I've literally never heard anyone conflate an agent and a model. Ever.

Often with posts like this I imagine someone had their own confusion and then somehow projected it on everyone else. Like Trump thinking people didn't know about the word groceries or that dumb ends with a b.

> I've literally never heard anyone conflate an agent and a model. Ever.

Author is a senior staff engineer. A big part of his job is to help more junior engineers and non-technical decision makers understand basics. Not every stakeholder with resources reads HN under a pseudo name "llm_nerd" :)

And to be fair to those juniors and less-technical folks: there were papers in prominent ML conferences up to like 2024-2025 that were consistently comparing proprietary model end-points to open weight models as an apples-apples comparison until very recently, and long after it was obvious that prop model providers were doing "stuff" behind the endpoint, which was obvious by fall 2021). Most of those papers did not put in the legwork to figure out if/when that "stuff" was happening, or what the "stuff" probably was, or even give a caveat.

Not exactly the same thing as conflating agent with model, but definitely 100% conflating "model+software" with "model", which is at the end of the day basically the same confusion.