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ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

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171–180 of 508 posts

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how do you know how much is correct Because it's a budget. Verifying them is _much_ cheaper than finding all the entries in a giant PDF in the first place. > the butterfly effect of dependence on an undependable stochastic system We're using stochastic systems for a long time. We know just fine how to deal with them. > Meanwhile an agent that you accept to get only 98% of things right is meeting expectations. There…

There are in fact lots of tasks people complete immediately at 99.99% success rate at first iteration or 99.999% after self and peer checking work Perhaps importantly checking is a continual process and errors are identified as they are made and corrected whilst in context instead of being identified later by someone completely devoid of any context a task humans are notably bad at. Lastly it's important to note the…

> There are in fact lots of tasks people complete immediately at 99.99% success rate at first iteration or 99.999% after self and peer checking work

This is so absurd that I wonder if you're telling? Humans don't even have a 99.99% success rate in breathing, let alone any cognitive tasks.

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#172
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am looking forward to learning why this is entirely unlike working with humans, who in my experience commit very silly and unpredictable errors all the time (in addition to predictable ones), but additionally are often proud and anxious and happy to deliberately obfuscate their errors.

You can point out the errors to people, which will lead to less issues over time, as they gain experience. The models however don’t do that.

The models do do that, just at the next iteration of the model. And everyone gains from everyone's mistakes.

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the bigger takeaway here is will his boss allow him to walk his dog or will he see available downtime and try to fill it with more work?

95% of people doing his job will lose them. 1 person will figure out the 2% that requires a human in the loop.

I don't know why everyone is so confident that jobs will be lost. When we invented power tools did we fire everyone that builds stuff, or did we just build more stuff?

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#175
post #30

The "spreadsheet" example video is kind of funny: guy talks about how it normally takes him 4 to 8 hours to put together complicated, data-heavy reports. Now he fires off an agent request, goes to walk his dog, and comes back to a downloadable spreadsheet of dense data, which he pulls up and says "I think it got 98% of the information correct... I just needed to copy / paste a few things. If it can do 90 - 95% of the…

I think the question then is what's the human error rate... We know we're not perfect... So if you're 100% rested and only have to find the edge case bug, maybe you'll usually find it vs you're burned out getting it 98% of the way there and fail to see the 2% of the time bugs... Wording here is tricky to explain but I think what we'll find is this helps us get that much closer... Of course when you spend your time building out 98% of the thing you have sometimes a deeper understanding of it so finding the 2% edge case is easier/faster but only time will tell

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#176
Predicted by the AI 2027 team in early April:

> Mid 2025: Stumbling Agents The world sees its first glimpse of AI agents.

Advertisements for computer-using agents emphasize the term “personal assistant”: you can prompt them with tasks like “order me a burrito on DoorDash” or “open my budget spreadsheet and sum this month’s expenses.” They will check in with you as needed: for example, to ask you to confirm purchases. Though more advanced than previous iterations like Operator, they struggle to get widespread usage.

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#177

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.

Im currently working on a way to basically make LLM spit out any data processing answer as code which is then automatically executed, and verified, with additional context. So things like hallucinations are reduced pretty much to zero, given that the wrapper will say that the model could not determine a real answer.

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agents respecting robots.txt is clearly going to end soon. Users will be installing browser extensions or full browsers that run the actions on their local computer with the user's own cookie jar, IP address, etc.

I wonder how many people will think they are being clever by using the Playwright MCP or browser extensions to bypass robots.txt on the sites blocking the direct use of ChatGPT Agent and will end up with their primary Google/LinkedIn/whatever accounts blocked for robotic activity.

I don't know how others are using it, but when I ask Claude to use playwright, it's for ad-hoc tasks which look nothing like old school scraping, and I don't see why it should bother anyone.

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#180
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope agents.txt becomes standard and websites actually start to build agent-specific interfaces (or just have API docs in their agent.txt). In my mind it's different from "robots" which is meant to apply rules to broad web-scraping tools.

I hope they don't build agent-specific interfaces. I want my agent to have the same interface I do. And even more importantly, I want to have the same interface my agent does. It would be a bad future if the capabilities of human and agent interfaces drift apart and certain things are only possible to do in the agent interface.

I think the word you're looking for is Apartheid, and I think you're right.
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