I think bearish on LLMs for automation, and bullish for LLM+human experts in specific fields, is about the right expectation for current architectures.
Apart from issues with task generalization, or perhaps related to it, is the fact that LLMs have real trouble with timekeeping, and cannot estimate the real world time it will take them to do things very well. This plus the memory issues make dreams of long horizon agents, that could plausibly handle changing specifications, quite implausible with current architectures.
In narrow domains with more deterministic outputs though, this is less of an issue, and we see multiple agents succeed much better.
The fusion of that capacity, with humans in the loop able to better direct such agents and act as their temporal tethers, is where I think the real action will be for a while at least.
> This plus the memory issues make dreams of long horizon agents, that could plausibly handle changing specifications, quite implausible with current architectures.
Any reason why that can't be solved through context management and keep-forward scaffolding?
And who’s to manage context? And who’s building the scaffolding? Yes, AI can be used for both, but you do realize that all this being self-contained and regulated internally is what makes biological agents successful agents, right? If you break the process apart and need to dial back in these aspects, and can only do so with human input, or another agent which will need the same handholding the one whose issues you’re solving for, where’s the agency?
randomImmigrant · · focus · HN ↗
Apart from issues with task generalization, or perhaps related to it, is the fact that LLMs have real trouble with timekeeping, and cannot estimate the real world time it will take them to do things very well. This plus the memory issues make dreams of long horizon agents, that could plausibly handle changing specifications, quite implausible with current architectures.
In narrow domains with more deterministic outputs though, this is less of an issue, and we see multiple agents succeed much better.
The fusion of that capacity, with humans in the loop able to better direct such agents and act as their temporal tethers, is where I think the real action will be for a while at least.
handfuloflight · · focus · HN ↗
Any reason why that can't be solved through context management and keep-forward scaffolding?
randomImmigrant · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
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