AI agents may soon surpass people as primary application users

I think everyone agrees with you. The issue is who is building API first interfaces? The value an agent provides here is that it moves control from the publisher to the consumer (in the technical sense).

“Twitter doesn’t want to let me access via an API? That’s fine, my browser/agent will automatically automate what I want it to do for me in the UI.” Is a major shift in how we interface with other services.

Because money.

End-user interfaces can be served ads, are intrinsically rate limited, and are often the main money source.

APIs make no ad revenue, can easily rack up expensive server costs, and are often a single third-party service that offer services to the rest of the customer base (bonus points for making you look bad if they implement a feature better).

People know this. But most actually useful software built for humans doesn't have a good programmatic API. So computer use is the only way to connect AI agents to that software. And that's where a lot of the true (medium-term) financial gain will be - automating tasks on tools that are poorly built or just old but are still valuable.

Unfortunately LOB apps often don’t have a useful API, nor do they have a vendor/support that is capable of supporting you in a timely manner even if they do.

RPA bridged the gap a bit for us.

I would think that a lot of apis are designed for human users and we may need new apis designed for a usage patterns more natural to bots.

Remember when blockchain was going to be used in everything?

Now we have AI + the ever favorite avatars.

They have a lot of faith in billable hours.

So far it is confined to the Internet. You just wait til they train robots. It will be gradual and then all at once. Especially coordination and swarming behavior between drones etc. We are cooked as they say.

Plus a huge chunk of internet traffic is already bots

The thing I don’t really get is: who the heck is gonna create services for all these agents? Other agents? That won’t work. And what should they get done for you? The boring work of what? So you concentrate on yours hobbies? AIs are already playing guitar better than a hobbyist. Agents or not, high diffusion of AI or not if you want to make something significant and deep in your life you still need to go deeper yourself, agents wouldn’t work out for you, you’d just get lazier otherwise. And in your example what’s the purpose of agents interacting with other friend’s agents? Makes no sense to me, sounds like totally wasted compute

I think we'll have HUDs like Meta's Orion, with always monitoring AI agents, before long.

Yes!

The simplest and most direct and useful implementation Generative UI is to have a settings / form react to the context — e.g. an email form, or a bunch of sliders. I have a zod-based form schema, and set of forms and schemas. If there's a new schema (e.g. if I want to add name and comments) I can just have the AI generate and save a new schema, and the UI will know how to handle the changes. This makes updating interfaces really easy. (this is personalized to the dev)

For UIs generated per user, ideally you'd have a lot of guardrails around what it's able to generate and what the underlying data and use case is. I haven't built any of this in production yet, but I think accessibility may get a boost. Some video games already have a "verbose mode" for new players, and a "bare bones" mode for players who already get the mechanisms. One might consider building an "explanation" layer where some of the concepts can be explained to the user dynamically, and some more complex options can be either revealed under an "advanced mode" or when the UI determines the user "understands" the underlying concepts, as not to overwhelm them. I'm currently experimenting and designing/thinking through some bioinformatics (gene annotation) tools with this approach, but it's early days.

It wasn't until 2044 that the Black Wall was implemented to separate the rogue AIs from the corporate nets. As is often postulated though, how would a network of rogue AIs power themselves? LLMs being quite energy intensive, it's impossible to know what technology would actually create AGI and if that will as well be energy intensive, but basically all intelligence to date including humans have proven to be quite demanding in resources.

An AI agent is an LLM attached to some external tool.

That's it.

What people are confused about is what groups of agents are, how they are managed and how they interact with each other.

They are confused because no one is building real multi-agent systems in the open which work.

Trying to build multi-step logical LLMs with the paltry memory we have today is about as effective as trying to play 8k video on a Intel 8008.

All the attention is on the LLMs themselves, which is the same thing as being excited about a CPU in 1970. Sure they are amazing engineering, but you will need another layer on top to make them actually useful.

Historically it was apple that first got the software right. We are now waiting for the first company to get a multi-agent system right - but again thanks to the tiny memories we have because of NVidia it will have to run in the data center, or it will be a decade away.

A few weeks ago, Anthropic published what seemed to me to be a level-headed discussion of agents:

https://www.anthropic.com/research/building-effective-agents

Simon Willison had some valuable comments about that article:

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/20/building-effective-age...

> It's like the hype of chatbot LLMs circa '21-23.

That’s funny, since I’m using a “chatbot LLM” right now in another window, writing code.

What is the difference between an Agent and Function Calls?