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Cal Newport

๐Ÿ‘ค Speaker
See mentions of this person in podcasts
3023 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

You can give it an input and it can give you a token.

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

You're talking about a program that is calling Mythos and then taking actions based on what it called.

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

And this is really what we're talking about with agents is the digital brains or LLMs.

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

And then you write a program

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

that will say to the LLM, give me a plan for doing X. And then the LLM spits out what seems like a reasonable text that seems like a reasonable plan.

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

And then you execute that plan.

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

The program executes that plan on behalf of the LLM.

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

And I wrote about this.

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

Yeah, and I wrote about this earlier this year.

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

LLMs are bad, you know, as a digital brain are bad planners.

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

It's not really, you're not going to get consistently usable plans because what an LLM is actually trying to do is finish the story you gave it.

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

So all it wants to do is produce a story

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

that sounds reasonable.

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

So it's giving you reasonable sounding plans.

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

Like, yeah, that's what a plan for doing this would more or less sound like.

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

But what it's not doing is actually doing step-by-step evaluations.

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

It doesn't have a clearly isolated goal that it's trying to measure how close you're getting to it.

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

It doesn't have a world model to evaluate what's going to happen with the steps that are going to unfold next.

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

And so in almost every context, it turns out, oh, a digital brain by itself being an LLM doesn't lead to good agents.

Better Offline
Cal Newport on Mythos and Anthropomorphization

In programming, it seems to work a