IMHO, the word agent is quickly becoming meaningless.
The amount of agency that sits with the program vs. the user is something that changes gradually.
So we should think about these things in terms of how much agency are we willing to give away in each case and for what gain[1].
Then the ecosystem question that the paper is trying to solve will actually solve itself, because it is already the case today that in many processes agency has been outsourced almost fully and in others - not at all. I posit that this will continue, just expect a big change of ratios and types of actions.
An agent, or something that has agency, is just something that takes some action, which could be anything from a thermostat regulating the temperature all the way up to an autonomous entity such as an animal going about it's business.
Hugging Face have their own definitions of a few different types of agent/agentic system here:
As related to LLMs, it seems most people are using "agent" to refer to systems that use LLMs to achieve some goal - maybe a fairly narrow business objective/function that can be accomplished by using one or more LLMs as a tool to accomplish various parts of the task.
> An agent, or something that has agency, is just something that takes some action, which could be anything from a thermostat regulating the temperature all the way up to an autonomous entity such as an animal going about it's business.
I have seen "agency" used in a much more specific way than this: An agent is something that has goals expressed as states of a world, and has an internal model of the world, and takes action to fulfill its goals.
Under this definition, a thermostat is not an agent. A robot vacuum cleaner that follows a list of simple heuristics is also not an agent, but a robot vacuum cleaner with a Simultaneous Location and Mapping algorithm which tries to clean the whole floor with some level of efficiency in its path is an agent.
I think this is a useful definition. It admits a continuum of agency, just like the huggingface link; but it also allows us to distinguish between a kid on a sled, and a rock rolling downhill.
> IMHO, the word agent is quickly becoming meaningless. The amount of agency that sits with the program vs. the user is something that changes gradually
Yes, the term is becoming ambiguous, but that's because it's abstracting out the part of AI that is most important and activating: the ability to work both independently and per intention/need.
Per the paper: "Key characteristics of agents include autonomy, programmability, reactivity, and proactiveness.[...] high degree of autonomy, making decisions and
taking actions independently of human intervention."
Yes, "the ecosystem will evolve," but to understand and anticipate the evolution, one needs a notion of fitness, which is based on agency.
> So we should think about these things in terms of how much agency are we willing to give away in each case
It's unclear there can be any "we" deciding. For resource-limited development, the ecosystem will evolve regardless of our preferences or ethics according to economic advantage and capture of value. (Manufacturing went to China against the wishes of most everyone involved.)
More generally, the value is AI is not just replacing work. It's giving more agency to one person, avoiding the cost and messiness of delegation and coordination. It's gaining the same advantages seen where smaller team can be much more effective than a larger one.
Right now people are conflating these autonomy/delegation features with the extension features of AI agents (permitting them to interact with databases or web browsers). The extension vendors will continue to claim agency because it's much more alluring, but the distinction will likely become clear in a year or so.
> Manufacturing went to China against the wishes of most everyone involved
Certainly those in China and the executive suites of Western countries wished it, and made it happen. Arguably the western markets wanted it too when they saw the prices dropping and offerings growing.
AI isn't happening in a vacuum. Shareholders and customers are buying it.
I think people keep conflating agency with agents, and that they are actually two entirely different things in real life. Right now agents have no agency - they do dot independently come up with new approaches, they’re mostly task-oriented.
So we should think about these things in terms of how much agency are we willing to give away in each case and for what gain[1].
Then the ecosystem question that the paper is trying to solve will actually solve itself, because it is already the case today that in many processes agency has been outsourced almost fully and in others - not at all. I posit that this will continue, just expect a big change of ratios and types of actions.
[1] https://essays.georgestrakhov.com/artificial-agency-ladder/