…so might as well say that “agent” is simply the next buzzword, since people aren’t so excited with the concept of artificial intelligence any more
This is exactly the reason for the emphasis on it.
The reality is that the LLMs are impressive and nice to play with. But investors want to know where the big money will come from, and for companies, LLMs aren’t that useful in their current state, I think one of the biggest use for them is extracting information from documents with lots of text.
So “agents” are supposed to be LLMs executing actions instead of just outputting text (such as calling APIs). Which doesn’t seem like the best idea considering they’re not great at all at making decisions—despite these companies try to paint them as capable of such.
They can’t close the source code as long as they use the Linux kernel, right? Besides, Android is popular among other companies because they can customize part of it as they see fit.
This change isn’t really that drastic, because Android never really followed the open source way of doing things. The article even explains that this won’t change much even for ROM developers, since they’re not creating releases based on “work in progress” branches.
Really the only difference is that Google will spare the work of merging two separate branches often and solving conflicts that might as well be turning into a nightmare as the code base has grown.