Theyre quickly becoming the next big thing in tech, but what exactly are they?
And why is everyone talking about them all of a sudden?
At Microsoft, the company announced Copilot AI systems that could independently act like virtual employees.
Photo: Daniel Karmann/picture alliance (Getty Images)
Meanwhile, OpenAI unveiled an AI system, GPT-4 Omni, that can see, hear and talk.
Prior to this, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told MIT Technology thathelpful agents hold the technologys best potential.
Google Gemini AI can help you return a pair of sneakers without doing any work!
Its like Jarvis from Iron Man, Tars from Interstaller, or HAL 9000 from A Space Odyssey.
They go a step further than just creating a response like the chatbots weve become familiar with theres action.
That means theyre teaching AI agents to work with various APIs on your gear.
Ideally, they can press buttons, make decisions, autonomously monitor channels, and send requests.
I agree that the future is agents, said Echo AI founder and CEO Alexander Kvamme.
The industrys been talking about it for years and it hasnt materialized yet.
Its just such a hard problem.
There are many decisions in that process you dont even think about, but youre subconsciously making.
As weve seen, large language models (LLMs) are not perfect even in controlled environments.
Altmans new favorite thing is calling ChatGPTincredibly dumb,and hes not exactly wrong.
When youre asking LLMs to work independently out on the open internet, theyre prone to mistakes.
You just have to program that task to a robot.
I suppose when youre building the stuff of science fiction, thats a valid concern.
And theres higher value use for their time in their life.
But again, they have to adapt.
Another use case of AI agents is self-driving cars.
So, what is going to get us to this future where AI can return your shoes?
Firstly, the underlying AI models likely have to get better and more accurate.
That means updates to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot will probably precede fully functioning agent systems.
But there also needs to be updates to the agent systems themselves.
That could be the thing that makes AI significantly more useful in our everyday lives.
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