Glossary

AI agent

Also called: autonomous agent, LLM agent

Definition

An AI agent is a program that uses a language model to decide which steps to take toward a goal, and can call tools to carry those steps out.

In practice

The difference between an agent and a chatbot is not intelligence, it is agency. A chatbot answers; an agent acts, by calling tools such as reading a mailbox, fetching a page, or writing a file, and by deciding for itself which to call next. That loop of decide, act, observe, repeat is the whole idea. What people usually get wrong is assuming an agent needs to be autonomous to be useful. Most agents that earn their keep are narrow and repetitive: one job, on a schedule, producing one deliverable. The ambitious general-purpose assistant is the version that stays a prototype.

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Nearby terms

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