Hyperdimensional

The Coming of Agents
First thing’s first: eject the concept of a chatbot from your mind. Eject image generators, deepfakes, and the like. Eject social media algorithms. Eject the algorithm your insurance company uses to assess claims for fraud potential. I am not talking, especially, about any of those things.

Instead, I’m talking about agents. Simply put and in at least the near term, agents will be LLMs configured in such a way that they can plan, reason, and execute intellectual labor. They will be able to use, modify, and build software tools, obtain information from the internet, and communicate with both humans (using email, messaging apps, and chatbot interfaces) and with other agents. These abstract tasks do not constitute everything a knowledge worker does, but they constitute a very large fraction of what the average knowledge worker spends their day doing.

Agents are starting to work. They’re going to get much better. There are many reasons this is true, but the biggest one is the reinforcement learning-based approach OpenAI pioneered with their o1 models, and which every other player in the industry either has or is building. The most informative paper to read about how this broad approach works is DeepSeek’s r1 technical report.