[HN Gopher] Mistral Agents
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Mistral Agents
Author : eitanturok
Score : 144 points
Date : 2024-08-07 19:32 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mistral.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (mistral.ai)
| Oras wrote:
| Genuine question, are there any examples of agents in production?
| simonw wrote:
| Depends what you mean by "agents".
| Oras wrote:
| The article is about LLM agents, so I'm asking in context.
|
| To clarify more, I see frameworks like CrewAI and similar,
| with tools even from Microsoft to define these "agents"
| quickly. But when I tried them, I noticed they are no more
| than chain of thought CoT functions to ask/extract/generate
| based on user input and functions output.
|
| As such, they can be quite unpredictable, hence my question
| of examples of LLM agents being used in production. I just
| don't see their value, but I might be missing something so
| wanted to see examples to understand more.
| colkassad wrote:
| Depends on your definition. I created a mapping application
| that allows one to navigate and style the map with natural
| language (more or less) as well as some prototype database
| interaction. When the user inputs a prompt, it gets sent to an
| "agent" whose sole purpose is to send a request to the API with
| a custom system prompt with few-shot examples stating something
| along the lines of "determine which agent should handle this
| request...only respond with one of [NavigationAgent,
| StyleAgent, ...]". When the response comes back, the prompt is
| then sent to the proper agent to handle the request. Each agent
| has function definitions for properly returning parameters to
| use to manipulate the map. I don't use any special libraries
| like langchain or anything, it's just regular API calls
| organized into classes that have specific system prompt
| behavior defined, function definitions, and some user prompt
| context ingestion when required (e.g. the current extent of the
| map).
| Oras wrote:
| Why can't this be done with functions? I don't see why you
| need the complexity and unpredictability of using "agents" to
| do that.
|
| I might be missing something?
| colkassad wrote:
| I call them agents just because. I'm just doing function
| calling with custom system prompts for the most part. It's
| hardly complex, I wrote most of it in a few days.
|
| EDIT: I should add that the first step is used to cut down
| on the number of function definitions I need to send to the
| model on each user prompt. Navigating a map can be done
| with as few as four function definitions but styling a map
| gets out of control fast (google "Mapbox Style
| Specification" if you want to see why).
| dudus wrote:
| Doctors are already using agents for scheduling. These agents
| can access calendar and talk to patients to arrange scheduling,
| changes, conflicts etc
| pton_xd wrote:
| This use-case actually makes a ton of sense. How many other
| low-hanging fruit applications for agents are out there like
| that?
|
| Although now that I think about it, a lot of doctors
| practices have a MyChart-style portal where you can schedule
| an appointment yourself. Why does an LLM need to be involved
| in that process? I guess for people who still want to
| schedule over the phone, the LLM agent makes sense. Kind of,
| assuming you don't have any special case problems. Which
| patients most likely do, if they're calling in. Is an LLM
| actually a good solution here?
| Areibman wrote:
| Yes, here's a directory of many of them https://staf.ai
| dsissitka wrote:
| Not quite sure if this is what you're looking for but Amazon
| has hidden their description/review search box behind a "Ask
| Rufus about this product" box. For example, go here and Ctrl+F
| for "Looking for specific info?":
|
| https://www.amazon.com/PolyScience-Temperature-Controlled-Co...
| qeternity wrote:
| Since we've apparently moved from calling everything a Copilot to
| calling everything an Agent, this seems much closer to OAI's GPT
| Store than anything that is truly agentic.
| voiper1 wrote:
| but worse! there's no tools or RAG/data yet...
| htrp wrote:
| don't forget about agentic workflows
| jsemrau wrote:
| No memory, no reasoning, no planning.
| rvnx wrote:
| We just have to wait that LLaMA does it, then suddenly they
| will have it.
|
| Mistral is like FitGirl Repacks for LLaMA.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Because Copilot implies a human working in tandem with AI. An
| agent is an autonomous process. The goal of agents is to remove
| any human agency from the process. Need software done? It won't
| be a human's job. It will be the agent's in an iterative loop.
| qeternity wrote:
| I understand why. Most products claiming to be agents today
| are simply prompts.
| baxtr wrote:
| Finally, finally we have a true and worthy successor to "AI" as
| buzzword. It's "Agents" ladies and gentlemen.
|
| Make sure to put it into your pitch as often as possible.
| 8338550bff96 wrote:
| Computers, desktops, and now we have these things called
| "Virtual Machines".
|
| Meaningless buzzword central.
|
| <<eats gallery peanuts>>
| xnx wrote:
| Agent Intelligence or "AI"
| flessner wrote:
| Doesn't "AI" already stand for Apple Intelligence, so that
| might be a bit confusing...
| xnx wrote:
| Anything Intelligence
| voiper1 wrote:
| >Agents help you create custom behaviour and workflows with a
| simple set of instructions and examples. So, it's just custom
| instructions baked in? I hope at least it's harder for them to
| get overwritten by the user?
|
| >We're working on connecting Agents to tools and data sources...
| So tools and RAG for data sources aren't available yet.
|
| Way behind GPTs/assistants. What's the point of this yet?
| eitally wrote:
| To me, this looks like a direct competitor to AI21 Labs:
| https://www.ai21.com/
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| OpenAI is supposedly working on agents as well:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41125900 (subthread)
| geepytee wrote:
| This is basically Mistral's attempt at custom GPTs?
| rodoxcasta wrote:
| Wait, this 'Agents' thing seems to be just a way to couple a
| system prompt and temperature to a model, that's it?
|
| What's the difference from sending the system prompt in the api
| call, as usual?
|
| Edit: Oh, missed that: "We're working on connecting Agents to
| tools and data sources."
| refulgentis wrote:
| There's this massive gap between those who can call API and
| those who can't. If you can't, then you get the same
| aspirational-AGI chat UI as everyone else.
|
| I agree with the implied statement that 'Agents' doesn't feel
| right. Reminds me more of the projects that put the model in a
| loop.
|
| It does feel to me to be a really tough thing to name & market,
| I'm about to release an app for this across all providers, I
| call it "Scripts" with "Steps" like chat, search, retrieval,
| art...
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| I implemented a number of enterprise Conversational AI tools
| for customer service back before the GenAI craze started and
| we used to just call it service orchestration and
| data/application integration. The chatbot was used to figure
| out what the customer wanted to do and then from there it was
| just about automating some business workflow. Customer wants
| to pay their bill, the bot needs to pull their current
| balance, get their payment information, process the payment.
| Customer wants to return a product, the bot needs to retrieve
| the order info, initiate an RMA, process a refund, etc. These
| were all well established business process that the bot would
| execute by making API calls or kicking off an RPA routine.
| The "agent" talk sounds to me like "let the LLM figure out
| what it needs to do and then do it" which I'm not even sure
| is the right approach for most enterprise use cases, it's how
| you get people tricking chatbots into selling them a new car
| for $1.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Why is tool picking such a hard functionality for these vendors
| to implement.
|
| Seems like a lot of the heavy lifting will come from 3rd
| parties making their APIs compatible with llms.
|
| There should be some sort of extension type app where people
| can build extensions or "tools" for llms and share them (I
| guess openAI sort or attempts to do this). Say I want to build
| one for Toast to order food. I can collect the info needed to
| run that tool (toast account info or whatever) and an API key
| for an appropriate llm and then use this configuration info for
| Toast to build out a middleware that can use natural langauge
| to build out an order and send the request to Toast via some
| function call.
|
| This seems very doable and I don't understand why there aren't
| a million of these "tools" already built into some LLM centric
| tool aggregator/ web store. What is the hold up? Is it just 3rd
| parties not wanting to hand out API access for things that
| require payment to applications controlled by llms? Would these
| 3rd parties rather have their own assistant tool they run? I'd
| imagine that some central llm-extension aggregator could have a
| central mechanism for payment methods that the llm had access
| to that could be used to implement safegaurds.
|
| Or is it simply that any assistant type tool that could be
| easily generalized like ordering food, booking a flight or
| inputing calender events is simply easier to handle doing
| yourself than asking an llm to do for you?
| simonw wrote:
| I've been complaining about how vague and loosely defined the
| term "agents" is like a broken record for months. This is not
| going to help.
| finikytou wrote:
| it is quite simple to explain. it is a while(1) and some if.
| simonw wrote:
| The problem is that if you ask two people you're likely to
| get two different answers. And those people probably
| incorrectly think that their version of a definition for
| "agents" is the same as everybody else's.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yeah, but there is still no while(1) here.
| pradn wrote:
| One sad part of the GenAI wave happening right now is that we're
| past the golden age of open APIs.
|
| It's hard to read data with widespread anti-abuse checks
| (CAPTCHAs), lack of open-format data (RSS support being spotty),
| and restricted APIs (ex: Twitter API). Companies have all the
| incentives to prevent bot use, and select for human eyeballs.
|
| If we had a Yahoo Pipes sort of golden age, GenAI agents would
| have a vaster playground to play in, and would be more useful for
| us.
|
| Consider building an agent for choosing what to do on weekends
| for a group of friends. The agent would need to keep state for
| past activities (X, Y, and Z went upstate to Storm King last
| week) and users' preferences (ex: liking dosas or Calder, dietary
| restrictions). This part is easy enough - you could just keep a
| notebook that's passed as context. Older context gets simply
| deleted or condensed into high level points.
|
| But would it be easy for the agent to:
|
| 1) Look up nearby restaurants and events? (Perhaps Resy/OpenTable
| allow listing restaurants, but it's likely they have tons of
| anti-abuse tech. Is there even a place where you could see a list
| of public events - Google pays a third-party for this feed.)
|
| 2) Actuate on behalf of the user? (Do Resy and OpenTable allow
| authority delegation so the agent could book restaurants for
| users? There's no standard way to do this across venue types -
| concerts, museums, cooking classes. Is it realistic for agents to
| click through these sites on their own?)
| exe34 wrote:
| seems to be a monetisation problem. everybody wants their cut.
| so any super agent needs to figure out how to pay them.
|
| we could imagine a data/api marketplace, where such an agent
| could pay for the data and subscriptions.
| tanelpoder wrote:
| This could/should be a direction for companies like Zapier...
|
| Edit: or Stripe.
| ilaksh wrote:
| The SOTA models have excellent instruction following capability
| and the ability to output in any format you want including JSON.
|
| That's all you need from the model to be able to use it in an
| agent. Tell it to output commands in a given JSON format.
|
| I assume that Mistral's API already allowed you to define the
| system prompt, right?
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