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.
I think automation is coming but it will be way more gnarly than frontier labs want public to believe. Value is just too big, when you can automate most of eg customer support it will create huge savings and same time customer satisfaction will get better.
> same time customer satisfaction will get better.
This part just can't be true though, right?
We have all been in numerous customer service scenarios where all we want to do is talk to a real human and that is denied to us, and it's a terrible customer experience!
Sure, using an LLM would be better than some of the sort of "menu option" style customer service calls. But there is no way it's better than talking to an actual human being
This. Listening and creative customer support rep, especially one who can even escalate fundamental product issues to company leadership is worth weight of gold.
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.
antupis · · focus · HN ↗
hi_im_greg_h · · focus · HN ↗
This part just can't be true though, right?
We have all been in numerous customer service scenarios where all we want to do is talk to a real human and that is denied to us, and it's a terrible customer experience!
Sure, using an LLM would be better than some of the sort of "menu option" style customer service calls. But there is no way it's better than talking to an actual human being
imhoguy · · focus · HN ↗