Article

LLM Powered Autonomous Agents

Lilian Weng (OpenAI) · lilianweng.github.io

The original technical essay that defined agent = LLM + planning + memory + tools.

Open on lilianweng.github.io ↗

The question it answers

  1. What actually is an AI agent, in plain language?

Read with it

  1. The most-cited definition of workflows vs agents, written by the team behind Claude. anthropic.com Guide Building Effective AI Agents Anthropic
  2. The expanded companion to Anthropic's canonical essay, packaged for non-engineers. resources.anthropic.com Guide Building Effective AI Agents (resource hub) Anthropic
  3. OpenAI's own plain-English playbook on what an agent is and when you need one. cdn.openai.com Guide A Practical Guide to Building Agents (PDF) OpenAI
  4. Three infra investors argue out the definition honestly, including where the hype ends. a16z.com Podcast What Is an AI Agent? a16z (Guido Appenzeller, Matt Bornstein, Yoko Li)
  5. Video AI Agents, Clearly Explained Jeff Su
  6. Video Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again) Y Combinator / Andrej Karpathy
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