The Era of Specialized AI - Part III

Part III: The Misplaced Urgency With AI Agents

Whether it is AI models or AI agents, the fundamentals are the same. The AI model or agent needs to be explainable, transparent, scalable, measurable/trackable, and tested for harmful risks and biases. What we have today is a handful of semi-transparent models with some esoteric benchmark that does not shed any light on how these models will perform for a unique set of use cases. There are no guarantees on how these models, when applied in production, will scale or how they will behave over time as data and usage evolve. And there is minimal effort put in to test for biases and risks. Hence, this is a very early phase of model proliferation that is not going to lead to transformative changes just by themselves and will certainly not lead to AGI any time soon.

What excites me the most with so many open source and open weight models, is the ability to develop unified representations of business, operations, process, systems. Connecting data and models from various sources and modalities will be the real unlock in business applications and AI Agents are certainly part of this vision but are not really that useful without domain specific integration.