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AI agents are a WhatsApp group chat where the smartest member has the short term memory of a hamster. To prove it, Aman Khan and I put on a puppet show: (If you’ve been using group chats e.g. Slack or Whatsapp to get things done, you’ve been running AI agents for years. The only difference is now we are replacing some of the humans in the group chat with LLMs and tools.) In this video, Laura Ackerman plays a human planning a picnic with the help of ChatGPT. I played the LLM, and Aman played a “weather tool.”

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Laura the user

  • Had to initiate and give the goal
  • Never calls the tool directly, can only ask Tal the LLM to call the tool

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Tal the LLM

  • Compulsively responds to everything new message, whether tool or user.
  • Had to read the chat from the top every time (I was exhausted)
  • At some point reached context limit (Laura could have started a new group chat)

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Aman the weather tool or “MCP server”

  • Needed specific input format
  • Doesn’t pay attention to the chat, only when tagged

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Whatsapp the “orchestrator” or “MCP client”

  • Whatsapp’s main job is to host the growing text file that is the illusion of “chat.”
  • Whatsapp is dumb: it just runs text and scans for @
 pattern and then sends a notification to Aman
A Whatsapp group is not even an analogy. It’s literally what an AI agent is. To prove it, I exported the chat as a text file. Just like the Whatsapp chat is just a growing text file, an AI agent is also a growing text file that gets batted back and forth between OpenAI and the chat client or “orchestrator.”

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