Comment by echoangle
9 hours ago
That’s exactly the problem I have with all this agent ideas too. Imagine you had a human concierge that is just waiting for your instructions and is as smart or a bit smarter than you. Would you just tell them “plan this holiday for me” or “order this food”? I don’t even trust my friends to get this right, why would I give this to someone else?
As a realistic construct:
When I tell a bot to find the best value per volume for a reasonable quantity of unscented Dawn dish soap [so I can buy that], then: It often makes a complete mess of this seemingly-simple operation.
(And yeah, that is an actual thing that I've tried to accomplish with voice commands while standing in my kitchen and doing some dishes. It seems very simple, and it did not go well.
Maybe when we get the basics figured out we can start worrying about how inept it is at doing vacation planning.
It seems that this kind of thing isn't sorted at all, and that this is a very real problem for those who are in the bot business: These missed opportunities leave money on the table.)
I wouldn't even use a bot for that, there's price comparison websites and of course I know where to find the cheapest stuff already.
Which makes me think: would a generation raised on AI and automating these things even consider looking for e.g. deals on household consumables? This is spiraling doomerism at this point, but, do people who outsource the hard thinking to LLMs get fresh ideas or inspiration still?
I think we can safely assume that AGI is still a good ways out then.
These AI LLM products really do well on the illusion of seeming intelligent to regular folks, but I'm not fully convinced they can replace human brains... yet. ;)
I mean: That sample was only demonstrative of shopping for dish soap. :)
I often get some seemingly-good results in the non-shopping research department, where I'm exploring science and physics; things that don't generally change rapidly.
But unlike dish soap, I can't buy the science results that I want[].
[]: er. well, ackshually... let's just not talk about that concept right now.
I wanted some banana plugs for my speakers, as well as I needed some longer speaker wire. I kinda wanted it for the weekend so I could watch movies with some friends. I didn't want to order online as that wouldn't arrive in time. Three stores around me had some, but they were quite far apart and I didn't want to drive to all of them, so I needed to figure out which store had ones that were actually decent and not too crappy.
LLMs completely and utterly failed at this.
The Mensa test results are impressive but are in no way shape or form relevant to real world scenarios.
I wanna see benchmarks on successfully completing benefits applications, on finding the best option to purchase X from, on correctly identifying a piece of furniture and its condition and setting a correct price on it and selling it on craigslist/FB market place and so forth.
You've got a good approach.
Also: What banana plugs did you wind up with?
I've been looking for usable, insulated, stackable banana plugs that work with 12 AWG wire for over a decade.
For a lot of my audio things, I can get by with MDPs from Pamona Eelectronics. They're insulated-enough, stackable, dual-banana plugs on 3/4" centers and where they work, they work very well. (I don't recall if 12AWG is within spec or not, but it can be made to fit.)
But they do not work on audio widgets that do not have 3/4" spacing, like my aging Lexicon receiver and its great quantity of binding posts for speakers.
I don't care if they're glitzy or fabulous-looking. I just want functional, insulated, stackable single banana plugs.
(The common marketplace is full of elaborate gold-plated non-insulated things. I guess they're pretty, but they're a hazard and nobody will see them again soon at all if everything goes well. Their function-follows-form beauty is only detrimental.)
Funny, I had a similar task for an LLM recently but it succeeded, so I'll describe it:
I asked the chatbot (librechat, tavily-mcp connected, kimi-k3) if anybody tests dish soaps rigorously. It said yes. I asked it to find the consumer reports from Germany. It did so, full access is paywalled but it did see the top positions. The I asked it what term to put in evay.de if I want to order. It gave me a string that found the auctions for me. I also asked it what the actual difference is and it described what info the EU law forces onto the label and told me what to look for in the ingredient lists.
The process is still involved. I wish I could just do it all by saying "find me another dishsoap, this one sucks". But then would everybody saying this phrase except the same approach to the issue that I took?
Because some people do.
Corporate travel is an example. In many organisations, you tell someone in the travel department "I need to be in Tokyo for this conference from Tuesday to Sunday, and charge it to this cost code", and they figure out flights, accommodation, etc for you, with minimal input from you.
But, like, isn't that what Expedia does and has done for 20 years?
If an agent planned a flight for me with an overnight layover, I'm unplugging it. I don't care whose dime it is lol.
“Find me a cheap ticket from Seattle to LA”
… 23 hours in Denver later…
Claude code planned my recent trip to China. I'm a very experienced traveller but don't enjoy planning. It was a great trip.
Yeah but the contention is here automating the bookings. Did Claude book the flights, hotels, tickets and attractions for you or would you let it without oversight?
Yes it booked everything, I just had to click the final pay button. I did run my itinerary against a fresh session like: 'There are errors in my travel plans, go find them'. It found one issue where I was scheduled to be at the wrong train station.
I think it depends on what you do for work. I'm not going to ask an agent to book my flight for my vacation to French Polynesia. I want to pick my seat and potentially find a deal making an upgrade worth it, choose an airline, etc.
But my routine business trips in the CONUS with strictly defined booking options... let me just email an agent "Get there by meeting on day A, leave after meeting day B" and have it sort it all out without the drudgery of the corporate travel portal. YES PLEASE!
By that point, you don't need an AI that boils the oceans and hopefully doesn't confabulate or misinterpret your words, all you need is a better corporate travel portal, which is a legitimate workplace productivity discussion to have, and a solved problem with traditional methods. Ours is effectively close to the workflow you describe: picking dates and time brackets, destination, fine tuning flights and hotel options, sending for validation, less than 10 clicks through information-dense and effective/predictable screens which I wouldn't want to trade for a chatbot and it's usually over the top words salad.
And the reason why there are 10 clicks is that that is the number of decisions that is required to get people to hand over their money.
There will have been an A-B test with 9 clicks -> less sales, less revenue.
There will have been an A-B test with 11 clicks -> less sales, less revenue.
The people making these sites are not dumb. They are also sitting on thin margins nowadays, and mostly from the airlines and hotels rather than from the users.
1 reply →
Most AI use cases can be reduced to a deterministic listing/form/report format (on the web) or a cli tools.
1 reply →
A good agent would call you to ask clarifying questions and then actually get you that perfect seat, etc. ideally
And I could bet money on that in short time after someone builds that sort of system the next step is to make it worse. Push worse and more expensive options to user. Or at least those from highest bidder... Anyone involved just can't keep themselves honest so it is doomed to be exploitative.
For me, it is not a matter of trust but that I actually like shopping, planning a trip, deciding what restaurant to go to. Deciding what to buy when shopping is a matter of personal taste and not intelligence.
A human assistant is largely a status symbol. Most people are not really that busy. The real problem with an agentic assistant is if everyone can have one then it no longer acts as a status symbol.
Plan, sure, many people ask this of AI already, but not actually ask it to buy autonomously.
Plan a holiday, definitely. There are many esoteric things one has to research to properly plan a holiday that I’d rather just not. Some things require reservations months in advance and I’d rather an AI just figure all that out for me ahead of time.
The rich fucks who run the show do.