Feeling the pressure from the “open agent” movement and specifically Chinese startup Butterfly Effect and its new product Manus, OpenAI has expanded the capabilities of its own AI technology, launching new tools to help businesses and developers build their own agents. The company’s new Responses API has the functionality of two earlier tools, the Chat Completions API (facilitating ChatGPT queries and responses) and the Assistants API (for multi-step reasoning and file access). The company is also issuing an Agents SDK, a suite of tools for creating and deploying agents that bundles the Responses API.

The SDK kit “allows coders to create teams of agents, each tasked with specific responsibilities,” writes ZDNet, noting “a ‘hand-off’ functionality allows one agent to do some work, then hand-off processing to another agent, and so on.”

A significant SDK feature is a monitoring dashboard that “allows developers to see each interaction with the AI, identify what agents were used for what, and how they were tasked,” ZDNet points out, emphasizing that the prevalence of AI hallucinations makes it “important to be able to keep track of what all those independent tasks are up to.”

The Wall Street Journal writes that OpenAI’s new product news “comes as both competition and hype around agents grow,” citing China’s Manus AI, that “generated waves on social media when it made a debut of its own ‘general’ AI agent, which it said can autonomously perform tasks such as data analysis.”

OpenAI has since fall 2024 doubled its paid subscription base for ChatGPT Team, Enterprise and Edu to two million, WSJ reports of the company’s business-oriented subscriptions. While there is no publicly available price list for Enterprise and Edu (with fees provided on a “contact us” basis), Team is $30 per month. (The $200-per-month ChatGPT Pro is consumer-facing and does not bundle dev tools.)

“The Responses API is designed for developers who want to easily combine OpenAI models and built-in tools into their apps, without the complexity of integrating multiple APIs or external vendors,” OpenAI explains in a news post.

WSJ notes that while AI agents are expected to “usher in the next wave of corporate productivity,” that wave is still “far off,” with businesses willing to use them for simple things but not “high-stakes tasks.”

“The tech industry has struggled to show people, or even define, what ‘AI agents’ really are,” reports TechCrunch, noting that the Butterfly Effect — which launched in 2022 with the AI assistant Monica — “earlier this week went viral for a new AI agent platform called Manus that users quickly discovered didn’t deliver on many of the company’s promises.”