On agentic AI vs chatbot AI

Two things I read last week that reminded me that not all people are not using generative AI and LLMs in the same way.

The first thing that I read was Timonthy Gowers‘s blog about math and LLMs. In the post, What sort of maths are LLMs good at?, he is writing about how AI is becoming very good at solving advanced math problems. However, when he talks about his own experiences with using gen AI, he seems to be talking about using chatbots like chatGPT, not agentic AI, which is what is how the math is being done.

The second thing I read was this: If you haven’t recently used Claude Code*, you might not understand where AI is at. It does a good job of showing how agentic AI is a different beast than the gen AI most people are used to.

If you are mainly using chatGPT or Gemini or CoPilot and want to know more about agents and agentic AI, then I recommend this primer from my employer, What is Agentic AI? | IBM. Or try this piece. You’ll see that what people like myself and others are doing with agentic AI to analyze documentation, design systems, write code, and much more.

Chatbots are still useful for getting information. But agentic AI is taking the use of AI to a new level. It’s worth learning about.

On how OpenAI lost control of an AI Model that ended up attacking Hugging Face

On July 21st OpenAI published this piece about how they and Hugging Face partnered to address a security incident during model evaluation. Like many people, I was shocked by the news of how agents at OpenAI broke out of their secure environment and attacked the Hugging Face site.

Later, though, in reading other pieces, I was less focused on how impressive the agents were and how poor a job the OpenAI team did. Reading this piece in TIME, it appears the agentic software was left unmonitored on the weekend. That was bad enough. Worse, the secure environment was not air gapped in any way. Once the agents figured out how to break through any software barriers between them and the Internet, they were free to wreck havoc on the outside world.

As the San Francisco Examiner states: “A recent hacking incident involving a pair of OpenAI’s artificial-intelligence models highlights the cybersecurity risks of the technology — and a serious security lapse by the San Francisco company, computer-security experts say.” Indeed.

For more on how OpenAI screwed up, see the pieces linked to here.

P.S. It gets worse…I just came across this: OpenAI’s rogue models roamed the internet for 4 days and staged a second attack – POLITICO