What, exactly, is an 'AI Agent'? Here's a litmus test

Post by DebtDeflation » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 2:19 AM UTC

andy99 wrote: post #7

Anthropic has a definition: Workflows are systems where LLMs and tools are orchestrated through predefined code paths. Agents, on the other hand, are systems where LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage, maintaining control over how they accomplish tasks https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-age... While I know it's a marketing term, I think a good distinction is that agents hav…

Post by musicale » Thu, Apr 03, 2025, 6:26 AM UTC

DebtDeflation wrote: post #41

andy99 wrote: post #7

Anthropic has a definition: Workflows are systems where LLMs and tools are orchestrated through predefined code paths. Agents, on the other hand, are systems where LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage, maintaining control over how they accomplish tasks https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-effective-age... While I know it's a marketing term, I think a good distinction is that agents hav…

And the LangChain definition is a further simplification of Anthropic's: "An AI agent is a system that uses an LLM to decide the control flow of an application." What gets left unsaid is whether current SOTA LLMs actually have the reasoning and planning capabilities to do this reliably. I would argue that except for code debugging tasks and simple research tasks (iterative Googling with a web browser and then formatt…

Post by owebmaster » Sun, Apr 06, 2025, 1:50 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #32

This Hacker News thread is already a great example of what always happens when this topic comes up: I count SIX definitions of agents in this thread already, each slightly different from each other but each expressed with a confidence that suggests that the author thinks their definition is clearly the correct one. (The OP did that as well.)