News/Agents
AI21 Debuts Jamba 1.5 With An Eye on Agentic AI
AI21 launches Jamba 1.5: AI21 has unveiled new versions of its Jamba model, combining transformer and Structured State Space (SSM) approaches to enhance AI capabilities. The Jamba 1.5 series includes mini and large versions, building upon the innovations introduced in Jamba 1.0 released in March. Jamba utilizes an SSM approach known as Mamba, aiming to leverage the strengths of both transformers and SSM for improved performance and accuracy. The name Jamba is an acronym for Joint Attention and Mamba architecture, reflecting its hybrid nature. Key features and enhancements: Jamba 1.5 introduces several new capabilities designed to facilitate the development of...
read Aug 23, 2024AI Agents Can Now Make Autonomous Financial Transactions
Skyfire, a San Francisco-based startup, has launched a beta version of its platform designed to enable autonomous AI agents to make financial transactions on behalf of users, potentially revolutionizing the intersection of artificial intelligence and finance. The big picture: Skyfire aims to become the "Visa for AI" by creating an open, global payments protocol that allows AI agents to spend money autonomously within user-defined limits. The company has secured $8.5 million in seed funding to develop its innovative platform. Founded by Amir Sarhangi (CEO) and Craig DeWitt (Head of Product), Skyfire positions itself at the forefront of the emerging "AI...
read Aug 20, 2024Why 82% of Business Leaders Plan to Adopt Multi-Agent Systems to Automate Work
The rise of multiagent AI systems: Organizations are increasingly turning to multiagent systems, a form of generative AI that employs multiple AI agents to automate complex workflows and business processes, as they seek to unlock the technology's value. Multiagent systems coordinate multiple AI agents to accomplish overarching goals, such as automating payroll, HR processes, and software development. A Capgemini survey reveals that 82% of business leaders anticipate integrating multiagent systems into their operations within the next one to three years. These systems show promise in automating complex use cases with highly variable inputs and outputs that have traditionally been challenging...
read Aug 16, 2024The Rise of AI Agents Prompts Calls for ‘Digital Personhood Verification’
The rise of advanced AI agents capable of mimicking human behavior online has sparked discussions about developing "personhood credentials" to verify human identity in digital spaces. The digital imposter problem: As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly sophisticated, distinguishing between human users and AI agents in online interactions is becoming more challenging. Personhood credentials are proposed as a potential solution to verify human identity while preserving privacy in digital environments. The concept aims to address the growing concern of AI agents potentially impersonating humans in various online contexts, from social media to professional platforms. This verification method could help maintain trust and...
read Aug 13, 2024Beyond Assistants: How AI agents Will Transform Industry
AI agents are poised to revolutionize how we interact with artificial intelligence, moving beyond reactive assistants to autonomous, intent-driven systems capable of handling complex tasks without human intervention. This shift is expected to significantly impact businesses across various sectors, prompting organizations to prepare for a new era of AI-driven productivity and innovation. The evolution of AI interaction: Gartner predicts that by 2028, one-third of human interactions with generative AI will involve direct engagement with autonomous, intent-driven agents rather than traditional prompt-based large language models (LLMs). This transition represents a major leap forward from the current landscape of reactive AI assistants...
read Aug 12, 2024OpenDevin Launches, Offers Open-Source Platform for Making AI Agents
OpenDevin, a new open-source platform for developing AI software agents, has been introduced by a team of researchers and contributors from academia and industry. This platform aims to create AI agents capable of interacting with the world in ways similar to human developers, potentially advancing the field of artificial intelligence and software development. Platform capabilities and design: OpenDevin allows for the implementation of new AI agents that can write code, interact with command lines, and browse the web, mimicking the actions of human software developers. The platform provides a sandboxed environment for safe code execution, ensuring that AI agents can...
read Aug 10, 2024New Research Shows How AI Agents Can Learn Faster with Less Data
Researchers at Imperial College London and Google DeepMind have introduced a groundbreaking framework called Diffusion Augmented Agents (DAAG) to enhance the learning efficiency and transfer learning capabilities of embodied AI agents, addressing the critical challenge of data scarcity in training these agents to interact with the physical world. The DAAG framework: A novel approach to embodied AI learning: DAAG combines large language models (LLMs), vision language models (VLMs), and diffusion models to create a powerful lifelong learning system for embodied agents. The framework is designed to enable agents to continuously learn and adapt to new tasks, making more efficient use...
read Aug 6, 2024What Org Structures Are Teaching Us About Multi-Agent System Design
AI organizational structures and performance: Recent experiments explore how structuring AI agent interactions based on big tech company org charts impacts performance on software engineering tasks. A researcher tested six different organizational structures modeled after Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle to evaluate their effectiveness in AI problem-solving scenarios. The study aimed to determine whether corporate-style hierarchies and team structures could enhance AI agents' capabilities in tackling complex software engineering challenges. This novel approach draws parallels between AI systems and human organizational dynamics, potentially offering new insights into optimizing multi-agent AI architectures. Key findings and implications: The experiment revealed...
read Aug 5, 2024How AI Agents are Re-shaping White-Collar Work
The AI labor market transformation: AI is poised to revolutionize white-collar work by addressing three key market attributes: toil, labor market shortages, and margin pressure. AI solutions, often referred to as Service-as-a-Software or AI agents, are targeting repetitive tasks and roles that are difficult to fill and maintain. This shift is particularly appealing in markets facing economic pressures and the need to do more with less. Understanding toil in the workplace: Toil refers to repetitive, necessary but non-strategic work that often leads to high turnover rates in certain job roles. Tasks such as reviewing alerts, triaging leads, and data entry...
read Aug 1, 2024How AI Agents Will Augment Human Decision-Making and Transform the Future of Work
The emergence of AI agents is transforming the way humans interact with and leverage artificial intelligence, with the potential to augment human capabilities rather than replace them. The Dawn of AI Agents: McKinsey & Company believes we are entering a new era where AI is evolving from knowledge-based tools to AI-enabled agents capable of executing complex workflows: These agents use foundation models to move from thought to action, helping people make better decisions by prioritizing and acting on data, especially in large, complex networks. AI agents are sophisticated software entities designed to perceive their environment, make informed decisions, and perform...
read Jul 29, 2024Hype vs. Reality of Autonomous Agents
There has been much talk of late about AI assistants that can act autonomously on behalf of users. Despite the potential of these "AI agents" to disrupt work and social environments, fundamental questions remain about their feasibility given liability issues and the transfer of agency from users to AI. Key issues surrounding deployment: Two critical factors will impact the rollout of advanced AI assistants: Liability concerns arise when AI agents act on behalf of users, raising questions about who is responsible for any harm or damage caused by the AI's actions. Effectively transferring agentic powers from users to AI assistants...
read Jul 26, 2024How AI Assistants Threaten to Disrupt Aggregator Platforms
The tech industry is on the cusp of a significant shift as AI-driven personal assistants like Siri threaten to disrupt the dominance of aggregator platforms such as Amazon, booking.com, and Uber. The rise of aggregators: Over the past decade, aggregator platforms have come to dominate various sectors by providing the most convenient access to services and maintaining a direct relationship with users: Amazon has become the go-to platform for product searches and purchases, with half of all users starting their product searches directly on the site. Aggregators in other sectors, such as booking.com for holidays, Netflix for entertainment, and Uber...
read Jul 17, 2024Saudi Aramco Backs AiXplain’s Mission to Transform Generative AI into Action-Taking Agents
Saudi Aramco's venture arm makes first U.S. AI investment, backing startup AiXplain in a $6.5 million pre-Series A round to develop generative AI agents that can take action and ensure better representation of Arabic languages. Key details of the investment: Wa'ed Ventures, a venture unit of Saudi Arabian oil company Aramco, is investing in San Francisco-based AiXplain as part of a $6.5 million funding round: AiXplain, led by AI industry veteran Hassan Sawaf, plans to use the proceeds to expand its business operations. The startup has raised $16.5 million to date, has early customers, and was profitable last year. AiXplain's...
read Jul 13, 2024LlamaIndex Launches New Platform with Advanced RAG and Multi-Agent Systems
LlamaIndex is ushering in the future of retrieval augmented generation (RAG) for enterprises by offering a platform that helps developers quickly and easily build advanced LLM-powered applications. Improving upon basic RAG systems: LlamaIndex aims to address the limitations of primitive RAG interfaces, which can have poor quality understanding and planning, lack function calling or tool use, and are stateless: Basic RAG systems can make it difficult to productionize LLM apps at scale due to accuracy issues, difficulties with scaling, and the requirement for deep-tech expertise to handle the many parameters. LlamaIndex's platform offers data extraction that turns unstructured and semi-structured...
read Jul 10, 2024CodiumAI Is Pioneering an AI-Powered Code Integrity Platform to Accelerate Enterprise Software Development
CodiumAI is pioneering an AI agent-driven approach to accelerate enterprise application development, recognizing that fully autonomous software development is not yet feasible for complex enterprise requirements. At VentureBeat Transform 2024, CodiumAI is unveiling its new Enterprise platform, which aims to enhance code integrity and developer productivity. Incremental AI agent approach: Rather than attempting to create a single end-to-end solution like Devin, CodiumAI is focusing on integrating many small AI agents into existing developer workflows to handle specific tasks: This approach tackles individual challenges within the complex world of enterprise software development, aiming to accelerate developer productivity and complete tasks more...
read Jul 7, 2024AI Agent Benchmarking Flaws Could Hinder Real-World Applications, Princeton Study Finds
The rapid development of AI agents has the potential to revolutionize real-world applications, but a recent study from Princeton University researchers highlights several shortcomings in current benchmarking practices that could hinder their practical usefulness. Cost vs. accuracy trade-off: Current agent evaluations often fail to control for the computational costs associated with improving accuracy, potentially leading to the development of extremely expensive agents: Some agentic systems generate hundreds or thousands of responses to increase accuracy, significantly increasing inference costs, which may not be feasible in practical applications with limited budgets per query. The researchers propose visualizing evaluation results as a Pareto...
read Jul 5, 2024AI Agents and The Autonomous Future of Human-Computer Interaction
AI agents are the next big focus in AI research, with the potential to autonomously execute a wide range of tasks and revolutionize how we interact with technology: AI agents can make decisions in dynamic environments, acting on natural language commands without supervision to complete complex tasks like planning a vacation or analyzing customer complaints. There are two main categories of AI agents: software agents that run on computers or mobile devices, and embodied agents situated in 3D worlds like video games or robots. Current state of AI agents: While the concept has existed for years, AI agents are still...
read Jul 2, 2024UiPath CEO Envisions AI-Powered Agents Transforming Work, Automating 80% of Tasks
UiPath CEO Daniel Dines envisions a future where AI-powered software agents handle the majority of work tasks, transforming business automation through agentic technology. Bridging the AI gap in real-world environments: UiPath's John Kelleher emphasizes the need to close the gap between the promise of AI and its actual deployment in operational environments: Businesses should view AI as a fabric that can be applied to end-to-end solutions across an enterprise, rather than a single application deployment point. Overcoming the gap requires a combination of technology choices, education, and data architectures that enable effective change management and collaboration between IT and business...
read Jul 2, 2024AI Shifts from Hype to Reality: 6 Debates Shaping Enterprise Adoption in 2024
The shift from hype to reality in enterprise AI is crystalizing as we enter the second half of 2024. Six critical debates are shaping how companies navigate this new landscape and pursue practical implementation of AI technologies. The LLM race plateauing: Performance differences between leading large language models have narrowed, allowing enterprises to select based on price, efficiency and use-case fit rather than chasing the single "best" model. OpenAI and Anthropic's latest models, GPT-4 Turbo and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, showcase only incremental improvements over their predecessors, suggesting the pace of advancement in LLMs is slowing. Experts argue that massive data...
read Jul 2, 2024AI Agents: Unchecked Autonomy Raises Concerns, Demands Proactive Regulation
The emergence of AI agents with the ability to independently work towards goals, interact with the world, and operate indefinitely raises significant concerns about their potential impact and the need for proactive regulation. Key takeaways: AI agents can be given high-level goals and autonomously take steps to achieve them, interact with the outside world using various software tools, and operate indefinitely, allowing their human operators to "set it and forget it": AI agents add up to more than typical chatbots, as they can plan to meet goals, affect the outside world, and continue operating well beyond their initial usefulness. The...
read Jun 29, 2024Ario Raises $16M to Develop “Universal Basic AI” for Personalized Assistance
In a major development for the AI assistant market, startup Ario has raised $16 million to develop what it calls "universal basic AI" – a digital helper accessible to everyone. Ario's unconventional approach: The company, founded by cybersecurity veterans, aims to leverage users' personal data to create highly personalized AI assistants that can save time and provide tailored recommendations: Ario connects to popular apps like Amazon, DoorDash, and Google Calendar to automate household tasks and streamline users' lives. The startup's "adversarial ETL" process helps users collect their own data from major websites and services, which forms the foundation for their...
read May 31, 2024Anthropic Launches AI Agent Tool Framework
Driving the News: Anthropic, a leading AI research company, has announced that AI agent tool capability is now generally available across its entire Claude 3 model family on the Anthropic Messages API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud's Vertex AI. This powerful new capability enables Claude to interact with external tools and APIs, allowing it to perform tasks, manipulate data, and provide more accurate and dynamic responses. https://youtu.be/b77htH1eX-s?si=rcZ7iYZDIw_4SRnT Why It Matters: The launch of tool use represents a significant milestone in Anthropic's mission to develop safe and capable AI systems that can be applied across a wide range of industries and...
read Apr 3, 2024AI in Education: Empowering Students for the Tech Future
As generative AI tools like ChatGPT continue to captivate the public, the education sector has responded with caution, concerned about issues of academic integrity and the potential for biased or inaccurate information. However, Houman Harouni, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, argues that educators must embrace these emerging technologies and find ways to leverage them in the classroom. Case in point: Harouni believes that rather than ignoring or banning AI tools, educators should engage with them directly alongside their students. This allows students to explore the capabilities and limitations of these technologies, while also teaching them how...
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