alt Hacker News> It's simultaneously the obvious next step
As it has been over three years ago, when that was originally published.
I'm continuously surprised both by how fast the models themselves evolve, and how slow their use patterns are. We're still barely playing with the patterns that were obvious and thoroughly discussed back before GPT-4 was a thing.
Right now, the whole industry is obsessed with "agents", aka. giving LLMs function calls and limited control over the loop they're running under. How many years before the industry will get to the point of giving LLMs proper control over the top-level loop and managing the context, plus an ability to "shell out" to "subagents" as a matter of course?
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We haven't hit the RSI threshold yet and so evolution is so slow that it's usually terminated as not-useful or it solves a concrete problem and is terminated by itself or a human. Earlier model+frameworks merely petered out almost immediately. I'm guessing it's roughly correlated with the progress on METR.
> How many years before the industry will get to the point
When/if the underlying model gets good enough to support that pattern. As an extreme example, you aren't ever going to make even a basic agent with GPT-3 as the base model, the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
Models have gotten way better and I'm now convinced (new data -> new opinion) that they are a major win for coding, but they still need a lot, a lot of handholding, left to their own devices they just make a mess.
The underlying capabilities of the model are the entire ballgame, the "use patterns" aren't exactly rocket science.