Building with AI

Agent

An AI system that works towards a goal over several steps, deciding which tools to use and acting on the results with limited supervision. Definitions vary widely, and the word is used in marketing for simple chatbots too. The more an agent can do, the more its permissions and checks matter.


Where this is taught

2A short history of AI
From Turing and the 1956 Dartmouth workshop through two AI winters, deep learning and the transformer to ChatGPT and agents: how we got here, and what it predicts.

Related terms

API (application programming interface)

A way for software to talk to other software. AI providers offer APIs so developers can send prompts and receive outpu…

API key

A secret string that identifies your account when your code calls an API, and that the bill is charged to. Treat it li…

Agentic workflow

A process where an AI model decides some of the steps itself, rather than following a fixed sequence. It handles messy…

Batch processing

Sending many requests together to be processed in the background over a longer window, rather than waiting for each in…

Benchmark

A standard public test used to compare models, such as sets of exam questions, coding problems or maths puzzles. Usefu…

Benchmark contamination

When benchmark questions or answers have leaked into a model's training data, so a high score partly reflects memory r…

Beyond the definition

Knowing the word is the easy part

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