A world full of agents

The first time I came across this concept of agents was when the Zoom CEO was on Decoder. It was a little difficult to understand Eric Yuan at times, but the conversation was very enjoyable.

Eric's vision was that of a world filled with agents. Agents trained on my data, but with different personalities. Or, trained for different tasks.

Eric really wants you to stop having to attend Zoom meetings yourself. You’ll hear him describe how he thinks one of the big benefits of AI at work will be letting us all create something he calls a “digital twin” — essentially a deepfake avatar of yourself that can go to Zoom meetings on your behalf and even make decisions for you while you spend your time on more important things, like your family.

Today, I was listening to Rabbit CEO Jesse Lyu on Decoder. He was talking about agents in a different context. These are general purpose rabbit agents, which go to the web, open a website and do things that we want them to do.

The thing that I took from these conversations and the thing that I agree with, is that these are very early days of this technology. And we don't have the killer app yet. All these companies, big and small, established and startups are trying things. Nobody has any idea of what will work.

There are many challenges, legal and otherwise. But mostly legal. It is about money in the end. There will be a moment soon when this will get resolved. There will be a new world order. About how things will work on the web. Will there be a web?

While listening to Jesse talk about the agent go to the web and click around as a user, gave me an almost Matrix like feeling, like the agent was Neo and he could just see html code, instead of the UI that is designed for us humans.

A web which is frequented by agents will be a different world than the one we live in now. The existing ways of monetisation does not work in this world. Will there be a web left? Or it will be an OS for apps and a playground for these agents.

There is a future, a common vision that most of these CEOs have. A future in which you can just ask Siri/Rabbit/Google/ChatGPT to go do something, and they do it. There are two aspects to this:

1. Understanding what you want
2. Doing the thing

The models are good enough in understanding what we want. It's the taking action part which is lacking.

The platforms would love to make the apps obsolete. Wherein apps are more like a backend, an API.
You ask Siri to book a ticket.
You ask Google to order food.
You ask Rabbit to book an Uber.
Whatever!

There are challenges there. Why would the apps want to be a backend? Why would they want to be even more separated from their customers. And hence the challenge.

There will be a reckoning for this. Soon.

Or, we might be left in a world of half-met promises. Siri will still only be setting our reminders and not do much more.

In all this, I can't help but think, we should be able to carry our data. I don't want my agent of choice to not be as useful because I use an iPhone and my email is on Gmail. There should be a stronger identity. Something I can carry around with me. Something that is me.

We all want our Jarvis, after all.