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woriklast Sunday at 12:15 AM0 repliesview on HN

I am against agents. (I will happy to be proved wrong, I want agents, especially agents that could drive my car, but that is another disappointment....)

There is a paradox in the LLM version of AI, I believe.

Firstly it is very significant. I call this a "steam engine" moment. Nothing will ever be the same. Talking in natural language to a computer, and having it answer in natural language is astounding

But! The "killer app" in my experience is the chat interface. So much is possible from there that is so powerful. (For people working with video and audio there are similar interfaces that I am less familiar with). Hallucinations are part of the "magic".

It is not possible to capture the value that LLMs add. The immense valuations of outfits like OpenAI are going to be very hard to justify - the technology will more than add the value, but there is no way to capture it to an organisation.

This "trifecta" is one reason. What use is an agent if it has no access or agency over my personal data? What use is autonomous driving if it could never go wrong and crash the car? It would not drive most of the places I need it to.

There is another more basic reason: The LLMs are unreliable. Carefully craft a prompt on Tuesday, and get a result. Resubmit the exact same prompt on Thursday and there is a different result. It is extortionately difficult to do much useful with that, for it means that every response needs to be evaluated. Each interaction with an LLM is a debate. That is not useful for building an agent. (Or an autonomous vehicle)

There will be niches where value can be extracted (interactions with robots are promising, web search has been revolutionised - made useful again) but trillions of dollars are being invested, in concentrated pools. The returns and benefits are going to be disbursed widely, and there is no reason they will accrue to the originators. (Nvidea tho, what a windfall!)

In the near future (a decade or so) this is going to cause an enormous economic dislocation and rearrangement. So much money poured into abstract mathematical calculations - good grief!