Glimpses – 2
Dear CEO,
Continuing our look at tomorrow’s world through the eyes of others.
Bill Gates (Nov 2023): “An agent will be able to help you with all your activities if you want it to. With permission to follow your online interactions and real-world locations, it will develop a powerful understanding of the people, places, and activities you engage in. It will get your personal and work relationships, hobbies, preferences, and schedule. You’ll choose how and when it steps in to help with something or ask you to make a decision… Agents are smarter. They’re proactive—capable of making suggestions before you ask for them. They accomplish tasks across applications. They improve over time because they remember your activities and recognize intent and patterns in your behavior. Based on this information, they offer to provide what they think you need, although you will always make the final decisions. Imagine that you want to plan a trip. A travel bot will identify hotels that fit your budget. An agent will know what time of year you’ll be traveling and, based on its knowledge about whether you always try a new destination or like to return to the same place repeatedly, it will be able to suggest locations. When asked, it will recommend things to do based on your interests and propensity for adventure, and it will book reservations at the types of restaurants you would enjoy. If you want this kind of deeply personalized planning today, you need to pay a travel agent and spend time telling them what you want… Agents won’t simply make recommendations; they’ll help you act on them. If you want to buy a camera, you’ll have your agent read all the reviews for you, summarize them, make a recommendation, and place an order for it once you’ve made a decision. If you tell your agent that you want to watch Star Wars, it will know whether you’re subscribed to the right streaming service, and if you aren’t, it will offer to sign you up. And if you don’t know what you’re in the mood for, it will make customized suggestions and then figure out how to play the movie or show you choose.”
Technology Review: ““What you really want is just this thing that is off helping you,” [said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman]. [He] described the killer app for AI as a “super-competent colleague that knows absolutely everything about my whole life, every email, every conversation I’ve ever had, but doesn’t feel like an extension.” It could tackle some tasks instantly, he said, and for more complex ones it could go off and make an attempt, but come back with questions for you if it needs to. It’s a leap from OpenAI’s current offerings. Its leading applications, like DALL-E, Sora, and ChatGPT (which Altman referred to as “incredibly dumb” compared with what’s coming next), have wowed us with their ability to generate convincing text and surreal videos and images. But they mostly remain tools we use for isolated tasks, and they have limited capacity to learn about us from our conversations with them. In the new paradigm, as Altman sees it, the AI will be capable of helping us outside the chat interface and taking real-world tasks off our plates.”
Channel Futures: “Boomi CEO Steve Lucas…painted a picture in the near future where AI agents will trigger a “reimagining of every single enterprise application.”…“We’re seeing the full reimagining of every single enterprise application that exists on the planet today,” he continued. “Everything that we use today − CRM SFA, ERP, HRM, HCM, whatever it may be − those concepts were invented when you couldn’t ask a semiautonomous or autonomous AI agent to magically do something for you, or build a website from scratch. Now is the perfect time to do what we in this room collectively do, which is help companies connect their systems, their applications, their databases, their APIs, and of course, their people… “There will be thousands of things that we will no longer do in two short years,” he said. “The agent economy is coming; nothing will stop it. We will talk about applications, databases, APIs and agents all in one conversation.””
WBUR in conversation with chief technology correspondent at Axios Ina Fried: “Engineers are building AI “agents” that can take action on users’ behalf, everything from booking a flight to handling a customer service complaint… “If you start letting agents take action on their own and they’re wrong, what happens? Especially if an agent starts talking to another agent…I do think that’s our future, because the productivity gains and the idea of having your computer do menial tasks for you is so appealing. But I think we have to get to a place where the AI systems are in better shape, and we have better safeguards to make sure when they are wrong, there’s recourse versus actions that are irreversible.”
