I’ve been having back-to-back conversations about the AI agentic future for a few months now, and I’ve found people are throwing this new piece of

Many Meanings of AI Agent | Sean Blanchfield

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2024-09-03 08:30:04

I’ve been having back-to-back conversations about the AI agentic future for a few months now, and I’ve found people are throwing this new piece of “agent” jargon around a bit loosely, referring to pretty distinct things. Here’s what I’ve classified so far:

To me, the most useful definition is based around tool use and asynchronous long-lived processes that have state. The most simple of these barely deserves new jargon - until recently we called them “scripts”. But perhaps the new applications unlocked by generative AI demands a new name. An “agent” is like a chatbot that can do things - most likely by calling an API as well as an LLM, and probably hang around doing useful work even when not chatting to a human. If the word “agent” seems to be getting your AI conversation in a tangle, I’ll suggest you call them “actbots” instead.