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What exactly are AI Agents?
Breaking down where we are with AI Agents and what’s coming in 2025
Right now, at the start of 2025, we have two major trends in AI: reasoning and agents. Recently, a lot of the focus has shifted to reasoning models, especially the controversies surrounding Deepseek’s open-source R1 model.
However, I think this is a mistake. Not that the models aren’t incredible on their own, setting new benchmarks for artificial intelligence. It’s more that they are “just” an iteration of what we’ve been seeing for the past two years. Agents are a new paradigm altogether. Getting PhD-level answers in chat is one thing. Having a PhD level coworker is another thing altogether.
I see people talking about agents in almost every context you can imagine, and it’s starting to sound like a replacement for the word AI itself. So even if just for my own sanity, I wanted to try and formalize a useful framework for how to think about agents today and what to expect in 2025 and beyond.
The differences between Chatbots and Agents
The logical place to start is to draw some level of distinction to the chatbots we’re all familiar with by now. Below is an attempt to visualize how the inner process of an agent might differ from a chatbot.
