What is an AI agent?
A model in a loop with tools and guardrails.
Transcript
A plain language model can only produce text. It cannot search, calculate, or act.
Give it tools, and it can ask for them to be run.
An agent works in a loop: think, call a tool, then read the result.
It repeats until the task is done, and then writes the final answer.
Because agents can act, they need guardrails: permissions, step limits, and checks.
For risky actions, a human approves before anything happens.
An agent is a language model in a loop, with tools and limits.
More in this series
1:14How does AI work?
Neurons and weights, learning from mistakes, and predicting the next word.
1:13How does AI read a sentence?
Tokens, embeddings and attention, stacked in layers to score the next token.
1:17What are billions of parameters?
What a parameter is, how big a billion is, and why big models need racks of GPUs.
1:26How do networks learn from errors?
Loss as a landscape, gradient descent and backpropagation.
1:24How is a chatbot trained?
Pretraining, fine-tuning and human feedback turn a text predictor into an assistant.
1:23What does temperature do?
Scores become probabilities, and temperature sharpens or flattens them.
1:19How does AI draw pictures?
Diffusion models add noise to learn, then remove it to create, steered by a prompt.
1:15How can AI use your own documents?
Retrieval-augmented generation: embed, retrieve, augment the prompt, generate.
1:14Why does AI make things up?
Likely is not the same as true: gaps, snowballing errors, and what helps.
1:16How much can an AI remember?
The context window, forgetting, the cost of long inputs, and workarounds.
1:12Can AI be biased?
Skewed data, where bias comes from, proxies, and how to audit and fix it.
1:10What is overfitting?
Underfit, good fit and overfit curves, train vs test error, and the fixes.