4 ms·

The hype around agent protocols reminds me of the emperor's new clothes. There's just nothing to it from a technical perspective.

esafak 1y ago
It's just something that needs to be done if you want LLMs to be useful. Everything does not have to be a technological marvel.
hendler 1y ago
HTML was XML for the web. Nothing to it from a technical perspective.
- pyuser583 1y ago
  XHTML was supposed to be revolutionary.
- padolsey 1y ago
  HTML was designed prior to XML fwiw, spinning off from SGML.
01100011 1y ago
Is it something like this: Ages and ages ago I was an EE turned programmer and everyone was hyping JUnit at the time. I had a customer ask for it on a project so fine I'll learn it. I kept thinking it was stupid because in my mind it barely did anything. But then I got it: it did barely do anything, but it did things you'd commonly need to do for testing and it did them in a somewhat standardized way that kept you from having to roll your own every time. Suddenly it didn't feel so stupid.
crystal_revenge 1y ago
Even worse is that virtually no one in this space even recognizes the fairly rich research into “agents” throughout the history of computer science. Mention John Holland’s work in adaptive systems, Hewitt’s actor model or even Minsky’s “Society of the Mind” and you’ll be met with blank stares. I do believe LLMs have the potential to make these older ideas relevant again and potentially create something amazing, but sadly the ignorant hype makes it virtually impossible to have intelligent conversations about these possibilities.
- mindcrime 1y ago
  > Hewitt’s actor model Hewitt's actors are arguably the earliest version of "agents" out there. But about one out of every 17,000 techbros running around claiming to be an AI expert today has even heard of actors. Much less Society of Mind, or any of the pioneering work on Agents that came out of the Stanford KSL[1] or UMBC (remember "AgentWeb"[2]?). And don't even mention KQML, FIPA, DAML+OIL, or KIF, or AgentSpeak, or JADE... [1]: http://ksl.stanford.edu/ http://ksl.stanford.edu/ [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20051125003655/http://agents.umbc.edu/ https://web.archive.org/web/20051125003655/http://agents.umb...
  - dang 1y ago
    Can you please edit swipes and putdowns out of your HN comments? They just make everything worse. "Edit out swipes." "Don't be curmudgeonly." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - mindcrime 1y ago
      But I like being curmudgeonly!! ;p Nah, all joking aside, no problem. I think it's relatively rare for me to be that way, but I'm human like everybody. And certain "hot button" issues can occasionally set me off. Too late to change this, but I'll try to keep that in mind in the future.
      - dang 1y ago
        Appreciated!
- dang 1y ago
  If you know more than others, that's great, but in that case please share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. Just putting others down doesn't help. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=share%20know%20learn%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... "Edit out swipes." "Don't be curmudgeonly." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
fnordpiglet 1y ago
HTTP was never an extraordinarily different protocol, there was really nothing to it from a technical perspective. What was important was it wrapped up a lot of the concepts from the various hypertext and linking protocols that existed into a standard that was widely supported. The standard and the compatibility across servers and clients made it important. This is generally true for protocols across the board. In fact very few standards protocols are particularly revolutionary from a technical perspective. That’s in many ways very much not the point.
- pyuser583 1y ago
  The world would be a better place if Gopher had taken off instead.
  - EGreg 1y ago
    How about Xanadu LOL The Web was freely available, while Gopher was licensed, making it less accessible and competitive As usual, open beats closed! TimBL actually is on video discussing how CERN didnt care to make money off the protocol, and it was lucky that they let it be freeee. https://youtu.be/GU6fWHHu6Es?si=gCgEQFyvwAZjKmZ9 https://youtu.be/GU6fWHHu6Es?si=gCgEQFyvwAZjKmZ9
- _QrE 1y ago
  I don't think that this is a fair comparison. HTTP actually has a specification that you need to follow if you need the web to _work_ (or at least, look good). MCP and others on the other hand are just you explaining to the LLM how you want it to format its responses. MCP is barely worth being called a protocol; LLMs are now smart enough to follow instructions however you give them. When I played around with creating my own tool-using agent, I specified the tools in YAML, and asked it to use custom tags to 'call' them. It worked just fine. More critically, there's nothing stopping the LLM from _not_ obeying whatever it is you give it, especially as the context fills up and/or the user trying to break it, except its own training. There is no proper HTTP server that would give you invalid responses 'just because'. Yeah, you could wrap the agent in a function that calls it again and again if the response isn't properly formatted with whatever formatting error happened, but I don't think any sane person would call that 'following the protocol', as the only entity it makes happy is whoever you're buying tokens from.
android521 1y ago
Too young, too naive.I think you just need to study the history of previous generation of protocols and standards to appreciate its importance.
padolsey 1y ago
I wonder if it's just our egos talking, telling us that for something to have value within this technical sphere it has to be complex and 'hard won'? I see this agent stuff as a pretty basic agreement wrapped up in the vernacular of a protocol, i.e. "we'll put this stuff in the 'role' prop on our JSON", and then everyone else knows where to look for it. It's not especially important what we decide, as long as we create shared expectations. I used to think protocols and RFCs and other products of standards bodies were the juicy 'big boy table' of tech, but then I realised: ok, it's not so complex–and perhaps doesn't itch my engineering itch–, but SOMEONE needs to take responsibility for deciding the protocol, otherwise it's just a bunch of randoms making up interfaces 1:1 with other parties and no useful tooling emerging for a long time. Best to beat it to the punch and just figure out a 'good enough' approach so we can all get on and make cool stuff. Addendum: I will say, however, that the AI space has a particularly unhealthy attraction to naming, coining, forming myriad acronyms and otherwise confusing what should be a very simple thing by wrapping it up in a whitepaper and saying LOOK MA LOOK!
pizza 1y ago
Well.. autodiff isn't particularly technically sophisticated. But I doubt that when it was first invented in the 1950s, people could have foreseen that a lot of autodiff put together can write an implementation of autodiff. If you're interested in more technical approaches, I think they're starting to come together, slowly. I've seen several research directions (operads / cellular sheaves for a theory of multiagent collaboration, the theory of open games for compositional forwards/backwards strategy/planning in open environments) that would fit in quite nicely. And to some extent, the earliest frameworks are going to be naive implementations of these directions.
ursaguild 1y ago
This article was written a few weeks after MCP was released and touches on why MCP is important. While I guess you could argue that technically there's nothing to it, protocols such as MCP is addressing a missing need to standardize interactions between your ai app and another service. Code needs to now be written for users, devs (apis), and ai. https://www.willowtreeapps.com/craft/is-anthropic-model-context-protocol-right-for-you https://www.willowtreeapps.com/craft/is-anthropic-model-cont...
dang 1y ago
Ok, but when posting here, can you please follow the site guidelines? They include: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "Don't be curmudgeonly." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

esafak 1y ago

It's just something that needs to be done if you want LLMs to be useful. Everything does not have to be a technological marvel.

hendler 1y ago

HTML was XML for the web. Nothing to it from a technical perspective.

pyuser583 1y ago
XHTML was supposed to be revolutionary.
padolsey 1y ago
HTML was designed prior to XML fwiw, spinning off from SGML.

01100011 1y ago

Is it something like this: Ages and ages ago I was an EE turned programmer and everyone was hyping JUnit at the time. I had a customer ask for it on a project so fine I'll learn it. I kept thinking it was stupid because in my mind it barely did anything. But then I got it: it did barely do anything, but it did things you'd commonly need to do for testing and it did them in a somewhat standardized way that kept you from having to roll your own every time. Suddenly it didn't feel so stupid.

crystal_revenge 1y ago

Even worse is that virtually no one in this space even recognizes the fairly rich research into “agents” throughout the history of computer science. Mention John Holland’s work in adaptive systems, Hewitt’s actor model or even Minsky’s “Society of the Mind” and you’ll be met with blank stares. I do believe LLMs have the potential to make these older ideas relevant again and potentially create something amazing, but sadly the ignorant hype makes it virtually impossible to have intelligent conversations about these possibilities.

mindcrime 1y ago
> Hewitt’s actor model Hewitt's actors are arguably the earliest version of "agents" out there. But about one out of every 17,000 techbros running around claiming to be an AI expert today has even heard of actors. Much less Society of Mind, or any of the pioneering work on Agents that came out of the Stanford KSL[1] or UMBC (remember "AgentWeb"[2]?). And don't even mention KQML, FIPA, DAML+OIL, or KIF, or AgentSpeak, or JADE... [1]: http://ksl.stanford.edu/ http://ksl.stanford.edu/ [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20051125003655/http://agents.umbc.edu/ https://web.archive.org/web/20051125003655/http://agents.umb...
- dang 1y ago
  Can you please edit swipes and putdowns out of your HN comments? They just make everything worse. "Edit out swipes." "Don't be curmudgeonly." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - mindcrime 1y ago
    But I like being curmudgeonly!! ;p Nah, all joking aside, no problem. I think it's relatively rare for me to be that way, but I'm human like everybody. And certain "hot button" issues can occasionally set me off. Too late to change this, but I'll try to keep that in mind in the future.
    - dang 1y ago
      Appreciated!
dang 1y ago
If you know more than others, that's great, but in that case please share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. Just putting others down doesn't help. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=share%20know%20learn%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... "Edit out swipes." "Don't be curmudgeonly." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

fnordpiglet 1y ago

HTTP was never an extraordinarily different protocol, there was really nothing to it from a technical perspective. What was important was it wrapped up a lot of the concepts from the various hypertext and linking protocols that existed into a standard that was widely supported. The standard and the compatibility across servers and clients made it important. This is generally true for protocols across the board. In fact very few standards protocols are particularly revolutionary from a technical perspective. That’s in many ways very much not the point.

pyuser583 1y ago
The world would be a better place if Gopher had taken off instead.
- EGreg 1y ago
  How about Xanadu LOL The Web was freely available, while Gopher was licensed, making it less accessible and competitive As usual, open beats closed! TimBL actually is on video discussing how CERN didnt care to make money off the protocol, and it was lucky that they let it be freeee. https://youtu.be/GU6fWHHu6Es?si=gCgEQFyvwAZjKmZ9 https://youtu.be/GU6fWHHu6Es?si=gCgEQFyvwAZjKmZ9
_QrE 1y ago
I don't think that this is a fair comparison. HTTP actually has a specification that you need to follow if you need the web to _work_ (or at least, look good). MCP and others on the other hand are just you explaining to the LLM how you want it to format its responses. MCP is barely worth being called a protocol; LLMs are now smart enough to follow instructions however you give them. When I played around with creating my own tool-using agent, I specified the tools in YAML, and asked it to use custom tags to 'call' them. It worked just fine. More critically, there's nothing stopping the LLM from _not_ obeying whatever it is you give it, especially as the context fills up and/or the user trying to break it, except its own training. There is no proper HTTP server that would give you invalid responses 'just because'. Yeah, you could wrap the agent in a function that calls it again and again if the response isn't properly formatted with whatever formatting error happened, but I don't think any sane person would call that 'following the protocol', as the only entity it makes happy is whoever you're buying tokens from.

android521 1y ago

Too young, too naive.I think you just need to study the history of previous generation of protocols and standards to appreciate its importance.

padolsey 1y ago

I wonder if it's just our egos talking, telling us that for something to have value within this technical sphere it has to be complex and 'hard won'? I see this agent stuff as a pretty basic agreement wrapped up in the vernacular of a protocol, i.e. "we'll put this stuff in the 'role' prop on our JSON", and then everyone else knows where to look for it. It's not especially important what we decide, as long as we create shared expectations. I used to think protocols and RFCs and other products of standards bodies were the juicy 'big boy table' of tech, but then I realised: ok, it's not so complex–and perhaps doesn't itch my engineering itch–, but SOMEONE needs to take responsibility for deciding the protocol, otherwise it's just a bunch of randoms making up interfaces 1:1 with other parties and no useful tooling emerging for a long time. Best to beat it to the punch and just figure out a 'good enough' approach so we can all get on and make cool stuff. Addendum: I will say, however, that the AI space has a particularly unhealthy attraction to naming, coining, forming myriad acronyms and otherwise confusing what should be a very simple thing by wrapping it up in a whitepaper and saying LOOK MA LOOK!

pizza 1y ago

Well.. autodiff isn't particularly technically sophisticated. But I doubt that when it was first invented in the 1950s, people could have foreseen that a lot of autodiff put together can write an implementation of autodiff. If you're interested in more technical approaches, I think they're starting to come together, slowly. I've seen several research directions (operads / cellular sheaves for a theory of multiagent collaboration, the theory of open games for compositional forwards/backwards strategy/planning in open environments) that would fit in quite nicely. And to some extent, the earliest frameworks are going to be naive implementations of these directions.

ursaguild 1y ago

This article was written a few weeks after MCP was released and touches on why MCP is important. While I guess you could argue that technically there's nothing to it, protocols such as MCP is addressing a missing need to standardize interactions between your ai app and another service. Code needs to now be written for users, devs (apis), and ai. https://www.willowtreeapps.com/craft/is-anthropic-model-context-protocol-right-for-you https://www.willowtreeapps.com/craft/is-anthropic-model-cont...

dang 1y ago

Ok, but when posting here, can you please follow the site guidelines? They include: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "Don't be curmudgeonly." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html