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Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

This oversells the paper quite a bit, the interactions are rather mundane as the authors note (and I'm rushing to implement it! it's awesome! but not all this)

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Curious -- where do you think the article oversells the research paper? In reading through the full study a few times, what stood out to me was the impression these Generative Agents left on the authors -- despite having mostly mundane interactions (which real humans do too), it was the emergent behaviors, totally unplanned, that seemed to delight the researchers.

Would you say it’s a ground-breaking simulation of human behavior? I can only get there through some pretty tight parsing. They did seem delighted!

I would say the study itself is a groundbreaking milestone in the architecture it posits. The human behavior... quite mundane I agree! I watched the full demo twice and it reminded me of the more boring parts of the Sims 4. But maybe that's the magic as well?

It’s a familiar pattern, these days you can present a prompt engineering strategy from 6 months ago & it plays as an epic new paradigm for representing human thought.

The trick is they’re all just permutations on manipulating what’s in context + embeddings for memory + prompt engineering.

There’s new things here! I’m rushing to implement the 2D visualization part! But this simply isn’t ground-breaking

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