Imagine an agent being a roommate. They see that toilet paper is running out, they go to the supermarket, they buy more, they charge you money. All without you saying a word. Sure, it might not be your favorite brand, or the price might not be optimal, but realistically, the convenience of not having to think about buying toilet paper is definitely worth the price of having your roommate choose the details. After all, it's unlikely they'll make a catastrophically bad decision.

This idea has been tried before and it failed not because the core concept is bad (it isn't), but because implementation details were wrong, and now we have better tools to execute it.

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taormina 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The idea has been tried before and it failed because people don’t actually want this product at the scale the inventors thought. Amazon has never stopped doing this. Adding an element of indeterminism to the mix doesn’t make this a better product. Imagine what the LLM is going to hallucinate with your credit card attached.

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anal_reactor 4 days ago | parent [-]

> Imagine what the LLM is going to hallucinate with your credit card attached.

As long as we have free returns, nobody cares.

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strange_quark 3 days ago | parent [-]

The second someone has to deal with returning an item that an LLM hallucinated they needed is the second they cancel this service. The hassle of returning something vastly outweighs any perceived convenience of not having to buy toilet paper or whatever the next time you're at the grocery store. Hell, you can buy toilet paper in 10 seconds on your phone while sitting on the toilet from Amazon, and that's been possible for probably 15 years. What problem is this actually solving?

	▲	anal_reactor 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's not how it works. People often buy random crap because they know they can return it once it arrives if they don't like it. > Hell, you can buy toilet paper in 10 seconds on your phone while sitting on the toilet from Amazon "We don't need telephone, we have message boys"

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Paradigma11 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure, but why would you use a nondeterministic LLM for that? LLMs can do things that we cant reasonably do with deterministic software. But everything that can be done deterministically should be done deterministically.

	▲	LtWorf 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> why would you use a nondeterministic LLM for that? To trick investors that they are going to get their money back and some more I presume.
	▲	anal_reactor 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Because for vast majority of people, LLM is a superior interface over Raspberry Pi with crontab running a Python script with headless Firefox. Hard to believe, I know.

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nemomarx 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

if my roommate charged me for toilet paper they picked out I would want to talk to them about the brand they go for and other details, at which point a lot of the overhead is back isn't it?

	▲	ewhanley 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's sort of the tradeoff, though. You get the convenience of having tp show up without having to to through the steps of shopping for it. Except in extreme cases, it seems likely your roommate will pick something that is effectively a commodity at a reasonable price. If you want granular control over brand, features, and pricing, you'll have to pay for it in time and/or money.