Microsoft’s AI agents, Perplexity AI in trouble, and other AI news this week:

Autonomous AI agents

Microsoft is enhancing its AI offerings with new autonomous agent capabilities to accelerate business adoption of artificial intelligence, AFP reported. AI agents are specialized programs designed to perform routine tasks autonomously, such as sifting through sales leads or handling customer service requests. The agents are intended to advance generative AI from chatbots, which require human prompts, to systems that can operate independently. In a blog post, Microsoft introduced 10 autonomous agents for its Copilot AI platform, designed to support sales, service, finance and supply chain teams.

xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, has launched an application programming interface (API) based on its Grok chatbot, allowing developers to access the Grok-1 language model (LM) and Grok digital assistant. It includes a set of development tools for creating scalable applications based on the model (which presumably uses user-generated content on X to create the LM). “Grok”, meaning “to understand intuitively”, is a neologism coined by Robert A. Heinlein for his 1961 science fiction novel. Stranger in a strange land– although many people associate it with Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy due to a statement from xAI at the time of its launch, which described the chatbot as “modeled after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and designed to answer everything, including “spicy” questions that would be rejected by more traditional language models.

In perplexity

THE Wall Street Journal and the New York Post filed a lawsuit in a US court against Perplexity AI, backed by Jeff Bezos and Nvidia, alleging copyright infringement and trademark infringement. Perplexity, whose AI-based search engine is often referred to as a competitor to Google Search, is accused of illegally copying and reproducing copyrighted content from both publications to power its AI-based engine. ‘AI, considered more up to date. than ChatGPT and provides links for verification. “Unlike the business model of a traditional Internet search engine, Perplexity’s business model does not direct business toward content creators,” the lawsuit claims.