Where did you get the idea that "LLM connected to tools" is the one true meaning of the term agents?

(I'm not trying to be accusatory here, just trying to understand how these opinions spread.)

It's the same that I've converged on: Agents are LLMs with agency, ie. can effect actions (by being connected to tools, APIs, etc). I break out the offerings into two groups: 1. those that are pre-built for specific tasks/areas (or can be no/low-code scripted using pre-built bits), 2. those that can be custom built to connect to you specific API/actions.

Another version of Agents is described in the paper "Agent Hospital: A Simulacrum of Hospital with Evolvable Medical Agents"[0] where instead of having one LLM prompted context, you create many that specialize in different areas, and have them communicate to distribute a task. The effect is that the outcome is higher quality than trying to use a single automated LLM.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02957

Dawn Song final lecture at LLM class, UC Berkeley two weeks ago

https://understanding-ai-safety.org/