David Owen: Vision limitations cause computer-use agents to get stuck in UI loops
David Owen · The 2045 Superintelligence Timeline: Epoch AI’s Data-Driven Forecast · Nov 24, 2025 · at 26:44
David Owen is a researcher at Epoch AI. He explains the technical bottlenecks preventing computer-use agents from achieving rapid performance gains comparable to coding models.
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“I do think that there is a sense in which models are a little bit artificially hobbled by their vision capabilities. Like, it does seem as if a common pattern you see when you try to get models to do stuff with a GUI is they kind of get a bit confused about manipulating it and, you know, in a way where it's like, Okay, this is interacting with your general propensity to get infused in long, as you would in, like, difficult long coding problems, but it's kind of exacerbated because, like, you're not able to just easily look back on the thing and see, kind of, ah, I was wrong. You instead go down, like, some awful dead end of just, I'm just gonna click this again and again and again.”
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