Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Agents Are Not Enough

arxiv.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 165 posts

Re: Agents Are Not Enough

#61

Post by 8338550bff96 »

williamcotton wrote: post #10
simonw wrote: post #4

This paper does at least lead with its version of what "agents" means (I get very frustrated when people talk about agents without clarifying which of the many potential definitions they are using): > An agent, in the context of AI, is an autonomous entity or program that takes preferences, instructions, or other forms of inputs from a user to accomplish specific tasks on their behalf. Agents can range from simple sy…

So basically just the concept of feedback in a cybernetic system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics

Then is "agents" just non-spooky coded language for "cyborgs"

Re: Agents Are Not Enough

#62

Post by ramesh31 »

zombiwoof wrote: post #19

Agent is a funding and marketing term imho Soon it will be AI Microservices

>Agent is a funding and marketing term imho

So was "mobile" 15 years ago. Companies are deploying hundreds of billions in capital for this. It's not going anywhere, and you'd be best off upskilling now instead of dismissing things.

Re: Agents Are Not Enough

#63

Post by dist-epoch »

TaurenHunter wrote: post #9

"More Agents is all you need" https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05120 I could not find a "Agents considered harmful" related to AI, but there is this one: "AgentHarm: A benchmark for measuring harmfulness of LLM agents" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09024 This "Agents considered harmful" is not AI-related: https://www.scribd.com/document/361564026/Math-works-09

Real agents have never been tried

Re: Agents Are Not Enough

#64

Post by ocean_moist »

Maybe I just don’t understand the article but I really have 0 clue how they go about making their conclusions and really don’t understand what they are saying.

I think the 5 issues they provide under “Cognitive Architectures” are severely underspecified to the point where they really don’t _mean_ anything. Because the issues are so underspeficifed I don’t know how their proposed solution solves their proposed problems. If I understand it correctly, they just want agents (Assistants/Agents) with user profiles (Sims) on an app store? I’m pretty sure this already exists on the ChatGPT store. (sims==memories/user profiles, agents==tools/plugins, assistants==chat interface)

This whole thing is so broad and full of academic (pejorative) platitudes that it’s practically meaningless to me. And of course although completely unrelated they through a reference into symbolic systems. Academic theater.

Re: Agents Are Not Enough

#65

Post by wkat4242 »

tonetegeatinst wrote: post #59

Somewhat related but here's my take on super intelligence or AGI. I have worked with CNN,GNN and other old school AI methods, but don't have the resources to build a real SOT LLM, but I do use and tinker with LLM's occasionally. If AGI or SI(super intelligence)/is possible, and that is an if...I don't think LLM's are going to be this silver bullet solution Just as we have in the real world of people who are dedicated…

Totally agree. An LLM won't be an AGI.

It could be part of an AGI, specifically the human interface part. That's what an LLM is good at. The rest (knowledge oracle, reasoning etc) are just things that kinda work as a side-effect. Other types of AI models are going to be better at that.

It's just that since the masses found that they can talk to an AI like a human they think that it's got human capabilities too. But it's more like fake it till you make it :) An LLM is a professional bullshitter.

Re: Agents Are Not Enough

#66

Post by DebtDeflation »

This whole idea of prompting an LLM and piping the output as the input (prompt) of another LLM and asking it to do something with it (like critique/edit it) and then piping the output of that LLM back to the first LLM along with instructions to keep repeating the process until some stop criteria is met seems to me to just be a money-making scheme to drive up token consumption.

Re: Agents Are Not Enough

#67

Post by Jerrrry »

ripped_britches wrote: post #27

I can imagine really powerful agents this year or next in theory. Agents meaning (not a thermostat) a system that can go complete some async tasks on your behalf. But in practice I don’t have any idea how we will solve for prompt injection attacks. Hopefully someone cracks it.

  >solve for prompt injection attacks
It is essentially the same Code as Data problem as always.

Re: Agents Are Not Enough

#68

Post by mindcrime »

adpirz wrote: post #5
simonw wrote: post #4

This paper does at least lead with its version of what "agents" means (I get very frustrated when people talk about agents without clarifying which of the many potential definitions they are using): > An agent, in the context of AI, is an autonomous entity or program that takes preferences, instructions, or other forms of inputs from a user to accomplish specific tasks on their behalf. Agents can range from simple sy…

You posted on X a while back asking for a crowdsourced definition of what an "agent" was and I regularly cite that thread as an example of the fact that this word is so blurry right now.

It's been blurry for a long time, FWIW. I have books on "Agents" dating back to the late 90's or early 2000's in which the "Intro" chapter usually has a section that tries to define what an "agent" is, and laments that there is no universally accepted definition.

To illustrate: here's a paper from 1996 that tries to lay out a taxonomy of the different kinds of agents and provide some definitions:

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...

And another from the same time-frame, which makes a similar effort:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stan-Franklin/publicati...

Re: Agents Are Not Enough

#69

Post by wkat4242 »

klabb3 wrote: post #52
bob1029 wrote: post #2

I think the goldilocks path is to make the user the agent and use the LLM simply as their UI/UX for working with the system. Human (domain expert) in the loop gives you a reasonable chance of recovering from hallucinations before they spiral entirely out of control. "LLM as UI" seems to be something hanging pretty low on the tree of opportunity. Why spent months struggling with complex admin dashboard layouts and web…

> "LLM as UI" seems to be something hanging pretty low on the tree of opportunity. Yes if you want to annoy your users and deliberately put roadblocks to make progress on a task. Exhibit A: customer support. They put the LLM in between to waste your time. It’s not even a secret. > Why spent months struggling with complex admin dashboard layouts You can throw something together, and even auto generate forms based on a…

> Yes if you want to annoy your users and deliberately put roadblocks to make progress on a task. Exhibit A: customer support. They put the LLM in between to waste your time. It’s not even a secret.

No this is because they use the LLM not only as human interface but also as a reasoning engine for troubleshooting. And give it way less capability than a human agent to boot. So all it can really do is serve FAQs and route to real support.

In this case the fault is not with the LLM but with the people that put it there.

Re: Agents Are Not Enough

#70

Post by wkat4242 »

deadbabe wrote: post #17
GiorgioG wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

re: LLM as UI: Given that I don't trust LLMs to be deterministic, I wouldn't trust them to make the correct API call every time I tell it to do X.

They are deterministic at 0 temperature

They are pretty deterministic then but they are also pretty useless at 0 temperature.
Post reply on HN