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ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

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Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#451

Post by ronjakoi »

ivape wrote: post #196
Aurornis wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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... This is where the AI hype bites people. A great use of AI in this situation would be to automate the collection and checking of data. Se…

”The people who YOLO it with prompting cycles until the code passes tests and then submit a PR are causing problems almost as fast as they’re developing new features in non-trivial codebases.” This might as well be the new definition of “script kiddie”, and it’s the kids that are literally going to be the ones birthed into this lifestyle. The “craft” of programming may not be carried by these coming generations and p…

Too bad no one will be able to read it. Better make it a video essay.

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#452

Post by wat10000 »

vidarh wrote: post #392
plaguuuuuu wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone has this impression that our internal monologue is what our brain is doing. It's not. We have all sorts of individual components that exist totally outside the realm of "token generation". E.g. the amygdala does its own thing in handling emotions/fear/survival, fires in response to anything that triggers emotion. We can modulate that with our conscious brain, but not directly - we have to basically hack the…

Unless we exceed the turing computable - which there isn't the tiniest shred of evidence for -, nothing we do is "outside the realm of 'token generation'". There is no reason why the token stream generated needs to be treated as equivalent to an internal monologue, or need to always be used to produce language at all, and Turing complete systems are computationally equivalent (they can all compute the same set of fun…

A token stream is universal, but I don't see any reason to think that a token stream generated by an LLM can ever be universal.

I mean, theoretically in an "infinite tape" model, sure. But we don't even know if it's physically possible. Given that the observable universe is finite and the information capacity of a finite space is also finite, then anything humans can do can theoretically be encoded with a lookup table, but that doesn't mean that human thought can actually be replicated with a lookup table, since the table would be vastly larger than the observable universe can store.

LLMs look like the sort of thing that could replicate human thought in theory (since they are capable of arbitrary computation if you give them access to infinite memory) but not the sort of thing that could do it in a physically possible way.

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#453

Post by achrono »

Jolter wrote: post #408
wilg wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LinkedIn is probably the only social platform that would be improved by bots.

Hiring companies certainly don’t want bots to write job applications. They are already busy weeding out the AI-written applications and bots would only accelerate their problem. Hiring companies happen to be paying customers of LinkedIn.

Job applications aren't the only use case for using LinkedIn in this connected way, but even on that topic -- I think we are moving pretty quickly to no longer need to "weed out" AI-written applications.

As adoption increases, there's going to be a whole spectrum of AI-enabled work that you see out there. So something that doesn't appear to be AI written is not necessarily pure & free of AI. Not to mention the models themselves getting better at not sounding AI-style canned. If you want to have a filter for lazy applications that are written with a 10-word prompt using 4o, sure, that is actually pretty trivial to do with OpenAI's own models, but is there another reason you think companies "don't want bots to write job applications"?

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#454

Post by camdenreslink »

prettyblocks wrote: post #250
imiric wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's "here" if you live in a handful of cities around the world, and travel within specific areas in those cities. Getting this tech deployed globally will take another decade or two, optimistically speaking.

Given how well it seems to be going in those specific areas, it seems like it's more of a regulatory issue than a technological one.

It snows like 40% of the year where I live. I don’t think the current iteration of self driving cars is even close to handling that.

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#455

Post by camdenreslink »

j_timberlake wrote: post #359
twalkz wrote: 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…

"It feels like either finding that 2% that's off (or dealing with 2% error) will be the time consuming part in a lot of cases." This is the part you have wrong. People just won't do that. They'll save the 8 hours and just deal with 2% error in their work (which reduces as AI models get better). This doesn't work with something with a low error tolerance, but most people aren't building the next Golden Gate Bridge. Th…

It’s not worth it because of the compounding effect when it is a repeated process. 98% accuracy might be fine for a single iteration, but if you run your process 365 times (maybe once a day for a year) whatever your output is will be so wrong that it is unusable.

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#456

Post by baby »

posix86 wrote: post #401
posix86 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's how progress works! To me it makes sense that llms first manage to do 80% of the task, then 90, then 95, then 98, then 99, then 99.5, and so on. The last part IS the hardest, and each iteration of LLMs will get a bit further. Just because it didn't reach 100% just yet doesn't mean that LLMs as a whole are doomed. In fact, the fact that they are slowly approaching 100% shows promise that there IS a future f…

I would go so far as to say that the reason people feel LLMs have stagnated is precisely because they feel like they're only progressing a few percentage points between iteration - despite the fact that these points are the hardest.

The people who feel that LLMs have stagnated are similar to the ones who feel like LLMs are not useful.

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#457

Post by killerstorm »

ddp26 wrote: post #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.…

They aren't predicting any new capabilities here: all things they mentioned already existed in various demos. They are basically saying that the next iteration of Operator is unlikely to be groundbreaking, which is rather obvious. I.e. "sudden breakthrough is unlikely" is just common sense.

Calling it "The world sees its first glimpse of AI agents" is just bad writing, in my opinion. People have been making some basic agents for years, e.g. Auto-GPT & Baby-AGI were published in 2023: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/12by8mj/i_used...

Yeah, those had much higher error rate, but what's the principal difference here?

Seems rather weird "it's an agent when OpenAI calls it an agent" appeal to authority.

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#458

Post by killerstorm »

chaos_emergent wrote: post #440
Fraterkes wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your point? We’re talking about the ai 2027 predictions here, which were made 4 months ago. 4 is “checks notes” less than 7

the point is that minimizing 4 months as an insufficient timeline along which to prove out ones ability to predict a sequence of events is dumb when the rate of progress is incredibly fast.

They predicted something completely unsurprising. Like "we'll see clouds next week".

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#459

Post by camdenreslink »

posix86 wrote: post #400
AgentMatrixAI wrote: post #47

I'm not so optimistic as someone that works on agents for businesses and creating tools for it. The leap from low 90s to 99% is classic last mile problem for LLM agents. The more generic and spread an agent is (can-do-it-all) the more likely it will fail and disappoint. Can't help but feel many are optimizing happy paths in their demos and hiding the true reality. Doesn't mean there isn't a place for agents but rathe…

But that's how progress works! To me it makes sense that llms first manage to do 80% of the task, then 90, then 95, then 98, then 99, then 99.5, and so on. The last part IS the hardest, and each iteration of LLMs will get a bit further. Just because it didn't reach 100% just yet doesn't mean that LLMs as a whole are doomed. In fact, the fact that they are slowly approaching 100% shows promise that there IS a future f…

But they don’t do 80% of the task. They do 100% of the task, but 20% is wrong (and you don’t know which 20% without manually verifying all of it).

So it is really great for tasks where do the work is a lot harder than verifying it, and mostly useless for tasks where doing the work and verifying it are similarly difficult.

Re: ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

#460

Post by CharlieDigital »

Jommi wrote: post #398
buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because playwright can be detected pretty easily and blocked. It needs to be (and will be) using the same browser that you regularly browse with.

detecting playwright is not "easy"... It can be done but its cat and mouse. Playwright in non headless mode is nearly impossible to detect.

Its the other way around: it's easier to detect because detectors are looking for specific "fingerprints" and may even try to run specific JavaScript that will only work when there is a UI present.

(Source: did a ton of web scraping and ran into a few gnarly issues and sites and had to write a p/invoke based UI automation scraper for some properties)

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