alt Hacker NewsAn 'AI agent' is just a chatbot that is told to type commands on a REPL-like interface as part of its system prompt. It's still processing pure text-based requests and responses, they're just not restricted to natural language.
Replies
hellohello2 • yesterday at 5:45 PM
They are chatbots trained for tool use, its not just a prompt.
sigmarule • yesterday at 7:43 PM
An AI agent and a chatbot are both applications built using LLM inference as a primitive.
furyofantares • yesterday at 7:07 PM
Yeah and a car is just an engine connected to wheels.
smj-edison • yesterday at 9:42 PM
Yeah. LLMs are fundamentally a batch-based system, and we smear a veneer of liveness and autonomy on top.
A lot of people dont know this , also the chatbot (chatgpt) itself is a next token predictor (the GPT) that's been given an initial text that says " pretend to be a chatbot .." and asked to complete it , the coherant chatting behaviour is something thats emergent .
later on someone figured if you asked it to output a reasoning before it gave a response its output would have more logical coherence, as though the reasoning output tokens functioned as a scratch space for it to work on.
at the end its all next token prediction