by bayindirh | 2025-05-14 10:47:58+00:00
So, I took your word, assumed I knew nothing about Agents and Agentic AI, and started digging. Wikipedia states the following for Agentic AI:

> "Agentic AI is a class of artificial intelligence that focuses on autonomous systems that can make decisions and perform tasks without human intervention."

I can work with that. So we have agents that autonomously react to their environment, changes, or what we can say impulses. They sit there and do what they are designed to do, and do that autonomously. Makes sense. However, this sounds a bit familiar to me. Probably me hallucinating something, so let's dig deeper. There seems to be an important distinction, though:

> "Agentic AI operates independently, making decisions through continuous learning and analysis of external data and complex data sets."

So, we need to be able to learn, evolve, and analyze external and complex data sets. That's plausible, but my hunch is still lingering there, tingling a bit stronger. At this point, for Agentic AI, we need an independent "thing" which can decide, act, learn, and access external data sources to analyze and learn from them. In short, I need to be able to give this Agentic AI a goal, and it accomplishes it automatically with the things at its disposal. Fair enough.

We were discussing (software) agents and their history. So let's pivot more to agents. Again, turning to Wikipedia, we find this sentence:

> "In computer science, a software agent is a computer program that acts for a user or another program in a relationship of agency."

Again, a piece of software that acts for a user or another program. Hmm... They have five basic attributes: 1)are not strictly invoked for a task, but activate themselves, 2)may reside in wait status on a host, perceiving context, 3) may get to run status on a host upon starting conditions, 4)do not require interaction of user, 5)may invoke other tasks including communication. That hunch, though. It feels more like mild kicking. Where do I know these concepts? Somewhere from the past? Nah, I'm hallucinating. You told me that they are new.

As I skim the article and pass "Intelligent Agents" past, I see something very familiar line under "Notions and frameworks for agents" title: "Java Agent Development Framework (JADE)". I know this. Now I remember!

I have used this framework to code a platform where an agent gets orders from a client for a set of items, and submits them to another agent, where other agents send their best prices, and another agent calculates the best combination for the cheapest price. Doing a "combinatorial reverse auction" for a set of items. We had no time to implement feedback-based price adjustment strategies, but the feedback and announcement code were there, so every agent knew how the transaction went. They all were autonomous. A single agent acted on behalf of the user, and the whole platform responded to that without any humans at any step, including final decisions!

That was my Master's thesis. I have also presented it at the IEEE Symposium on Intelligent Agents, IA in Orlando in 2014 [0]!

When did I complete my Master's thesis?

Oh. 2010. 15 years ago.

Alright. This solves it.

Now, on to your second question. Let's put it right here:

> You blindfold a human and prevent him from using any tools and then ask him what tools he used? What do you expect will happen. Either the human will lie to you about what he did or tell you what he didn't do. No different from an LLM.

You're mangling my question here. The question I ask is different:

> Generate me a Python code for solving problem X, then tell me which source repositories you used to generate this code. Cite their licenses, if possible.

All of this information is in the core network for the first part of the problem. LLMs without tool capabilities can generate code, and generate it well. The source of this knowledge came from their training set, which consists of at least "The Stack", and some other data sources on top of that. So, the LLM can generate the code without any tools, but it can't know where the source came from. It's just there, in the core network.

You think the question is stupid, but it's not. This is where all the ethical questions regarding LLM training are rooted. LLMs hallucinate licenses, don't know where the code came from, and whatnot. If you ask me about a code piece in my source code, I can give you the source, the thought process, and design, citing the originality or how I found it elsewhere and got into my codebase. Lying about it would be a big problem in the light of licenses, but LLMs get scot-free because they're just fair using it. Humans can't do the same thing, why LLMs? Because their owners have money and influence? Seems so.

> You didn't store those references in your brain right? You looked that shit up.

No, when I looked that shit up, I recorded where I read it alongside other contexts, including the weather that day in some particular cases. I don't answer "I just know, I don't know how" when people ask me about the source of my knowledge.

This is the difference between humans and LLMs; this thin line is very important.

[0]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7009456