Intro to AI Agents
ƻ
EuRuKo 2024
Friday, September 13th, 2024
by Andrei Bondarev
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Work
Source Labs LLC
Software-development firm
Clients: VC-backed startups and Enterprises
We <3 Rails
Patterns AI
Applied AI research organization
Open-source work
We <3 Ruby
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GenAI Impact
Before:
1 month
Label data
3 months
Train custom model
3 months
Deploy (optimize)
After:
Few days
Prompt engineering
Few weeks
Basic RAG (if needed)
Few days
Deploy
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Common ML tasks
Classification Named Entity Recognition
Summarization Translation
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Capabilities, an API call away
Adoption
Cost
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(Re-)Rise of AI Agents
1950s 1970s — 1980s 1990s — 2000s
Intelligent Machines
Expert Systems
2010s
Software Agents
2020s
Chatbots
LLMs as Agents
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The Vision
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AI Agent
ƻ
Definition: An autonomous software system capable of perceiving its environment, making decisions, and
taking actions to achieve specific goals.
♻ Environment
awareness
2 Decision-making
Ƣ Action-taking
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Agent vs Assistant
Assistant
Conversational system that continuously takes
directions from a human
Agent
Autonomous system that independently executes a
task (like a background job)
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Agent vs Assistant
Conversational Assistant
Free-for-all input from user
Autonomous Agent
Guided-input from user
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Use-cases
Automating business processes
Mundane low-IQ tasks Personal assistant (co-pilot)
Tasks in a consulting business:
Creating invoices
from timesheets
Categorizing
business expenses
Writing project
proposals (incl.
service offering,
meeting notes)
Writing job
descriptions.
Writing JIRA tickets.
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Components of an AI agent
1. Planning & Reasoning 2. Role Playing
3. Environment Perception 4. Tool Calling
5. Memory 6. Evaluations (Evals)
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Planning
Plan formulation
Decomposing a top-level task into numerous sub-
tasks.
Plan reflection
Leveraging feedback mechanism to reflect upon a
plan and evaluate its merits.
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Reasoning
Cornerstone for problem-solving, decision-making and critical analysis.
Deductive, inductive, abductive are the primary
forms of reasoning.
Reasoning capacity is crucial for solving complex
tasks.
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Chain-of-Thought (CoT)
Forcing the AI to explain it's reasoning.
Without Chain-of-Thought prompting
With Chain-of-Thought prompting
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Role playing
Forcing the AI to adopt certain personality, character, and behavior, via prompt engineering
Ɗ Strict Manager
% Relaxed Manager
Dungeon Master
Ƽ Helpful AI assistant
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Environment perception
"Today is September 13, 2024
"
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Tool/Function Calling
Structured Outputs
Response adhere to a predefined JSON schema
External Tools
Intent detection
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Tool Calling
Use tools to do the following:
Get data from external sources
(APIs)
Get real-time data
Take actions Execute deterministic tasks1
Without Tools
Using the Tool (Code Interpreter)
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Tool Calling
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Memory ("remembering")
Saving the environment, progress, tool calling to memory
Evaluations
Benchmarks
Comparing to a large dataset of question-answer
pairs.
"LLM as a Judge"
Asking LLM whether the answer fits a list of criteria.
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Benchmarks
huggingface
gretelai/gsm8k-synthetic-diverse-405b · Datasets at Hugging Face
We
ʼ
re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through
open source and open science
.
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Reasoning (Next Frontier)
Training models specifically on reasoning
data but…
No good training data
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langchainrb
⭐
Ruby framework for building LLM-powered applications
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Demo
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Nerds & Threads
Selling comfortable nerdy t-shirts for software engineers that work from home
Services
ú Customer
Management
✉ Email Service
Payment
Gateway Service
Order
Management
Inventory
Management
Shipping Service
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Diagram
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Code
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Demo
AI Assistant Chat
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Why would you use this?
Changing requirements on the fly
Text-to-SQL using the Database tool