As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve at lightning speeds, and developers and enterprises take notice, AI agents are becoming commonplace, and with OpenAI’s new tools, creating proprietary AI agents is getting easier.
Indeed, OpenAI has recently released the new Agents SDK, together with a suite of powerful API updates aiming to improve AI-driven applications, with innovations including the Responses API, built-in tools, OpenAI Agents SDK, and observability tools, per the company’s press release on March 11.
How are AI agents built?
The new Responses API combines the simplicity of the Chat Completions API with the tool use capabilities of the Assistants API for building AI agents. The built-in tools include web search, file search, and computer use, while the Agents SDK orchestrates single- and multi-agent workflows. Finally, the integrated observability tools can monitor agent workflow.
According to OpenAI, these capabilities make the AI agents’ development process more streamlined, boost AI responsiveness in interactions, and offer deeper insights into agent performance. This way, they provide businesses and developers with resources to create smarter, more reliable, and useful AI solutions – and more easily at that.
The process of building your own AI agent with the new OpenAI Agents SDK is relatively simpler than before and follows a few essential steps, as tested and described in detail by Pankaj Singh at Analytics Vidhya.
As Singh noted, developers previously had to pass entire conversation histories repeatedly, whereas the new Responses API automatically stores responses and enables seamless continuation of conversations using previous_response_id.
Furthermore, Chat Completions originally worked on a basic list-of-messages-in, message-out model, and Responses API has now introduced Items that represent inputs and outputs, in addition to natively supporting file and web search, structured outputs, and hosted tools.
Additionally, previous APIs used delta streaming, which was difficult to integrate and not type-safe, while Responses API has semantic events, making it clearer and more structured. Also, the new Vector Stores Search API facilitates using OpenAI’s RAG capabilities with any model, alongside one-line integration for web and file search, as well as the upcoming code execution.
The new simpler structure, enabled by switching from externally- to internally-tagged polymorphism, also supports flattened JSON response structures, simplifying them for parsing and working with, in addition to making integration smoother with form-encoded inputs.
Can I build my own AI agent?
If the above makes any sense to you, then yes – you can build your own AI agent. Otherwise, you may want to polish your technical expertise or wait for the process to become even more simplified for beginners. OpenAI’s new Agents SDK is also open-source, at least making it more available to the public.
Thanks to this, developers can more easily orchestrate multi-agent workflows, improving upon Swarm, a previously released and popular experimental SDK. With the introduction of Swarm Agents, OpenAI has brought improvements such as smarter agents, seamless handoffs, stronger guardrails, and better debugging and insights.
OpenAI also provides key building blocks, including tools, models, guardrails, memory, and orchestration, in addition to having them work together toward easier creation of intelligent systems that can analyze, think, and take action upon their analyses.
On top of that, vector stores and embeddings allow agents to access knowledge beyond their initial training and recall important data in real-time. This way, they’ve become smarter and more adaptable. And if that wasn’t enough, the built-in safeguards like moderation API and instruction hierarchy ensure AI works responsibly and reliably.
Orchestration tools – Agent SDK, tracing, and evaluations – help developers to build, overview, and fine-tune AI agents easily. Finally, integrated observability tools cover traceability, performance monitoring, error detection, and optimization of AI workflows at every step.
Are AI agents the future?
All things considered, AI agents might well be the future, especially given their growing popularity and the evolution of tools like the ones produced by OpenAI, which makes it increasingly easier to develop them. That said, caution is necessary as AI agents could also be used for evil, even by governments, as evident from Google Threat Intelligence Group’s report from January.
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