The Evolution of AI Agents: Navigating the “Fog of AI” in Rapidly Changing Foundations | Stanislas Polu and Harrison ChaseStan Polu and Harrison Chase unpack agents, reliability hurdles, and staying defensible in the age of AI.Thank you to our sponsor: Brex—The banking solution for startups.What’s next for AI agents, and how will they change the way we work? In this conversation, Stanislas Polu (CEO of Dust, formerly research at OpenAI) and Harrison Chase (CEO of LangChain, one of the most influential open-source AI frameworks) unpack the current state and future of AI agents. They reflect on their early conversations in the pre-ChatGPT days, how the landscape has evolved, and where it's headed next. Stan and Harrison share lessons from building today’s agent infrastructure—from chat interfaces to the future of ambient, autonomous systems—and discuss the challenges of operating in the chaotic "fog of AI." We dig into the open questions, early insights, and messy realities of building in today’s fast-moving AI landscape. In this conversation, we explore:
Explore the episodeTimestamps(00:00) Intro (02:33) Brief overviews of Dust and LangChain (03:30) The early days of LLM product development (11:02) Harrison's journey to founding LangChain (14:35) Dust's evolution and focus on enterprise productivity (17:15) Tobi’s AI memo (18:42) An overview of AI agents and how they differ from AI workflows (26:43) High-leverage use cases for agents at Dust and LangChain (30:41) How to interact with agents and an explanation of ambient agents (36:21) What the future of agents may look like (40:52) Current limitations of AI agents and reliability challenges (45:40) Will we converge to one agent or many specialized ones? (51:32) How to solve the sycophant problem (56:04) The challenges of building AI companies in a rapidly changing landscape (01:03:06) Recent AI talent acquisitions and market dynamics (01:05:28) How Dust and LangChain attract talent (01:09:12) How far off AGI may be (01:12:52) Final meditations Follow Stanislas PoluLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spolu/ Follow Harrison ChaseLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrison-chase-961287118/ Resources and episode mentionsBooks
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