When most people think of AI, they think of chatbots like Chat GPT and Gemini.
But tech leaders are trying to get the word out about a new form of AI called agentic. Some say we’ll end up engaging with this technology the most.
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Duke professor Jon Reifschneider built his own AI model that he believes could be a gamechanger for researchers. He spoke with WRAL News about the rise of the technology and what may lie ahead for its use in daily life.
Reifschneider and cofounder Pramod Singh have a new AI product called Inquisite.
“Our ultimate goal with this is to speed up discovery and translation so we can do things like bring new drugs to market," Reifschneider said. "In, let's say, 3 to 5 years rather than 10 to 20 years ... We need it.”
What is 'agentic AI?'
Before showing how it works, let's have a quick vocabulary lesson.
Popular chatbots like Chat GPT or Gemini are mainly considered generative AI. That means you give it a question or prompt – and it gives you a response based on the massive amounts of data it has access to.
Inquisite is something different. It’s referred to as agentic AI.
Agentic AI doesn’t just give you answers, it performs tasks for you.
“Agents are particularly exciting because they can actually sort of do work, very much like a human might,” Reifschneider said.
AI as research assistant
Inquisite’s agents play the role of research assistant -- scouring through its massive database of research and medical journals to find, read and summarize the relevant papers scientists need to do their jobs.
“We can see here it found 119 papers that were potentially relevant using those queries," Reifschneider said. "It then went through a process where it reviewed all the metadata, the titles, authors, and abstracts and it filtered those 119 papers down to just 17 papers that it determined were highly relevant to answer my question."
“So if you're saving time, does that mean you get discoveries faster?" Reifschneider said. "We believe so. That's our ultimate goal with Inquisite.”
That could mean a faster path to a cure for certain cancers or a new gene therapy for Parkinson's.
Inquisite is ahead of the curve – with the top minds in tech this summer proclaiming agentic AI is the future.
Tech leaders have acknowledged agentic AI's capabilities and the likelihood of future use.
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“Agentic AI is real," said Nvidia CEO and President Jensen Huang. "Agentic AI is a giant step function from one shot AI.”
“I think every business in the future will have an AI agent that their customers can talk to in the future,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
No competition for human creativity
But will these agents replace jobs?
“They're really designed to augment human research teams, not try to replace the scientists and researchers," Reifschneider said. "That's kind of key. You're not building this to replace researchers. You're building this to help them. Research is a highly creative task.”
When asked about AI agents potentially taking jobs, he said he thinks fears about AI taking jobs are overblown.
In fact, he’s teaching his graduate-level students that they have a quality AI can’t replace.
“I don’t think AI will have the creativity we need to do really novel research. I think we very much still need human scientists in the loop,” Reifschneider said.