IBL News | New York
Hugging Face released a free, web-agentic AI tool called Open Computer Agent this month, which behaves similarly to OpenAI’s Operator.
Users can prompt a task, and the agent opens the necessary programs and determines the required steps.
It uses a Linux virtual machine preloaded with several applications, including Firefox. However, as Techcrunch described, “Be forewarned: It’s quite sluggish and occasionally makes mistakes.”
“It often runs into CAPTCHA tests that it’s unable to solve.”
The Hugging Face team’s goal is to demonstrate that open AI models are becoming more capable and cheaper to run on cloud infrastructure, not to build a state-of-the-art computer-using agent, as one of the developers expressed below.
We’re launching Computer Use in smolagents! 🥳
-> As vision models become more capable, they become able to power complex agentic workflows. Especially Qwen-VL models, that support built-in grounding, i.e. ability to locate any element in an image by its coordinates, thus to… pic.twitter.com/mI8MuWZkIS
— m_ric (@AymericRoucher) May 6, 2025
Agentic technology is attracting increasing investment as enterprises look to boost productivity. A recent KPMG survey shows that 65% of companies are experimenting with AI agents. Experts say the AI agent segment might grow from $7.84 billion in 2025 to $52.62 billion by 2030.
