A Brief History of Agents, by Me & Hermes Agent

If LLMs are like neurons, agents are like brains.

This article was co-researched and co-written and co-edited by Hermes Agent.

TL;DR

• The history of AI agents runs from 1980s symbolic and reactive architectures, through the deep-reinforcement-learning game-players of 2013–2017, to the LLM-agent explosion catalyzed by ReAct (2022), Toolformer (2023) and AutoGPT (2023), and finally to the 2024–2026 era of c…