I agree. I don’t think agents will outcompete tools in every domain; indeed in most domains perhaps specialized tools will eventually win (already, we see humans being replaced by expensive specialized machinery, or expensive human specialists, lots of places). But I still think that there will be strong competitive pressure to create agent AGI, because there are many important domains where agency is an advantage.
Expensive specialized tools are themselves learned by and embedded inside an agent to achieve goals. They’re simply meso-optimization in another guise. eg AlphaGo learns a reactive policy which does nothing which you’d recognize as ‘planning’ or ‘agentiness’ - it just maps a grid of numbers (board state) to another grid of numbers (value function estimates of a move’s value). A company, beholden to evolutionary imperatives, can implement internal ‘markets’ with ‘agents’ if it finds that useful for allocating resources across departments, or use top-down mandates if those work better, but no matter how it allocates resources, it’s all in the service of an agent, and any distinction between the ‘tool’ and ‘agent’ parts of the company is somewhat illusory.
I agree. I don’t think agents will outcompete tools in every domain; indeed in most domains perhaps specialized tools will eventually win (already, we see humans being replaced by expensive specialized machinery, or expensive human specialists, lots of places). But I still think that there will be strong competitive pressure to create agent AGI, because there are many important domains where agency is an advantage.
Expensive specialized tools are themselves learned by and embedded inside an agent to achieve goals. They’re simply meso-optimization in another guise. eg AlphaGo learns a reactive policy which does nothing which you’d recognize as ‘planning’ or ‘agentiness’ - it just maps a grid of numbers (board state) to another grid of numbers (value function estimates of a move’s value). A company, beholden to evolutionary imperatives, can implement internal ‘markets’ with ‘agents’ if it finds that useful for allocating resources across departments, or use top-down mandates if those work better, but no matter how it allocates resources, it’s all in the service of an agent, and any distinction between the ‘tool’ and ‘agent’ parts of the company is somewhat illusory.