest people to cheat at arguments Only if the goal is to deceive. If the communication is well intentioned then there is nothing inherently wrong with it despite it not being to your liking.
The definition is just incoherent! "Sometimes an agent is deterministic and in this case the term only includes manmade tools, other times an agent is an apparently nondeterministic automaton and in this case we can include natural life." It only allows "agent" to be labelled ad hoc, and in particular blurs the distinction between "nondeterministic tool" and "lifeform" in ways that are scientifically unjustifiable. The only people this pointless word game benefits are liars like Sam Altman and Mustafa Suleyman; if people are well-intentioned then these definitions bring nothing but confusion.
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> By this definition, Jupiter is an agent. Is it? What task was it designed to carry out autonomously? Where are the inputs and the logic hiding? > for dishonest people to cheat at arguments Only if the goal is to deceive. If the communication is well intentioned then there is nothing inherently wrong with it despite it not being to your liking.
The problem is they also put "worms" in the same category, and they aren't designed by humans to do anything! Why is it that the natural laws of a worm responding to Earth's environment are distinct from the natural laws of Jupiter responding to the solar system's environment? I suppose because of complexity. But then why is a thermostat different from Jupiter despite being considerably simpler? I suppose because it…
Similar logic can be used to argue that machines are no different from rocks.
At the end of the day it's an argument of semantics so it's always going to come down to some fairly arbitrary criteria. You could survey people to determine common usage. You could establish a standards body to define it. Probably some other options as well.
Recall that Pluto used to be considered a planet.
I think their apparent definition seems fairly reasonable, although it's far from the only one. It appears to amount to living organisms plus any machinations constructed by said organisms that respond to the environment in some clear manner. Thus worms, dogs, humans, and thermostats. Probably not bicycles or hammers. Drones probably only qualify when operating in an autonomous mode. I'm not seeing the issue.
A) Looks really good, will be checking it out in depth as I get time! Thanks for sharing. B) The endorsements are interesting before you even get to the book; I know all textbooks are marketed, but this seems like quite the concerted effort. For example, take Judea Pearl's quote (an under-appreciated giant): This revised and extended edition of Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents should becom…
Hey! Thanks a lot for the detailed review. So for now, this seems to be a better introductory text?
AIAMA certainly has an absolute mountain of existing material, and it's never a bad idea to be working off the same baseline as a large majority of your interlocutors!