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"Agent" is a word with meaning that predates the LessWrong crowd. It is just an AI tool that performs actions to achieve its goal. That is all.
by adastra22 1y ago
"Agent" is a word with meaning that predates the LessWrong crowd. It is just an AI tool that performs actions to achieve its goal. That is all.
- QuadmasterXLII 1y agoIt had a meaning that predated the LessWrong crowd, but the LessWrong meaning had taken over pretty completely as of the GPT-4 paper, only to get swamped again by the new "agentic is good actually" wave. From the GPT-4 paper: """ 2.9 Potential for Risky Emergent Behaviors Novel capabilities often emerge in more powerful models.[61, 62] Some that are particularly concerning are the ability to create and act on long-term plans,[63] to accrue power and resources (“power- seeking”),[64] and to exhibit behavior that is increasingly “agentic.”[65] Agentic in this context does not intend to humanize language models or refer to sentience but rather refers to systems characterized by ability to, e.g., accomplish goals which may not have been concretely specified and 54 which have not appeared in training; focus on achieving specific, quantifiable objectives; and do long-term planning. Some evidence already exists of such emergent behavior in models.[66, 67, 65] For most possible objectives, the best plans involve auxiliary power-seeking actions because this is inherently useful for furthering the objectives and avoiding changes or threats to them.19[68, 69] More specifically, power-seeking is optimal for most reward functions and many types of agents;[70, 71, 72] and there is evidence that existing models can identify power-seeking as an instrumentally useful strategy.[29] We are thus particularly interested in evaluating power-seeking behavior due to the high risks it could present.[73, 74]"""