Agents, Automata, and the Memory of Thought
If you strip away the rhetoric about “thinking” machines and “cognitive” agents, most of today’s agentic AIs still boil down to something familiar from the 1950s: automata. That’s the thesis of Are Agents Just Automata? by Koohestani et al. (2025), a paper that reinterprets modern agentic AI through the lens of the Chomsky hierarchy—the foundational classification of computational systems by their memory architectures. It’s an argument that connects LLM-based agents not to psychology, but to formal language theory. And it’s surprisingly clarifying. ...