Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines
Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Since 2017 | Week 356 | July 5-11, 2024 | Archive
Shaping Section | 2
What are AI agents?
By Melissa Heikkilä | MIT Technology Review | July 5, 2024
Extractive Summary of the Article | Listen
When ChatGPT was first released, everyone in AI was talking about the new generation of AI assistants. But over the past year, that excitement has turned to a new target: AI agents. Agents featured prominently in Google’s annual I/O conference in May, when the company unveiled its new AI agent called Astra, which allows users to interact with it using audio and video. OpenAI’s new GPT-4o model has also been called an AI agent. And it’s not just hype, although there is definitely some of that too. Tech companies are plowing vast sums into creating AI agents, and their research efforts could usher in the kind of useful AI we have been dreaming about for decades. Many experts, including Sam Altman, say they are the next big thing.
The grand vision for AI agents is a system that can execute a vast range of tasks, much like a human assistant. One vision for agents is that they are multimodal, meaning they can process language, audio, and video. For example, in Google’s Astra demo, users could point a smartphone camera at things and ask the agent questions. The agent could respond to text, audio, and video inputs.
The term “AI agents” has been around for years and has meant different things at different times. There are still many open questions that need to be answered. They can do stuff, but they’re unreliable and still not really autonomous. So humans still need to be actively involved in the process. AI systems still can’t fully reason, which is a critical step in operating in a complex and ambiguous human world. Another limitation is that after a while, AI agents lose track of what they are working on. AI systems are limited by their context windows, meaning the amount of data they can take into account at any given time. To tackle this problem, Google has increased its models’ capacity to process data, which allows users to have longer interactions with them in which they remember more about past interactions. The company said it is working on making its context windows infinite in the future. For embodied agents such as robots, there are even more limitations. There is not enough training data to teach them, and researchers are only just starting to harness the power of foundation models in robotics.
So amid all the hype and excitement, it’s worth bearing in mind that research into AI agents is still in its very early stages, and it will likely take years until we can experience their full potential.
3 key takeaways from the article
- When ChatGPT was first released, everyone in AI was talking about the new generation of AI assistants. But over the past year, that excitement has turned to a new target: AI agents. Agents featured prominently in Google’s annual I/O conference in May, when the company unveiled its new AI agent called Astra, which allows users to interact with it using audio and video. OpenAI’s new GPT-4o model has also been called an AI agent.
- And it’s not just hype, although there is definitely some of that too. Tech companies are plowing vast sums into creating AI agents, and their research efforts could usher in the kind of useful AI we have been dreaming about for decades. Many experts say they are the next big thing.
- The grand vision for AI agents is a system that can execute a vast range of tasks, much like a human assistant. There are still many open questions that need to be answered. They can do stuff, but they’re unreliable and still not really autonomous. So humans still need to be actively involved in the process.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Technology, Artificial Intelligence, AI Assistant, Chat GPT, Large Language Model
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.