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Agents are the future AI companies promise — and desperately need

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Agents are the future AI companies promise — and desperately need

Humans have automated tasks for centuries. Now, AI companies see a path to profit in harnessing our love of efficiency, and they’ve got a name for their solution: agents. 

AI agents are autonomous programs that perform tasks, make decisions, and interact with environments with little human input, and they’re the focus of every major company working on AI today. Microsoft has “Copilots” designed to help businesses automate things like customer service and administrative tasks. Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian recently outlined a pitch for six different AI productivity agents, and Google DeepMind just poached OpenAI’s co-lead on its AI video product, Sora, to work on developing a simulation for training AI agents. Anthropic released a feature for its AI chatbot, Claude, that will let anyone create their own “AI assistant.” OpenAI includes agents as level 2 in its 5-level approach to reach AGI, or human-level artificial intelligence.

Obviously, computing is full of autonomous systems. Many people have visited a website with a pop-up customer service bot, used an automated voice assistant feature like Alexa Skills, or written a humble IFTTT script. But AI companies argue “agents” — you’d better not call them bots — are different. Instead of following a simple, rote set of instructions, they believe agents will be able to interact with environments, learn from feedback, and make decisions without constant human input. They could dynamically manage tasks like making purchases, booking travel, or scheduling meetings, adapting to unforeseen circumstances and interacting with systems that could include humans and other AI tools.

Artificial intelligence companies hope that agents will provide a way to monetize powerful, expensive AI models. Venture capital is pouring into AI agent startups that promise to revolutionize how we interact with technology. Businesses envision a leap in efficiency, with agents handling everything from customer service to data analysis. For individuals, AI companies are pitching a new era of productivity where routine tasks are automated, freeing up time for creative and strategic work. The endgame for true believers is to create AI that is a true partner, not just a tool.

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“What you really want,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told MIT Technology Review earlier this year, “is just this thing that is off helping you.” Altman described the killer app for AI as a “super-competent colleague that knows absolutely everything about my whole life, every email, every conversation I’ve ever had, but doesn’t feel like an extension.” It can tackle simple tasks instantly, Altman added, and for more complex ones, it will attempt them but return with questions if needed. Tech companies have been trying to automate the personal assistant since at least the 1970s, and now, they promise they’re finally getting close.

At an OpenAI press event ahead of the company’s annual Dev Day, head of developer experience Romain Huet demonstrated the company’s new Realtime API with an assistant agent. Huet gave the agent a budget and some constraints for buying 400 chocolate-covered strawberries and asked it to place an order via a phone call to a fictitious shop.

The service is similar to a Google reservation-making bot called Duplex from 2018. But that bot could only handle the simplest scenarios — it turned out a quarter of its calls were actually made by humans.

While that order was placed in English, Huet told me he gave a more complex demo in Tokyo: he prompted an agent to book a hotel room for him in Japanese where it would handle the conversation in Japanese and then call him back in English to confirm it’s done. “Of course, I wouldn’t understand the Japanese part — it just handles it,” Huet said.

But Huet’s demo immediately sparked concerns in the room full of journalists. Couldn’t the AI assistant be used for spam calls? Why didn’t it identify itself as an AI system? (Huet updated the demo for the official Dev Day, an attendee says, making the agent identify itself as “Romain’s AI Assistant.”) The unease was palpable, and it wasn’t surprising — even without agents, AI tools are already being used for deception.

There was another, arguably more immediate problem: the demo didn’t work. The agent lacked enough information and incorrectly recorded dessert flavors, causing it to auto-populate flavors like vanilla and strawberry in a column, rather than saying it didn’t have that information. Agents frequently run into issues with multi-step workflows or unexpected scenarios. And they burn more energy than a conventional bot or voice assistant. Their need for significant computational power, especially when reasoning or interacting with multiple systems, makes them costly to run at scale.

AI agents offer a leap in potential, but for everyday tasks, they aren’t yet significantly better than bots, assistants, or scripts. OpenAI and other labs aim to enhance their reasoning through reinforcement learning, all while hoping Moore’s Law continues to deliver cheaper, more powerful computing.

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So, if AI agents aren’t yet very useful, why is the idea so popular? In short: market pressures. These companies are sitting on powerful but expensive technology and are desperate to find practical use cases that they can also charge users for. The gap between promise and reality also creates a compelling hype cycle that fuels funding, and it just so happens that OpenAI raised $6.6 billion right as it started hyping agents.

AI agent startups have secured $8.2 billion in investor funding over the last 12 months

Big tech companies have been rushing to integrate all kinds of “AI” into their products, but they hope AI assistants in particular could be the key to unlocking revenue. Huet’s AI calling demo outpaces what models can currently do at scale, but he told me he expects features like it to appear more commonly as soon as next year, as OpenAI refines its “reasoning” o1 model.

For now, the concept seems to be mostly siloed in enterprise software stacks, not products for consumers. Salesforce, which provides customer relationship management (CRM) software, spun up an “agent” feature to great fanfare a few weeks ahead of its annual Dreamforce conference. The feature lets customers use natural language to essentially build a customer service chatbot in a few minutes through Slack, instead of spending a lot of time coding one. The chatbots have access to a company’s CRM data and can process natural language easier than a bot not based on large language models, potentially making them better at limited tasks like asking questions about orders and returns.

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AI agent startups (still an admittedly nebulous term) are already becoming quite a buzzy investment. They’ve secured $8.2 billion in investor funding over the last 12 months, spread over 156 deals, an increase of 81.4 percent year over year, according to PitchBook data. One of the better-known projects is Sierra, a customer service agent similar to Salesforce’s latest project and launched by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor. There’s also Harvey, which offers AI agents for lawyers, and TaxGPT, an AI agent to handle your taxes.

Despite all the enthusiasm for agents, these high-stakes uses raise a clear question: can they actually be trusted with something as serious as law or taxes? AI hallucinations, which have frequently tripped up users of ChatGPT, currently have no remedy in sight. More fundamentally, as IBM presciently stated in 1979, “a computer can never be held accountable” — and as a corollary, “a computer must never make a management decision.” Rather than autonomous decision-makers, AI assistants are best viewed as what they truly are: powerful but imperfect tools for low-stakes tasks. Is that worth the big bucks AI companies hope people will pay?

For now, market pressures prevail, and AI companies are racing to monetize. “I think 2025 is going to be the year that agentic systems finally hit the mainstream,” OpenAI’s new chief product officer, Kevin Weil, said at the press event. “And if we do it right, it takes us to a world where we actually get to spend more time on the human things that matter, and a little less time staring at our phones.”

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Wall Street analysts downgrade Honeywell. We think they’re making a mistake.

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Wall Street analysts downgrade Honeywell. We think they're making a mistake.


Honeywell International Inc. signage is displayed on a monitor on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

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Honeywell stock received a rare downgrade from JPMorgan on Thursday. It’s the first time in more than a decade that analysts at the firm lowered their rating.



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Android 16’s Priority Modes leaked, and I need them right now

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Android 16's Priority Modes leaked, and I need them right now

On those days when you have a lot of work to do and not nearly enough time to do it, shutting out distractions is vital. Android’s Do Not Disturb mode is already tremendously helpful in that respect, but it looks like a better version is coming in Android 16 called Priority modes.

Android Authority’s Mishaal Rahman first spotted the change in the Android 15 QPR1 Beta 1. According to Rahman, the Priority Mode feature replaces the Do Not Disturb menu and brings with it UI elements and display settings straight from the Digital Wellbeing feature. He played around with the feature, but was unable to interact with it beyond that.

Things have progressed a bit in the most recent version of the beta. The previously inactive Quick Settings tile is now functional and allows you to quickly activate or deactivate different modes. The modes shown include Do Not Disturb, Event, Gardening, Meditating, and Sleeping. Any selected modes are highlighted so you can easily see which ones are active at a glance.

In his analysis, Rahman pointed out that both Event and Sleeping have placeholder icons, but he says he expects a more fleshed-out interface by the time the project is finalized. Android has already introduced more than 40 different icons to choose from in the QPR Beta 2, which suggests that you can set up custom Priority Modes with an icon of your choice.

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This is a massive change that revamps and improves one of Android’s core features. Since it is such a big shift, it will likely be part of Android 16’s feature list, but it is possible it will be released later in Android 15‘s life cycle.

From a user perspective, I love what Priority Modes brings to the table. The ability to customize alerts so that only specific ones come through is basically what exists with Do Not Disturb now, but Priority Modes will make it significantly more convenient to activate. One of the primary obstacles right now is the process of activating Do Not Disturb; why bother going through all those taps when I can just toss my phone in a hoodie pocket and achieve the same effect?

Other reports say that Priority Mode can enable other features, like dimming the wallpaper, turning the screen black-and-white, and much more. I’d rather not admit how often I glance at my phone because of a dynamic wallpaper, so this is a welcome feature.

It’s also worth pointing out that this same update appears to let you place any app into a bubble for easy multitasking and screen management. It all sounds great, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

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Perakitan Rack Server Indorack Close Rack IR11542P

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Galaxy Z Fold 5 & Flip 5 start getting October 2024 security update

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Galaxy Z Fold 5 & Flip 5 start getting October 2024 security update

Samsung has started rolling out the October 2024 security update to last year’s foldable smartphones, the Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Z Flip 5. It’s worth noting that the company is also rolling out this month’s security update to the Galaxy Z Fold 6 alongside.

The Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Galaxy Z Flip 5 start getting the October 2024 security update

Initially, the company pushed the latest security update to the Galaxy S24 series including the Galaxy S24 FE. Now, the Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Galaxy Z Fold 5 have also started receiving the October 2024 security update in Europe.

The latest security update for the Galaxy Z Fold 5 comes with a firmware version F946BXXS3DXI9. Whereas, the new update carries a firmware version F731BXXS3DXI9 on the Galaxy Z Flip 5. The October 2024 security update includes fixes for 42 security vulnerabilities that have been reported in the previous version.

Notably, these include fixes from Google and Samsung. Google reportedly patches 2 critical and 28 high-level security loopholes in total with one already resolved in the previous update. Whereas, two fixes have nothing to do with the Samsung Galaxy smartphones.

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On the other hand, Samsung fixes 12 security flaws related to system services and Knox. It should be noted that the October 2024 security update doesn’t bring any new features to both the foldable.

You can check for the update by following the instructions below

If you live in Europe and have Galaxy Z Fold 5 (Review) or Flip 5, you can check for the update right away. You can do so by going to Settings > Software update. On the Software update page, wait for the device to scan for any new updates.

If a new update pops up, you can simply tap Download and install. That’s all you have to do, your device will take care of the rest. Moreover, if you live outside of Europe, the update might soon pop up on your device too, so stay patient.

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Refurbished Server in India | Used Server in Bangalore

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Refurbished Server in India | Used Server in Bangalore



TieDot Technologies Provides Used and Refurbished HPE Rack Servers, HPE Tower Servers, HPE Blade Servers, HPE Apollo Servers Dell PowerEdge T140, T30, T330, T340, R840, R940, R440, R540, R730, R730xd, R740, R640, R630, R740xd, R240, R340, T440, T640 Server Series for price and availability Call: +91-9035020041 | +91-9036000187 Email: sales@tiedottechnologies.com

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Apple, Anker, Sonos, Lego and more

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Apple, Anker, Sonos, Lego and more

Another October Prime Day is on the books, but all of the deals haven’t disappeared from Amazon’s site just yet. This year’s Fall Prime Day brought a bunch of discounts on smartphones, speakers, wearables, robot vacuums and more tech, and you can still grab some of the sale prices right now even after the event has officially ended. While it’s possible we see some of these deals come back in a month during Black Friday, it’s a good idea to pick up your top items now if you’re keen on getting some of your holiday shopping done early. Here are the best Prime Day deals you can still get today.

10th-gen iPad

Photo by Nathan Ingraham / Engadget

Apple deals can be hit or miss during Amazon Prime Day, but we saw a number of good ones this time and many of them are still available. Whether you’ve been on the hunt for a new Apple device for yourself or you know you want to pick one up as a gift, you can save a bit of cash if you do so now.

A number of Lego sets are still on sale post October Prime Day. Some of our favorites come from the Star Wars, Super Mario and Harry Potter lineups, and you’ll find savings up to 41 percent on those.

Roku Streaming Stick 4K

Will Lipman Photography for Engadget

Yes, Black Friday is right around the corner, but it would be unwise to sleep on these Prime Day tech deals that you can still get today. We’re seeing steep discounts on headphones, TVs, streaming devices, gaming gear and more, making it a good time to pick up something for yourself or cross a few items off your holiday shopping list early.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice, and stay tuned to Engadget.com for all of the best tech deals coming out of October Prime Day 2024.

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