Recent massive investments by tech giants almost guarantee that we will soon have an ecosystem of autonomous agents before us. But what is an “autonomous agent”?
Sebastian Thielkeplatform economics leader at AWS, describes it like this (paraphrasing): “An autonomous agent reacts to environmental stimuli, is proactive in pursuit of a goal, has social interaction capabilities, and can continually learn and improve.” Wikipedia offers a similar definition: “autonomous agents are computational systems that inhabit a complex dynamic environment, perceive and act autonomously in this environment, and, in doing so, achieve a set of goals or tasks for which they are designed.” And in a previous article, I offered the following definition that I think captures both: Autonomous agents use agent ai (sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning) to plan and execute tasks independently.
With that out of the way, I want to get to the main focus of this article: What is the architecture of an autonomous agent (hereinafter called “agent”) and what are its main components? What capabilities must be implemented to create an “intelligent” agent that can plan and execute tasks? And since no agent is alone, but rather works in an ecosystem of…
