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Cisco Donates the AGNTCY Project to the Linux Foundation

1 month 1 week ago
Cisco has donated its AGNTCY initiative to the Linux Foundation, aiming to create an open-standard "Internet of Agents" to allow AI agents from different vendors to collaborate seamlessly. The project is backed by tech giants like Google Cloud, Dell, Oracle and Red Hat. "Without such an interoperable standard, companies have been rushing to build specialized AI agents," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. "These work in isolated silos that cannot work and play well with each other. This, in turn, makes them less useful for customers than they could be." From the report: AGNTCY was first open-sourced by Cisco in March 2025 and has since attracted support from over 75 companies. By moving it under the Linux Foundation's neutral governance, the hope is that everyone else will jump on the AGNTCY bandwagon, thus making it an industry-wide standard. The Linux Foundation has a long history of providing common ground for what otherwise might be contentious technology battles. The project provides a complete framework to solve the core challenges of multi-agent collaboration: - Agent Discovery: An Open Agent Schema Framework (OASF) acts like a "DNS for agents," allowing them to find and understand the capabilities of others. - Agent Identity: A system for cryptographically verifiable identities ensures agents can prove who they are and perform authorized actions securely across different vendors and organizations. - Agent Messaging: A protocol named Secure Low-latency Interactive Messaging (SLIM) is designed for the complex, multi-modal communication patterns of agents, with built-in support for human-in-the-loop interaction and quantum-safe security. - Agent Observability: A specialized monitoring framework provides visibility into complex, multi-agent workflows, which is crucial for debugging probabilistic AI systems. You may well ask, aren't there other emerging AI agency standards? You're right. There are. These include the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, which was also recently contributed to the Linux Foundation, and Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP). AGNTCY will help agents using these protocols discover each other and communicate securely. In more detail, it looks like this: AGNTCY enables interoperability and collaboration in three primary ways: - Discovery: Agents using the A2A protocol and servers using MCP can be listed and found through AGNTCY's directories. This enables different agents to discover each other and understand their functions. - Messaging: A2A and MCP communications can be transported over SLIM, AGNTCY's messaging protocol designed for secure and efficient agent interaction. - Observability: The interactions between these different agents and protocols can be monitored using AGNTCY's observability software development kits (SDKs), which increase transparency and help with debugging complex workflows You can view AGNTCY's code and documentary on GitHub.

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ChatGPT's New Study Mode Is Designed To Help You Learn, Not Just Give Answers

1 month 1 week ago
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The rise of large language models like ChatGPT has led to widespread concern that "everyone is cheating their way through college," as a recent New York magazine article memorably put it. Now, OpenAI is rolling out a new "Study Mode" that it claims is less about providing answers or doing the work for students and more about helping them "build [a] deep understanding" of complex topics. Study Mode isn't a new ChatGPT model but a series of "custom system instructions" written for the LLM "in collaboration with teachers, scientists, and pedagogy experts to reflect a core set of behaviors that support deeper learning," OpenAI said. Instead of the usual summary of a subject that stock ChatGPT might give -- which one OpenAI employee likened to "a mini textbook chapter" -- Study Mode slowly rolls out new information in a "scaffolded" structure. The mode is designed to ask "guiding questions" in the Socratic style and to pause for periodic "knowledge checks" and personalized feedback to make sure the user understands before moving on. It's unknown how many students will use this guided learning tool instead of just asking ChatGPT to generate answers from the start. In an early hands-off demo attended by Ars Technica, Study Mode responded to a request to "teach me about game theory" by first asking about the user's overall familiarity with the subject and what they'll be using the information for. ChatGPT introduced a short overview of some core game theory concepts, then paused to ask a question before providing a relevant real-world example. In another example involving a classic "train traveling at speed" math problem, Study Mode resisted multiple simulated attempts by the frustrated "student" to simply ask for the answer and instead tried to gently redirect the conversation to how the available information could be used to generate that answer. An OpenAI representative told Ars that Study Mode will eventually provide direct solutions if asked repeatedly, but the default behavior is more tuned to a Socratic tutoring style. OpenAI said it drew inspiration for Study Mode from "power users" and collaborated with pedagogy experts and college students to help refine its responses. As for whether the mode can be trusted, OpenAI told Ars that "the risk of hallucination is lower with Study Mode because the model processes information in smaller chunks, calibrating along the way." The current Study Mode prompt does, however, result in some "inconsistent behavior and mistakes across conversations," the company warned.

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