Navigating the Early Days of AI Development

This chapter explores the transformative journey of AI, highlighting the role of Langchain in development and reflecting on the industry's maturation since the early days before ChatGPT. The speakers share their insights on the disconnect between advanced AI models and their initial commercial applications, emphasizing the importance of practical product development.

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What’s next for AI agents, and how will they change the way we work? In this conversation, Stanislas Polu (CEO of Dust, formerly research at OpenAI) and Harrison Chase (CEO of LangChain, one of the most influential open-source AI frameworks) unpack the current state and future of AI agents. They reflect on their early conversations in the pre-ChatGPT days, how the landscape has evolved, and where it's headed next.

Stan and Harrison share lessons from building today’s agent infrastructure—from chat interfaces to the future of ambient, autonomous systems—and discuss the challenges of operating in the chaotic "fog of AI." We dig into the open questions, early insights, and messy realities of building in today’s fast-moving AI landscape.

In our conversation, we explore:

• What sparked Stan and Harrison’s early interest in LLMs

• The pre-ChatGPT era and how the AI landscape has evolved since late 2022

• High-leverage use cases for agents inside Dust and LangChain today

• The critical differences between AI workflows and true agents—and why agents may unlock more powerful, long-term solutions

• Why reliability is the main blocker to ambient agents

• Real-world enterprise use cases for AI agents across customer support, sales, and engineering

• How to build in the “fog of AI” and the challenge of maintaining product vision when foundations shift every six months

• Strategies for creating defensibility in a world where tech giants can quickly replicate features

• The future of multi-agent systems and how they could transform enterprise productivity

• The current state of the AI talent market

• And much more