[Night_Thastus]

An agent is an amazing idea, and it would add enormous convenience - if implemented well.

But we're a long, long, long, long, long way away from agents. What we have now aren't even precursors to agents, more like very distant cousins to an ancestor.

In order to make what he's talking about, you'd need true general artificial intelligence operating at a human's level or above.

And if we have that, the entire world is going to change regardless - personal assistants will be insignificant in comparison.

It's difficult to predict when a breakthrough like that would happen, but I doubt it'll be within the next 200 years.

What we have now isn't even a stepping stone in the right direction, it's just smoke and mirrors that looks like it is if you only look at it on a surface level.

[throwitaway222]

Work may change significantly soon.

Slack lets your conversation kinda go.

What happens when slack starts remembering tasks someone asked you to do... follows up with you to make sure you did it? And the person that originally asked you?

Right now you arrive at work and you have a few things to do, but your brain only remembers 1 of them, and barely at that. With AI it will have a few iterations on emails ready for you.

This is all possible right now with an LLM of today's caliber. He's not talking about general AI.

[Night_Thastus]

What he's talking about is absolutely not possible with an LLM. An LLM is just for language and has no deeper understanding, reasoning, logic, learning and growth, etc.

See here:

"Agents are smarter. They’re proactive—capable of making suggestions before you ask for them. They accomplish tasks across applications. They improve over time because they remember your activities and recognize intent and patterns in your behavior."

None of that is possible with today's LLMs - not in the way he's describing it.

[throwitaway222]

All of that is possible with LLMs:

> They’re proactive—capable of making suggestions before you ask for them.

An LLM can capture things that are "todos" very easily now. If someone messages you and says "can you collect data on the Brenda client" it can know that this is a request.

Further, if you give it access to notion or company wiki, it could be tuned to understand your clients, work and much much more.. The LLM can, in today's work: open an email, or a VSCode instance with some pre-filled connection to your analytics database - maybe even a sample query with the Brenda client pre-filled.

Across applications - this is more-or-less something that will be coming soon. Within a few months you will see pretty much every major OS (linux, Mac, Windows) announce OS level APIs to interact with a basic LLM, and paid for LLMs. This will enable applications to start communicating with each other because they will generally understand what you're typing and output function calls..

When applications can ubiquitously call "predict(...)" at the OS level, and probably many other AI APIs that will be introduced, you will see a HUGE change in interactivity.

Now that being said, it sounds like you're picturing Tom Cruise in Minority Report, or Will Smith in I-Robot.

There's a huge in-between you're extending his conversation to that's totally unnecessary.

[stvltvs]

Isn't it fairer to say that LLMs in the context of a lot of other systems can do these things?

[JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B]

I have my own todo lists, calendar, and notes. I don’t need to give up my whole privacy to take care of this.

[nonrandomstring]

> In order to make what he's talking about, you'd need true general artificial intelligence operating at a human's level or above.

Worse, you'd need an AGI that was relentless, creative, able to lie and deceive, to mimic, to charm and flatter, to subtly threaten or act subservient, to be taciturn and know when to be silent, and generally socially engineer, understand rules and break them.

And that's just me dealing with a bank on a normal day with someone who actually wants to help me but is hamstrung by policies, checklists, scripts and service non-interoperability.

Wait until your "agent" is dealing with another "agent" purposed by the company (adversary) to also dodge, lie, trick you into agreement, procrastinate, time-waste, discombobulate and deliberately annoy.

The moment Bill Gates' "Agent" meets its counterpart from Verizon it will be like that first time you set your mail auto-responder to respond to their auto-responder.... they will instantaneously consume all the computing resources on the planet while locked in a battle of corporate shitfuckery to the death.

This is the endgame for "online computing services".

[ben_w]

> Worse, you'd need an AGI that was relentless, creative, able to lie and deceive, to mimic, to charm and flatter, to subtly threaten or act subservient, to be taciturn and know when to be silent, and generally socially engineer, understand rules and break them.

So, Bing Chat?