Comment by nstart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nstart | Hacker News Reader

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I've been subscribed to ed for a long time. I commend his foundational ideas like what he laid out in "The Era of the Business Idiot" or "The Rot Economy". My recommendation line for him to anyone else is "if nothing else, he'll leave you with something to chew on for a while to come".

My issue with Ed is that he doesn't have the ability to draw the line. In the pursuit of making a point he goes so dogmatic that he is willing to make harsh statements that go beyond number backed predictions. Like in his piece "AI is really weird" he states about agents, "Probably the weirdest thing about this entire era is how nobody wants to talk about the fact that AI isn’t actually doing very much, and that AI agents are just chatbots plugged into an API.". That's a massive stretch to make. Just because he has a claim that the business doesn't make sense, he doesn't get to claim that agents are not capable of doing very real work. His assessment of cowork was "a chatbot that deleted every single one of a guy’s photos when he asked it to organize his wife’s desktop.". These statements damage his credibility and make it too easy to dismiss his writing as a rant of an angry man.

>"Probably the weirdest thing about this entire era is how nobody wants to talk about the fact that AI isn’t actually doing very much, and that AI agents are just chatbots plugged into an API." That's a massive stretch to make.

With the notable exception of TTI models, that description seems accurate to me. Is there any widely promoted "AI product" that is more than a chatbot in fancy dress?

Thats the thing though. The reduction of agents to Chatbots in a fancy dress doesn't make sense. Whether there's much of a moat to the models agentic approaches is a different question. But the idea of reframing questions and results in a back and forth between itself while holding on to context and all the laundered knowledge it has (no I'm never letting go of the lack of ethics in its knowledge acquisition) is an impressive feat. To say it isn't doing much is to liken someone doing any kind of thinking as doing nothing much. I'm not saying LLMs are sentient or intelligent in a human sense. But their synthetic intelligence does have capabilities that are impressive and they are capable of reducing so much busy work for me personally. Those ai agents that aren't apparently doing much can help me narrow down my reading about prior art in security implementations super quickly by going site by site, categorizing, locating the correct page in docs, or a Reddit discussion, extracting a relevant paragraph, sourcing it, and putting it down for me. The idea that this isn't much is reductive. That would have been 2 hours of my energy previously and instead I pick up the completed work, visit the links I asked the agent to get for me, do my reading in a pre planned structured way, and complete my work (I always try to be respectful of source material instead of attributing to the LLM). That is very useful behaviour and I think we thumb our nose at it to our own detriment.

Outside of coding agents, which are overhyped, I can't really think of any other agents that are particularly useful for getting work done. I installed cowork at one point and couldn't figure out anything I'd want to use it for. I guess there's maybe call center agents, which don't work great and live in an uncanny valley.

Personally I think the big benefits are gonna be in pretty specific business processes which are currently done manually. Lots of KYC and data entry between systems where it wasn't plausible to automate before are now doable.

I'm pretty uncertain around the businesses of foundation models but the tech is definitely useful.

Yep. I like to sometimes think of Agents as a slow but tireless unofficial API glue between completely disparate elements. I dislike the approach the companies took in laundering information through them. But their ability to work through clerical work that no one should be doing ideally has been incredible for me. Of course there's nuance to that last sentence. Someone needs to have an eye on certain things in domains like finance. But it's up to companies to be smart here and ask how AI can augment that process rather than trying to get rid of it. For example, collecting all relevant context and presenting it on demand for a suspicious transaction flag would eliminate what could be days of inter departmental wrangling in a normal work process.

My only side note of sadness here is that companies are more likely to implement such stuff in a haphazard way rather than anything actually thoughtful.

> My only side note of sadness here is that companies are more likely to implement such stuff in a haphazard way rather than anything actually thoughtful.

This will definitely happen, but the trend will end up towards automating a bunch of this stuff with manual checks on a subsample to ensure that it's working effectively. It's rather like moving from phone/mail based ordering to online ordering, in that it'll take a while but it's almost certainly gonna happen.

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