Comment by bhouston

Comment by bhouston 2 days ago

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"Does the AI system perform actions under its own identity?"

I don't agree with this definition.

I view an agent has having the ability to affect the world, and then sense how it affected the world and then choose to make additional actions. Thus there is an act, sense, re-act feedback loop going on that does not require a human to mediate this. This to me is an agent.

"But why isn't, say, ChatGPT an agent?"

ChatGPT (the web app where you send it chats and it responses) by default doesn't act on the world and sense the changes it is making. Although once you take the GPT o4 model and hook it up with tool calling that affects the world in a feedback loop is definitely an agent.

I believe this definition generally aligns with most people's definitions as well.

I wrote an essay about building an agentic coder and it really is when you establish the tool-calling feedback loop that things move from an assistant to an agent: https://benhouston3d.com/blog/building-an-agentic-code-from-...

wongarsu 2 days ago

I agree with you. People really overcomplicate this.

From wiktionary:

""" Agent (plural agents)

- One who exerts power, or has the power to act.

- One who acts for, or in the place of, another (the principal), by that person's authority; someone entrusted to act on behalf of or in behalf of another, such as to transact business for them.

- [various more specific definitions for real estate, biology, etc]

From Latin agēns, present active participle of agere (“to drive, lead, conduct, manage, perform, do”). """

An agent is simply someone or something that does something, usually for someone else. An AI agent is thus an AI that does something, usually for someone else. An AI assistant could be an AI agent, or it could be a glorified chatbot who merely offers you spoken or written word, possibly after reacting to real-world information (but not itself modifying it)

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  • ninininino 2 days ago

    The problem with just using that definition is that drawing the line of what it means to have "the power to act" or to "act for, or in the place of, another" is subjective.

    Most would agree that a system or automation that could receive the instruction "do my entire job for me" and proceed to physically embody a bio-clone of me, walk to my office, impersonate me 40hrs a week, and keep my pay check coming in while I play MMOs would satisfy the definition.

    Most would also agree that a computer terminal receiving the command "git push origin main" doesn't qualify as an AI "agent". But in a very loose sense it does do the thing your definition says. It does some git work for me on behalf of me. So we'd argue about what exactly an AI is. Are we just using it as a stand-in for ML model enabled software agents now? Or for LLM+multi-modal transformer enabled models/systems?

    Now pick 1000 points in between those two ends of the spectrum and you're gonna find that there is not a single cut-off where some see the transition from "Is an AI Agent" to "Is not an AI agent".

    Is an LLM that can take my request to find me a movie showing for the new Transformer movie next Thursday night, buy the ticket, and add it to my calendar an AI agent? Or is that just voice-activated/human-language as input Zapier/IFTT? Is that just a regular ChatGPT prompt with an integration to my Fandango account and GCal?

    Or would it need to monitor movie releases and as new movies come out, ask me pro-actively if I want it to go ahead and find time in my GCal and buy a ticket pro-actively?

    Or does it need to be a software agent that is run by a movie studio and proactively posts content online to try to spread marketing for that movie ahead of its release?

    Does it need to be a long-running software process instantiated (birthed) to a docker pod, given a single goal ("make the Transformers movie more profitable, focusing on marketing"), and then doing all the rest of the planning, execution, etc. itself?

    Defining that cut-off is the hard part, or what definition gives us a useful way to determine that cut-off. I'd argue your dictionary definition doesn't really do it.

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    • wongarsu 2 days ago

      It all comes down to your definition of "act". Which maybe does split into at least two criteria: the "trigger" (is running "git push" every time I ask it to enough, or does it have to decide to do that on its own, for example by monitoring my workflow) and the "action" (is running "git push" enough, or does it have to be able to order movie tickets?).

      On the action my view is fairly lax. Anything that modifies the world counts, which does include a git push run on my computer. Tasks aren't less real just because they have a convenient command line interface.

      The trigger is a bit trickier. We expect the agent to have some form of decision-making-process (or at least something that looks and feels like one, to avoid the usual discussion about LLMs). If a human doesn't make decisions they are a tool, not an agent. Same rule for AI agents. But defining the cut-off point here is indeed hard, and we will never agree on one. I'm not at all opposed to deciding that IFTTT is an agent, and that slapping some AI on it makes it an AI agent.

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    • pixl97 2 days ago

      The spectrum of behaviors is why we should probably have an agent classification system where it can fall in particular categories of agent dependant on its abilities.

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Tteriffic 2 days ago

Your right, the “own identity” part is the problem. You can act on your own agency or you act as an agent for someone else.

AI today is only the second. We tell it what we want, it acts by our impetus, but what it does or how it does it, is up to it.

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simonw 2 days ago

Is ChatGPT with its Code Interpreter tool an agent?

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  • bhouston 2 days ago

    Good point. It is a bit of a grey area. It is acting, then executing the code, and sensing the results, and then making changes. So in that sense it is an agent, but it is a little self-contained.

    In a way thinking is sort of agentic in a way, it is talking to itself and sensing it and deciding what to think next...

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