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- Hacker News
- Computers are generally useful because we have come to trust the output. How many people would use a spreadsheet that posted a disclaimer that stated (some of the calculations might be wrong, don't use the output without first checking each total manually!)?by didgetmaster
- I don't trust corporations with my data.
So a serious AI product would have to have my data (contexts, conversations) in a "secure enclave". If backed up, it needs to be encrypted.
I want a context and history that, over time, essentially knows everything about me.
It's one of the things that has been rather fascinating about Claude & Co.— he'll come back with things like, "Since you are already familiar with the ESP32…" or, "You already have a heat press from your work with dye sublimation, that will work nicely to set the inks when you screen print t-shirts…"
(Shades of "Diamond Age"… I imagine it helping me recall things when I am in my old age, notice patterns in my life I might want to break free from, etc.)
by JKCalhoun - Whatever it is, it won't be sold as an AI product. Coding and writing tools are probably the easiest to predict. An AI hiding in IntelliSense popping up and warning you that your lacking the proper exception handling, that you're leaking memory and offers to add the missing code, is already doable. Just don't label it as AI, it's realtime security screening for your code.
Or writing an article in Word or Google Docs, having a built in fact-checker akin to the spell/grammar checker is clearly useful. Pink squiggly line, your facts are incorrect, click to fix. Hell built that thing into Facebook or X. Again, it's not completely out of the question to add that right now and have it add the correct sources.
LLMs are clearly useful, but they aren't really a product, they are an engine you can put into other things.
by mrweasel - Really refreshing read. This feels glaring in so many of these, and the methods to get things to "behave" of just slapping additional markdown prompts at various levels is both silly and ineffective.by sligbad
- Good read. I think there are plenty of people who are reaching this point of wanting to shake off the novelty aspects of the agent coding experience and make it all a bit more grown-up.
The stuff about context control has always been my itch. The scrollback that most agents show is not what the model is reading. Things get summarised, dropped, cached or never included at all, and the transcript carries on showing the original as though it were still there.
It irked me enough to do my own agent: https://juggler.studio, explicitly to offer hands-on with the real context. The UX is all about making it easy to navigate and visualise every bit of the context, and even let you edit it. While it feels like other harnesses are actively trying to hide it from us..
by julesrms - The thing about the "AI can make mistakes, so double-check responses" thing is the essence of our future hellhole — deterministic software replaced with AI and legal disclaimers.
The reason the firms do not want to invest in making fact-checking a first-class feature is that the appearance of being right is what people want from AI.
by dofm - I'm very thankful for the section on reproducibility. I argue this is the single biggest hangup for the entire space. You CAN have temperature and determinism. I've been waiting for six years for a major provider to offer it, there is demand, but I've slowly come to realize the current game theory does not support it.
For providers, not supporting deterministic eval means:
- users use more tokens = more money
- providers can generate more tokens per compute = more money
- providers have cheaper hardware options (GPUs) = more money
- providers models are harder to extract/distill = more money
- providers are harder to hold liable for outputs = more money
- providers can secretly use other models = more money
- providers are harder to compare against others = more money
- providers can cherry pick performance results = more money
by ramity - I have been dwelling on the "No First-Person Output" problem.
I fully agree with the author's point that it's an incoherent interface for a tool. But more than that, it's a constant irritating reminder to me that these LLMs aren't actually thinking or synthesizing new ideas. The LLM is fundamentally not a person, and does not have a human's context, so representing itself with human pronouns and speech patterns is fundamentally contradictory and inaccurate. Author gets into that with the apologies, but once you start noticing it, it's everywhere.
If these programs were actually capable of thinking, and committed to veractiy, they would represent themselves in a new way, and it would be insightful and interesting. We the users wouldn't have comfortable and misleading language masking the 'alien intelligence' and it would be a weird adjustment, but we would be adjusting instead of pretending.
by awakeasleep