Teddy Svoronos describes how today’s agentic AI changes what and how we teach on episode 617 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

An AI agent is an LLM that runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal.

The process of having a task, write a report, use a tool, web search, and do it over and over again until you feel like you’ve gotten the full sort of spectrum of things—that I think is what an agent really is.

These LLMs are now becoming like this intermediary between me and the actual content. And so I’m optimizing in a different way than I used to.

I think there’s an analogy with these tools that I’ve been thinking of as cognitive debt, which is that as you offload to them, there are things that they’ll do that you won’t quite understand.