What are AI Agents? (SOLVED)
AI Agents are the hottest topic in 2025–2026 GenAI interviews, but most candidates confuse agents with chatbots. Interviewers at OpenAI and Anthropic want you to articulate the agent loop — perceive, plan, act, reflect — and explain when tool use justifies agent complexity over a simple chain.
TL;DR — Quick Answer
AI agents are LLM-powered systems that perceive, reason, plan, and act using tools in a loop to accomplish goals autonomously.
The Interview Question
Define AI agents. How do they differ from simple LLM chatbots? Describe the core components of an agentic system.
Deep Explanation
An AI agent extends a chatbot with: (1) Planning — breaking goals into subtasks, (2) Memory — short and long-term context, (3) Tool use — APIs, code execution, search, (4) Reflection — evaluating outputs and retrying.
The agent loop: observe → think → act → observe results → repeat until goal met or max iterations.
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