When OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT at the end of 2022, it kicked off the chatbot boom. Then last year, new systems from OpenAI and Anthropic incited a new technological push with so-called A.I. agents that can perform tasks like personal digital helpers.
Now, a San Francisco start-up called Arena, which tracks hundreds of thousands of artificial intelligence users, is trying to take some of the mystery out of what exactly those digital tasks are.
The company’s service, Agent Mode, showed that over the past few weeks, people used agents for code-writing tasks about 17 percent of the time. Roughly 10 percent of the time, the company said, people used agents to do research.
Research agents were closely followed by agents that create images, generate documents like graphs and spreadsheets or brainstorm ideas. About 5 percent of the time, the users applied agents for creative writing or tutoring and education. Other areas included code debugging, which is related to building software, and chatting.
Systems from OpenAI, Anthropic and other companies can generate, test and edit computer code, letting experienced programmers automate many tasks they once performed on their own. Agents can also spend minutes or even days researching specific topics via the wider internet, including finance, health care, the law and practically anything else.
Some of these tasks overlap with what a chatbot can do. But the main difference with an agent is that it can use other software apps on behalf of users, including spreadsheets, calendars and email programs.