[cromka]

As much as I hate it, you and your opinion is exactly what Jobs always talked about: people don't need things until they realize they need them.

You not envisioning use for it is just a past bias. You can't know that. You can't because we haven't yet reached the point where the OS is fully useful when controlled with AI.

[gedy]

But the industry types have been talking about "agents" for 30 years... This used to be a thing that "intelligent agents will go on the internet and gather information for you" then search engines came out and people were happy with that instead.

[spankibalt]

Yeah, just a week ago I read an interview with Alan Kay from 1990, where he shared his thoughts about the third revolution in computing: the "intimate computer" (the agentic platform that follows the "institutional computer" and the "personal computer").

[cromka]

Except it is only now when this is actually possible.

[spankibalt]

Funnily enough, he spoke about one of his first "agentic computing" implementations: a computer agent of his he tasked with compiling a sort of newspaper for breakfast reading. It ran overnight for 12 to 15 hrs., and collated textual as well as graphical information from specified news resources and databases. That was ten years before the interview, in 1980. Sadly, the piece doesn't go into more detail on the setup or its performance metrics.

He also mentioned that the idea of agentic computing was already 30 years old, and that he was busying himself with the topic for 15 years by then (1990). So... five years from taking interest (mid-70s) to his first practical implementations (1980).

[hakfoo]

Stupid thought: Maybe it's about scale.

Take that "sort of newspaper for breakfast reading" description and multiply that by 20 million MAU and you have the yahoo.com front page circa 1999, or the opening screen of the Reddit app circa 2020.

There are going to be a lot of tasks where if someone wired up some tools to do it for personal consumption, you'd call it agentic. Since there are a lot of overlapping interests, the obvious route is to have a handful of specialists building the tools and selling them as a packaged service to a broader consumer-type audience. While this will move away from the "a agent following your specific directives" narrative, since all you'll get is a few tunable knobs, it will also offer instant gratification and probably fewer footguns than trying to build your own.

This bodes poorly for a certain type of dev though. I suspect every shop of a certain size or larger now has at least one AI evnagelist building a bespoke "agentic" workflow that converts inbound support tickets to outbound CVEs. When you've got a brace of vendors all offering that as a COTS product, do you still want him? Firms like Atlassian and Github/lab might be in privileged positions for that storyline, because they already know all the secrets of the systems they're trying to instrument, and could potentially build API extensions to suit their needs.

[rbanffy]

It’s funny to see how much of those embryos of ideas ended up in Tron, where programs act as agents, via Kay’s relationship with Bonnie McBird.

[devn0ll]

Do you use an adblocker? If so, how could you know that you do not need all those things they offer in the ads?

A bit tongue in cheek, I know, but a nice comparison I think. If the value is true, it will come to me soon enough without it needing to be pushed in my face every second (AI in notepad for instance, or via a completely unneeded extra keyboard button)

In fact, I see a great need for AI in medical science, security research. But not as a tool to "create art"... (Don't make me ~~puke~~ laugh.) Or as a replacement for human interaction with my insurance company.

[sublinear]

I'm sorry, but what was Steve Jobs ever uniquely right about except that we needed better touch screens on smartphones?

We don't see the same obvious applications of AI because nobody has developed a proper user interface for it. We're stuck with voice, chat, and dumping documents onto it. The current pro-AI stance is basically "fuck the user and fuck interfaces".

[adrian_b]

The idea about various fads that "not envisioning use for it is just a past bias", is seldom true.

What people want has not changed for millennia and it is unlikely to change soon.

Most of the things that are useful have already been imagined millennia ago, even if at that time nobody had any idea about how one could develop any technology for building such things in reality. For instance in the Ancient Greek literature there are descriptions of artificial robots for doing the hard work, means for flying etc.

The past bias can block indeed one to envision the usefulness of some things, but only when those things are not a goal in themselves, but they are only intermediates for achieving things that are already known to be useful and the past bias prevents the user to realize that there exists an alternate path to the useful goals, instead of the known traditional path.

LLMs are indeed tools that can be used to achieved some useful goals, so in some cases a user may not realize how they can be used, due to past bias.

There is no doubt that there are a few applications for which LLMs are very useful, but for experienced people, even if they have never used LLMs yet, it is easy to recognize with certainty that some of the proposed applications for LLMs will never be useful for them.

For example, I would never use an LLM for searching the Web or for summarizing documents. What I recognize as important in a Web search or in a document differs too much from what typical humans would recognize, for an LLM to have any chance to generate equivalent results.

The only reason why I may find useful to put some questions to a big LLM is because it is likely that it may have had access during training to documents to which I do not have access. Thus the answer might provide some clues about other sources than those known to me. Instead of this, I would very much prefer to use a traditional search tool on the training set, but the LLM may be a poor substitute for its training set, which is better than nothing.

For now, the most lucrative application for LLMs is as coding assistants. Here there is no past bias, because since the earliest times of automatic computers, people have hoped for methods that would allow the generation of computer programs with minimum input from a human.

I do not think that there is anyone who would dispute that LLMs have allowed a much greater progress than before in this direction. Here what are frequently disputed are only the correct strategies of using LLMs for this purpose, because it is obvious that they are frequently misused and those who do not understand programming, like most managers, have completely unrealistic ideas about what can be done and what should be done with LLMs.