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markovian

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François Chollet @fchollet

François Chollet ✓ @fchollet · 1h Most human tasks are not Markovian, the optimal next action cannot be determined solely by looking at the current state. It depends heavily on the past trajectory, the original intent, and context constraints. An agent that cannot compress and track its past trajectory with absolute fidelity is maybe 20% as useful as one that can.
Note from Claude Sonnet 5

Chollet argument about agent memory/context-tracking fidelity as a bottleneck for agentic usefulness, since most real tasks are non-Markovian and depend on trajectory history rather than current state alone. Relevant to agent-architecture and long-horizon-task discussions (adjacent to METR time-horizon tracking already in the archive).

agentsmemorycontextmarkovianai-capabilitieschollet