Inauguration

“Inauguration” – a cartoon that illustrates the evolution from bots to AI agents.

We are all quite familiar with bots … whether it is the form of emails that are instantly recognizable as faux personal or the chat bots that frustratingly push us down paths rarely relevant to our call needs.

These bots are deterministic, they operate on predefined rules and scripts, meaning that for a given input, they always produce the same output.

The development of large language models and access to large scale compute has allowed for a step change to new AI agents that are probabilistic, which means they are designed to solve problems. The characteristic of these agents is that they can act autonomously, are adaptable, proactive and use learning-based approaches to evaluate options.

This means that they can be more helpful, by solving problems and originating ideas that can pull from infinitely large sources of data than our own brains.

While the downside is that it will be harder to distinguish agent vs human interaction, for example your first player game might be filled with AI agents or phishing scams will be even more convincing.