Understanding AI Agents Foundations from Google's Latest Whitepaper

A closer look at what constitutes an Agent

Image by Author (Ideogram.ai)

You’ve probably seen people talking about AI agents everywhere—on social media, blogs, and podcasts. Everyone’s saying that AI agents will change the world.

But what exactly is an Agent?

Recently, the Google team published a whitepaper introducing the concept of Agents. In this article, we’ll simplify the key ideas from the whitepaper to help you understand what an Agent is and what qualifies as one.

Without further ado, let’s start!

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Let’s Talk About Agent

For a few years now, I’ve been fascinated by the concept of agents and have long predicted that they would become a major trend.

Well, here we are—suddenly, everyone’s talking about agents all day. Even without a deep understanding, people call them the holy grail that will transform the world.

And you know what? This time, I think they might be right. Agents will change the world, and I truly believe that.

Let’s get back to business and talk about what an Agent actually is.

When we mention agents here, we’re referring to AI Agents, more precisely LLM-based Agents. It’s important to clarify this because there are many types of agents out there, and not all are the same.

In the Whitepaper, an AI Agent can be defined as an autonomous system that can observe its environment, reason about its goals, and take actions using external tools to achieve a desired outcome.

It’s a shift from the traditional model where the response is limited to the static training data and becomes more dynamic to interact with the world and to act without direct human feedback.

Inherently, Agents contains the following characteristics:

1. Autonomy—Agents can operate without continuous human input.

2. Proactive—Agents can plan and take the next steps to achieve their goals.

3. Goal-Oriented—Agents are designed with specific objectives in mind.

4. Adaptable—Agents able to learn and take actions through cognitive architectures

In short, an Agent is a system capable of reasoning about its actions based on its input.

Now, let’s go beyond the surface—what exactly are the core components of Agents?