alt Hacker NewsI get that impression to, but why are there so many assistant models released? It must be a very small niche of people actually using them like that? Meta released Muse Glimmer recently, this model, Qwen is made for agentic workflow, Gemma 4 is agentic, all modern models are agentic. So there must be more to it than some hobbyists wanting to automate their calendars and emails.
Replies
I think these are cheap and easy toy models to toss out for the big labs, to see what they can do with limited inference resources. I'm not sure what the plan is for a company like LFM that seems to be doing this as an entire business plan.
I see it as a niche now but it will hopefully grow in the future. The amount of information these servers are collecting about you for potential use against you is staggering and makes adware spy tech look like the good old days of privacy.
Strongest and easiest use case now would be just to hook one of these up to a search engine tool and ask your random questions to it rather than adding to OpenAI or Gemini's database about you.
I consider "agentic" to simply mean that it performs well given a loop of actions and a success criterion. As such, lots of code _can_ be written agentically (even if it is not the best or fastest way to do it).
When I am wrapping up work for the day, I usually set Qwen3.8-27B loose on some coding task. It's very good about continuing its agent loop until it can plausibly claim success. A lot of this work I might end up throwing away, but pretty often there's some piece of it that's worth keeping. Because it was "agentic", I end up with some useful pieces for little effort.
A less agentic model would need me involved the whole time, and while my being there would probably steer it towards initially better results, I'm not working overnight anyway. So, autonomous/agentic but not-so-smart and not-always-correct is still valuable to me.
Anyway, I've found that it's reasonably easy to constrain a "highly agentic" model to suit interactive usage, but back when they were less agentic it was annoying to get them to be autonomous. So I think more agentic is better, provided the instruction-adherence is strong enough.