AI Agents 2024 Rewind - A Year of Building and Learning

2024 was quite an eventful year for generative AI and agents! I spent sometime curating the most interesting updates I found along the way (see all of them here - https://multiagentbook.com/news); here are my top 5 trends based on analyzing all 35 entries.

Summary of Top 5 Trends

Here goes:

1. Enterprise Adoption with Pragmatic Implementation

Companies are integrating agents and adopting the term - but primarily as LLM orchestration layers over existing APIs, prioritizing reliability over full autonomy.

2. Rise of "Agent-Native" Foundation Models

Models like OpenAI's o1 and Google's Gemini are now built with inherent capabilities for planning, task decomposition, and tool use - shifting core agent capabilities into the foundation model itself.

3. Interface Automation Dominance

A lot of commercial deployments focused on interface agents - from ChatGPT's screen sharing to Anthropic Claude's computer use, reflecting immediate value in automating UI-based tasks.

4. Evolution to Complex Task Patterns and Multi-agent Frameworks

We've moved beyond simple chains to sophisticated patterns for handling multi-step tasks, supported by frameworks like AutoGen, LangGraph, and CrewAI etc.

5. Benchmark-Driven Progress

New evaluation frameworks like CORE-Bench and WebArena, WindowsAgentArena revealed both achievements and limitations, with specialized agents excelling in narrow domains while general-purpose agents still face challenges.

The full post is here. https://newsletter.victordibia.com/p/ai-agents-2024-rewind-a-year-of-building.

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