{"id":668866,"date":"2025-05-13T12:49:26","date_gmt":"2025-05-13T09:49:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/even-a16z-vcs-say-no-one-really-knows-what-an-ai-agent-is\/"},"modified":"2025-05-13T12:49:26","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T09:49:26","slug":"even-a16z-vcs-say-no-one-really-knows-what-an-ai-agent-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/even-a16z-vcs-say-no-one-really-knows-what-an-ai-agent-is\/","title":{"rendered":"Even a16z VCs say no one really knows what an AI agent is"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Buzzwords that are stretched to the point of being meaningless are as old as the tech industry itself. The top current one is \u201cAI agent\u201d and its variants, like \u201cagentic.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, unsurprisingly,\u00a0no one really knows what an AI agent is.\u00a0Even people with software engineering backgrounds who work for Andreessen Horowitz, one of the premier venture capital firms madly funding AI startups, say that there\u2019s no agreed-upon definition.<\/p>\n

Three a16z infrastructure investment partners \u2014 Guido App<\/a>enzeller, Matt Bornstein, and Yoko Li \u2014 tried to come up with their own definition of agent during a recent podcast episode called\u00a0\u201cWhat Is an AI Agent?\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

For perspective, a16z, backer of such hot AI companies as OpenAI and Anysphere (maker of Cursor), is so gung-ho on the AI opportunity that it\u2019s reportedly attempting to raise a $20 billion mega-fund to invest even more heavily in the sector, sources told Reuters<\/a> last month. Back in September, two other a16z VCs explained the firm\u2019s excitement, writing on its corporate blog:<\/a> \u201cWe believe every white-collar role will have an AI copilot. Some of these roles will be fully automated with AI agents.\u201d<\/p>\n

To cash in on the buzz, \u201ca continuum\u201d of AI startups are describing their products as agents, Appenzeller says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe simplest thing that I\u2019ve heard being called an agent is basically just a clever prompt on top of some kind of knowledge base,\u201d he said. This so-called agent takes a question from a human, then fetches a \u201ccanned\u201d response, such as with IT help desk support.<\/p>\n

But lately, companies that make agents, or want to make them, have been describing them as human worker replacements.<\/p>\n

To really do that, their AI software would have to be \u201csomething close to AGI,\u201d Appenzeller says, which means \u201cit needs to persist over long periods of time\u201d and \u201cit needs to work independently on problems.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet such a thing \u201cdoesn\u2019t work yet,\u201d both he and Li said.<\/p>\n

The reality is that getting this nascent AI agent tech\u00a0to work reliably well has been a surprisingly hard journey, Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, the CEO of sales AI agent company Artisan, told TechCrunch last month. Carmichael-Jack is still hiring humans, despite his startup\u2019s viral \u201cstop hiring humans\u201d ad campaign.<\/p>\n

For an AI to become a true human worker replacement, there are significant technical issues to solve, such as persistent long-term memory (and costs associated with that), and stomping out hallucinations.\u00a0Because no company wants to hire an employee \u2014 human or artificial \u2014 who can\u2019t remember a previous conversation and who also randomly lies.<\/p>\n

During the podcast, the a16z trio did land on a solid definition of what\u2019s possible today. As Li described, an AI agent is a reasoning, multi-step LLM with a dynamic decision tree.<\/p>\n

In other words, she said, an agent isn\u2019t a bot that just does a task when asked; it must also be able to make decisions about the task and take action autonomously, like grab a list of prospects from a database, decide which ones to email, and write the emails. Or write code and decide where to insert it.<\/p>\n

As for whether agents could actually replace humans in the foreseeable future, all three VCs agreed they could be used to handle some tasks humans do now, just like automation has always done. But this may actually lead to companies hiring more human workers, not fewer, as productivity rises.<\/p>\n

Bornstein said he can\u2019t envision a time \u2014 given the current state of agents \u2014 when humans will be unnecessary. From \u201cour perch in Silicon Valley,\u201d the tech industry can \u201cforget\u201d that most people have jobs that require human creativity and \u201cthinking,\u201d he described. To replace humans with a bot, \u201cI\u2019m just not sure that even is kind-of theoretically possible,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Still, such human replacement rhetoric \u2014 often done for marketing\/business model and\/or pricing reasons \u2014 is \u201ca big reason for the confusion we\u2019re experiencing now,\u201d Bornstein says.<\/p>\n

The upshot is, if those seeing all the most cutting-edge uses of AI agents are skeptical about the boldest claims AI agent companies are making today, that\u2019s probably a good sign the rest of us should be, too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Buzzwords that are stretched to the point of being meaningless are as old as the tech industry itself. The top current one is \u201cAI agent\u201d and its variants, like \u201cagentic.\u201d So, unsurprisingly,\u00a0no one really knows what an AI agent is.\u00a0Even people with software engineering backgrounds who work for Andreessen Horowitz, one of the premier venture…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":668867,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/GettyImages-924636730.jpg?resize=1200,1000","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[77337,77473,151873,151477],"class_list":["post-668866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-ai","tag-andreessen-horowitz","tag-ai-agents","tag-venture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=668866"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/668866\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/668867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=668866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=668866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=668866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}