🚀 Big news for AI agents! With the latest release of smolagents, you can now securely execute Python code in sandboxed Docker or E2B environments. 🦾🔒
Here's why this is a game-changer for agent-based systems: 🧵👇
1️⃣ Security First 🔐 Running AI agents in unrestricted Python environments is risky! With sandboxing, your agents are isolated, preventing unintended file access, network abuse, or system modifications.
2️⃣ Deterministic & Reproducible Runs 📦 By running agents in containerized environments, you ensure that every execution happens in a controlled and predictable setting—no more environment mismatches or dependency issues!
3️⃣ Resource Control & Limits 🚦 Docker and E2B allow you to enforce CPU, memory, and execution time limits, so rogue or inefficient agents don’t spiral out of control.
4️⃣ Safer Code Execution in Production 🏭 Deploy AI agents confidently, knowing that any generated code runs in an ephemeral, isolated environment, protecting your host machine and infrastructure.
5️⃣ Easy to Integrate 🛠️ With smolagents, you can simply configure your agent to use Docker or E2B as its execution backend—no need for complex security setups!
6️⃣ Perfect for Autonomous AI Agents 🤖 If your AI agents generate and execute code dynamically, this is a must-have to avoid security pitfalls while enabling advanced automation.
Here's a quick walk through of the first drop of material that works toward the use case:
- a fundamental introduction to reinforcement learning. Answering questions like, ‘what is a reward?’ and ‘how do we create an environment for a language model?’
- Then it focuses on Deepseek R1 by walking through the paper and highlighting key aspects. This is an old school way to learn ML topics, but it always works.
- Next, it takes to you Transformers Reinforcement Learning and demonstrates potential reward functions you could use. This is cool because it uses Marimo notebooks to visualise the reward.
- Finally, Maxime walks us through a real training notebook that uses GRPO to reduce generation length. I’m really into this because it works and Maxime took the time to validate it share assets and logging from his own runs for you to compare with.
Maxime’s work and notebooks have been a major part of the open source community over the last few years. I, like everyone, have learnt so much from them.
Extremely bullish on @CohereForAI's Aya Vision (8B & 32B) - new SOTA open-weight VLMs
- 8B wins up to 81% of the time in its class, better than Gemini Flash - 32B beats Llama 3.2 90B! - Covers 23 languages, excels in image captioning, VQA & more - Integrated on transformers from Day 0!
We just published the LlamaIndex unit for the agents course, and it is set to offer a great contrast between the smolagents unit by looking at
- What makes llama-index stand-out - How the LlamaHub is used for integrations - Creating QueryEngine components - Using agents and tools - Agentic and multi-agent workflows
The team has been working flat-out on this for a few weeks. Supported by Logan Markewich and Laurie Voss over at LlamaIndex.