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Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

OT: I’m not entirely sure why, but "agentic" sets my teeth on edge. I don't mind the concept, but the word itself has that hollow, buzzwordy flavor I associate with overblown LinkedIn jargon, particularly as it is not actually in the dictionary...unlike perfectly serviceable entries such as "versatile", "multifaceted" or "autonomous"

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To play devil's advocate, the correct use of the word would be when multiple AIs are coordinating and handing off tasks to each other with limited context, such that the handoffs are dynamically decided at runtime by the AI, not by any routine code. I have yet to see a single example where this is required. Most problems can be solved with static workflows and simple rule based code. As such, I do believe that >95% of the usage of the word is marketing nonsense.

I actually have built such a tool (two AIs, each with different capabilities), but still cringe at calling at agentic. Might just be an instinctive reflex.

You nailed an interesting nuance there about agents needing to make their own decisions!

I'm getting fairly excited about "agentic" solutions to the point that I even went out of my way to build "AgentOfCode" (https://github.com/JasonSteving99/agent-of-code) to automate solving Advent of Code puzzles by iteratively debugging executions of generated unit tests (intentionally not competing on the global leaderboard).

And even for this, there's actually only a SINGLE place in the whole "agent" where the models themselves actually make a "decision" on what step to take next, and that's simply deciding whether to refactor the generated unit tests or the generated solution based on the given error message from a prior failure.

I think this sort of usage is already happening, but perhaps in the internal details or uninteresting parts, such as content moderation. Most good LLM products are in fact using many LLM calls under the hood, and I would expect that results from one are influencing which others get used.

Versatile is far worse. It’s so broad to the point of meaninglessness. My garden rake is fairly versatile.

Agentic to me means that it acts somewhat under its own authority rather than a single call to an LLM. It has a small degree of agency.

I'm personally very glad that the word has adhered itself to a bunch of AI stuff, because people had started talking about "living more agentically" which I found much more aggravating. Now if anyone states that out loud you immediately picture them walking into doors and misunderstanding simple questions, so it will hopefully die out.

Need a general term for autonomous intelligent decision making.

No, we need a scientific understanding of autonomous intelligent decision-making. The problem with “agentic AI” is the same old “Artificial Intelligence, Natural Stupidity” problem: we have no clue what “reasoning” or “intelligence” or “autonomous” actually means in animals, and trying to apply these terms to AI without understanding them (or inventing a new term without nailing down the underlying concept) is doomed to fail.

They don’t mean anything precise, and don’t need to. They describe a bag of behaviors with overlapping properties that we observe animals/people doing.

‘Intelligent’ is exactly as precise as ‘funny’ or ‘interesting’. It’s a label for a cluster of observations of another agent’s behavior. It entails almost nothing about how those behaviors are achieved.

This is of course only an opinion, but it’s my professional opinion after thirty five years in the AI business.

Isn't that just "intelligent"?

We need something to describe a behavioral element in business processes. Something goes into it, something comes out of it - though in this case nondeterminism is involved and it may not be concrete outputs so much as further actioning.

Intelligence is a characteristic.

Volitional, independent, spontaneous, free-willed, sovereign...

Huh, all three words you mentioned as replacement are equally buzzwordy and I see them a lot in CVs while screen candidates for job interview.

They agree—they're saying that at least those buzzwords are in the dictionary, not that they'd be a good replacement for "agentic".

Versatile implies it can to more kinds of tasks (than it's predecessor or competitor). Agentic implies it requires less human intervention.

I don't think these are necessary buzzwords if the product really does what they imply.

At least all three of them are actually in the dictionary

That's not necessarily a good thing because they are overloaded while novel jargon is specific.

We use new words so often that we take it for granted. You've passively picked up dozens of new words over the last 5 or 10 years without questioning them.

Yeah I hate it when AI companies throw around words like AGI and agentic capabilities. It’s non sense to most people and ambiguous at best

This is what other replies are missing - I've been following AI closely since GPT 2 and it's not immediately clear what agentic means, so to other people, the term must be even less clear. Using the word autonomous can't be worse than agentic imo.

agentic obviously means "not gentic" and gent is from the Latin for "people".

agentic == not people.

Quite sensible, really.

Take good care of your teeth, my friend. It's a new era in agentic factuality.

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