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Who manages the agents?

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Re: Who manages the agents?

#51

Post by j45 »

blauditore wrote: post #11

The closer I start working with and on AI stuff, the more I start seeing the disconnect between doomsday predictions of what AI will replace vs. what it is actually capable of. Yes, it can do stuff, and yes, it's getting better. But the closer you look the more clear it becomes that the enthusiast vision of completely independent AI systems is unrealistic as of today. Yes, all the tech companies are pushing for exact…

AI capability is not a snapshot, but treated like a traditional software capability snapshot.

The capabilities sometimes have completely evolved by a take spreads far enough that it's no longer true, or suddenly it is true and possible.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#52

Post by cindyllm »

cyanydeez wrote: post #20
dominotw wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we have a google calender bot type ai that you can ask in slakc to make a meeting with participants. It gets it wrong about 80% of time . i try to think of this whenever i am going into ai psychosis.

I'm fairly certain the smart people driving AI are also sociopathic either via position (MBA) or via legit Autism.

[dead]

Re: Who manages the agents?

#54

Post by manmal »

> The best agentic developers are now probably exceeding 100x, doing massive rewrites of codebases that would have taken years of engineering in days

I‘m not denying that you can get far with a port of a well tested codebase. But it’s a bit of a selective example, no? Porting a large framework to Rust is not something that’s making up a meaningful fraction of a developer’s time usually. It’s also a bit of a luxury IMO, and something you could have skipped entirely.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#55

Post by newaccountman2 »

estetlinus wrote: post #48

I am still waiting for the day me and my wife can share a grocery list, that can be accurately modified by a voice assistant AND correctly sorted by category. This guy is arguing mass unemployment, while I still have to tell Apple Reminders that no, Siri, wood glue is not in the Candy department.

> I am still waiting for the day me and my wife can share a grocery list, that can be accurately modified by a voice assistant AND correctly sorted by category.

Sounds to me like that day could be any day with the tech as it exists (?) lol

You could use LLMs to help you build that reasonably quickly I imagine. Maybe not "weekend" quick, but within a couple weeks if you devote a couple hours a day. (Or maybe you're smarter than me and could do it in a weekend, IDK)

Re: Who manages the agents?

#56

Post by pmg101 »

azinman2 wrote: post #43

It’s hilarious to me that there are people that think just a few people will control everything and the rest of the population will just accept whatever handouts they get. It’s like they’ve ignored all of human history.

Isn't that basically a one sentence description of the feudal system that operated for five centuries in Europe?

Re: Who manages the agents?

#57

Post by [deleted] »

blauditore wrote: post #11

The closer I start working with and on AI stuff, the more I start seeing the disconnect between doomsday predictions of what AI will replace vs. what it is actually capable of. Yes, it can do stuff, and yes, it's getting better. But the closer you look the more clear it becomes that the enthusiast vision of completely independent AI systems is unrealistic as of today. Yes, all the tech companies are pushing for exact…

[deleted]

Re: Who manages the agents?

#58

Post by ekidd »

fragmede wrote: post #29
ekidd wrote: post #7

The author is completely right about the AI Lab's promised vision of the world: They claim to want to create superhuman intelligence, which will produce vast abundance. But superhuman intelligence would be extremely dangerous, so it needs to be controlled by a tiny "priesthood" of trusted people, or somehow designed so that the superhuman intelligence could be trusted. (We have no idea how to do that.) But the author…

I don't take 3 as a given. There's just too much going on in the space for one cloistered company to control it all and be in control of it. Today, I can run a local LLM with tool calling as a weirdo nerd that is able to accomplish a small subset of tasks a human could do. There are enough weirdo nerds out there that I don't see a future where future, more capable versions will be exclusively locked down and restrict…

> I don't take 3 as a given. There's just too much going on in the space for one cloistered company to control it all and be in control of it.

Yeah, in my comment, I was assuming the publicly-stated goals of the labs actually came true. I assumed that they achieved true AGI (defined as "about as smart as Fable, except it can manage long-term tasks as well as a smart human, too"), and that this would cause widespread unemployment and fully-automated production. And furthermore, I assumed that once they could use AGI to automate more AI research, they could use that to make even smarter models. The labs call this "recursive self-improvement" (RSI) and like to insist it will happen Real Soon Now.

Given this chain of events come true, then I think there's an excellent chance that the resulting models will never be sold via an API. Given those assumptions, the labs would probably make more money by keeping all the compute to themselves and just ordering the AI to start and manage businesses. Imagine Anthropic having an in-house OpenClaw that could plan and run a successful startup with no human input besides an annual "board meeting" with the humans.

This isn't the only possible outcome, of course.

- Maybe the labs are wrong and progress stalls out well short of superintelligence. This would be nice!

- Maybe true AGI is only requires one or two clever algorithmic tricks beyond what we have now. In this case, training costs might go down, and superhuman models might become widespread. I suspect that possible future would be extra weird.

Re: Who manages the agents?

#59

Post by pmg101 »

Tenemo wrote: post #40
hoppp wrote: post #3

Agents manage agents. The middle management in companies is one of the worst inventions ever. I think baboons have better middle management structure than us. Might as well replace all that.

Serious question then: if you were the CEO/CTO and were employing 10,000 engineers, what would you do without middle management? Would you have 1k+ line managers each managing I'm not saying corporations execute on this flawlessly, just any time when I wonder what I would've done myself, I end up with a similar structure (maybe a bit flatter)...

I've also wondered about it.

I think the answer is, "you don't really need 10,000 engineers". You can do a lot with small teams of engineers. This was true before AI. Macintosh was designed and built from scratch with a team of 3 which eventually peaked at 20-30. Does anyone seriously believe a company building a web app needs 10,000 engineers?

Re: Who manages the agents?

#60

Post by 484994949595 »

manmal wrote: post #54

> The best agentic developers are now probably exceeding 100x, doing massive rewrites of codebases that would have taken years of engineering in days I‘m not denying that you can get far with a port of a well tested codebase. But it’s a bit of a selective example, no? Porting a large framework to Rust is not something that’s making up a meaningful fraction of a developer’s time usually. It’s also a bit of a luxury IM…

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