Harrison

Language Agents: From Reasoning to Acting — with Shunyu Yao of OpenAI, Harrison Chase of LangGraph

Sep 27, 2024 · 1:26:33

Shunyu Yao of OpenAI and Harrison Chase of LangChain discuss the evolution of language agents, arguing that combining reasoning and acting through techniques like ReAct remains foundational, while tool design and cognitive architectures like CoALA will shape the next wave. Shunyu traces his work from text games to ReAct, showing how thinking as an action improves reliability; Harrison explains LangChain's adoption and the shift to LangGraph for stateful orchestration. They emphasize agent-computer interfaces (ACI) as a neglected area, noting that SWE-Agent's success came from optimizing tools for models, not humans. The conversation covers memory types (semantic, episodic, procedural) and applies CoALA's three dimensions to current systems. They highlight promising applications: customer support, coding agents, and spreadsheet-style UX for batch operations. Shunyu stresses that better benchmarks like SWE-Bench (which solved 30% of GitHub issues) and TauBench (best model 48%) are critical, and that data—not architecture—will drive future model improvements.

Personal AI Meetup - Bee, BasedHardware, LangChain LangFriend, Deepgram EmilyAI

Apr 6, 2024 · 58:54

This episode features Damien Murphy of Deepgram, Ethan of Owl/Bee, and Harrison of LangChain demonstrating how to build personal AI with real-time voice bots, wearable life-recording devices, and memory-enhanced journaling apps. Damien shows building a voice bot with subsecond latency using Deepgram, OpenAI, and open source code, costing about 6.5 cents per five-minute call. Ethan presents his Owl wearable that continuously records audio, triggers actions via hot word 'Scarlett,' and discusses challenges in adding vision and open source adoption. Harrison introduces LangFriend, a journaling app using conversational, semantic, and knowledge graph memory, referencing the Generative Agents paper for recency and importance weighting. The episode also highlights open source projects Whomane, Friend, and ADeus, arguing that hardware, voice, and memory are all necessary components for personal AI.