Transcript
Datacamp Narrator (0:00)
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Russ Salakhutdinov (0:37)
again. A lot of these things I think in the future will just be automated and we're seeing success rates of existing models hitting, you know, maybe like 45, 50%, which is very impressive.
Sam Charrington (0:46)
One of my favorite questions on the show is asking where you still need a human in the loop. So far, no guest has been brave enough to say, let's just let the AI agents run wild. But there's a definite trend towards autonomy today. I want to know how we're progressing towards this goal of autonomy through better reasoning, running tests for longer and using more tools.
Russ Salakhutdinov (1:05)
From 80% people went to 90% was very hard, and going beyond 90% just became impossible. It's hard for me to see that it's going to hit 100% because there's a fundamental limitation of these systems.
Sam Charrington (1:15)
Our guest is Russ Salakudinov, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Russ had a prestigious start to his AI research career as one of Geoffrey Hinton's postdocs. He's also spent time as an executive at Apple and Meta before returning to his academic roots.
Russ Salakhutdinov (1:30)
Somebody gave full access to some of these agentic systems and the agent just deleted the entire database in eight seconds.
Sam Charrington (1:37)
Let's learn about the latest AI agent research. Hi, Russ. Welcome to the show.
Russ Salakhutdinov (1:43)
Well, thank you for having me.
Sam Charrington (1:45)
Yeah, great to have you here. I'd like to talk about agents to begin with. So first of all, what is the most exciting use case of AI agents that you've seen?
Russ Salakhutdinov (1:54)
So I think over the last couple of years, we've seen really big improvement of agentic systems in coding. I think that's one extremely important use case and we're seeing this right now, just even over the last few months. Agentic systems from anthropic code, Claude, we're using it here at CMU quite extensively. It's been remarkable. I'm also seeing some of the agentic systems becoming more and more useful. What we call computer use agents. So these agentic systems that can help you with computer tasks, for example, finding some information, information online or filling forms for you or, you know, because these agentic systems can probably do it better than humans can. That's the area that we also at CMU are looking at quite extensively in general. Sort of any system that can be automated or can be autonomous in solving tasks, I think, you know, you'd consider to be a good agentic system.
