I think about agents as being an entity that you can collaborate with. Among other things, it needs 1/ memory, 2/ ability to create and execute long-term plans. One of the best papers that I have read on this topic is the Generative Agents paper by Park [1]

Today's LLMs are kind of like Dory from Finding Nemo - you have to recreate the context every time you do a slightly different task, or when the context window for the LLM is no longer sufficient to remember previous turns in a conversation.

An agent can sit on the other side of a piece of collaborative software that was designed for human collaboration. This is why chatbots are the current "killer app" for AI, we already understand how to collaborate with other people via chat.

Now imagine what we can do with more sophisticated pieces of software like Figma or Excel. Disclosure: I work on the Python in Excel feature and we just announced Copilot for Excel a couple of days ago. [2] Other modalities that excite me are tools like Vision Pro which will be an interesting test bed for multi-modal generative agents.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442

[2] https://twitter.com/john_lam/status/1704886164753363261