What are AI Agents?
- Over the years there've been many interpretations of AI agents
- Peter Norvig had a famous definition in his famous book: an agent could be a thermostat
- The cybernetics field previously defined many things we do in ML as agents, rediscovered still
- RL agents, DeepMind did amazing things with those
- BAIR defined "compound AI systems", worth reading
- Andrew Ng came up with a definition of "agentic workflows" and "agentic systems", he said we don't have to agree on definitions, but see it as more of a spectrum of 'agency'
- Many people today build LLM agents: maybe a router, maybe makes decisions and calls APIs, searches based on patterns (ReAct etc. in prompt engineering)
- Open to all of these, and happy to have people bring their input
Next up
Jassim Alseddiqi and Fawad Tariq-Khan are two entrepeneurs who are proposing the $1M Agents Challenge.