I'm going to put some criticisms below, but first I just want to say that this was very interesting and well written. I found the survey of ways in which "agentiness" has already been incorporated into deep learning especially valuable. It's a little unclear to me though if these are supposed to transform a Tool AI into an Agent AI, because it seems to me that most of the cited systems would still be considered Tools.

It does seem to me however that the article is in some ways ignoring the central premise of the tradeoff between the effectiveness of Agent AIs and (ostensibly) the safety of Tool AIs. When the article says "Tool AIs are inferior on every dimension to Agent AIs" it ignores the dimension of safety. And when it goes on to argue that Agent AIs are indeed more effective, I can't help but think that this was already the premise of the tradeoff (although the analysis of why Agents outperform Tools is insightful).

An argument could perhaps be made that Agents are so much better that nobody would make the tradeoff for safety, or that those who do will be competed out of the market, but this is not explicitly done (at least: safety is not taken into account here). The article says Agents would be systematically preferred over Tools, but I would think that safety has at least some value: surely a billion dollars is preferable to infinity dollars + the end of humanity. Also, regarding competitiveness, it may be possible to discriminate against Agent AIs in the market to such a degree that Tool AIs actually become more profitable. I very much doubt it, but it seems to warrant some analysis.

I'm inclined to agree with the general conclusion that Tool/Oracle AIs are probably not a good long-term solution, but more for the reasons briefly stated in the Background section. In other words: not because the "effective" side of the tradeoff is more effective than the other side, but because the "safe" side is not actually that safe or might actually be infeasible.