Introduction to AI Agents

Overview

This lecture introduces AI agents and the core ideas behind how they perceive context, choose actions, use tools, and work towards a goal.

Class materials

• View the lecture slides (PDF)
• Open the Colab notebook

Further reading

1. Berkeley Function-Calling Leaderboard
2. Vector databases
3. Ishan Kavathekar, Raghav Donakanti, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, and Karthik Vaidhyanathan. “Small Models, Big Tasks: An Exploratory Empirical Study on Small Language Models for Function Calling”. Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering, 2025.