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New tools for building agents

openai.com

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Re: New tools for building agents

#121

Post by isoprophlex »

jjfoooo4 wrote: post #118
daviding wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This bit feels like we are being pushed away from the existing API for non-technical reasons? > When using Chat Completions, the model always retrieves information from the web before responding to your query. To use web_search_preview as a tool that models like gpt-4o and gpt-4o-mini invoke only when necessary, switch to using the Responses API. Porting over to the new Responses API is non-trivial, and we already ha…

From their perspective, if they don’t have your data, it’s too easy to switch providers.

Exactly this is what's going on. Moat-building.

Re: New tools for building agents

#122

Post by cpfiffer »

bob1029 wrote: post #78

I don't know how much this API churn is going to help developers who are trying to integrate OAI into real, actual, non-wrapper products. Every vendor-managed state machine that handles conversation, messages, prompt hand-off, etc., has ultimately proven inadequate, presumptive or distracting for my use cases. At the end of the day, all I ever seem to use is the chat completion API with structured outputs turned on.…

This is my sense too.

I haven't really found any agent framework that gives me anything I need above a simple structured gen call.

As you say, most requests to LLMs are (should be?) prompt-in structure-out, in line with the Unix philosophy of doing precisely one thing well.

Agent frameworks are simply too early. They are layers built to abstract a set of design patterns that are not common. We should only build abstractions when it is obvious that everyone is reinventing the wheel.

In the case of agents, there is no wheel to invent. It's all simple language model calls.

I commonly use the phrase "the language model should be the most boring part of your code". You should be spending most of your time building the actual software and tooling -- LLMs are a small component of your software. Agent frameworks often make the language model too large a character in your codebase, at least for my tastes.

Re: New tools for building agents

#123

Post by baxtr »

nsonha wrote: post #108
baxtr wrote: post #5

A bit off topic but the post comes handy: can we settle the debate what an agent really is? It seems like everyone has their own definition. Ok I’ll start: an agent is a computer program that utilized LLMs heutiger for decision making.

There is already a definition in agent oriented programning. It has something to do with own sensors of environment and react autonomously. I find that definition fits agentic AI too. My rudimentary interpretation is anything with its own inner (event) loop.

So it’s just a program?

Re: New tools for building agents

#124

Post by NitpickLawyer »

mrtksn wrote: post #82

I feel like all those AI agent attempts are misguided at their core because they don't attempt to create new ways but replace humans on the legacy systems. This is fundamentally shortsighted because the economy, life and everything is about humans interacting with humans. The current AI agent approach appears to be permutations of the joke about how people will make AI to expand their once sentence to a long nice e-m…

> because the economy, life and everything is about humans interacting with humans.

How many hand crafted, clay bowls, baked in a human powered kiln are you using everyday? Or how many weaved baskets, made out of hand picked sticks?

History has showed that anything that can be automated, will be automated. And everything that can be made "cheaper" or "faster" will as well.

Re: New tools for building agents

#125

Post by mrtksn »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #124
mrtksn wrote: post #82

I feel like all those AI agent attempts are misguided at their core because they don't attempt to create new ways but replace humans on the legacy systems. This is fundamentally shortsighted because the economy, life and everything is about humans interacting with humans. The current AI agent approach appears to be permutations of the joke about how people will make AI to expand their once sentence to a long nice e-m…

> because the economy, life and everything is about humans interacting with humans. How many hand crafted, clay bowls, baked in a human powered kiln are you using everyday? Or how many weaved baskets, made out of hand picked sticks? History has showed that anything that can be automated, will be automated. And everything that can be made "cheaper" or "faster" will as well.

That's not the point though, I'm not anti-automation or anything like that. The point is, using robots on interfaces and systems made for people is not the way to go.

Why would you want to have your swipes on Tinder and your trip planning to Rio be automated through human interface? If it was for legit reasons it would have happened as from machine to machine communications. I'm big fan of the AI agent concept, my objection is that at in its current state people don't think out of the box and propose using the current infrastructure to delegate human functions instead of re-imagining the new world that is possible when working together with AI.

Re: New tools for building agents

#126

Post by zombiwoof »

mortoc wrote: post #94
bob1029 wrote: post #78

I don't know how much this API churn is going to help developers who are trying to integrate OAI into real, actual, non-wrapper products. Every vendor-managed state machine that handles conversation, messages, prompt hand-off, etc., has ultimately proven inadequate, presumptive or distracting for my use cases. At the end of the day, all I ever seem to use is the chat completion API with structured outputs turned on.…

I get the sense that these sorts of tools are more for power users than for software engineers with production AI experience.

Every manager I see now who gave up or was not a good coder is now chomping at the bit to use these tools

Re: New tools for building agents

#127

Post by dazzaji »

I was fortunate to get early access to the new Agent SDK and APIs that OpenAI dropped today and made an open source project to show some of the capabilities [1]. If you are using any of the other agent frameworks like LangGraph/LangChain, AutoGen, Crew, etc I definitely suggest giving this agent SDK a spin.

To ease into it, I added the entire SDK with examples and full documentation as a single text file in my repo [2] so you can quickly get up to speed be adding it to a prompt and just asking about it or getting some quick start code to play around with.

The code in my repo is very modular so you can try implementing any module using one of the other frameworks to do a head-to-head.

Here’s a blog post with some more thoughts on this SDK [3] and some if its major capabilities.

I’m liking it. A lot!

[1] https://github.com/dazzaji/agento6

[2] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dazzaji/agento6/refs/heads...

[3] https://www.dazzagreenwood.com/p/unleashing-creativity-with-...

Re: New tools for building agents

#128

Post by malthaus »

bob1029 wrote: post #78

I don't know how much this API churn is going to help developers who are trying to integrate OAI into real, actual, non-wrapper products. Every vendor-managed state machine that handles conversation, messages, prompt hand-off, etc., has ultimately proven inadequate, presumptive or distracting for my use cases. At the end of the day, all I ever seem to use is the chat completion API with structured outputs turned on.…

outsourcing state to openai & co is great for them as vendor lock-in. the real money in AI will be business- and user-interfacing tools built on top of the vendors and it would be a terrible business decision to not abstract away from the model provider in the background and keep all private data under your domain, also from a data protection / legal point of view

i can understand them trying to prevent their business from becoming a commodity but i don't see that working out for them except for some short term buzz, but others will run with their ideas in domain specific applications

Re: New tools for building agents

#129

Post by swyx »

sippeangelo wrote: post #86
bob1029 wrote: post #78

I don't know how much this API churn is going to help developers who are trying to integrate OAI into real, actual, non-wrapper products. Every vendor-managed state machine that handles conversation, messages, prompt hand-off, etc., has ultimately proven inadequate, presumptive or distracting for my use cases. At the end of the day, all I ever seem to use is the chat completion API with structured outputs turned on.…

I mirror this sentiment. Even their "function calling" abstraction still hallucinates parameters and schema, and the JSON schema itself is clearly way too verbose and breaks down completely if you feed it anything more complex than 5 very simple function calls. This just seems to build upon their already broken black box abstractions and isn't useful for any real world applications, but it's helpful for getting small…

> Even their "function calling" abstraction still hallucinates parameters and schema

huh? sample code please? this should not be true since Structured Outputs came out - literally prevented from generating invalid json

(more: https://www.latent.space/p/openai-api-and-o1)

Re: New tools for building agents

#130

Post by ozim »

Androider wrote: post #107
bob1029 wrote: post #78

I don't know how much this API churn is going to help developers who are trying to integrate OAI into real, actual, non-wrapper products. Every vendor-managed state machine that handles conversation, messages, prompt hand-off, etc., has ultimately proven inadequate, presumptive or distracting for my use cases. At the end of the day, all I ever seem to use is the chat completion API with structured outputs turned on.…

Exactly. You would have to be naive to build a company on top of this kind of API. LLMs are going to be become commodities, and this is OpenAI fighting against that fate as their valuation and continued investment requirements doesn't make any sense otherwise. If you built on the Assistant API, maybe take the hint and don't just rewrite to the Responses API? Own your product, black box the LLM-of-the-day.

Looking at all the „AI specialists” that popped up recently- I have feeling there is enough naivety out there for it to work.
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