From The Next Platform, January 28:
Almost a year ago, executives, researchers, and developers within the Outshift group of Cisco Systems – an incubation unit focused on such advanced technologies as AI and quantum computing – began batting about the idea of a network infrastructure connecting vast numbers of AI agents from multiple vendors or organizations, allowing those AI agents to automatically communicate, work together, and solve complex problems for enterprises.
The idea is that, as the nature of AI agents evolves and their use grows, there needs to be an open environment in which they can find each other and work together, regardless of what vendors built them. If an organization has a drug discovery project or sales forecasting problem that needs to be addressed, the AI agents they assign to it should be able to pull in other agents from other companies to solve it.
That’s not happening. Not yet, anyway. But it’s coming, according to Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president of the Outshift incubator, and it’s going to arrive in the form of the Internet of Agents.
“Largely, computing has been deterministic in nature for all these decades with probabilistic (stochastic) computing being relegated to special use cases (ML models) or quantum computing use cases,” Pandey wrote this month in a white paper on the subject. “Generalized probabilistic computing only took shape after the democratization of language foundation models such as ChatGPT in November 2022.”
The rise of foundation model-based AI-native applications, particularly in the form of AI agents, is happening quickly and will change how AI is used by enterprises and how work and business is done. Pandey pointed to the Internet and the Internet for clouds as examples of infrastructure adapting to rapid changes in business and IT environments. A similar shift is needed for AI agents.
“We stand at yet another inflection point – the move to distributed agentic computing,” he wrote. “One that will drive a platform paradigm shift larger than all other platforms in the past. This distributed agentic computation platform needs a new secure connectivity layer that sits above the current cloud native connectivity layer.”
The Internet of Agents will need to be fast, safe, and open, he wrote. It will involve “push-button hardware-software stacks” that include GPU and CPU virtualization, sophisticated pipelines for transmitting data, and tightly coupled compute clusters that provide high memory bandwidth and very low latency connections.
“This infrastructure must process agent collaboration at machine speed, potentially thousands of times faster than current,” Pandey wrote, adding that it also must be protected from upcoming quantum computing, which threatens encryption and other security methods. “This isn’t just about protecting data in transit – it’s about securing the entire chain of agent interactions across organizational boundaries.”
It’s also going to take industry-wide cooperation for such tasks as creating open standards for communication between agents, including defining how agents identify themselves, create trust, and securely share information. In additions, all companies should be able to implement the open protocols....
....MUCH MORE
Recently from The Next Platform (January 27):
How Did DeepSeek Train Its AI Model On A Lot Less – And Crippled – Hardware?(third of three links on that page)
