An agent, or something that has agency, is just something that takes some action, which could be anything from a thermostat regulating the temperature all the way up to an autonomous entity such as an animal going about it's business.
Hugging Face have their own definitions of a few different types of agent/agentic system here:
As related to LLMs, it seems most people are using "agent" to refer to systems that use LLMs to achieve some goal - maybe a fairly narrow business objective/function that can be accomplished by using one or more LLMs as a tool to accomplish various parts of the task.
> An agent, or something that has agency, is just something that takes some action, which could be anything from a thermostat regulating the temperature all the way up to an autonomous entity such as an animal going about it's business.
I have seen "agency" used in a much more specific way than this: An agent is something that has goals expressed as states of a world, and has an internal model of the world, and takes action to fulfill its goals.
Under this definition, a thermostat is not an agent. A robot vacuum cleaner that follows a list of simple heuristics is also not an agent, but a robot vacuum cleaner with a Simultaneous Location and Mapping algorithm which tries to clean the whole floor with some level of efficiency in its path is an agent.
I think this is a useful definition. It admits a continuum of agency, just like the huggingface link; but it also allows us to distinguish between a kid on a sled, and a rock rolling downhill.
Hugging Face have their own definitions of a few different types of agent/agentic system here:
https://huggingface.co/docs/smolagents/en/conceptual_guides/...
As related to LLMs, it seems most people are using "agent" to refer to systems that use LLMs to achieve some goal - maybe a fairly narrow business objective/function that can be accomplished by using one or more LLMs as a tool to accomplish various parts of the task.