Live data from Hacker News

ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

openai.com

151–160 of 508 posts

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#151
> These unified agentic capabilities significantly enhance ChatGPT’s usefulness in both everyday and professional contexts. At work, you can automate repetitive tasks, like converting screenshots or dashboards into presentations composed of editable vector elements, rearranging meetings, planning and booking offsites, and updating spreadsheets with new financial data while retaining the same formatting. In your personal life, you can use it to effortlessly plan and book travel itineraries, design and book entire dinner parties, or find specialists and schedule appointments.

None of this interests me but this tells me where it's going capability wise and it's really scary and really exciting at the same time.

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#153
post #14

It's very hard for me to imagine the current level of agents serving a useful purpose in my personal life. If I ask this to plan a date night with my wife this weekend, it needs to consult my calendar to pick the best night, pick a bar and restaurant we like (how would it know?), book a babysitter (can it learn who we use and text them on my behalf?), etc. This is a lot of stuff it has to get right, and it requires a…

Agents are nothing more than the core chat model with a system prompt, and wrapper that parses responses and executes actions and puts the result into the prompt, and a system instruction that lets the model know what it can do.

Nothing is really that advanced yet with agents themselves - no real reasoning going on.

That being said, you can build your own agents fairly straightforward. The key is designing the wrapper and the system instructions. For example, you can have a guided chat on where it builds of the functionality of looking at your calendar, google location history, babysitter booking, and integrate all of that into automatic actions.

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#154

One the one hand this is super cool and maybe very beneficial, something I definitely want to try out. On the other, LLMs always make mistakes, and when it's this deeply integrated into other system I wonder how severe these mistakes will be, since they are bound to happen.

This. Recently I uploaded screenshot of movie show timing at a specific theatre and asked ChatGPT to find the optimal time for me to watch the movie based on my schedule. It did confidently find the perfect time and even accounted for the factors such as movies in theatre start 20 mins late due to trailers and ads being shown before movie starts. The only problem: it grabbed the times from the screenshot totally inco…

And this is actually a great use of Agents because they can go and use the movie theater's website to more reliably figure out when movies start. I don't think they're going to feed screenshots in to the LLM.

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#155
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By 2030 Europe will be known for croissants and colossal brains.

The European livestyle isn't god given and has to be paid for. It's a luxury and I'm still puzzled that people don't get that we can't afford it without an economy.

Europe runs 3% deficits and gets universal healthcare, tuition free universities, 25+ days paid vacation, working trains, and no GoFundMe for surgeries.

The U.S. runs 6–8% deficits and gets vibes, weapons, and insulin at $300 a vial. Who's on the unsustainable path and really overspending?

If the average interest rate on U.S. government debt rises to 14%, then 100% of all federal tax revenue (around $4.8 trillion/year) will be consumed just to pay interest on the $34 trillion national debt. As soon as the current Fed Chairman gets fired, practically a certainty by now, nobody will buy US bonds for less than 10 to 15% interest.

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, Pareto principle is at work here. In an adjacent field, self-driving, they are working on the last "20%" for almost a decade now. It feels kind of odd that almost no one is talking about self-driving now, compared to how hot of a topic it used to be, with a lot of deep, moral, almost philosophical discussions.

It’s past the hype curve and into the trough of disillusionment. Over the next 5,10,15 years (who can say?) the tech will mature out of the trough into general adoption. GenAI is the exciting new tech currently riding the initial hype spike. This will die down into the trough of disillusionment as well, probably sometime next year. Like self-driving, people will continue to innovate in the space and the tech will be…

Liquidity in search of the biggest holes in the ground. Whoever can dig the biggest holes wins. Why or what you get out of digging the holes? Who cares.

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, Pareto principle is at work here. In an adjacent field, self-driving, they are working on the last "20%" for almost a decade now. It feels kind of odd that almost no one is talking about self-driving now, compared to how hot of a topic it used to be, with a lot of deep, moral, almost philosophical discussions.

It’s past the hype curve and into the trough of disillusionment. Over the next 5,10,15 years (who can say?) the tech will mature out of the trough into general adoption. GenAI is the exciting new tech currently riding the initial hype spike. This will die down into the trough of disillusionment as well, probably sometime next year. Like self-driving, people will continue to innovate in the space and the tech will be…

The Gartner hype cycle assumes a single fundamental technical breakthrough, and describes the process of the market figuring out what it is and isn't good for. This isn't straightforwardly applicable to LLMs because the question of what they're good for is a moving target; the foundation models are actually getting more capable every few months, which wasn't true of cryptocurrency or self-driving cars. At least some people who overestimate what current LLMs can do won't have the chance to find out that they're wrong, because by the time they would have reached the trough of disillusionment, LLM capabilities will have caught up to their expectations.

If and when LLM scaling stalls out, then you'd expect a Gartner hype cycle to occur from there (because people won't realize right away that there won't be further capability gains), but that hasn't happened yet (or if it has, it's too recent to be visible yet) and I see no reason to be confident that it will happen at any particular time in the medium term.

If scaling doesn't stall out soon, then I honestly have no idea what to expect the visibility curve to look like. Is there any historical precedent for a technology's scope of potential applications expanding this much this fast?

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#158
post #65

Very slightly impressed by their emphasis on the gigantic (my word, not theirs) risk of giving the thing access to real creds and sensitive info.

I'm amazed that I had to scroll this far to find a comment on this. Then again, I don't live in the US.

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#159
post #107
post #70

I've been using OpenAI operator for some time - but more and more websites are blocking it, such as LinkedIn and Amazon. That's two key use-cases gone (applying to jobs and online shopping). Operator is pretty low-key, but once Agent starts getting popular, more sites will block it. They'll need to allow a proxy configuration or something like that.

THIS is the main problem. I was listening the whole time for them to announce a way to run it locally or at least proxy through your local devices. Alas the Deepseek R1 distillation experience they went through (a bit like when Steve Jobs was fuming at Google for getting Android to market so quickly) made them wary of showing to many intermediate results, tricks etc. Even in the very beginning Operator v1 was unable…

This is why an on device browser is coming.

It'll let the AI platforms get around any other platform blocks by hijacking the consumer's browser.

And it makes total sense, but hopefully everyone else has done the game theory at least a step or two beyond that.

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s past the hype curve and into the trough of disillusionment. Over the next 5,10,15 years (who can say?) the tech will mature out of the trough into general adoption. GenAI is the exciting new tech currently riding the initial hype spike. This will die down into the trough of disillusionment as well, probably sometime next year. Like self-driving, people will continue to innovate in the space and the tech will be…

The Gartner hype cycle assumes a single fundamental technical breakthrough, and describes the process of the market figuring out what it is and isn't good for. This isn't straightforwardly applicable to LLMs because the question of what they're good for is a moving target; the foundation models are actually getting more capable every few months, which wasn't true of cryptocurrency or self-driving cars. At least some…

Could you please expand on your point about expanding scopes? I am waiting earnestly for all the cheaper services that these expansions promise. You know cheaper white-collar-services like accounting, tax, and healthcare etc. The last reports saw accelerating service inflation. Someone is lying. Please tell me who.
Post reply on HN