24 Comments
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WvG's avatar

As always, a great and easy to understand write-up. I am subscribed to a lot of publishers on Substack, but you are definitely one of my favourites! Please keep on writing these amazing posts.

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Cameron R. Wolfe, Ph.D.'s avatar

Thank you so much for the kind words!

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Rohit Singh's avatar

This was really long awaited. Tysm ❤️

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Cameron R. Wolfe, Ph.D.'s avatar

No prob! Hope it was helpful!

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Antonio O's avatar

This article is insane, what a great piece.Thank you for the share!! ❤️‍🔥🙌🙏

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L S's avatar

Fantastic writeup.

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Cameron R. Wolfe, Ph.D.'s avatar

Thanks!

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krish's avatar

Thank You for sharing your knowledge and demystifying many aspects to even beginners in AI. I was hooked up while reading this.

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Cameron R. Wolfe, Ph.D.'s avatar

Of course! I'm glad you enjoyed the article, and I hope it helped you learn something new :)

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Adi Pradhan's avatar

Fantastic write up. Super helpful in understanding the current state and the historical context. People forget that this direction was clear after toolformer though I'm sure everyone is surprised how fast it's developed since.

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Cameron R. Wolfe, Ph.D.'s avatar

Totally agree! I wrote a series of write ups on tool usage a super long time ago right after the Toolformer paper was published (I linked all of them in this post). At the time, I remember constantly thinking to myself: "This makes so much sense, I can't believe more people are not focusing heavily on tool use!"

These days, this vision has kind of been realized -- tool use (or more generally agents) are probably the hottest applied / engineering research topic in AI. It just took a little bit for engineers to realize how cool this idea is :)

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Dennis Traub's avatar

This is an incredible deep dive. I really learned a lot, thank you!

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Cameron R. Wolfe, Ph.D.'s avatar

I’m glad it was helpful! Thank you for reading

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Benjamin Riley's avatar

These write ups are so, so useful for understanding what's happening with AI. Thanks for sharing them publicly.

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Cameron R. Wolfe, Ph.D.'s avatar

Of course! Thanks for reading!

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VMSNWFcuQqq1's avatar

good

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VMSgWFcuQlll's avatar

good

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Sanjog Mehta's avatar

Great right up, thanks for explaining this from first principles. Appreciate it.

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Mathew Schroeder (bsides230)'s avatar

This is a nice engineering strategy diagram, not a philosophical or architectural first-principles system. It's like calling a prebuilt LEGO set a "new theory of architecture."

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Simon Torrance's avatar

Hello Cameron - thanks for this. I feel, based on our own experience of deploying advanced Agentic systems that you've missed the following key points:

* Persona and Memory as core components - you focused on reasoning/action but didn't emphasize these as fundamental architectural elements

* Agentic Teams as deliberative committees - you mentioned multi-agent workflows but not the collaborative decision-making model we've pioneered (understandable, since it's super cutting-edge - see here: www.ai-risk.co/insights

* Economic agency - No discussion of agents as assets, NFTs, or autonomous economic actors (we've just started to implement this)

* Decentralized architectures - Missing the blockchain/ownership aspects of agents

* Human-AI hybrid teams - Didn't cover humans as agents within the system (in person or as clones, something else we've done)

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Harrison's avatar

Fascinating read! I’m Harrison, an ex fine dining line cook. My stack "The Secret Ingredient" adapts hit restaurant recipes for easy home cooking.

check us out:

https://thesecretingredient.substack.com

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Nimish Sanghi's avatar

Very well written with curated references.

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Cameron R. Wolfe, Ph.D.'s avatar

Thank you so much!

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