We hear about agents and even autonomous agents.
How different is this from a program?
By autonomous agents,
we understand systems that can iteratively perform certain actions.
They can sense the environment,
they can set up plans, and then they can execute and act
on the environment, collect back feedback and do all this iteratively.
So, that is what makes it different from a typical program.
The concept has existed since the seventies.
But what's interesting is that only recently have
we found a way to make them really autonomous by providing LLMs.
So, in this case, LLMs can be used as a brain
for this type of agents, can actually plan for them, can collect
and analyze the feedback that agents receive from the environment.
Can you give us situations, examples,
where you've seen, we've seen those autonomous agents in action?
So again, this is a very, very new development.
But you can think of using autonomous agents to control other software.
For example, an autonomous agent can create configuration files,
can launch software, can receive results from those
computations done by other software, can analyze them.
And if doesn't like it, change again the configuration and run it again.
So, in some sense, it can replace a lot of human work
and become really an agent.
It's both fascinating, but also a bit scary.
Do you think there's a line we should draw somewhere
to protect society, mankind?
One is we need to prevent an autonomous agent
from being able to modify itself,
to change its own code, change its own program.
And the second point is, we want to limit
the ability of the agents to do goal settings.
We still want humans to control overarching goals.
Any other technology that has been created so far
has been capable of spreading intelligence, transmitting intelligence.
This is the first time we’ve created
technology that can create intelligence. And this can be a little scary.