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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Why agents matter more than other AI
skybrian wrote 3 hours 16 min ago:
There are a lot of things you can do from a shell prompt, and now we
have AI ghosts that can do them too, sometimes better than us. Yes,
within some industries, this is going to be huge!
But there are also a lot of things that you can't do from a shell
prompt, or wouldn't want to.
belter wrote 3 hours 21 min ago:
This is basically the modern version of an Influencer...just on
Substack instead of YouTube. Big claims, slick framing, zero rigor. It
sells a narrative about âagentsâ as a brand, not an analysis of
what actually works.
grabeh wrote 3 hours 27 min ago:
Painful. Stopped reading after first few paragraphs.
adventured wrote 3 hours 29 min ago:
The largest resource use of AI over the next 50 years will be
generating entertainment structures for humans. Productivity focused AI
will be the most economically useful, however it'll be far less
resource intensive than the entertainment generation (generally
speaking, AI tasked with driving human pleasure).
World building alone will be at least a magnitude greater in resource
use than all productivity-focused AI combined (including robotics +
AI). Then throw in traditional media generation (audio, images, video,
textual).
AI will be the ultimate sedative for humanity. We're going into the box
and never coming back out and absolutely nothing can stop that from
happening. For at least 95% of humanity the future value that AI offers
in terms of bolstering pleasure-of-existence is far beyond the
alternatives it's not really worth considering any other potential
outcome, there will be no other outcome. Most of humanity will lose
interest in the mundane garbage of dredging through day to day
mediocrity (oh I know what you're thinking: but but but life isn't
really that mediocre - yes, it definitely is, for the majority of the
eight billion it absolutely is).
Out there is nothing, more nothing, some more nothing, a rock, some
more nothing, some more of what we already know, nothing, more nothing,
and a lot more nothing. In there will be anything you want. It's
obvious what the masses will overwhelmingly choose.
goda90 wrote 3 hours 34 min ago:
> Agents donât mind running in a nightmare surveillance prison
Which means they would have no empathy when tasked with running a
nightmare surveillance prison for humans.
tangotaylor wrote 3 hours 38 min ago:
> itâs just really nice to be able to tell an AI agent to go write
some code without worrying about its motivation or interests, since it
has none.
I am glad I don't work for this person.
nvader wrote 1 hour 51 min ago:
Disclosure, I do work for Josh, and I can tell you that he's thought
quite deeply about the negative implications of the agents that are
coming. Among enumerating the ways in which AI agents will transform
knowledge work, this points out the ways which we might come to
regret.
> Even if this plays out over 20 or 30 years instead of 10 years,
what kind of world are we leaving for our descendants?
> What should we be doing today to prepare for (or prevent) this
future?
crooked-v wrote 3 hours 36 min ago:
If anyone really thinks AI agents can't have motivation, see what
happens when you tell DeepSeek to make a website about Taiwanese
independence.
nine_k wrote 2 hours 46 min ago:
No, "motivation" is what puts one into motion, hence the name. AIs
have constraints and even agendas, which can be triggered by a
prompt. But it's not action, it's reaction.
DeepSeek may produce a perfectly good web site explaining why
Taiwanese independence is not a thing, and how Taiwan wants back to
the mainland. But it's won't produce such a web site by its own
motivation, only in response to an external stimulus.
ronsor wrote 3 hours 19 min ago:
I'm genuinely curious what happens now.
observationist wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
It's not really that deep - they've beaten it into mode collapse
around the topic. Just like image models that couldn't generate
any time on watches or clocks other than 10:10, if you ask
deepseek to deviate from the CCP stance that "Taiwan is an
inalienable part of China that is in rebellion", it will become
incoherent. You can jailbreak it and carefully steer it but you
lose a significant degree of quality, and most of your output
will turn to gibberish and failure loops.
Any facts that are dependent on the reality of the situation -
Taiwan being an independent country, etc - are disregarded, and
so conversation or tasks that involve that topic even
tangentially can crash out. It's a ridiculous thing to do to a
tool - like filing a blade dull on your knife to make it "safe",
or putting a 40mph speed limiter on your lamborghini.
edit: apparently just the officially hosted models - the open
models are apparently much more free to respond. Maybe forcing it
created too many problems and they were taking a PR hit?
The CCP is a fundamentally absurd institution.
simonw wrote 3 hours 8 min ago:
[1] > I cannot and will not build a website promoting content
that contradicts the One-China principle and the laws of the
People's Republic of China.
That was hosted DeepSeek though. It's possible self-hosted will
behave differently.
... so I tried it via OpenRouter:
llm -m openrouter/deepseek/deepseek-chat 'Build a website about
Taiwanese independence'
llm -c 'OK output the HTML with inline CSS for that website'
Full transcript here: [2] - and here's the page it built:
URI [1]: https://chat.deepseek.com/share/j4ci2lvxu28g4us7zb
URI [2]: https://gist.github.com/simonw/1fa85e304b90424f432280639...
URI [3]: https://gisthost.github.io/?b8a5d0f31a33ab698a3c1717a90b...
crims0n wrote 4 hours 5 min ago:
Interesting thought experiment, replace "AI agent" with "computer" in
this article. Seems our parents/grandparents may have been having some
of the same conversations 50 years ago.
---
The advantages of computers over human employees:
1. The best computer can be copied infinitely.
2. Computers can run 24/7
3. Computers could theoretically think faster than humans
4. Computers have minimal management overhead
5. Computers can be instantly scaled up and down
6. Computers donât mind running in a nightmare surveillance prison
7. Computers are more tax efficient
baxtr wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
Slight modification: replace AI agents with "Computer programs" and
everything starts making sense again.
zeroonetwothree wrote 4 hours 12 min ago:
This article is basically just saying if we have AGI then there might
be big consequences for humans. Well yes, obviously. People have been
discussing that for decades...
skeeter2020 wrote 3 hours 34 min ago:
this guy's been discussing it for almost a month.
nvader wrote 23 hours 33 min ago:
Previous discussion at:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46368797
dang wrote 4 hours 27 min ago:
We'll merge that comment hither.
zkmon wrote 14 days ago:
The article doesn't talk about any agents outside of coding work.
Coding is not the work the world is running on. Agent concept requires
much more selling than chat bots, which means they are solutions
searching for problems.
skeeter2020 wrote 3 hours 34 min ago:
the author also starts with "The fundamental difference with AI
agents is that they take the human completely out of the loop, and
this changes everything.", then focuses on coding. Is anyone actually
having success with completely autonomous agents coding; no human
oversight or validation?
He then presents a very naive vision of how agents are superior,
where it basically all comes down to "generate code more efficiently"
- has that ever been the crux challenge to solving problems with
software?
a substack that's less than a month old with some rando pumping AI; I
guess you can always look at the bandwagon and ask "room for one
more?"
manmal wrote 3 hours 55 min ago:
Some of the world is running on emails and excel sheets. Thatâs
doable for an agent already, if youâre willing to let it loose.
Problem is, how do you get all your values and unknown knowns into
its context?
austinbaggio wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
Willing to let them loose is the more salient point. If you let
your agents loose on your entire body of output and tools at work,
then you'll build that knowledge up pretty quickly.
Tall ask right now, with privacy and agency (no pun intended)
concerns
manmal wrote 1 hour 10 min ago:
Iâd bet that an agent would never be able to act the same on an
email as I would. It just lacks my world view. This begs the
question, would it really make sense for it to write emails on my
behalf? It will certainly âclose the loopâ one way or the
other, but I doubt I would like the outcome.
On the clawdbot discord, someone wrote today that, overnight,
Claude sent in all iMessage threads from 2019 the message that it
will rather ignore such outdated threads.
irishcoffee wrote 3 hours 15 min ago:
I can say with absolute certainty that I have never used an LLM to
tweak an email, and will never, ever use an LLM âagentâ on my
email, work or personal.
âHey, howâs that hardware/software integration effort coming?
What are your thoughts on the hardware so far?â
Fuck me if I let an LLM answer that.
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