alt Hacker NewsThe gap between "useful chatbot" and "useful agent" is way bigger than people realize. A chatbot can be wrong 10% of the time and still help you. An agent that's wrong 10% of the time is sending bad emails and making wrong API calls with no one checking.
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csomar • today at 6:23 PM
The problem is that with text/code, judgement is hard. Here is what it looks like for physical activity: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lK7TjujKQLw It's hard to see how that it's not useful at best and could be a disaster for any unsupervised use.
mikebs1 • today at 6:49 PM
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blcknight • today at 6:14 PM
The gulf is bridgeable. The problem is that a lot of people are building agents without strong enough judgment layers around them. Work that can be verified with reasonable accuracy are the sweet spot right now.
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I see this as the gap between an general-purpose agent and a coding agent. A coding agent can imagine something to be true, test it, discover that it's wrong, and recover.
But if you go beyond what can be tested easily, asking the agent to do real work rather than writing a patch, imagining things to be true is a problem.