I’ve always argued that vertical integration is the only way you’ll make LLMs somewhat accepted and useful. The article is making the same point. Having a virtual girlfriend like in “Her” isn’t appealing to the average person, but certain results achieved by an agent without seeming like the BS output of an LLM may be seen as useful.
I’ve seldom been described as a normal person, but in my job, I have to get things right or there are problems for real people. So whatever tools I use have to be reproducible in their results, transparent in how they give their answers, and verifiable. So that precludes LLMs, which are automated bullshit firehoses with opaque, constantly mutable workings.
Those are exactly the properties that should never apply to a system whose output actually matters.
I used AI at work this week and it was so consistently incorrect that I dropped it
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.
To be clear, “normal” people are using LLMs like crazy. This I believe is specifically talking about is installed local agents. Boomers and non tech industry suits are using LLMs left and right and won’t shut up about them.
Doesn’t help the conversation that some LLM chat systems call minor customization of the prompt making an agent.
Under duress I use CoPilot Chat at work. No, the basic sad customization I did along the lines of “don’t be sycophantic, always cite sources, use these specific official documentation sites as sources before searching outside of them and clearly call out when you search outside them” that customization isn’t making a damn agent, it’s adjusting the prompt and saving those changes you disingenuous marketing fucks!
Yeah this is the deal. I’m a Gen x er and I use Gemini for some tasks - I want a quick id of a component or reference some knowledge chunk to verify something. I have absolutely no use for an agent.
They are not using agents. Most people use LLMs as Google on steroids.
i know some tech people that uses it.
lol it’s true. My mom sends me screenshots of AI chats every fucking day.
99% nudify apps
So you’re decided not to use a useful tool, because you don’t like it. Gotcha.
I once thought the fediverse was full of cool, techsavy people. Turned out it’s full of old people yelling at clouds.
I’ve had Gemini downright lie or completely fuck up before and it’s not a rare occurrence. That means you have to verify everything anyway and hell at that point maybe you should have just looked it up yourself.
First of: When? Few months make a huge difference. Development happens fast.
Second: Gemini is not the top of the line. You could do worse - if you use the fucking LLMs from meta.
You have your definition of useful, I have mine. Maybe predictability is important to many others, but not to you.
Besides, “not liking it” sounds like a pretty legit reason for not using something, lol. Would you listen to music if you didn’t like it?
Music is NOT a tool.
Its more like not using a screwdriver and using only a hammer. And that would be fine - if you only have nails.
And this argument about different definitions is fundamentally dishonest under a comment that say broadly we don’t like AI. I have my definitions of interesting, useful and fun. But if I would make a post about, I would be torn apart here, lol.
If I’m trying to fasten something, and the screwdriver fucks up half the time, then yeah I’m going to nail it together instead. Or use glue, or anything but an unreliable screwdriver.
Thats the thing. AI doesn’t fuck up all the time and has gotten genuinely useful for some things in the last months.
But a huge amount of you doesn’t know this or doesn’t care, generating an insufferable, ignorant circlejerk, drowning out every interesting discussion you can have about this topic.
Not only do we not care about it, we actively hate it.
Are we considered “normal people” though?
I often wonder as well because being a news reader makes me assume others are also following the news more closely than myself. When I test this theory by talking to people around me, I learn that maybe I’m more alone than I thought.
At least with social media I get to follow the news with all of you, my fellow nerds
One of us! One of us! One of us!
Gabba gabba hey!
Here on social media we get to ensure that we only associate with other “normal” people. By our definition of “normal.”
And then we get shocked when we discover that large numbers of people out there are not, in fact, “normal.” Often when an election happens.
I have at least one head, so I’m normal. You?
Quite a few of the people I know and consider “normal” openly dislike AI.
I’m not sure it’s a majority opinion buts it’s not an obscure one.
I have agents force fed to me at work. I’ve already got my own honed workflows I’ve refined over the years; now, Outlook and Teams and Various agentic frameworks are spamming me with summaries of stuff I either already know or don’t need to know… except they still get it wrong constantly, so I can’t trust what they think I should prioritize (usually it’s work I’ve already assigned to others).
Claude Code agents are decent, but they need to create discrete work objects that can be properly reviewed, so act like junior coders.
The main issue I have with most agents today is that they try to replace MY work, making it more complicated and time consuming, instead of completing the work I can’t bother to do myself. And in order to do those things effectively, I have to loosen my privacy and security models to the point where they effectively don’t exist. Which I’d never do for another human, so why should I do it for an agent that’s more likely to catastrophically screw things up at record speed?
The point is to replace you not help you
why
Uh, because its the future and if you don’t you’re not cool?
Because you don’t need AI when you’ve got NI.
I like Northern Ireland, despite its problems, but I’ve never considered it an alternative to AI. Interesting insight there.
It’s only natural.
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