It looks like Andrej's definition of "agent" here is an entity that can replace a human employee entirely - from the first few minutes of the conversation:

When you’re talking about an agent, or what the labs have in mind and maybe what I have in mind as well, you should think of it almost like an employee or an intern that you would hire to work with you. For example, you work with some employees here. When would you prefer to have an agent like Claude or Codex do that work?

Currently, of course they can’t. What would it take for them to be able to do that? Why don’t you do it today? The reason you don’t do it today is because they just don’t work. They don’t have enough intelligence, they’re not multimodal enough, they can’t do computer use and all this stuff.

They don’t do a lot of the things you’ve alluded to earlier. They don’t have continual learning. You can’t just tell them something and they’ll remember it. They’re cognitively lacking and it’s just not working. It will take about a decade to work through all of those issues.

He’s not just talking about agents good enough to replace workers. He’s talking about whether agents are currently useful at all.

>Overall, the models are not there. I feel like the industry is making too big of a jump and is trying to pretend like this is amazing, and it’s not. It’s slop. They’re not coming to terms with it, and maybe they’re trying to fundraise or something like that. I’m not sure what’s going on, but we’re at this intermediate stage. The models are amazing. They still need a lot of work. For now, autocomplete is my sweet spot. But sometimes, for some types of code, I will go to an LLM agent.

>They kept trying to mess up the style. They’re way too over-defensive. They make all these try-catch statements. They keep trying to make a production code base, and I have a bunch of assumptions in my code, and it’s okay. I don’t need all this extra stuff in there. So I feel like they’re bloating the code base, bloating the complexity, they keep misunderstanding, they’re using deprecated APIs a bunch of times. It’s a total mess. It’s just not net useful. I can go in, I can clean it up, but it’s not net useful.

Because that's the definition that is leading to all these investments, the promise that very soon they will reach it. If Altman said plainly that LLMs will never reach that stage, there would be a lot less investment into the industry.

Quite telling -- thanks for the insightful comment as always, Simon. Didn't know that, even though I've been discussing this on and off all day on Reddit.

He's a smart man with well-reasoned arguments, but I think he's also a bit poisoned by working at such a huge org, with all the constraints that comes with. Like, this:

  You can’t just tell them something and they’ll remember it.

LLMs are a necessary part of AGI(/"agents") due to their ability to avoid the Frame Problem[1], but they're far from the only needed thing. We're pretty dang good at "remembering things" with computers already, and connecting that with LLM ensembles isn't going to take anywhere close to 10 years. Arguably, we're already doing it pretty darn well in unified systems[2]...

If anyone's unfamiliar and finds my comment interesting, I highly recommend Minsky's work on the Society of Mind, which handled this topic definitively over 20 years ago. Namely;

A short summary of "Connectionism and Society of Mind" for laypeople at DARPA: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA200313.pdf

A description of the book itself, available via Amazon in 48h or via PDF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind

By far my favorite paper on the topic of connectionist+symbolist syncreticism, though a tad long: https://www.mit.edu/~dxh/marvin/web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/pa...

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frame-problem/

[2] https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/sr...

Do you have a comment? Most of what you've said here is a quote.