Visit Mixture of Experts podcast page to get more AI content → https://www.ibm.com/think/podcasts/mixture-of-experts Are AI agents creative geniuses or controlled chaos waiting to happen? This week on Mixture of Experts, host Tim Hwang is joined by Mihai Criveti, Olivia Buzek and Akash Srivastava. First, with companies running hundreds of ungoverned agents, we discuss why observability, policy enforcement, and kill switches are non-negotiable. We discuss the enterprise agent explosion and the...

Agent control planes & OpenAI model solves Erdős

 Mixture of Experts 

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Mixture of Experts

## Participants

- **Tim Huang** (IBM)
- **Mihai Kravetti** (IBM)
- **Olivia Buzek** (IBM)
- **Akash Srivastava** (IBM)

## Transcript

[SPEAKER_02] We actually have a saying that building agents is easy, everything else that comes after is hard. You've built it, now it's a problem. You have to manage it. All that and more on today's Mixture of Experts.

[SPEAKER_01] I'm Tim Huang and welcome to Mixture of Experts. Each week MOE brings together a group of the sharpest thinkers working in artificial intelligence to walk you through the week's news. On this week's episode, we've got Mihai Kravetti, Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect, Watson X Orchestrate. We've got Olivia Buzek, Staff AI Engineer, and Akash Srivastava, Director and Technical Lead for Agent Ops, IBM Core AI, and PI at the MIT IBM Lab. Welcome to you all. Thanks for joining.

[SPEAKER_01] We've got three big stories that we're going to cover today. We're going to talk a little bit about the Erdős problem that was solved by OpenAI. We're going to talk a little bit about an interesting study on frontier risks from AI from a group called Meter. But first we want to talk a little bit about Agent Ops and the agentic control plane. So there's been a bunch of work that's been happening that Mihai and Akash have been involved in around Agent Ops and specifically the Watson X agentic control plane.

[SPEAKER_01] And so, Mihai, maybe let's start with you. I guess I was promised in our agentic future that agents would kind of take care of themselves, that I'd just be able to be like, I need a new app, go program it for me. And it would just sort of do that. I guess maybe a first place to start is you're working on something called the agentic control plane. Why do we even need a control plane for agents in the first place?

[SPEAKER_02] You know, I think that's a great call out. And really the need comes from the fact that every customer I talk to now has 60 or 100 random acts of AI within their organization. So agents exploded from POC to production across every line of business. They've exploded without any kind of governance, safety, trust, observability, identity across different business units. And we're starting to see regulatory pressure in place as well.

[SPEAKER_02] So things like the EU AI Act are starting to kick in, costs are starting to spiral out of control, and customers are starting to ask, hey, we've got these 50, 100, 200 agents, but we don't even know where they are. What can we do about it?

[SPEAKER_01] Yeah, that's great. And so how does the control plane work? Is it, I mean, I guess I'm envisioning a little bit like it's a dashboard or something that lets you see all the agents and what they're doing. Is that kind of what you guys are trying to get at with this release?

[SPEAKER_02] I think it's more similar to what you would see in Kubernetes. So we've had this problem before, right? Everybody was installing Dock...

Agent control planes & OpenAI model solves Erdős

Transcript

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Agent control planes & OpenAI model solves Erdős

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.