but the LLMs show a very surprising lack of agency,
No, they don’t. LLMs show an enormous amount of agency. They will generate text which includes things like plans even without a prompt for that. (As should come as no surprise, because LLMs are RL agents which have been trained offline on data solely from agents, ie. behavioral cloning.) They contain so much agency you can plop them down into robots without any training whatsoever and they provide useful control. They are tools that want to be agents so much that I think it took all of a few weeks for someone to hook up the OA API to a commandline in June 2020 and try to make it autonomous. LLMs like LaMDA started being granted access to the live Internet not long after that, simply because it’s so obviously useful for tool AIs to become agent AIs. Startups like Adept, dedicated solely to turning these tools into agents, followed not long after that. I hardly need mention Sydney. And here we are in the present where OA has set up hundreds of plugins and an vast VM system to let their tools do agent-like things like autonomously write code, browse webpages, and integrate with other systems like make phone calls. LLMs show an enormous amount of agency, and it’s only increasing over time under competitive and economic pressure, because more agency makes them more useful. Exactly as predicted.
Maybe we understand agency differently. You give LLMs tools to use, they will use it. But there is no discernable drive or “want” to change the world to their liking. Not saying that it won’t show up some day, it’s just conspicuously lagging the capabilities.
I guess that is one way to say it. But the statement is stronger than that, I think. They do not care about the box or about anything else. They react to stimuli, then go silent again.
No, they don’t. LLMs show an enormous amount of agency. They will generate text which includes things like plans even without a prompt for that. (As should come as no surprise, because LLMs are RL agents which have been trained offline on data solely from agents, ie. behavioral cloning.) They contain so much agency you can plop them down into robots without any training whatsoever and they provide useful control. They are tools that want to be agents so much that I think it took all of a few weeks for someone to hook up the OA API to a commandline in June 2020 and try to make it autonomous. LLMs like LaMDA started being granted access to the live Internet not long after that, simply because it’s so obviously useful for tool AIs to become agent AIs. Startups like Adept, dedicated solely to turning these tools into agents, followed not long after that. I hardly need mention Sydney. And here we are in the present where OA has set up hundreds of plugins and an vast VM system to let their tools do agent-like things like autonomously write code, browse webpages, and integrate with other systems like make phone calls. LLMs show an enormous amount of agency, and it’s only increasing over time under competitive and economic pressure, because more agency makes them more useful. Exactly as predicted.
Maybe we understand agency differently. You give LLMs tools to use, they will use it. But there is no discernable drive or “want” to change the world to their liking. Not saying that it won’t show up some day, it’s just conspicuously lagging the capabilities.
In other words, LLMs are not actively trying to “get out of the box”.
I guess that is one way to say it. But the statement is stronger than that, I think. They do not care about the box or about anything else. They react to stimuli, then go silent again.