A Survey of AI Agent Protocols

The hype around agent protocols reminds me of the emperor's new clothes. There's just nothing to it from a technical perspective.

I scrolled straight to section 2.1 "Definition and Characteristics of LLM agents" to find out which of the many definitions of "agent" they are using here.

They went for LLM + short-term and long-term memory + planning + tool using + action execution.

Presumably "planning" here is covered by any LLM that can do "think step by step" reasonably well?

It wasn't clear to me what the difference between "tool using" and "action execution" was.

I haven't seen a definition that specifically encompasses both short- and long-term memory before. They say:

> This dual memory system allows agents to maintain conversation continuity while building knowledge over time.

So presumably, this is the standard LLM chat conversation log plus a tool that can decide to stash extra information in a permanent store - similar to how ChatGPT's memory feature worked up until about four weeks ago.

Is AI Agent just LLM wrapper ? Is there anything more interesting to it ?