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Microsoft has updated its AutoGen orchestration framework so the agents it helps build can become more flexible and give organizations more control.
AutoGen v0.4 brings robustness to AI agents and solves issues customers identified around architectural constraints.
“The initial release of AutoGen generated widespread interest in agentic technologies,” Microsoft researchers said in a blog post. “At the same time, users struggled with architectural constraints, an inefficient API compounded by rapid growth and limited debugging and intervention functionality.”
The researchers added that customers are asking for stronger observability and control, flexibility around multi-agent collaboration and reusable components.
AutoGen v0.4 is more modular and extensible, with scalability and distributed agent networks. It adds asynchronous messaging; cross-language support, observability and debugging; and built-in and community extensions.
Asynchronous messaging means agents built with AutoGen v0.4 support event-driven and request-interaction patterns. The framework is more modular, so developers can add plug-in components and build long-running agents. It also enables users to design more complex and distributed agent networks.
AutoGen’s extension module simplifies the process of working with multi-agent teams and advanced model clients. It also allows open-source developers to manage their extensions.
To address the issue of observability, AutoGen v0.4 has built-in metric tracking, messaging tracing and debugging tools so users can monitor agent interactions. The updates enable interoperability between agents speaking different coding languages; for now, AutoGen v0.4 supports Python and .NET, but support for additional languages is in the works.
New framework
Microsoft updated AutoGen’s framework to better define responsibilities across the framework, tools and application.
It has three layers: core, which consists of the foundational building blocks for an event-driven system; AgentChat, a “task-driven, high-level API built on the core layer” that features group chat, code execution and pre-built agents and is most similar to AutoGen v0.2; and first-party extensions, which interface with integrations like the Azure code executor and OpenAI’s model client.
Along with updating its framework, some tools Microsoft built around AutoGen also got an upgrade.
AutoGen Studio, a low-code interface for rapidly prototyping agents, was rebuilt on the AutoGen v4.0 AgentChat API. Users can get real-time agent updates, pause conversations or redirect agents with mid-execution control, design agent teams with a drag-and-drop interface, import custom agents and get interactive feedback.
Microsoft and agents
Microsoft released AutoGen in October 2023 with the hope of simplifying how agents communicate with each other. Along with LangChain and LlamaIndex, AutoGen was one of the first AI agent orchestration frameworks released before agents became the buzzword they are today.
Since then, Microsoft released other agentic systems including Magentic-One, a generalist agentic system that can power multiple agents to complete tasks.
The company has embraced AI agents, deploying perhaps the largest AI agent ecosystems through its Copilot Studio platform.
But other companies are hot on its heels. Salesforce launched AgentForce, and more recently its updated AgentForce 2.0, while ServiceNow released a library of customizable agents. AWS has also added more support for creating multi-agent systems to its Bedrock platform.
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