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I'm currently building an Agent, and I will take the other side of this bet, I don't think these things are ready for prime-time. I have two major problems so f

I'm currently building an Agent, and I will take the other side of this bet, I don't think these things are ready for prime-time. I have two major problems so far 1. Level of specificity. It's like having a really dumb assistant. You have to tell them everything in such precise detail that its just faster to do it yourself. 2. Getting stuck. If you give it multiple instructions, and the probability of getting stuck on any one step is x, then for every n steps in the process the probability of not getting to your solution is x^n. I'm not a great developer, so there's that. Plus agents are about 6 days old, so I might be being hasty in my judgement. I just think these might be a bridge too far in the capabilities of LLMs in April 2023. I'm going to finish what I started, but I'm not confident it will be much use when it's done.

williamcotton 3y ago
“Getting stuck” is my basic theory of why the AGI apocalypse is not going to be an issue during my lifetime. I’ve jokingly been calling it the non-halting problem.
- mark_l_watson 3y ago
  I installed AutoGPT on my MacBook this morning. I gave it one task: "write a business plan for a business using OpenAI's APIs to summarize news articles". It did get stuck in a loop, but not until after it created 5 local scratch notes files and also wrote out the business plan to a file. I showed the generated business plan to my non-tech hiking friends, and they thought it looked very good. But, it did not halt - I had to halt it myself. So far I have only tried this one test run. By the way, it looks like it cost $0.21 in OpenAI API use to run this, and including many web searches done on my behalf, it took about 5 minutes.
- 13years 3y ago
  This is a possibility that we don't reach AGI due to many such unforeseen obstacles. However, there is another concerning problem, that being what we have is a very sophisticated machine of unpredictable behavior. The more immediate concern will be giving such more control over important systems than we should. I have a feeling that within a year or so the euphoria may fade as we are left dealing with endless numbers of "bugs" in black box systems that we can't define the behavior.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  We’ll what’s the utility of something with agency that cannot he controlled? That’s so smart you can’t understand and doesn’t really share any of your problems. “Hello, today can you please cure cancer, solve climate change and when your done, wash my poodle. K thanks” “Ok master no problems” I just can’t see it.
coffeebeqn 3y ago
> agents are about 6 days old Exactly. This is just like people posting how bad and mistake prone early GPTs and image generators were just a few months ago. It’s way too early to say how far agents can go. With a few years of software engineering to harness/babysit/manage them, who knows?

williamcotton 3y ago

“Getting stuck” is my basic theory of why the AGI apocalypse is not going to be an issue during my lifetime. I’ve jokingly been calling it the non-halting problem.

mark_l_watson 3y ago
I installed AutoGPT on my MacBook this morning. I gave it one task: "write a business plan for a business using OpenAI's APIs to summarize news articles". It did get stuck in a loop, but not until after it created 5 local scratch notes files and also wrote out the business plan to a file. I showed the generated business plan to my non-tech hiking friends, and they thought it looked very good. But, it did not halt - I had to halt it myself. So far I have only tried this one test run. By the way, it looks like it cost $0.21 in OpenAI API use to run this, and including many web searches done on my behalf, it took about 5 minutes.
13years 3y ago
This is a possibility that we don't reach AGI due to many such unforeseen obstacles. However, there is another concerning problem, that being what we have is a very sophisticated machine of unpredictable behavior. The more immediate concern will be giving such more control over important systems than we should. I have a feeling that within a year or so the euphoria may fade as we are left dealing with endless numbers of "bugs" in black box systems that we can't define the behavior.
ChatGTP 3y ago
We’ll what’s the utility of something with agency that cannot he controlled? That’s so smart you can’t understand and doesn’t really share any of your problems. “Hello, today can you please cure cancer, solve climate change and when your done, wash my poodle. K thanks” “Ok master no problems” I just can’t see it.

coffeebeqn 3y ago

> agents are about 6 days old Exactly. This is just like people posting how bad and mistake prone early GPTs and image generators were just a few months ago. It’s way too early to say how far agents can go. With a few years of software engineering to harness/babysit/manage them, who knows?