Why Normal People Aren’t Using AI Agents

What we want is software that behaves predictably. Since LLMs don’t do that, we don’t want them or their “agents.”

For fuck’s sake.

I actually really like the technology that has been collectively lumped together as “AI”. I think it’s fairly useful now, and suspect we’re at the beginning of the curve for this technology, and it will only continue to improve, even as it becomes more efficient. I understand this is a wildly unpopular stance in these parts, judging by the avalanche of downvotes I get for having this opinion.

What I don’t like is feeding tons of information about myself to a giant tech company. I run a local LLM on my phone and another on my (fairly decent) computer, and sometimes I use duckduckgo’s front end, which anonymizes prompts.

As for agents, it’s pretty much as you say. I just am not ready to have an LLM take action without my direct supervision, because I’m confident that between flaws in the LLM and flaws in how I give it direction, something will go sideways.

Same, it’s a tool everyone will use one day, it’s just bad today.

Remember the first mobile phones? Sucked dirt, and we’re stupidly expensive. Then they got cheaper and better, today they almost give them away and the charge lasts a week and you can phone almost anywhere on the planet.

“AI” will be the same, in some years I guess.

If it does get better, it will be with technology other than LLMs, because LLMs don’t get cheaper per unit of usage as usage scales.

I suspect that we won’t have actually useful AI of some sort until LLMs get out of the way. They’re sucking all the oxygen out of the room right now.

I bet you can make a cheap “AI” chip for using the trained model, it seems the training is the ruinous thing today.

Remember when they predicted heavier than air flight to be centuries in the future just the week before the wright brothers flew? Me neither I wasn’t born then, but it’s an interesting example IMO.