From Assistants to Agents in the LLM Era

AI assistants have been in our lives since the 1990s. Building AI agents from LLMs has changed the way we do research, development and deployment of assistants as agents. Agents are AI systems with various degrees of reasoning and planning, that can anticipate user needs, autonomously figure out the steps to fulfil such needs, access knowledge and tools external to the LLM, to accomplish user tasks. They are the new AI assistants in the LLM era. In this talk, I will give an overview of the evolution of AI assistants to AI agents, and outline the challenges we still face today and the opportunities ahead for developing a Family of Agents that span over different modalities and interfaces. As different model architectures emerge in the future, LLMs will remain as an effective tool of building agents, replacing manual design.