AI Chain vs. AI Agent

This is me learning. I'm learning the concepts. And today's interesting conceps are AI Chain and AI Agent.

 

To summarize, AI Chain is a cooking recipe. AI Agent is a cook.

 

AI Chain: Components are brought together in a specific manner to solve a specific problem, the flow is explicitly designed by someone and is deterministic - takes place each time it's triggered in the given order. To me, this sounds like automation enhanced with AI. This is a tool for a given task - the results are predictable.

 

AI Agent: AI Agent is (supposed to be) more about giving the agent a goal and tools, and let it do the rest. So, it is more unpredictable, but you don't care, you just want to get things done.

 

An important distinction is that AI Chain also gives you predictability from a resource angle, AI Agent might end up being more "creative" around things (and then you pay more), but AI Chain is limited in its creativity and therefore, resource usage.

 

A combination could be to use an AI Agent to determine the plan, and make it use predetermined AI Chains to complete its task.