One of the inventors of Siri, the original AI agent, wants you to “handle with care” when it comes to artificial intelligence. But are we becoming too cautious around AI in Europe and risking our future?
Agentic AI is just a buzzword for letting AI do things without human supervision. It’s absolutely a recipe for disaster. You should never let AI do anything you can’t easily undo as it’s guaranteed to screw it up at least part of the time. When all it’s screwing up is telling you that glue would make an excellent topping for pizza that’s one thing, but when it’s emailing your boss that he’s a piece of crap that’s an entirely different scenario.
Agentic AI is just a buzzword for letting AI do things without human supervision
No, it isn’t.
As per IBM https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/agentic-ai
Agentic AI is an artificial intelligence system that can accomplish a specific goal with limited supervision. It consists of AI agents—machine learning models that mimic human decision-making to solve problems in real time. In a multiagent system, each agent performs a specific subtask required to reach the goal and their efforts are coordinated through AI orchestration.
The key part being the last sentence.
Its the idea of moving away from a monolithic (for simplicity’s sake) LLM into one where each “AI” serves a specific purpose. So imagine a case where you have one “AI” to parse your input text and two or three other “AI” to run different models based upon what use case your request falls into. The result is MUCH smaller models (that can often be colocated on the same physical GPU or even CPU) that are specialized rather than an Everything model that can search the internet, fail at doing math, and tell you you look super sexy in that minecraft hat.
And… anyone who has ever done any software development (web or otherwise) can tell you: That is just (micro)services. Especially when so many of the “agents” aren’t actually LLMs and are just bare metal code or databases or what have you. Just like how any Senior engineer worth their salt can point out that isn’t fundamentally different than calling a package/library instead of rolling your own solution for every component.
The idea of supervision remains the same. Some orgs care about it. Others don’t. Just like some orgs care about making maintainable code and others don’t. And one of the bigger buzz words these days is “human in the loop” to specifically provide supervision/training data.
But yes, it is very much a buzzword.
Hat on top of a hat technology. The underlying problems with LLMs remain unchanged, and “agentic AI” is basically a marketing term to make people think those problems are solved. I realize you probably know this, I’m just kvetching.
