OpenAI’s ChatGPT is simple enough to use: You type in a request and get a response that may be helpful and sounds convincingly human. Yet it has severe limitations as a practical tool. It still generally doesn’t have access to the internet (and, in fact, its training data stops sometime in 2021), isn’t designed to remember queries from conversation to conversation, isn’t all that factually reliable, and can only generate a single answer for each prompt.
Where to next? Researchers and AI enthusiasts seeking the next phase of the current chatbot hype cycle have begun to coalesce around another idea: so-called AI agents, software that connects to large language models such as the one that powers ChatGPT (and perhaps various internet services or even payment methods, too) and, after being assigned a goal by a human, comes up with a series of tasks and carries them out on its own in an effort to reach that objective.
This hints at a future where AI agents could be acting autonomously across the internet, carrying out a wide range of tasks however they see fit. Those who are most enthusiastic about AI agents see them as the closest thing yet to artificial general intelligence, or AGI, the long-sought goal of creating software that can learn and carry out any intellectual task a human can.
