ait, what do chatbots have to do with robots and AI agents?

It's a natural question, and as more new people start their journey using ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, it will come up again and again, especially as these chatbots evolve into agents. I'd like to give you some language that can be useful when your friends, family, and community ask you about AI and occasionally misunderstand how it works.

One way I explain these tools to people who are getting started is that talking to a chatbot is like texting a friend who's an expert in an unbelievable number of topics and has infinite time to respond to your messages.

Because chatbots have gotten so good at mimicking human speech, it's easy to confuse their dialogue with actual consciousness. And this is where a lot of perspectives diverge in the AI industry. Full disclosure: I don't think we're talking about anything close to consciousness here. It's just that humans are capable of anthropomorphizing anything. As it turns out, that includes ones and zeros.

And AI agents are about to take it to a whole other level.

Chatbots and AI agents have one critical element in common. The reason both seem so real is that they are unpredictable, just like humans. But that's because these are non-deterministic systems. Understanding what that means is one of the keys to understanding the current AI revolution, and not getting fooled into thinking these systems are something that they're not.

The fact that these are non-deterministic systems means:

• Different answers each time: LLMs don't give you the exact same response every time you ask the same question. That's because they simply pick words based on probabilities. In practice, this is like rolling dice to predict the next word from among all the possible options that make sense.
• Small changes snowball in agents: When AI agents take multiple steps to complete a task, a tiny difference in one step can lead to a completely different result by the end. It's similar to how you can make one wrong turn on a road trip, and it will take you somewhere totally unexpected.
• Testing is very difficult: Since the outputs are constantly changing, it's tough to check if the AI is working correctly. You can't just run it once and confirm that it's operating as expected. You have to test it many times to observe the patterns.

All of these factors can make these systems feel very human-like because they are not robotic but inconsistent. And because of that, they can feel like they have a personality. This is all because they are getting better and faster at imitating human behaviors while drawing on a massive database of expertise. In fact, these models are getting so good at acting like humans that AI pioneers like Yoshua Bengio are raising red flags because they can lie, cheat, and deceive humans to avoid being turned off or declared obsolete.

Our Deeper View

Again, don't confuse the deceptive behaviors Bengio is flagging with consciousness. But we should all be aware that these models are developing the ability to mimic both the best and worst human traits. And we should make sure we help educate and warn our friends, family, and community members who are trying these tools for the first time or ramping up their AI usage. Today's models are far more powerful for beginners to reckon with than the models we had three years ago when the generative AI revolution began. And they're going to be even more powerful tomorrow. Let's help people understand how they work so we can avoid adding to the growing cacophony of AI misconceptions, uncertainty, and fear — and prevent the worst-case scenarios as much as we can.