autogen

An open-source framework for building AI agent systems, simplifying the creation of event-driven, distributed, scalable, and resilient agentic applications.

AutoGen

All right so I haven't made an autogen video in quite some time. Actually, it's been a few months. When I first did the integration with mzero and autogen, and before that, I interviewed the founder of autogen, Shi. 

So in today's video, I kind of want to clarify some things. Also, there's been a lot of things happening with autogen that have been confusing, and I want to make sure that is clarified for you as well. So you know the path moving forward, and you can choose what you want to do. 

Now I've been making videos since I saw AI Jason's first video last October on autogen. I actually did my first video on chat Dev, and then I saw autogen that was backed by Microsoft. I thought, okay, it's backed by Microsoft, they're going to continue doing releases. The development is going to be there, they have a better, a bigger team, not better but a bigger team at least behind it. 

So I know that it's going to be more stable, and so I just went all in on autogen. I learned the framework inside and out, and I've done a bunch of content videos on it. They are creating so many different things, but then some things over the summer kind of started happening. 

So let me explain. Now this is all from my perspective, but after I interviewed the founder of autogen, which I highly recommend watching because he is very intelligent, he was really nice to interview. But then after that, I only made one other video, like I said, a few months ago because I just started noticing things over the probably the last maybe four to five months right now. 

I don't want to say the within the last month, but it just felt something felt off. I started thinking like, okay, so autogen was founded during Shi's time at Microsoft when he was a lead. He got a team together, they formed autogen, but now one right before I interviewed him, I saw in LinkedIn a couple of weeks before that he left Microsoft. 

So then I kind of thought, well wait a second, even though it's kind of open source, it was developed under Microsoft and he left, that's his baby. Well now what's going to happen? Well, as it turns out that autogen is now AG2. There are actually three libraries that are comprised of, it's not just AG2, it's autogen, pyen, and AG2 are the libraries and the other.

People that were with autogen that I believe are still at Microsoft. I don't 100% sure yet they are keeping the Microsoft uh autogen the the main autogen framework. But they're going into a different direction. So that's where like autogen Studio you know uh Adam for did the whole web Surfer agent thing. They're really improving that stuff. Those things are separated now and they're not together. 

So let's go over that. Okay, so this Twitter post from Shi a while ago, well not too long ago, uh November 14th. It says um so this is where they kind of came out with the big news that autogen is now ag2 or autogen 2. They have a new repo ag2 AI or ag2. I'll link that um there's documentation. They have the same Discord okay because there's another P I'm guess going to relate to that. 

So ag2 like I just said was is the original autogen same thing. So there's no breaking changes if that you made all of your stuff with that autogen. Then there's not going to be any breaking changes because this is the same that same codebase framework everything right. Like so that's not going to change. 

And here is actually their and here's actually their new website which I think is pretty cool. I love the aesthetic of this website right. So this is ag2 where you can um I have this in the description so it's just a2.

Really simple which is nice. Uh there's a GitHub. Uh there's a Discord. There's so this is kind of where you can see everything. Um this kind of explains it. You know again the group chats here the sequential chats nested conversations. If you watched any of my videos or you've done stuff on your own this that is those are like the main patterns with autogen has especially group chat. Right they were the first ones to kind of do group chat. Um it's an amazing you know the dynamic speaker selection that's really cool. They did that really well. Aogen I think nailed that group chat down especially being the first one to do that. They did a really good job. 

Uh but you know coming down here you know there's a ag2 studio. They're you know they're doing something with that. Uh they have a Marketplace and all this stuff. Okay so here where you can kind of look at this for yourself. They still own the same Discord that I've been following and if you've been following at all that's it's that same one. They are not moving from that Discord because the founder of autogen I believe he was probably the owner. He created that Discord so he owns that. 

But because he's no longer with Microsoft what does that mean for the other people that are still at Microsoft and still want to continue working on autogen? Well I don't know everything that happened behind the scenes of course. I mean I did a little bit of digging but at the end of the day you know there were a lot of decisions made in the background. Um probably a lot of talks that I just don't know about. 

And you know so these are some things are my speculation. Okay not saying any of these are exactly what happened. I'm not trying to tell you exactly what happened because I don't know all the details. Here is another Twitter post on the clarification regarding autogen Forks. Okay. Uh so as there should be people wanted to clarify and distinguish between various autogen Forks the clones and the current Pi autogen package. 

Okay so the official GitHub repository for autogen project is still at the same GitHub it's always been. U but they're actively working on maintaining aogen 0.2 and have recently introduced new Innovations to autogen 0.4 as well as aogen studio and.

Magentic 1 as part of the Project's road map development will continue in the under the open source uh MIT license. They are currently restructuring uh python packages. C datails here unfortunately admin access to P autogen is currently blocked for us. 

Please be aware that the current version of Pi autogen is not affiliated with the Microsoft autogen Project. So the current version of Pi autogen which is the original package that we all knew right because the autogen the actual Library package for python autogen was something completely different. So they had to say Pi autogen for python autogen um that they're saying it's no longer affiliated with the Microsoft autogen. 

We are unable to communicate on the original Discord server since many of our members no longer have viewing or posting permissions there. For inquiries and discussions you can reach out there um blah blah blah. They have a teams meeting L teams meeting link wed dayss at uh Wednesdays I can't I can't speak 10: a.m.

P blah blah blah right. So the cre since creation has been a highly collaborative project. Most of the team behind autogen from day one continues to deeply be deeply involved. Uh today, uh we want to clarify that no one at Microsoft is involved with any forks or clones of the project. We recognize that these variations reflect the diverse interest in evolving business endeavors in the community. 

I think that's I think that's a really kind of important thing to say that we recognize that these variations reflect diverse interests in evolving business endeavors in the community. So what she the again I'm just going to say the founder of aogen, you know one thing that when I talked to him, they're very much about governance. Basically meaning that us, you know as developers or just people of the community, um whenever we're using it, what we have thoughts, hey you know know this would be cool, um maybe this would make it easier for us to use, um what do you think about this idea blah blah blah right. 

So it's kind of more community driven, right? That's what he wants and I I'm I'm not speaking for him again watch the interview. He just we talked about all this stuff, um but you know I think that's just what he really wanted. 

And so I also believe that Microsoft wanted the piece of the pie. They realized, I mean just let's go look at um let's go look at their GitHub real quick. This their GitHub link, uh yeah this is the GitHub link. Look it has 35.3k stars. Now I don't know as far as every um every AI agent framework, uh but I think for reference like crei is at like 22k. 

Now even though I know that's what I use, but like autogen was there at the height or at the hyp the beginning of the hype of AI agents and the frameworks and they did a really good job. I mean it's really popular, right? Um and I think Microsoft one a piece pie and probably people within Microsoft wanted a piece of pie. 

And then when it gets bigger, you know people have their ideas of what they want for it. Of course again I'm not speaking for the developers or everybody here, I'm just kind of trying to make sense of uh some of the things that are being said and decipher them a little bit. But this right here, this autogen Microsoft autogen, right this was built.

Under Microsoft when it was originally created so I don't know legality wise what's going to happen or what has happened like you know before. But this you know it's still Microsoft's product right. So if you leave Microsoft and it was founded there then obviously there was some there was probably some agreements or something uh behind the scenes. But uh now the this is going to be updated right. So this right here now as you can kind of see here uh interest in the standard find uh interested in the standard autogen is a prior user find it at the actively maintained autogen 0.2 branch and autogen Das agent chat Pi package. 

Autogen 0.4 is a from the ground up rewrite of autogen but so they so they're maintaining 0.2 version but there's an autogen Dash agent agent chat and the 0.4 version this is going to kind of be the rewrite that they're talking about right. Um so autogen 0.4 is in progress you can go here to find the 0.2 documentation. Okay so now going back to ag2 just to clarify with you this is their GitHub that um is in is it's on their website ag2 is available via piy autogen which we all know or it's Alias autogen or ag2 now. 

So they had they did something to get that Alias for autogen and they also now have ag2 and if we just take a and if we take a quick look at the the rewrite uh that will be in version 0.4 of aogen Das agent chat. I don't I can't say that very well uh let's take a look at this real quick first off you know there's already some things um you know you just look at the library right that's different the assist there's an assistant agent um there's a text mention termination. 

So before that was one of the big things is how to uh how to terminate uh how a chatbot or an agent knows how to terminate once you know whatever it is is done. So they round robin group chats you know you could choose as a property round robin but they're really extracting things out. So this is going to look different it just it's just going to um if we go down here there's still you know the net autogen Donnet uh they created that you know quite a few months ago right they released that um they're still maintaining that as you can see here right this is I'm not a c developer uh but this is you.

Know they're still maintaining that as well. Here is the road map that they have. Um, so this is autogen 0.2, the current stable release of autogen. They says they will continue to accept bug fixes and minor enhancements. Minor enhancements probably, I doubt they'll do too much with that. But the 0.4 is going to be the release of the new architecture. It's still in preview. I mean, I'm sure by the time they write this, probably needs updated. But they want to add more programming languages, more built-in agents, and multi-agent workflows. Uh, reimplementation or M and migration of autogen studio and so forth. Right, so you can look here and you can kind of get some more information. 

But autogen 0.4 is a rewrite of autogen from the ground up. Um, to try to be more robust, easier to use, and cross-language library. So what this is, I mean, so again, let's do a quick recap. Autogen, the original in here, in if you go to the autogen GitHub that we've always gone to, it's going to be under version 0.2. That's like the stable version I believe what it used to be. Or if we go to ag2, ag2 is the founder and that team. They're coming over here and they're maintaining the original python package as three separate libraries. 

They're constantly doing releases and the idea is to be more community-driven. Now they just had an update, if I can and click where they came out with swarm agents and a captain agent. I'll probably go over a different update on exactly what that is, but I really just wanted to clarify some things. So I hope this helped clarify. And again, the original repository 0.4 is going to be the new rework. 

As you can see, I mean, you can see here right with the code. I mean, that we went over, this looks different. If you have used the original one, this is going to be different. I'm not saying the implementation, the implementation is definitely different. Uh, but a lot of the ideas are kind of the same. Um, I'm sure there's new. I mean, this is just a sample code, right? I haven't really dove too much into this, but that's going to be a rework. Right, so the problem with this is if you want to use this, you're going to have to migrate over to this new implementation of the algen framework and you're going to have to.

Figure out you know all the these different um all the different classes and how to use them. And it's not that they are entirely different. It's just the framework is built differently. So you're going have to do that migration over to 0.4 or you could just use ag2, which you know here's their website. You could come over here and if I can get to let me go back here on their GitHub. This is that version right. They've evolved into ag2 and has and this is the original Pi Auto gen package. 

Now with that said, you know I'm not going to get into oh this happened because of this or this person you don't like them anymore. Right again this is this is these are different communities. Things happen you know whenever you build things under a company and then you leave. You know I don't again I don't know what happened behind the scenes. I really don't um but something happened right because now there's different versions of autogen and the founders um they have a G2 now which is a new GitHub repo even though it's the same autogen framework that we've all been used to. 

So with that said I think you know you can make up your own decision on which way you want to go. Um I you know I think the problem was Microsoft. You know probably Microsoft a lot of people probably wanted a part of this a piece of the pie here. I can only imagine because it you know it it's one of the most popular AI agent Frameworks. And with the popularity of AI agents in general having a framework to create these AI agents is amazing. 

So I really just want to make this to kind of get some clarification on what is happening or what has happened. And you know as you can see here you've probably heard of magentic one. It's not magnetic one it's magentic one. Okay uh so you can come in here I'll have a link to this also but this is just another um but this is something else that is with the new autogen. Right it's not with the old one. On this is something with with the new one but you come here and read this. 

I'll probably go more in depth on all of these things especially with the older version of autogen. See what's going on with autogen studio um but uh just quickly with this magentic one the web Surfer as I said Adam forny was one I did a video on.

That some time ago um they're really trying to make this file Surfer and web Surfer you know it's not easy to do but they're trying to make it um make it easy as far as architecturally for us to use. So I just went over all these things kind of briefly but I hope I really hope that this helped you understand the differences. 

And you know I don't have anything against anybody here it's just things happened and you know we kind of have to make some decisions on what you want to do moving forward. I really appreciate you watching. Leave some comments down the section below um on your thoughts where you're kind of headed with this and I would just love to hear what you think about this situation. 

I said a brand new course on Crea it's over 2 hours long so you completely understand the framework. I also have a video on how to build build something. I'm going to be doing more of those because it's a lot of fun and I can introduce you to different Frameworks and how to make them work together. 

Thank you for watching until next video.

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