Five Things AI: Agents, Agents, Intern, Work, Service-as-a-Software
A truly fascinating week in AI. Read on.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things AI!
This week was a big week for Anthropic! You should make sure to the first article in this edition of Five Things AI and then take a look at the demo videos Anthropic provided. Really interesting stuff and a glimpse of what will come with the wave of AI Agents. And if you always felt like you needed to catch on to the prompt engineering wave, now you can rest assured that the next wave will even bigger and therefore you should read about AI Agents and the developer perspective of it.
The concept of AI Agents has been around for a while and people have been warming up to it, but this week was probably the week where everybody had to see just how huge this concept is. Accordingly, four out of five articles are about AI Agents, or Agentic AI or Agentic Services. Pick your poison and start exploring how this will change your work.
Also, make sure to register for AI.SUMMIT 2024 in Hamburg!
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AI.SUMMIT 2024 - Corporate Edition: The time to adopt AI is now!
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Before you unleash the Agents, read these five articles!
The AI agents have arrived
“It’s easy to imagine using an AI agent to manage your appointments and scheduling, fill out online forms and routine paperwork, draft replies to your emails, and shopping on your behalf. Or it could browse the web on your behalf, preparing a personalized digest for you that means you never have to fight against a paywall ever again.
It’s also easy to imagine an agent with those capabilities setting up spam operations, automating the production of AI slop websites, and overwhelming human-run businesses and institutions with a flood of AI-generated requests.“
AI Agents: A Comprehensive Introduction for Developers
“The best way to think about an AI agent is as a digital twin of an employee with a clear role. When any individual takes up a new job, there is a well-defined contract that establishes the essential elements — such as job definition, success metrics, reporting hierarchy, access to organizational information, and whether the role includes managing other people. These aspects ensure that the employee is most effective in their job and contributes to the overall success of an organization.”
ByteDance intern fired for planting malicious code in AI models
It’s always the intern. On a more serious note, this will be not the only time somebody tries to tamper with AI models trying to inject something that will have huge consequences along the line.
Bots, agents, and digital workers: AI is changing the very definition of work
“Perhaps the rise of AI agents isn’t just a technological shift, but a philosophical one—challenging us to rediscover the essence of our humanity in the face of artificial intelligence.
In dissecting jobs and reassembling them with AI, we’re not merely changing work—we’re evolving our understanding of human value in work itself. This process challenges us to question not just what we do but why we do it, pushing us toward a future where work becomes a true expression of our uniquely human capabilities.”
Generative AI’s Act o1
“The cloud transition was software-as-a-service. Software companies became cloud service providers. This was a $350B opportunity.
Thanks to agentic reasoning, the AI transition is service-as-a-software. Software companies turn labor into software. That means the addressable market is not the software market, but the services market measured in the trillions of dollars.” - this is a really insightful essay published by Sequoia Capital, one of the leading VC companies in the world.
If you missed last week’s edition of Five Things AI, you can read it here:
That’s it for Five Things AI this week! 🤖
— Nico