[poulsbohemian]

> no technical barrier to the creation of self-contained agent products

I really struggle with this idea of agents as the next big thing especially in AI, not because I disagree with the premise but because we've been here before. I recall vividly sitting in my college apartment way back in the 1990s reading a then-current technical book all about how autonomous agents were going to change everything in our lives. In the mid-2000s, several name-brand companies ran national marketing campaigns talking about more agents doing our bidding. Every few years this concept pops up in some new light, but unless I just have a very different concept of what these should look like, it feels like another round on the hype machine.

[brokencode]

We had nothing that could rival GPT in the 90s. I think that’s what’s different this time. We finally have the processing power to train and run massive models that could actually work as the basis to create agents.

[version_five]

That's been my initial take. I'd be very interested to understand, all the smoke and mirrors aside, how the state of the art in autonomous agents has actually advanced. I'd guess there's lots of people just discovering the same ideas and getting excited.

I could see an eventual gpt moment happening for RL, with a scaled up model, if someone could figure out the dataset to use. But that's not what these agents are.

[poulsbohemian]

Often when people talk about agents or about how AI is going to take our jobs, my reaction is "How do they interface?" Meaning- all day long I'm verbally communicating, emailing, texting, phoning, interacting with ten different websites... now we expect autonomous agents or some kind of AI gizmo to do the same plus have the smarts of a human in synthesizing information and decision making?

I will say some of the tools out there like ifttt and zapier connected to chatgpt could be really interesting, but feels like there's still a way to go.

[sebzim4500]

Plenty of people work remotely, and I don't see why you couldn't hook AI agents up to zoom/slack/email/etc.

[poulsbohemian]

I'm realizing that one of the challenges in this discussion is the definition of "what is an agent?" and "What does it mean to interface with different systems?". Can I plug a chatbot into Slack? Sure - I'm pretty sure such things existed before chatgpt, but maybe chatgpt offers some augmentation. Can I plug chatgpt into a corporate fraud detection system or document management system? Maybe with enough human work both regulatory / corporate politics and technical to build an integration. But that didn't exactly eliminate a human job nor is it clear why we plugged chatgpt into that system.

[flangola7]

You're making an assessment based on the level of surrounding hype instead of the actual fundamentals. That isn't a very useful signal in either direction.

[poulsbohemian]

You are both correctly and incorrectly interpreting my sentiments. Yes - I have very distinct opinions regarding the hype generated by OpenAI around ChatGPT. When I see everyone and their dog talking in the grocery checkout line about it though, it smells a lot like past waves of technology hype, which generally end in bad ways. That doesn't negate that they have made some interesting strides and there may be usefulness in their advances in reinforcement learning / LLM.