Comment by ninininino
2 days ago
The problem with just using that definition is that drawing the line of what it means to have "the power to act" or to "act for, or in the place of, another" is subjective.
Most would agree that a system or automation that could receive the instruction "do my entire job for me" and proceed to physically embody a bio-clone of me, walk to my office, impersonate me 40hrs a week, and keep my pay check coming in while I play MMOs would satisfy the definition.
Most would also agree that a computer terminal receiving the command "git push origin main" doesn't qualify as an AI "agent". But in a very loose sense it does do the thing your definition says. It does some git work for me on behalf of me. So we'd argue about what exactly an AI is. Are we just using it as a stand-in for ML model enabled software agents now? Or for LLM+multi-modal transformer enabled models/systems?
Now pick 1000 points in between those two ends of the spectrum and you're gonna find that there is not a single cut-off where some see the transition from "Is an AI Agent" to "Is not an AI agent".
Is an LLM that can take my request to find me a movie showing for the new Transformer movie next Thursday night, buy the ticket, and add it to my calendar an AI agent? Or is that just voice-activated/human-language as input Zapier/IFTT? Is that just a regular ChatGPT prompt with an integration to my Fandango account and GCal?
Or would it need to monitor movie releases and as new movies come out, ask me pro-actively if I want it to go ahead and find time in my GCal and buy a ticket pro-actively?
Or does it need to be a software agent that is run by a movie studio and proactively posts content online to try to spread marketing for that movie ahead of its release?
Does it need to be a long-running software process instantiated (birthed) to a docker pod, given a single goal ("make the Transformers movie more profitable, focusing on marketing"), and then doing all the rest of the planning, execution, etc. itself?
Defining that cut-off is the hard part, or what definition gives us a useful way to determine that cut-off. I'd argue your dictionary definition doesn't really do it.
It all comes down to your definition of "act". Which maybe does split into at least two criteria: the "trigger" (is running "git push" every time I ask it to enough, or does it have to decide to do that on its own, for example by monitoring my workflow) and the "action" (is running "git push" enough, or does it have to be able to order movie tickets?).
On the action my view is fairly lax. Anything that modifies the world counts, which does include a git push run on my computer. Tasks aren't less real just because they have a convenient command line interface.
The trigger is a bit trickier. We expect the agent to have some form of decision-making-process (or at least something that looks and feels like one, to avoid the usual discussion about LLMs). If a human doesn't make decisions they are a tool, not an agent. Same rule for AI agents. But defining the cut-off point here is indeed hard, and we will never agree on one. I'm not at all opposed to deciding that IFTTT is an agent, and that slapping some AI on it makes it an AI agent.
The spectrum of behaviors is why we should probably have an agent classification system where it can fall in particular categories of agent dependant on its abilities.