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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023
  • baatliwala@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5LinuxEnglish
    232·
    2 months ago

    Serious and long answer because you won’t find people actually providing you one here: in theory (heavy emphasis on theory), an “agentic” world would be fucking awesome.

    Agents

    You know how you have been programmed that when you search something on Google, you need to be to terse and to the point? The worst you get is “Best Indian restaurants near me” but you don’t normally do more than that.

    Well in reality most of the times when people just love rambling on or providing lots of additional info, so the natural language processing capabilities of LLMs are tremendously helpful. Like, what you actually want to do is “Best Indian restaurants near me but make sure it’s not more than 5km away and my chicken tikka plate doesn’t cost more than ₹400 and also I hope it’s near a train station so I can catch a train that will take me home by 11pm latest”. But you don’t put all that on fucking Google do ya?

    “Agents” will use a protocol that works in completely in the background called Model Context Protocol (MCP). The idea is that you put all that information into an LLM (ideally speak into it because no one actually wants to type all that) and each service will have it’s own MCP server. Google will have one so it will narrow down your filters to one being near a train station and less than 5km away. Your restaurant will have one, your agent can automatically make a reservation for you. Your train operator will have one, so your agent can automatically book the train ticket for you. You don’t need to pull up each app individually, it will all happen in the background. And at most you will get a “confirm all the above?”. How cool is that?

    Uses

    So, what companies now want to do is leverage agents for everything, making use of NLP capabilities.

    • Let’s say you maintain a spreadsheet or database of how your vehicle is maintained, what repairs you have done. Why do you want to manually type in each time? Just tell your agentic OS “hey add that I spent ₹5000 in replacing this car part at this location in my vehicle maintenance spreadsheet. Oh and also I filled in petrol on the way.” and boom your OS does it for you.

    • You are want to add a new user to a Linux server. You just say “create a new user alice, add them to these local groups, and provide them sudo access as well. But also make sure they are forced to change their password every year”.

    • You have accounts across 3 banks and you want to create a visualisation of your spendings? Maybe you want to also flag some anamolous spends? You tell your browser to fetch all that information and it will do that for you.

    • You can tell your browser to track an item’s price and instantly buy it if it goes below a certain amount.

    • Flying somewhere? Tell your browser to compare airline policies, maybe checkout their history of delays and cancellations

    • And because it’s natural language, LLMs can easily ask to clarify something

    Obvious downsides

    So all this sounds awesome, but let’s get to why this will only work in theory unless there is a huge shift:

    • (Edit thanks to /u/[email protected], can’t believe I forgot this) LLMs have the capacity to know literally EVERYTHING about you!!! It’s a big privacy nightmare waiting to happen if companies aren’t careful, and not to mention Governments and other organisations trying to get data for surveillance!!!

    • LLMs still suck in terms of accuracy. Yes they are decent but still not at the level where it’s needed and still make stupid errors. Also currently they are not making as generational upgrades as before

    • LLMs are not easy to self host. They are one of the genuine use cases of making use of cloud compute.

    • This means they are going to be expensiveeeeee and also energy hogs

    • Commercial companies actually want you to land on their servers. Yes its good that your OS will do it for you and they get a page hit but as of now that is absolutely not what companies want. How are they going to serve you ads and steal all your data from your cookies?

    • People will lose their technical touch if bots are doing all the work for them

    • People do NOT want to trust a bot with a credit card. Amazon already tried that with Alexa/Echo devices and people just don’t like saying “buy me a roll of toilet paper” because most people want to see what the fuck is actually being bought. And even if they are okay, because LLMs are still imperfect, they are going to make mistakes now and then.

    • There are going to be clashes of what the OS will do agentically vs what a browser will do. Agentic browser makers like Perplexity want you in their ecosystem but if Windows ships with that functionality out of the box then how much reason is there really to get Perplexity? I expect to see anti-competitive lawsuits around this in the future.

    • This also means there is going to be a huge lock-in to Big Tech companies.

    My personal view is that you will see some of these features 5-10 years down the line but it’s not going to materialise in the way some of these AI companies are dreaming it will.