The Future is AI Agents. No Doubt.

Everybody is talking about them. In fact, no conversation in tech circles goes without the mention of ‘AI agents’ or ‘agent AI’ or ‘compound AI systems’ these days.?

“I am actually convinced that the adoption of agent AI will be faster,” said CP Gurnani, the former CEO of Tech Mahindra and the co-founder of AIonOS, at our MachineCon GCC event, held recently in Namma Bengaluru. AIonOS is an AI startup, which Gurnani started with Rahul Bhatia, the group MD of InterGlobe Aviation (IndiGo).

Gurnani envisions a future where each of us will have a personalised AI avatar. The avatar will be deeply familiar with our daily tasks and activities, enabling it to analyse the business and rule engines and provide invaluable support to enhance productivity and efficiency. Check out the full interview, exclusively on AIM.?

In the past few months alone, there has been a body of research surrounding AI agents. Andrew Ng, too, is obsessed with it and has been busy releasing a series of courses on how to build one.?

Developers’ favourite Andrej Karpathy has also been advocating agent OS for some time now, speaking about how it will transform industries through its ability to automate and optimise complex workflows rapidly and efficiently. “With agent OS, you're able to create multi-agent workflows in a matter of seconds from natural language,” he added.?

Vinod Khosla has been dreaming about it too. He envisions a future in which internet access will mostly be through agents acting for consumers, carrying out tasks, and fending off marketers and bots. “Tens of billions of agents on the internet will be normal,” he wrote.

So, what are AI agents? Simply put, AI agents are autonomous systems that perform complex tasks and make decisions, thereby enhancing productivity, efficiency, and innovation across industries.?

At present, AI agents are being used in various sectors, including coding, healthcare, finance, and legal, and we are already starting to see some early signs of their applications in the real world.?

However, it is easier said than done.?

“Hallucinations block a lot of enterprise use cases,” said Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, in a fireside chat with entrepreneur, investor and startup helper Elad Gil, at GoogleCloudNext, adding that Anthropic is working really hard to reduce the hallucinations present in models.?

“What I expect to see in the next year or two are agents,” he added, saying that, so far, we’ve seen lots of instantiations of agents and not seen anything that is really, really strong. “I think getting something that’s really strong will need additional scale and techniques on top of that,” said Amodei.?

He said the models need to get more reliable because the individual steps must have very low error rates. And a part of that will come from scale. “We need another generation or two of scale before the agents really work," he added.?

Amodei said that as models start to become agents, as they go out in the physical world, and as they take actions on computers, phones, and interfaces autonomously and without humans overseeing them, there will be very substantial risks in this area —“like what guardrails; how do I know this thing didn't introduce a security vulnerability intentionally or by accident?”

Autonomous AI agents will have to wait. Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman said that it won’t be until GPT-6 in 2 years' time that AI models will be able to follow instructions and take consistent action. “I think it’s going to require not just one but two orders of magnitude more computation to train the models.”

As OpenAI CTO Mira Murati said in an interview, the next generation of GPT will be ‘PhD-level’ compared to GPT-3 (toddler) and GPT-4 (high school). She also said the next model will be released in a year and a half.

Early Signs of Autonomous AI Agents?

“A lot of them are basically using humans in the loop to help steer something. So an agent is almost like a junior employee or intern who's coming back and asking you for help,” quipped Amodei. This includes Cognition Labs (Devin) and alike for coding, and Magic.AI by YC-backed Fieldprox, which optimises field service management by intelligently automating task assignments based on performance metrics and geographical proximity.?

Recently, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), in collaboration with AWS, announced the launch of D.A.V.I.D., a generative AI-powered navigator designed to assist clinicians and researchers in real time with questions about clinical trials, patient data, treatments, and outcomes.

A few months ago, the Institute for Future Health unveiled Conversational Health Agents (CHA), a personalised LLM-powered framework designed to assist healthcare professionals with real-time conversational AI capabilities.?

Similarly, in finance, the AI4Finance Foundation released FinRobot, an open-source AI agent platform designed for financial applications, which uses LLMs to automate complex financial tasks and enhance decision-making.

In legal, besides Harvey, which is backed by OpenAI, ContractKen, started by former EXL exec Amit Sharma in 2021, is building the world’s best AI copilot for contracts, assisting legal professionals in corporate legal teams and law firms to draft, review, and negotiate contracts efficiently.?

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