As most people understand them, a lot of marketing and imagination. There's some fairly dense theory on the underlying concept that is probably inaccessible to someone without a math degree, and much of this research happened well after my academic days so I cannot comment on a deep level, but I'm extremely skeptical of its attempted implementation in the current market, particularly when language models are at the core of it. From what I understand, an agentic system can exist entirely without LLM's and all the rube-goldberg machinations behind giving it the appearance of working. However, this is the course that every single tech company has gone all in on, so we'll see how it goes. I suspect that LLM's will be discarded in favor of something much better in the mid to far future, but the fact that no one can currently say what that is or even would look like is a little bit concerning to me when the large bets are being made that it will just happen inevitably in more near-future timelines.
Currently it's up to the user to add its own actions, you can find an example where I gave the agents access to ChatGPT (cf link)
Obviously, some default actions will be added in the future :D
link to example: https://github.com/Thytu/Agentarium/blob/main/examples/3_add...
(this being the only sensible terminology definition I’ve seen for which has very definitely been a “fund my startup” marketing term until now: https://www.anthropic.com/research/building-effective-agents)
While all "Agentic" system will likely use some form of function calling, not all function calling is "Agentic". Most implementations are more "Workflows" than "Agents".
stafford beer on cybernetics (also worth mention, norbert weiner): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJ6orMfmorg
Lots of other people start w/ other things but i'm a mgmt minded person so a social engineering + psychology + anthropology oriented lens has always been my anchor.
My first real intro to math where everything clicked was w/ primitive graph theory as it were 2000+ years ago. From there, algebra, geometry, trig, calc, etc# started clicking.
Once you start examining scenarios where there are multiple clones of you that you perhaps cannot tell apart, your memory has been limited, you are facing larger amounts of pain & pleasure that you can handle without going insane, everyone wants the same thing but you also want something different, or someone gets mind-reading powers that might be partial and only work when they reveal their thoughts... then you are analytically working towards the end goal of building a larger catalogue of "everything" & making a theory & terminology out of that.
I would dedicate 2-20 years on the formal work but there's no funding I could get I know of & besides couldn't promise to yield results since foundations yields no results until it does if it ever does.
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A related note: Kolmogorov complexity & finitism go along beautifully but the bit-lifting to calculate memory computational process takes insofar is out of my capacity. Nevertheless you can define a maximum number to ever allowed to exist in a system as Church number & have then perhaps the minimum amount of logical operations required to get there to be the maximum amount of memory your operations can take, closing the system since you lose memory in say substraction to a, b, the process initial size (hello, Kolmogorov) & process memory consumed at most (in any procedure, the smallest procedure being the number itself).
is the new
"AI" -> LLM