Comment on No one knows what the hell an AI agent is | TechCrunch
lvxferre@mander.xyz 5 weeks ago
Etymologically “agent” is just a fancy borrowed synonym for “doer”. So an AI agent is an AI that does. Yup, it’s that vague.
You could instead restrict the definition further, and say that an AI agent does things autonomously. Then the concept is mutually exclusive with “assistant”, as the assistant does nothing on its own, it’s only there to assist someone else. And yet look at what Pathak said - that she understood both things to be interchangeable.
…so might as well say that “agent” is simply the next buzzword, since people aren’t so excited with the concept of artificial intelligence any more. They’ve used those dumb text gens, gave them either a six-fingered thumbs up or thumbs down, but they’re generally aware that it doesn’t do a fraction of what they believed to.
balder1993@programming.dev 4 weeks ago
This is exactly the reason for emphasis on it.
The reality is that the LLMs are impressive and nice to play with. But investors want to know where the big money will come from, and for companies, LLMs aren’t that useful in their current state, I think one of the biggest use for them is extracting information from documents with lots of text.
So “agents” are supposed to be LLMs executing actions instead of just outputting text. Which doesn’t seem like the best idea considering they’re not great at all at making decisions—despite these companies try to make it seem like they can.