Comment by FranciscoCarlos
15 days ago
How is a model that has never seen an agent on it's pretraining data going to reasonably plan and fan-out tasks to multiple agents? Or engineer software for agents to edit semi-automatically, it has zero awareness of it's capabilities in it's internal representation.
I don't think that's likely to be a problem, really. If I explained the concept of an agent to you in a couple of sentences in Feb 2025, could you understand it, even though agents didn't exist yet? I think you could, and I think a modern frontier LLM probably can too.
Yeah, it can be worked around with in-context instructions but they still tend to scope, delegate and architect without awareness of the fact that agents exist and work. It's an actual big deal IMHO, opus 5.5 is the most updated AFAIK.
Nowadays the scraped training data is only one part of the training process. The RL phase of training can instill a knowledge of tactics like sub-agent delegation without documentation about them being present in the training corpus. Context isn't the only way for a model with an early knowledge cutoff to know about it.
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