>"The two main categories I see are people who think AI agents are obviously things that go and act on your behalf—the travel agent model—and people who think in terms of LLMs that have been given access to tools which they can run in a loop as part of solving a problem."
This is exactly the problem and these two categories nicely sum up the source of the confusion.
I consider myself in the former camp. The AI needs to determine my intent (book a flight) which is a classification problem, extract out the relevant information (travel date, return date, origin city, destination city, preferred airline) which is a Named Entity Recognition problem, and then call the appropriate API and pass this information as the parameters (tool usage). I'm asking the agent to perform an action on my behalf, and then it's taking my natural language and going from there. The overall workflow is deterministic, but there are elements within it that require some probabilistic reasoning.
Unfortunately, the second camp seems to be winning the day. Creating unrealistic expectations of what can be accomplished by current day LLMs running in a loop while simultaneously providing toy examples of it.
