A 10-Minute Template to Build an AI Assistant on HuggingFace

And why you should build yours today

All images are by the author via screenshots and Midjourney.

AI agents are the next big thing in the AI scene. Imagine fully self-driving cars, bots doing your taxes, and AI tutors teaching your kids.

“Hey Jarvis! Walk the dog please, book a trip for next weekend, and while you’re at it, go double my income.”

But let’s be real. Agents — and I mean fully autonomous agents — are far from being solved. That’s because agency involves planning, world models, and resource management — skills Machine Learning sucks at.

It’s so hard to build autonomous agents that companies are either changing the definition of “agent” or trying to hack their way around it.

Some stitched together two clunky LLMs and pretended they figured out agency (Hi AutoGPT). Others shared fake demos boasting about half-baked capabilities (hello Devin).

It’s not all hype and empty words though. A few actors are trying to get close, giving us a glimpse of what agents could look like — and…