AI Agent in 100 Seconds

Chatbots have come a long way, and the chat box on your screen barely changed while the engine behind it was swapped out three times. Here's the whole arc in a hundred seconds.

• ~2010s — keyword matching. Type a word it recognized, get a canned reply. Miss the keyword and it was lost.
• ~2017 — intent. It stopped matching words and started matching meaning. Phrase it however you liked; it figured out what you wanted.
• ~2022 — LLMs. Suddenly fluent. It could write, summarize, and reason — but it was still text in, text out. It could tell you what to do; it couldn't do it.
• 2024+ — agentic AI. The leap. You give it a goal, and it actually finishes the job — planning steps, calling tools, and acting until the task is done, not just described.

That's the shift. The interface is the same chat window it's always been. What changed is the engine underneath: from a thing that answers to a thing that acts.

Same window. New engine. That's an AI agent.

Want to see two of them go head-to-head? Watch OpenClaw vs Hermes Agent.