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Re:LLM Powered Autonomous Agents by lannisterstark on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @05:14AM (#36490629)
"not a single word about the safety implications of such a system"

Oh please. Not everything has to be regulated-to-hells before a use case is even found on this. Autonomous agents have existed for decades.

If it can automate agents like huginn[0] with natural language, I'd be very happy. Autonomous agents doesn't mean it's going to take over the world autonomously. Let's lower the fearmongering a bit.

[0]: https://github.com/huginn/huginn

Re:LLM Powered Autonomous Agents by p-e-w on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @05:27AM (#36490720)
Huginn is a bunch of mechanical rules explicitly created by the user and easily understandable by them. It's "autonomous" in the sense of a grandfather clock.

The rules governing LLMs, while in principle mechanical, cannot be accurately controlled or even understood by humans. They are "autonomous" in the sense of animals, which may be trained to some degree, but may still surprise or even become a danger to their "owners", no matter how much effort is spent trying to control them.

An LLM may do what you ask it to, using the methods you expect it to use. Or it may do what you ask it to, using methods you weren't expecting at all. Or it may not do what you have asked at all. This isn't comparable to a rule-based system like Huginn.

Re:LLM Powered Autonomous Agents by lannisterstark on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @05:31AM (#36490751)
Huginn was just an example. With the similar definition to yours, are these "LLM autonomous agents" really actually "autonomous?"

>They are "autonomous" in the sense of animals

That's a really weird equivalency, which frankly, I'm not even sure is true.

Re:LLM Powered Autonomous Agents by TeMPOraL on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @06:40AM (#36491131)
> That's a really weird equivalency, which frankly, I'm not even sure is true.

A mind that's a black box to us, that we can predict to a degree based only on observing it at work, that's also a general-purpose intelligence we're trying to employ for limited set of tasks. It's not a bad analogy. Like animals, LLMs too have the capacity to "think outside the box", where the box is what you'd consider the scope of the task.