4 ms·

Why do you think they will fade out?

by DenisM 10mo ago

orliesaurus 10mo ago
Adoption on most of these has been weak, except MCP (and whatever flavor of markdown file you like to add to your agent context)
- zingababba 10mo ago
  Microsoft seems to be pushing MCP pretty hard in the Azure ecosystem. My cynical take is they are very aware of the context bloat so see it as extra inference $$.
  - bonesss 10mo ago
    Pure speculation, but I feel the inference money is tiny compared to the speed and permanence of Office integrations MCP enables through the consultancy swarm. MCP lets you glue random assed parts of services to mega-ultra-high critical business initiatives with no go between. Delivered through a personalized chat interface that will tell you how sexy you are and how you deserved to win at golf yesterday… from salesman to auto interface to forever contract in minutes. MS sells to insecurities of incompetent management and facilitates territory marking at the expense of governments and societies around the world for mega bucks. MCP, obvious as it is technically, also lets them plug a library into existing services for a quick upgrade then an atomized upsell directly to the chat interfaces of upper management. Microsoft’s CEO has talked about his agent swarm. Much like RPA this woo appeals strongly to the barely technical.
amitport 10mo ago
His point, I believe, was that it is early in the innovation cycle and they very well be replaced quickely with different solutions/paradigms.
- wuliwong 10mo ago
  Agreed. I think if this is overly concerning, developing early in the innovation cycle just might not be the ideal place to be. :)
- DenisM 10mo ago
  Well, some things fade out and some do not. How do we decide which one it is? The reason I ask is that the pace of new things arriving is overwhelming, hence I was tempted to just ignore it. Not because things had signs of transience, but because I was drowning and didn't know where to start. That is not the same thing as actually observing signs of things being too foamy.
observationist 10mo ago
Frontier models will eventually eat all the tedious tailored add-ons as just part of something they can do. Right now models have roughly all of the written knowledge available to mankind, minus some obscure held out private archives and so on. They have excellent skills and general abilities to construct plausible sequences of actions to accomplish work, but we need to hold their hands to really get decent performance across a wide range of activities. Skills and agent frameworks and MCP carve out different domains of that problem, with successful solutions providing training data for future models that might be able to be either generalized, or they'll be able to create a vast mountain of synthetic data following successful patterns, and make the next generation of models incredibly useful for a huge number of tasks, by default. It might also be possible that by studying the problem, identifying where mode collapses and issues with training prevent the right sort of generalization, they might tweak the architecture and be able to solve the deficiency through normal training runs, and thereby discard the need for all the bespoke artisanal agent specifications.
- DenisM 10mo ago
  I hear you - model development might overcome the shortcomings one day. However the "waiting out" strategy needs a timeout. It might happen that agentic crutches around LLMs will bear fruit much sooner than high-quality LLMs arrive. If you don't have a timeout or a decent exit criteria you may end up waiting indefinitely, or at least until reality of things becomes too painful to ignore. The "ski rental problem" comes to mind here, but maybe there is another "wait it out" exit strategy?
- mbesto 10mo ago
  > Right now models have roughly all of the written knowledge available to mankind, minus some obscure held out private archives and so on. Sorry for the nit, but this is a gross oversimplification. Most private archives are not obscure but obfuscated and largely are way more valuable training data then the publicly available ones. Want to know how the DOD may technically tracks your phone? Private. Want to know how to make Coca Cola at scale? Private. Want to know what the schematic is for a Google TPU? Private. etc etc.
- jonahbenton 10mo ago

Why do you think they will fade out?

by DenisM 10mo ago

Why do you think they will fade out?

Adoption on most of these has been weak, except MCP (and whatever flavor of markdown file you like to add to your agent context)

zingababba 10mo ago
Microsoft seems to be pushing MCP pretty hard in the Azure ecosystem. My cynical take is they are very aware of the context bloat so see it as extra inference $$.
- bonesss 10mo ago
  Pure speculation, but I feel the inference money is tiny compared to the speed and permanence of Office integrations MCP enables through the consultancy swarm. MCP lets you glue random assed parts of services to mega-ultra-high critical business initiatives with no go between. Delivered through a personalized chat interface that will tell you how sexy you are and how you deserved to win at golf yesterday… from salesman to auto interface to forever contract in minutes. MS sells to insecurities of incompetent management and facilitates territory marking at the expense of governments and societies around the world for mega bucks. MCP, obvious as it is technically, also lets them plug a library into existing services for a quick upgrade then an atomized upsell directly to the chat interfaces of upper management. Microsoft’s CEO has talked about his agent swarm. Much like RPA this woo appeals strongly to the barely technical.

amitport 10mo ago

His point, I believe, was that it is early in the innovation cycle and they very well be replaced quickely with different solutions/paradigms.

wuliwong 10mo ago
Agreed. I think if this is overly concerning, developing early in the innovation cycle just might not be the ideal place to be. :)
DenisM 10mo ago
Well, some things fade out and some do not. How do we decide which one it is? The reason I ask is that the pace of new things arriving is overwhelming, hence I was tempted to just ignore it. Not because things had signs of transience, but because I was drowning and didn't know where to start. That is not the same thing as actually observing signs of things being too foamy.

observationist 10mo ago

Frontier models will eventually eat all the tedious tailored add-ons as just part of something they can do. Right now models have roughly all of the written knowledge available to mankind, minus some obscure held out private archives and so on. They have excellent skills and general abilities to construct plausible sequences of actions to accomplish work, but we need to hold their hands to really get decent performance across a wide range of activities. Skills and agent frameworks and MCP carve out different domains of that problem, with successful solutions providing training data for future models that might be able to be either generalized, or they'll be able to create a vast mountain of synthetic data following successful patterns, and make the next generation of models incredibly useful for a huge number of tasks, by default. It might also be possible that by studying the problem, identifying where mode collapses and issues with training prevent the right sort of generalization, they might tweak the architecture and be able to solve the deficiency through normal training runs, and thereby discard the need for all the bespoke artisanal agent specifications.

DenisM 10mo ago
I hear you - model development might overcome the shortcomings one day. However the "waiting out" strategy needs a timeout. It might happen that agentic crutches around LLMs will bear fruit much sooner than high-quality LLMs arrive. If you don't have a timeout or a decent exit criteria you may end up waiting indefinitely, or at least until reality of things becomes too painful to ignore. The "ski rental problem" comes to mind here, but maybe there is another "wait it out" exit strategy?
mbesto 10mo ago
> Right now models have roughly all of the written knowledge available to mankind, minus some obscure held out private archives and so on. Sorry for the nit, but this is a gross oversimplification. Most private archives are not obscure but obfuscated and largely are way more valuable training data then the publicly available ones. Want to know how the DOD may technically tracks your phone? Private. Want to know how to make Coca Cola at scale? Private. Want to know what the schematic is for a Google TPU? Private. etc etc.
jonahbenton 10mo ago