Nathan Lambert: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think agents are promising? We have to talk about this. This is the excitement of the year that agents are going to rev.. This is the generic hype term that a lot of business folks are using. AI agents are going to revolutionize everything. Okay. So mostly the term agent is obviously overblown. We’ve talked a lot about reinforcement learning as a way to train for verifiable outcomes. Agents should mean something that is open-ended and is solving a task independently on its own and able to adapt to uncertainty. There’s a lot of the term agent applied to things like Apple Intelligence, which we still don’t have after the last WWDC, which is orchestrating between apps and that type of tool use thing is something that language models can do really well. Apple Intelligence I suspect will come eventually. It’s a closed domain. It’s your messages app integrating with your photos with AI in the background. That will work. That has been described as an agent by a lot of software companies to get into the narrative. The question is what ways can we get language models to generalize to new domains and solve their own problems in real time. Maybe some tiny amount of training when they’re doing this with fine-tuning themselves or in context learning, which is the idea of storing information in a prompt. And you can use learning algorithms to update that and whether or not you believe that that is going to actually generalize to things like me saying, “Book my trip to go to Austin in two days. I have XYZ constraints,” and actually trusting it. I think there’s an HCI problem coming back for information. Well, what’s your prediction there? Because my gut says we’re very far away from that.…

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