Sholto Douglas: belief

Transcript context

…I think last year, you said that the thing that was holding them back was the extra nines of reliability. I don't know if that's the way you would still describe the way in which these software agents aren't able to do a full day of work, but are able to help you out with a couple minutes. Is it the extra nines that's really stopping you or is it something else? I think my description there was, in retrospect, probably not what's limiting them. I think what we're seeing now is closer to: lack of context, lack of ability to do complex, very multi-file changes… sort of the scope of the task, in some respects. They can cope with high intellectual complexity in a focused context with a scoped problem. When something's a bit more amorphous or requires a lot of discovery and iteration with the environment, with this kind of stuff they struggle more. Maybe the way I would define the thing that's holding them back like this. If you can give it a good feedback loop for the thing that you want it to do, then it's pretty good at it. If you can't, then they struggle a bit. For the audience, can you say more about what you mean by this feedback loop if they're not aware of what's happening with RL and so forth?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.