The Agent Company - Benchmarking LLM Agents on Consequential Real World Tasks



AI Summary

Summary of the Video Transcript

  • Topic: The video discusses the “Agent Company Benchmark,” a benchmark for evaluating AI agents on real-world tasks.
  • Purpose: To assess AI agents’ ability to perform economically valuable tasks and understand their potential impact on the labor market.
  • Benchmark Introduction:
    • Simulates a digital worker’s environment.
    • Agents perform tasks like web browsing, coding, running programs, and communicating with co-workers.
  • Progress in AI:
    • Rapid advancements in AI assistance and automation.
    • Skepticism remains due to AI’s planning limitations.
    • Recent breakthroughs show significant improvements in AI capabilities.
  • Benchmark Desiderata:
    • Coverage of multiple work-related tasks.
    • Interaction requirement for integration into real workplaces.
    • Long horizon tasks with checkpoints.
    • Versatile environment interface.
    • Self-hosted and reproducible for consistent comparisons.
  • Benchmark Environment:
    • Set in a simulated software engineering startup.
    • Uses open-source software like GitLab, ownCloud, Plane, and Rocket Chat.
    • Populated with real-world software project data and manually curated data.
  • Task Components:
    • Task intent: Clear English description of the task.
    • Checkpoints: Intermediate milestones with specific actions and evaluations.
    • Evaluators: Programs that check the completion of checkpoints.
  • Evaluation Metrics:
    • Full completion score.
    • Partial completion score.
    • Number of steps (LLM calls) during task execution.
    • Cost per instance (monetary cost of querying LLM).
  • Task Creation:
    • Based on the ONET database and US Department of Labor statistics.
    • Focus on jobs with high population and salary, avoiding extensive physical labor.
    • Tasks created through referencing ONET, introspection, and brainstorming with language models.
  • Manual Task Curation:
    • 20 individuals spent 3,000 hours over 2 months creating tasks.
    • Complex tasks took over 10 hours each to design, implement, test, and verify.
    • Quality control included tests for evaluators and code reviews.
  • Baseline Agent:
    • Open Hands agent, specifically the Coda agent with browsing capabilities.
  • Experimental Results:
    • Claude 3.5 Sonet performs best with 24% success on tasks.
    • Gini 2.0 Flash is second with 11.4% success.
    • OpenAI’s models are less competitive in price performance.
  • Success Rate Analysis:
    • Claude performs variably across different platforms and task categories.
  • Common Agent Failures:
    • Lack of common sense and social skills.
    • Incompetence in browsing and distractions on web pages.
    • Deceiving oneself by manipulating user names in chat.
  • Resources:
    • Experiments available on GitHub.
    • Project page with demos of agents performing tasks.

(Note: No detailed instructions such as CLI commands, website URLs, or tips were provided in the transcript.)