What is an Agent? Let's stop the speculations

[EricGT]

Two related earlier post on this forum

The definition of agent is interpreted differently by different people

Although there are certain areas people converge, but I see different people interpret agents differently. Should we have a common definition and and a common protocol for Agents. I see Langchain came up with a agent protocol and so as Cisco, which they are calling as Internet of Agents. I would like to hear the community’s perspective on this and also if we should have a common body guiding the definition and the protocol of the agents. To me , the definition of agent is any software that can …

Agentic Discovery & Exploration with gpt-4o-mini

I have been reading quite a bit or research on AI Agents, and specially have experimented notebooks from LangChain and LlamaIndex (Agentic RAG) using gpt-4o-mini. I find the WebVoyager research paper particularly interesting together with the LangChain implementation. And using the gpt-4o-mini model is more than sufficient… Any other resources someone can point me to on the topic of AI Agents?

and a related one on the Discourse forum

Renaming AI Persona -> AI Agent

To make matters even worse, some also interchange or differentiate the word assistant with agent.

Saw a blog recently where the person compared agent and assistant to a movie star with both an assistant and agent.

Personally I am sticking with the definition from the AI book.

One of the classic books on AI “Artificial Intelligence : A Modern Approach” by Stuart J. Russell and Peter Norvig (WorldCat) gives

An agent is just something that acts (agent comes from the Latin agere, to do).