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For technology adopters looking for the next big thing, agentic AI is the future. At least, that’s what the marketing pitches and tech industry T-shirts say. What makes an artificial intelligence product agentic depends on who’s selling it. But the promise is usually that it’s a step beyond today’s generative AI chatbots. Chatbots, however useful, are all talk and no action. They can answer questions, retrieve and summarize information, write papers, and generate images, music, video, and lines of code. AI agents, by contrast, are supposed to be able to take actions on a person’s behalf. But if you’re confused, you’re not alone. Google searches for agentic have skyrocketed from near obscurity a year ago to a peak earlier this fall. A new report Tuesday by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Boston Consulting Group, who surveyed more than 2,000 business executives around the world, describes agentic AI as a new class of systems that can plan, act, and learn on their own. They are not just tools to be operated or assistants waiting for instructions, says the MIT Sloan Management Review report. “Increasingly, they behave like autonomous teammates, capable of executing multistep processes and adapting as they go. How to know if it’s an AI agent or just a fancy chatbot AI chatbots such as the original ChatGPT that debuted three years ago this month rely on systems called large language models that predict the next word in a sentence based on the huge trove of human writings they’ve been trained on. They can sound remarkably human, especially when given a voice, but are effectively performing a kind of word completion. That’s different from what AI developers including ChatGPT’s maker, OpenAI, and tech giants like Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce have in mind for AI agents. A generative AI-based chatbot will say, Here are the great ideas and then be done, said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Agentic AI at Amazon Web Services, in an interview this week. Its useful, but what makes things agentic is that it goes beyond what a chatbot does. Sivasubramanian, a longtime Amazon employee, took on his new role helping to lead work on AI agents in Amazon’s cloud computing division earlier this year. He sees great promise in AI systems that can be given a high-level goal and break it down into a series of steps and act upon them. I truly believe agentic AI is going to be one of the biggest transformations since the beginning of the cloud, he said. For most consumers, the first encounters with AI agents could be in realms like online shopping. Set a budget and some preferences and AI agents can buy things or arrange travel bookings using your credit card. In the longer run, the hope is that they can do more complex tasks with access to your computer and a set of guidelines to follow. Id love an agent that just looked at all my medical bills and explanations of benefits and figured out how to pay them, or another one that worked like a personal shield fighting off email spam and phishing attempts, said Thomas Dietterich, a professor emeritus at Oregon State University who has worked on developing AI assistants for decades. Dietterich has some quibbles with certain companies using agentic to describe any action a computer might do, including just looking things up on the web, but he has no doubt that the technology has immense possibilities as AI systems are given the freedom and responsibility to refine goals and respond to changing conditions as they work on people’s behalf. We can imagine a world in which there are thousands or millions of agents operating and they can form coalitions, Dietterich said. Can they form cartels? Would there be law enforcement (AI) agents? Agentic is a trendy buzzword based on an older idea Milind Tambe has been researching AI agents that work together for three decades, since the first International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems gathered in San Francisco in 1995. Tambe said he’s been amused by the sudden popularity of agentic as an adjective. Previously, the word describing something that has agency was mostly found in other academic fields, such as psychology or chemistry. But computer scientists have been debating what an agent is for as long as Tambe has been studying them. In the 1990s, people agreed that some software appeared more like an agent, and some felt less like an agent, and there was not a perfect dividing line, said Tambe, a professor at Harvard University. Nonetheless, it seemed useful to use the word agent to describe software or robotic entities acting autonomously in an environment, sensing the environment, reacting to it, planning, thinking. The prominent AI researcher Andrew Ng, co-founder of online learning company Coursera, helped advocate for popularizing the adjective agentic more than a year ago to encompass a broader spectrum of AI tasks. At the time, he also appreciated that mainly technical people were describing it that way. When I see an article that talks about agentic workflows, Im more likely to read it, since its less likely to be marketing fluff and more likely to have been written by someone who understands the technology, Ng wrote in a June 2024 blog post. Ng didn’t respond to requests for comment on whether he still thinks that. Matt O’Brien, AP technology writer
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A widely used Internet infrastructure company said that it has resolved an issue that led to outages impacting users of everything from ChatGPT and the online game League of Legends,” to the New Jersey Transit system early Tuesday. Around 10 a.m. ET, Cloudflare said it was continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal. Other platforms that experienced outages Tuesday included the social media site X, Shopify, Dropbox, Coinbase, and the Moody’s credit ratings service. Moody’s website displayed an Error Code 500 and instructed individuals to visit Cloudflare’s website for more information. New Jersey Transit said parts of its digital services including njtransit.com, may be temporarily unavailable or slow to load. Cloudflare, based in San Francisco, provides internet infrastructure that protects websites from online threats and helps them run more smoothly. Last month, Microsoft had to deploy a fix to address an outage of its Azure cloud portal that left users unable to access Office 365, Minecraft, and other services. The tech company wrote on its Azure status page that a configuration change to its Azure infrastructure caused the outage. And Amazon experienced a massive outage of its cloud computing service in October. The company resolved the issue, but the outage took down a broad range of online services, including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming, and financial platforms. Michelle Chapman, AP business writer
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Meta Platforms has been spending too aggressively on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and that will affect the tech giant’s profitability, according to a new investor note from Wall Street analyst firm MoffettNathanson. The note, published on Tuesday, points out that Metas stock price (Nasdaq: META) has fallen almost 20% over the past month or so, exacerbated by its most recent earnings results, which were released on October 29. MoffettNathanson has been a staunch defender of the Facebook and Instagram parent company, even when its shares have dipped in the past. But on Tuesday, analysts at the firm wrote, we were obviously too complacent in our investment advice.” Why is Meta spending so much on AI? Meta along with fellow Big Tech firms including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google parent company Alphabet are in a high-stakes race to build out infrastructure and invest in the talent they see as necessary to compete in a world being transformed by generative AI. However, investors and many experts have expressed concerns that we may be in an AI bubble similar to the one seen during the dotcom era. So the question is whether these investments will pay off in the long run. To be crystal clear, we feel that this time is different and that defending the stock even at this level is harder because of the ramping of the massive incremental bet that Meta, without a cloud business or pre-existing enterprise assets, has been making in building out a Meta Superintelligence business, the note says. Given the outlook, the issue from here is that even with strong top-line expectations, Q4 and 2026 margins will likely compress. In other words, MoffettNathansons team feels that Meta is overspending on AI, and it could come back to bite investors. Despite the relatively harsh words, the firm still rates Meta’s stock as a buy, though it has adjusted its price target, dropping it from $875 to $750. window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}); Meta, and much of tech overall, has significantly increased its capital expenditures in the wake of the AI revolution. But according to the note, Meta is “trying to punch above its weight” when compared to its peers. Although the company is spending a similar amount on AI infrastructure, it does not have a cloud platform like Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon, the analysts point out. MoffettNathanson projects that Meta’s capex-to-revenue ratio will hit 47% next year. By comparison, Microsofts is 29%, Alphabets is 26%, and Amazons is 16%, MoffettNathanson estimates. Meta lacks a comparable coherent pathway for monetizing GenAI directly, the firm says. Shares of Meta are trending downward this week along with the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite as investors await tomorrow’s highly anticipated earnings report from AI chip giant Nvidia. Meta shares are down roughly 2% year to date.
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