The keywords that are stretched to the point of being meaningless are as old as the technology industry itself. The top current is “Ai Agent” and its variants, such as “Agentic”.
So it’s not surprising, no one really knows what an AI agent is. Even people with a mechanical software background working for Andreessen Horowitz, one of the leading business capital companies funding crazy AI companies, say there is no agreed definition.
Three A16Z Infrastructure Investment Partners – Guido Appenzeller, Matt Bornstein and Yoko Li – attempted to find their own definition of agent during a recent podcast episode called “What is an AI agent?”
For the perspective, the A16Z, a supporter of such hot AI companies such as Openai and Anysphere (manufacturer of the runner), is so Gung-Ho for the AI opportunity that it is reportedly trying to gather a mega-fund 20 billion dollars to invest even more in the field, Reuters Last month. In September, two other A16Z VCs explained the company’s enthusiasm, writing his corporate blog: “We believe that every role of white collar will have a copilot AI. Some of these roles will be fully automated with AI agents.”
To redeem the buzz, AI’s newly established “a continuous” of the newly established companies describe their products as agents, says Appenzeller.
“The simplest thing I’ve heard that he is called an agent is basically just a clever exhortation over some kind of knowledge basis,” he said. This so -called agent receives a question from a man, then brings a “canned” answer, as with the support of a helping office.
But recently, companies that make agents or want to do them describe them as replacements of a human worker.
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To do this, the AI software should be “something close to AGI”, says Appenzeller, which means that “it must insist on long periods” and “must work independently of problems”.
However, such a thing “doesn’t work yet,” he and Lee said.
The reality is that the execution of this budding AI Agent Tech to work reliably was a surprisingly hard trip, Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, CEO of AI Agent Artisan, told Techcrunch last month. Carmichael-Jack still hires people, despite the campaign of starting the viral “Stop Hiring Humans”.
To make a true replacement of a human worker, there are important technical issues for resolution, such as persistent long -term memory (and costs associated with it) and the launch of illusions. Because no company wants to hire an employee – human or artificial – who can not remember a previous discussion and who is also accidental.
During podcast, the A16Z trio landed in a constant definition of what is possible today. As Li described, an AI agent is a multi -step LLM reasoning with a dynamic decision tree.
In other words, he said, an agent is not a bot that just does a job when asked. It must also be able to make work decisions and take autonomous action, such as grabbing a list of prospects from a database, deciding which one is to email and write the emails. Or write code and decide where to enter it.
As for whether agents could really replace people in the foreseeable future, all three VCs agreed that they could be used to handle certain tasks that people do now, as well as automation has always done. But this can actually lead to companies that hire more human workers, no less, as productivity increases.
Bornstein said that he cannot envision a time – given the current situation of factors – when people are unnecessary. From “Perch in Silicon Valley”, the technology industry may “forget” that most people have jobs that require human creativity and “thought”, he described. To replace man with a bot, “I’m not just sure even theoretically possible,” he said.
Still, such a rhetorical replacement – often done for marketing/business model and/or pricing – is “a great reason for the confusion we are experiencing now,” says Bornstein.
The upshot is, if those who see all the most innovative uses of AI agents are skeptical about the boldest claims made by AI Agent today, this is probably a good sign that should be the rest.
