ChatGPT's next AI blockbuster application is "Automated AI Intelligent Agent" going all-in in Silicon Valley.

Under the impetus of the Large Language Model (LLM), AI agents have become extremely popular.

AI agents, a type of AI intelligent entity, are capable of perceiving the environment and reacting to it. They can autonomously make decisions and take actions to complete certain tasks, and they can also iterate through learning and reflection.

Due to their strong autonomy, the entire process relies very little on human instructions and supervision.

This new technology has now swept through Silicon Valley, with individual developers, tech giants such as Microsoft and Alphabet-C (the parent company of Alphabet-C), as well as startups, almost all entering the field.

Taking a startup as an example, Inflection AI raised $1.3 billion in funding at the end of June.

According to co-founders Reid Hoffman and Mustafa Suleyman, as revealed in a podcast, the company is developing a personal assistant that can serve as an advisor and handle tasks such as obtaining flight points and hotel reservations after travel delays.

Another startup, Adept, raised $415 million in funding.

Adept has developed the Action Transformer (ACT-1) model, which can enter a company's Salesforce customer relationship database with just a single prompt, completing a task that supposedly requires humans to click 10 times or more.

At the same time, investors are pouring in.

Jason Franklin of WVVCapital said he had to work hard to secure investments from two former Alphabet-C brain engineers for an AI agent company.

In May, Google Ventures, a venture capital fund under Alphabet-C, led a seed round of $2 million in funding for the startup Cognosys to develop AI agents.

Hesam Motlagh, founder of the agent startup Arkifi, said the company completed a "significant" Series A funding round in June.

In addition, well-known AI journalist Matt Schlicht said that at least 100 serious projects are dedicated to commercializing AI agents. He said:

Entrepreneurs and investors are very excited about autonomous AI agents. They are more interested in AI agents than chatbots.

AI company MultiOn is currently beta testing an AI agent application it has developed. Developer Div Garg said:

To a large extent, we hope it becomes your personal AI friend.

He added:

It may evolve into J.A.R.V.I.S. (Tony Stark's AI assistant in Iron Man), and we hope it can connect to many of your services. If you want to do something, you can talk to your AI assistant and it can help you do it.

Large Language Model with AI Proxy

In March, OpenAI released the large language model GPT-4, further driving competition in the field of AI proxies.

In just a few weeks, AI agents have sprung up like mushrooms after the rain.

The most typical examples are Baby AGI and Auto-GPT, both of which can determine the priority and execution of tasks based on predefined goals and results.

Auto-GPT obtains output from GPT-4, feeds it back to itself through an improvised external memory, further iterates a task, and can also correct errors or suggest improvements.

Baby AGI operates similarly to Auto-GPT, but with different task preferences.

Vivian Cheng, an investor at CRV, a venture capital firm focused on AI proxies, said that GPT-4 enhances the strategic and adaptive thinking required to handle unpredictable real-world situations.

Kanjun Qiu, CEO of General Intelligence, a competitor of OpenAI and creator of AI agents, along with four other AI agent developers, stated that they expect the first batch of systems capable of reliably executing multi-step tasks and having a certain degree of autonomy to be launched within a year, with a focus on specific areas such as coding and marketing tasks.

"As dumb as a rock"

Currently, AI agents are still in their early stages and require "nanny-style" guidance and supervision from humans, otherwise, there may be loopholes.

Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, a competitor of ChatGPT, said, "There are many ways to make mistakes." Therefore, he prefers to offer agent products supervised by humans.

You must treat artificial intelligence like a baby and constantly supervise it like a mother.

"The real challenge is to build systems with powerful reasoning capabilities," Qiu said.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, believes that basic model technology is a leap forward for their own digital assistants such as Microsoft Xiaona, Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, and Alphabet-C Assistant. In his view, these digital assistants have not lived up to their initial expectations. "None of them are as dumb as rocks. Whether it's Microsoft Xiaona, Alexa, Alphabet-C Assistant, or Siri," Nadella told the Financial Times in February.

An Amazon spokesperson said that Alexa has been using advanced AI technology and added that the team is developing new models to make the assistant more powerful and useful.

Alphabet-C claims that it is also continuously improving its assistant, and its Duplex technology can make restaurant reservations and verify business hours by making phone calls.

Artificial intelligence expert Edward Grefenstette also joined Alphabet-C's DeepMind research group last month, developing a general-purpose agent that can adapt to open environments.

Although AI agents are not yet perfect, their potential is astonishing, and OpenAI was the first to notice.

Recently, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy said at a developer event that if a paper proposes a different training method for models, OpenAI would dismiss it, but when a new AI agent paper comes out, they would discuss it with great excitement.

Karpathy expressed his excitement at the time:

AI agents represent a future for AI!"