[GolfPopper]

>"Probably the weirdest thing about this entire era is how nobody wants to talk about the fact that AI isn’t actually doing very much, and that AI agents are just chatbots plugged into an API." That's a massive stretch to make.

With the notable exception of TTI models, that description seems accurate to me. Is there any widely promoted "AI product" that is more than a chatbot in fancy dress?

[nstart]

Thats the thing though. The reduction of agents to Chatbots in a fancy dress doesn't make sense. Whether there's much of a moat to the models agentic approaches is a different question. But the idea of reframing questions and results in a back and forth between itself while holding on to context and all the laundered knowledge it has (no I'm never letting go of the lack of ethics in its knowledge acquisition) is an impressive feat. To say it isn't doing much is to liken someone doing any kind of thinking as doing nothing much. I'm not saying LLMs are sentient or intelligent in a human sense. But their synthetic intelligence does have capabilities that are impressive and they are capable of reducing so much busy work for me personally. Those ai agents that aren't apparently doing much can help me narrow down my reading about prior art in security implementations super quickly by going site by site, categorizing, locating the correct page in docs, or a Reddit discussion, extracting a relevant paragraph, sourcing it, and putting it down for me. The idea that this isn't much is reductive. That would have been 2 hours of my energy previously and instead I pick up the completed work, visit the links I asked the agent to get for me, do my reading in a pre planned structured way, and complete my work (I always try to be respectful of source material instead of attributing to the LLM). That is very useful behaviour and I think we thumb our nose at it to our own detriment.