What are AI agents?

When ChatGPT was first released, everyone in AI was talking about the new generation of AI assistants. But over the past year, that excitement has turned to a new target: AI agents. Many experts, including Sam Altman, say they are the next big thing. In this edition of What’s Next in Tech, learn what AI agents are and how you can use them.

TODAY: Deepfakes are proliferating online thanks to advances in generative AI. Join MIT Technology Review reporters and editors for a fascinating discussion on LinkedIn Live about the rise of deepfakes including the risks they pose and some interesting positive uses. Register for free.

The next big thing is AI tools that can do more complex tasks. Here’s how they will work.

AI Agents featured prominently in Google’s annual I/O conference in May, when the company unveiled its new AI agent called Astra, which allows users to interact with it using audio and video. OpenAI’s new GPT-4o model has also been called an AI agent.??

And it’s not just hype, although there is definitely some of that too. Tech companies are plowing vast sums into creating AI agents, and their research efforts could usher in the kind of useful AI we have been dreaming about for decades.?

The grand vision for AI agents is a system that can execute a vast range of tasks, much like a human assistant. In the future, it could help you book your vacation, but it will also remember if you prefer swanky hotels, so it will only suggest hotels that have four stars or more and then go ahead and book the one you pick from the range of options it offers you. It will then also suggest flights that work best with your calendar, and plan the itinerary for your trip according to your preferences. It could make a list of things to pack based on that plan and the weather forecast. It might even send your itinerary to any friends it knows live in your destination and invite them along. In the workplace, it could analyze your to-do list and execute tasks from it, such as sending calendar invites, memos, or emails.?

These agents could also make processes smoother for businesses and public organizations, says David Barber, the director of the University College London Centre for Artificial Intelligence. For example, an AI agent might be able to function as a more sophisticated customer service bot. The current generation of language-model-based assistants can only generate the next likely word in a sentence. But an AI agent would have the ability to act on natural-language commands autonomously and process customer service tasks without supervision. For example, the agent would be able to analyze customer complaint emails and then know to check the customer’s reference number, access databases such as customer relationship management and delivery systems to see whether the complaint is legitimate, and process it according to the company’s policies, Barber says.?

Read the story to learn more about how AI agents work and when you can try one out.

Why does AI hallucinate? Will supershoes make you run faster? How did gamification take over the world? In our Play issue, we examine these questions and a whole lot more. Subscribe today to save up to 17% and explore the full issue.

Get ahead with these related stories:

1. How to use AI to plan your next vacation — AI tools can be useful for everything from booking flights to translating menus.
2. A way to let robots learn by listening will make them more useful — For robots to move beyond warehouses and into homes, they’ll need to navigate using more than just vision.
3. Why does AI hallucinate?—The tendency to make things up is holding chatbots back. But that’s just what they do.

Image: Stephanie Arnett/MIT Technology Review | Getty