On Monday, Microsoft announced its new multi-agent artificial intelligence (AI), called Magnetic-One. The tech corporation said it is a high-performance system, in so far as several AI agents can be performed and used directly in web browsers on the local device. It is based on a new framework that will give an AI model access to several modalities and capabilities to complete tasks such as booking a ticket, shopping for some product online, or editing a document held on the device. Notably, Microsoft’s Magnetic-One is an open-source project and is accessible to researchers and developers.

Microsoft Introduces Magnetic-One

It has enormously advanced machine intelligence, able to create outputs in text, image, audio, and video formats. Modern AI systems, though great at retrieving information, remain poor at reasoning, especially at solving problems and completing tasks.

That is why AI agents, in essence miniature software capable of taking an action, are important extensions of large language models. Microsoft’s Magnetic-One also operates on the same principle as discussed in a research paper. The company describes it as a “high-performing generalist agentic system” designed to complete complex multi-step tasks like software engineering, data analysis, scientific research, and web navigation.

Magnetic-One is a multi-agent architecture where one LLM can activate several agents to complete a piece of work. In this regard, the AI system activates a lead agent named the Orchestrator. The Orchestrator acts as a leader over four other agents, and all of them specialize in a different task.

For instance, it might request a ticket for some movie; in that case, the Orchestrator can evoke a vision agent able to look at the screen and process visual information. Another maybe cognizant of web browsers and deal with its navigation. The third may make action from the prompt, and the fourth can take care of financial operations. An important amount of accuracy and speed is achieved in completing the task by distributing the work among many such specialized agents.

The open-source Magnetic-One AI system is placed on GitHub. It could be accessed through this link. It is available free to researchers and developers. Moreover, it is distributed under a custom Microsoft license, for use in business applications. In addition, Microsoft also published AutoGenBench, which is a test tool to test an AI agent’s performance. It has built-in loop and isolation controls to perform an exhaustive test of the agent.