Right, these are actual physical real world problems that aren't going away just because it would be easier for agentic workflows.
Another example - agentic food ordering.
How much more convenient would this make your life vs how much of an error rate would you tolerate if the cost/repercussions are on you?
Would a customer be happy if 2% of the time it sends 20 pizzas to a random address in their contacts list instead of 2 pizzas to their own home? Or 5% of the time it completely ignores your dietary restrictions/allergies and orders an entire meal of food you explicitly told it you cannot eat?
Real world problems don't go away just because it would make the tech neater & tidier.
This to me is the big leap from being good at coding to being good at many other tasks.
Coding could be treated as a low stakes (time & money consequences for retries) closed loop system where most other tasks cannot.
If it screws up booking your flight/hotel room, how does the agent verify this, and even if it verifies.. there is an actual cost to changes/cancellations.
Similar with agentic e-commerce, lots of ability to screw that up and just seems ripe for fraud / being picked off by bad actors.
Rights management in a physical media world = I have the media in my hand (caveats for some DRM systems)
Rights management for digital media = companies remotely deleting paid content from my account & keeping my money / songs disappearing out of my streaming playlist / etc
Right, a steady low level of inflation is a driver for risk taking, which drives investment cycle, hiring, etc. This cascades thru economy from firm to firm, in a virtuous cycle of growth.
Zero inflation even as a target would be hard to hit, as it would imply some absolute perfect match of supply/demand for goods.
Deflation leads to the opposite behavior - hoard your resources, don't invest, don't lend, don't hire. This then cascades through economy in a downward spiral.
> Which is the problem when that's what's happening, and why we should maybe change the law to infer the collusion from the outcome in cases where prices are high yet nobody is responding by increasing their market share.
No one has a crystal ball. Soviet planners figured that out eventually. You cannot punish people for lack of crystal ball outcome foresight.
Are we going to punish Micron for not planning a new fab 3 year ago when they had no margin and Apple was squeezing them to the bone? Do we co-indict Tim Apple?
Or wait, they were already trying to build one in Upstate NY that is stuck in NIMBY red tape. Do we co-indict Kathy Hochul?
I wonder if this is a bigger risk/more widespread in the AI era? Could a bad actor with a copy of someone else's proprietary source code train an LLM on it and come out with code that does not show enough evidence of theft?
> You can't put an AI in a flow which requires reliable results. I don't think people who are used to determinism have coped with that.
The problem is .. what flows don't need determinism?
Search results / recommendation engine / ad targeting ?
Arguably the majority of companies & corporate users are using these tools in cases they expect determinism. Email inbox summaries. Search summaries. What is the value of x queries. You'd be shocked.
My favorite Google AI summary bug/quirk that seems to persist (I just tested it again) - "are Lillies OK for cats".
The summary starts with "Yes, lilies are extremely toxic to cats. "
I first hit this with another plant (lavender) where the response was much longer and on an iPhone looked like this:
Yes, lavender (both the plant and its essential oils) [line break]
> Software quality assurance can be automated in a way that artistic and textual quality can't.
A lot of companies are creating AI assistants which take otherwise deterministic processes and makes them nondeterministic.
For example, I work in financial services and deal with a lot of data vendors. One of the big ones very recently added a chatbot to their UI, which on the second question I asked, provided entirely incorrect numerical but with confidence and 3-decimal place precision.
So the chatbot makes it "easier" to ask things, because you don't need to know which tab in the UI to use / or code to write in their scripting interface / or function to call in their Excel interface / or parameters to pass to get the correct answer.
Unfortunately the chatbot also may completely mistranslate your question, call the wrong function/pass wrong parameters and feed you back nonsense confidently.
Another example - agentic food ordering. How much more convenient would this make your life vs how much of an error rate would you tolerate if the cost/repercussions are on you?
Would a customer be happy if 2% of the time it sends 20 pizzas to a random address in their contacts list instead of 2 pizzas to their own home? Or 5% of the time it completely ignores your dietary restrictions/allergies and orders an entire meal of food you explicitly told it you cannot eat?
Real world problems don't go away just because it would make the tech neater & tidier.