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What exactly is an AI agent?
Jacqueline Choi
July 31, 2024
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What's in this week's issue?
🤖 What exactly is an AI agent?
🙊 Whistleblowers accuse OpenAI of ‘illegally restrictive’ NDAs
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AI agents are supposed to be the next big thing in AI, but there isn’t an exact definition of what they are. To this point, people can’t agree on what exactly constitutes an AI agent.
At its simplest, an AI agent is best described as AI-fueled software that does a series of jobs for you that a human customer service agent, HR person or IT help desk employee might have done in the past, although it could ultimately involve any task. You ask it to do things, and it does them for you, sometimes crossing multiple systems and going well beyond simply answering questions.
Seems simple enough, right? Yet it is complicated by a lack of clarity. Even among the tech giants, there isn’t a consensus. Google sees them as task-based assistants depending on the job: coding help for developers; helping marketers create a color scheme; assisting an IT pro in tracking down an issue by querying log data.
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Whistleblowers have accused OpenAI of placing illegal restrictions on how employees can communicate with government regulators, according to a letter obtained by The Washington Post.
Lawyers representing anonymous whistleblowers sent the letter to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Gary Gensler. The letter refers to a separate, formal complaint asking the SEC to investigate OpenAI’s severance, non-disparagement, and non-disclosure agreements.
“The agreements prohibited and discouraged both employees and investors from communicating with the SEC concerning securities violations, forced employees to waive their rights to whistleblower incentives and compensation, and required employees to notify the company of communication with government regulators,” the letter says.
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AI News
📈 The AI financial results paradox (link)
✔️ New AI method enhances prediction accuracy and reliability (link)
💡 Experiment finds AI boosts creativity individually — but lowers it collectively (link)
💸 Anthropic launches $100 million AI fund with Menlo Ventures, ramping up competition with OpenAI (link)
🧠 MIT News: Reasoning skills of large language models are often overestimated (link)
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