One of the inventors of Siri, the original AI agent, wants you to “handle with care” when it comes to artificial intelligence. But are we becoming too cautious around AI in Europe and risking our future?
Agentic AI is just a buzzword for letting AI do things without human supervision. It’s absolutely a recipe for disaster. You should never let AI do anything you can’t easily undo as it’s guaranteed to screw it up at least part of the time. When all it’s screwing up is telling you that glue would make an excellent topping for pizza that’s one thing, but when it’s emailing your boss that he’s a piece of crap that’s an entirely different scenario.
Agentic AI is just a buzzword for letting AI do things without human supervision
No, it isn’t.
As per IBM https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/agentic-ai
Agentic AI is an artificial intelligence system that can accomplish a specific goal with limited supervision. It consists of AI agents—machine learning models that mimic human decision-making to solve problems in real time. In a multiagent system, each agent performs a specific subtask required to reach the goal and their efforts are coordinated through AI orchestration.
The key part being the last sentence.
Its the idea of moving away from a monolithic (for simplicity’s sake) LLM into one where each “AI” serves a specific purpose. So imagine a case where you have one “AI” to parse your input text and two or three other “AI” to run different models based upon what use case your request falls into. The result is MUCH smaller models (that can often be colocated on the same physical GPU or even CPU) that are specialized rather than an Everything model that can search the internet, fail at doing math, and tell you you look super sexy in that minecraft hat.
And… anyone who has ever done any software development (web or otherwise) can tell you: That is just (micro)services. Especially when so many of the “agents” aren’t actually LLMs and are just bare metal code or databases or what have you. Just like how any Senior engineer worth their salt can point out that isn’t fundamentally different than calling a package/library instead of rolling your own solution for every component.
The idea of supervision remains the same. Some orgs care about it. Others don’t. Just like some orgs care about making maintainable code and others don’t. And one of the bigger buzz words these days is “human in the loop” to specifically provide supervision/training data.
But yes, it is very much a buzzword.
Hat on top of a hat technology. The underlying problems with LLMs remain unchanged, and “agentic AI” is basically a marketing term to make people think those problems are solved. I realize you probably know this, I’m just kvetching.
Not really. By breaking down the problem you can adjust the models to the task. There is a lot of work going into this stuff and there are ways to turn down the randomness to get more consistent outputs for simple tasks.
there are ways to turn down the randomness to get more consistent outputs for simple tasks.
Yes: shell scripting, which we have had for half a century.
But the term “Agentic AI” sells better than “shell scripting with extra steps and shittier results.”
turn down the randomness to get more consistent outputs for simple tasks.
This is a tricky one… if you can define good success/failure criteria, then the randomness coupled with an accurate measure of success, is how “AI” like Alpha Go learns to win games, really really well.
In using AI to build computer programs and systems, if you have good tests for what “success” looks like, you’d rather have a fair amount of randomness in the algorithms trying to make things work because when they don’t and they fail, they end up stuck, out of ideas.
Yes. You’ve shared the use case where Agentic AI makes sense.
Basically, if I need more randomness than a shell script can supply, it makes sense to mix a learning model in.
The use case I think we will continue to see significant use in is (low quality) advertising in contexts where only the product matters (not the brand). The cost for failure is lower, and the reward for creativity is higher.
Even in that nearly ideal use case, many companies leveraging it are going to discover that their brand image cannot afford to be associated with sociopathic AI slop. So I think even that trend is about to peak and reduce.
I started working with AI in earnest a few weeks ago, I find myself constantly making the distinction between “deterministic” processes and AI driven things. What I’m mostly focused on is using AI to develop reliable deterministic processes (shell scripts, and more complex things) - because while it’s really super cool that I can ask an AI agent to “do a thing” and it just does what I want without being told all the details, it’s really super un-cool that the tenth time I ask it to do a very similar, even identical, thing it gets it wrong - sometimes horribly wrong: archive these files, oops I accidentally irretrievably deleted them.
To play devils advocate, agentic things wouldn’t necessarily include software development. “Hey siri create me an e-commerce site” isn’t likely to happen for a long while, because like you said it’s a complex thing that doesn’t have clear success measures. But “hey siri get me a restaurant reservation at place, hire a taxi for me to get there, and let Brad know the details” can be broken down into a number of different “simple” things that have simple to define measures of success. Did a reservation get booked? Did we tell Brad the details? etc.
“Hey siri create me an e-commerce site”
You should try it. If your e-commerce site is simple with a lot of similar examples out in the wild to point at, I believe the latest agents actually can do such a thing. You’ll just have to give them access to your financial account details so the site can process payments to you, you understand? While that’s a joke, it’s also true. You need to be able to check what the AI has done to be sure it’s doing what you want.
“Hey siri create me an e-commerce site” isn’t likely to happen for a long while, because like you said it’s a complex thing that doesn’t have clear success measures.
One would hope so, but of course Someone is trying it, and it has gone as poorly as you might imagine.
Yes, but my point is that it’s a completely separate problem. Think of agentics like powershell applets. They generally only do one thing, but you can chain them together to achieve a larger goal.
You’re complaining about single applet, or a specific type of applet, while the topic is applets in general.
You’re both right imo. LLMs and every subsequent improvement are fundamentally ruined by marketing heads like oh so many things in the history of computing, so even if agentic AI is actually an improvement, it doesn’t matter because everyone is using it to do stupid fucking things.
Yeah like stringing 5 chatgpt’s together saying “you are scientist you are product lead engineer etc” is dumb but stringing together chatgpt into a coded tool into a vision model into a specific small time LLM is an interesting new way to build workflows for complex and dynamic tasks.
The way I see Agentic AI is it’s just a dumber customer service agent that is ready and willing to be scammed and phished. Not my fault if these companies are too stupid to put in proper guardrails.
I agree with you. I don’t mind local AI searching the web for topics I’m interested in and providing me with news and interesting tidbits. I’m not OK with AI having any kind of permission to run executable code.
I think there’s a difference between letting it do somethings and letting it finish something.
It shouldn’t be the one clicking the send button because everything needs to be verified, but it’s fine to have it surf the internet or turn a request into a set number of tasks with a to-do list.
Writing an email with it is a no-go for me though, I avoid it the moment it comes to actually communicating with someone. Using AI strikes me as patronizing.
It’s Argo Workflows
Mechanical key based door lock cylinders are “Agentic AI” - they decide whether or not to allow the tumbler to turn based on the key (code) inserted. They’re out there, in their billions around the world, deciding whether or not to allow people access through doorways WITHOUT HUMAN SUPERVISION!!! They can be easily hacked, they are not to be trusted!!! Furthermore, most key-lock users have no idea how the thing really works, they just stick the key in and try to turn it.
The best way to deal with Agentic AI is to ignore it until it goes away. That’s my strategy. 🙅♂️🫣😖
May I join you?
Hop on in, water’s still warm.
"People are over-trusting [AI] and taking their responses on face value without digging in and making sure that it’s not just some hallucination that’s coming up.
So very, very much this. I see people taking AI responses at face value all the time. Look at the number of lawyers that have submitted briefs containing AI hallucinated citations and been reprimanded for them, for example.
And it’s not just stupid people either. Even smart and educated people get lulled into a false sense of security by a few correct answers to easy questions.
In a way this has happened before (people trusting stuff on social media, trusting bad headlines from bad newspapers, …), but AI is this on steroids.
That’s because their bosses want them to use ai somehow. So here’s the result.
