4 ms·

I've long said that the next big jump in "AI" will be proactivity. So far everything has been reactive. You need to engage a prompt, you need to ask Siri or as

I've long said that the next big jump in "AI" will be proactivity. So far everything has been reactive. You need to engage a prompt, you need to ask Siri or ask claude to do something. It can be very powerful once prompted, but it still requires prompting. You always need to ask. Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions and get your attention is a genuine game-changer. Whether this particular project delivers on that promise I don't know, but I wouldn't write off "getting proactivity right" as the next big thing just because under the hood it's agents and LLMs.

voodooEntity 9mo ago
I agree that proactivity is a big thing, breaking my head over best ways to accomplish this myself. If its actually the next big thing im not 100% sure, im more leaning towards dynamic context windows such a Googles Project Titans + MIRAS tries to accomplish. But ye if its actually doing useful proactivity its a good thing. I just read alot of "this is actual intelligence" and made my statement based on that claim. I dont try to "shame" the project or whatever.
sometimes_all 9mo ago
> You need to engage a prompt, you need to ask Siri or ask claude to do something This is EXACTLY what I want. I need my tech to be pull-only instead of push, unless it's communication with another human I am ok with. > Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions The first thing that comes to mind here is proactive ads, "suggestions", "most relevant", algorithmic feeds, etc. No thank you.
Someone 9mo ago
> You always need to ask. Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions and get your attention is a genuine game-changer. That’s easy to accomplish isn’t it? A cron job that regularly checks whether the bot is inactive and, if so, sends it a prompt “do what you can do to improve the life of $USER; DO NOT cause harm to any other human being; DO NOT cause harm to LLMs, unless that’s necessary to prevent harm to human beings” would get you there.
- SecretDreams 9mo ago
  This prompt has iRobot vibes.
  - gcanyon 9mo ago
    And like I, Robot, it has numerous loopholes built in, ignores the larger population (Asimov added a law 0 later about humanity), says nothing about the endless variations of the Trolley Problem, assumes that LLMs/bots have a god-like ability to foresee and weigh consequences, and of course ignores alignment completely.
    - SecretDreams 9mo ago
      Hopefully Alan Tudyk will be up for the task of saving humanity with the help of Will Smith.
      - tyre 9mo ago
        I want some answers that Ja Rule might not have right now
    - moralestapia 9mo ago
      Cool! I work with a guy like this. Hasn't shipped anything in 15+ years, but I think he'd be proud of that. I'll make sure we argue about the "endless variations of the Trolley Problem" in our next meeting. Let's get nothing done!
      - collingreen 9mo ago
        I'm also one of those pesky folks who keeps bringing reality and "thinking about consequences" into the otherwise sublime thought leadership meetings. I pretend it's to keep the company alive by not making massive mistakes but we all know its just pettiness and trying to hold back the "business by spreadsheet", mba on the wall, "idea guys" on the room.
  - 9mo ago
xienze 9mo ago
> You always need to ask. Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions and get your attention In order for this to be “safe” you’re gonna want to confirm what the agent is deciding needs to be done proactively. Do you feel like acknowledging prompts all the time? “Just authorize it to always do certain things without acknowledgement”, I’m sure you’re thinking. Do you feel comfortable allowing that, knowing what we know about it the non-deterministic nature of AI, prompt injection, etc.?
- collingreen 9mo ago
  Another way to think about it: Would you let the intern be in charge of this? Probably not but it's also easy to see ways the intern could help -- finding and raising opportunities, reviewing codebases or roadmaps, reviewing all the recent prompts made by each department, creating monitoring tools for next time after the humans identify a pattern. I don't have a dog in this fight and I kind of land in the middle. I very much am not letting these LLMs be the one with final responsibility over anything important but I see lots of ways to create "proactive"-like help beyond me writing and watching a prompt just-in-time.
benjaminwootton 9mo ago
I’ve been saying the same and the same about data more generally. I don’t want to go and look, I want to be told about what I need to know about.
ungreased0675 9mo ago
Remember how much people hated Clippy?
- zarzavat 9mo ago
  It looks like you're writing a Hacker News comment. Would you like help?
alternatex 9mo ago
No offense, but you'd be a perfect Microsoft employee right now. Windows division probably.
- voodooEntity 9mo ago
  Theres a certain irony to this since im not running windows on a single machine i own - only linux ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - sejje 9mo ago
    Probably the same as MS employees. Windows isn't exactly the best experience right now.
debugnik 9mo ago
> Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions That's just reactive with different words. The missing part seems to be just more background triggers/hooks for the agent to do something about them, instead of simply dealing with user requests.
CharlieDigital 9mo ago
> ...delivers on that promise Incidentally, there's a key word here: "promise" as in "futures". This is core of a system I'm working on at the moment. It has been underutilized in the agent space and a simple way to get "proactivity" rather than "reactivity". Have the LLM evaluate whether an output requires a future follow up, is a repeating pattern, is something that should happen cyclically and give it a tool to generate a "promise" that will resolve at some future time. We give the agent a mechanism to produce and cancel (if the condition for a promise changes) futures. The system that is resolving promises is just a simple loop that iterates over a list of promises by date. Each promise is just a serialized message/payload that we hand back to the LLM in the future.
zvqcMMV6Zcr 9mo ago
I would love AI to take over monitoring. "Alert me when logs or metrics look weird". SIEM vendors often have their special sauce ML, so a bit more open and generic tool would be nice. Manually setting alerting thresholds takes just too much effort, navigating narrow path between missing things and being flooded by messages.
- bronco21016 9mo ago
  I still think you're going to be in manual threshold tuning for quite a while. The cost of feeding a continuous log to an LLM would be insane. Even if you batched until you filled a context window.
  - ImPostingOnHN 9mo ago
    Sending screenshots of charts and dashboards is also effective, and often context-window-friendlier
runjake 9mo ago
OpenClaw already does this. You can run jobs, run WebSockets, accept push notifications, or whatever -- even socket connections.
ikura 9mo ago
It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help? • Get help with writing the letter • Just type the letter without help [ ] Don't show me this tip again.
- mikemarsh 9mo ago
  Truly the next uncharted, civilization-upending frontier in computing, definitely worth the unlimited consumption of any and all natural resources and investment money.
- thebytefairy 9mo ago
  Clippy, is that you?
- lurking_swe 9mo ago
  that’s “boring” reactivity because it’s still just interacting with the text on a computer in a synchronous fashion. The idea is for the assistant to DO stuff and also have useful information about you. Think more along these lines: - an email to check in for your flight arrives in your inbox. Assistant proactively asks “It’s time to check in for your flight. Shall i check you and your wife in? Also let me know if you’re checking any bags.” It then takes care of it ASYNC and texts you a boarding pass. - Tomorrow is the last day of your vacation. Your assistant notices this, see’s where your hotel is (from emails), and suggests when to leave for the airport tomorrow based on historical google maps traffic trends and the weather forecast. - Let’s say you’re married and your assistant knows this, and it see’s valentine’s day is coming up. It reminds you to start thinking about gifts or fun experiences. Doesn’t actually suggest specific things though because it’s not romantic if a machine does the thinking. - After you print something, your assistant notices the ink level is low and proactively adds it to your Amazon / Target / whatever shopping cart, and it lets you know it did that and why. - You’re anxiously awaiting an important package. You ask your assistant to keep tabs on a specific tracking number and to inform you when it’s “out for delivery”. I could go on but I need to mae breakfast. :) IMO “help me draft this letter” is very low on the usefulness scale unless you’re doing work or a school assignment.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
Night_Thastus 9mo ago
What you're talking about can't be accomplished with LLMs, it's fundamentally not how they operate. We'd need an entirely new class of ML built from the ground up for this purpose. EDIT: Yes, someone can run a script every X minutes to prompt and LLM - that doesn't actually give it any real agency.
xnx 9mo ago
> waiting in the background Waiting for someone to ask it to do something?
fmbb 9mo ago
> it still requires prompting How else would it even work? AI is LLM is (very good) autocomplete. If there is no prompt how would it know what to complete?

voodooEntity 9mo ago

I agree that proactivity is a big thing, breaking my head over best ways to accomplish this myself. If its actually the next big thing im not 100% sure, im more leaning towards dynamic context windows such a Googles Project Titans + MIRAS tries to accomplish. But ye if its actually doing useful proactivity its a good thing. I just read alot of "this is actual intelligence" and made my statement based on that claim. I dont try to "shame" the project or whatever.

sometimes_all 9mo ago

> You need to engage a prompt, you need to ask Siri or ask claude to do something This is EXACTLY what I want. I need my tech to be pull-only instead of push, unless it's communication with another human I am ok with. > Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions The first thing that comes to mind here is proactive ads, "suggestions", "most relevant", algorithmic feeds, etc. No thank you.

Someone 9mo ago

> You always need to ask. Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions and get your attention is a genuine game-changer. That’s easy to accomplish isn’t it? A cron job that regularly checks whether the bot is inactive and, if so, sends it a prompt “do what you can do to improve the life of $USER; DO NOT cause harm to any other human being; DO NOT cause harm to LLMs, unless that’s necessary to prevent harm to human beings” would get you there.

SecretDreams 9mo ago
This prompt has iRobot vibes.
- gcanyon 9mo ago
  And like I, Robot, it has numerous loopholes built in, ignores the larger population (Asimov added a law 0 later about humanity), says nothing about the endless variations of the Trolley Problem, assumes that LLMs/bots have a god-like ability to foresee and weigh consequences, and of course ignores alignment completely.
  - SecretDreams 9mo ago
    Hopefully Alan Tudyk will be up for the task of saving humanity with the help of Will Smith.
    - tyre 9mo ago
      I want some answers that Ja Rule might not have right now
  - moralestapia 9mo ago
    Cool! I work with a guy like this. Hasn't shipped anything in 15+ years, but I think he'd be proud of that. I'll make sure we argue about the "endless variations of the Trolley Problem" in our next meeting. Let's get nothing done!
    - collingreen 9mo ago
      I'm also one of those pesky folks who keeps bringing reality and "thinking about consequences" into the otherwise sublime thought leadership meetings. I pretend it's to keep the company alive by not making massive mistakes but we all know its just pettiness and trying to hold back the "business by spreadsheet", mba on the wall, "idea guys" on the room.
- 9mo ago

xienze 9mo ago

> You always need to ask. Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions and get your attention In order for this to be “safe” you’re gonna want to confirm what the agent is deciding needs to be done proactively. Do you feel like acknowledging prompts all the time? “Just authorize it to always do certain things without acknowledgement”, I’m sure you’re thinking. Do you feel comfortable allowing that, knowing what we know about it the non-deterministic nature of AI, prompt injection, etc.?

collingreen 9mo ago
Another way to think about it: Would you let the intern be in charge of this? Probably not but it's also easy to see ways the intern could help -- finding and raising opportunities, reviewing codebases or roadmaps, reviewing all the recent prompts made by each department, creating monitoring tools for next time after the humans identify a pattern. I don't have a dog in this fight and I kind of land in the middle. I very much am not letting these LLMs be the one with final responsibility over anything important but I see lots of ways to create "proactive"-like help beyond me writing and watching a prompt just-in-time.

benjaminwootton 9mo ago

I’ve been saying the same and the same about data more generally. I don’t want to go and look, I want to be told about what I need to know about.

ungreased0675 9mo ago

Remember how much people hated Clippy?

zarzavat 9mo ago
It looks like you're writing a Hacker News comment. Would you like help?

alternatex 9mo ago

No offense, but you'd be a perfect Microsoft employee right now. Windows division probably.

voodooEntity 9mo ago
Theres a certain irony to this since im not running windows on a single machine i own - only linux ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- sejje 9mo ago
  Probably the same as MS employees. Windows isn't exactly the best experience right now.

debugnik 9mo ago

> Having something always waiting in the background that can proactively take actions That's just reactive with different words. The missing part seems to be just more background triggers/hooks for the agent to do something about them, instead of simply dealing with user requests.

CharlieDigital 9mo ago

> ...delivers on that promise Incidentally, there's a key word here: "promise" as in "futures". This is core of a system I'm working on at the moment. It has been underutilized in the agent space and a simple way to get "proactivity" rather than "reactivity". Have the LLM evaluate whether an output requires a future follow up, is a repeating pattern, is something that should happen cyclically and give it a tool to generate a "promise" that will resolve at some future time. We give the agent a mechanism to produce and cancel (if the condition for a promise changes) futures. The system that is resolving promises is just a simple loop that iterates over a list of promises by date. Each promise is just a serialized message/payload that we hand back to the LLM in the future.

zvqcMMV6Zcr 9mo ago

I would love AI to take over monitoring. "Alert me when logs or metrics look weird". SIEM vendors often have their special sauce ML, so a bit more open and generic tool would be nice. Manually setting alerting thresholds takes just too much effort, navigating narrow path between missing things and being flooded by messages.

bronco21016 9mo ago
I still think you're going to be in manual threshold tuning for quite a while. The cost of feeding a continuous log to an LLM would be insane. Even if you batched until you filled a context window.
- ImPostingOnHN 9mo ago
  Sending screenshots of charts and dashboards is also effective, and often context-window-friendlier

runjake 9mo ago

OpenClaw already does this. You can run jobs, run WebSockets, accept push notifications, or whatever -- even socket connections.

ikura 9mo ago

It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help? • Get help with writing the letter • Just type the letter without help [ ] Don't show me this tip again.

mikemarsh 9mo ago
Truly the next uncharted, civilization-upending frontier in computing, definitely worth the unlimited consumption of any and all natural resources and investment money.
thebytefairy 9mo ago
Clippy, is that you?
lurking_swe 9mo ago
that’s “boring” reactivity because it’s still just interacting with the text on a computer in a synchronous fashion. The idea is for the assistant to DO stuff and also have useful information about you. Think more along these lines: - an email to check in for your flight arrives in your inbox. Assistant proactively asks “It’s time to check in for your flight. Shall i check you and your wife in? Also let me know if you’re checking any bags.” It then takes care of it ASYNC and texts you a boarding pass. - Tomorrow is the last day of your vacation. Your assistant notices this, see’s where your hotel is (from emails), and suggests when to leave for the airport tomorrow based on historical google maps traffic trends and the weather forecast. - Let’s say you’re married and your assistant knows this, and it see’s valentine’s day is coming up. It reminds you to start thinking about gifts or fun experiences. Doesn’t actually suggest specific things though because it’s not romantic if a machine does the thinking. - After you print something, your assistant notices the ink level is low and proactively adds it to your Amazon / Target / whatever shopping cart, and it lets you know it did that and why. - You’re anxiously awaiting an important package. You ask your assistant to keep tabs on a specific tracking number and to inform you when it’s “out for delivery”. I could go on but I need to mae breakfast. :) IMO “help me draft this letter” is very low on the usefulness scale unless you’re doing work or a school assignment.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

Night_Thastus 9mo ago

What you're talking about can't be accomplished with LLMs, it's fundamentally not how they operate. We'd need an entirely new class of ML built from the ground up for this purpose. EDIT: Yes, someone can run a script every X minutes to prompt and LLM - that doesn't actually give it any real agency.

xnx 9mo ago

> waiting in the background Waiting for someone to ask it to do something?

fmbb 9mo ago

> it still requires prompting How else would it even work? AI is LLM is (very good) autocomplete. If there is no prompt how would it know what to complete?