The Anatomy of Autonomy: AI's Fifth Killer App
Learn about the fifth killer app of AI, Autonomous Agents, and the five stages of "brain" development it took to get from Foundation Models to Autonomous Agents. Read this blog to understand why Full Autonomy is like "Full Self Driving".
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Anti-ego ideas for anti-ergodic life. Working on something smol. AI news & interviews: @latentspacepod Book on Principles: @coding_career
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🧠The Anatomy of Autonomy 🤖
— swyx.ai (@swyx) April 19, 2023
The fifth killer app of AI is Autonomous Agents.
Presenting
- Summary of #AutoGPT / @babyAGI_
- The 5 stages of "brain" development it took to get from Foundation Models to Autonomous Agents
- Why Full Autonomy is like "Full Self Driving"!
Begin: pic.twitter.com/ytUJzFdR1a -
I think there have been 4 "Killer Apps" of AI so far.
— swyx.ai (@swyx) April 19, 2023
"Killer App" as in:
- unquestionable PMF
- path to making >$100m/yr
- everybody holds it up as an example
They are:
1. Generative Text
2. Generative Art
3. Copilot for X
4. ChatGPT
We're seeing the birth of Killer App #5 pic.twitter.com/V4a6kUmw1B -
🤖What is AutoGPT and why are they "the next frontier of prompt engineering"?
— swyx.ai (@swyx) April 19, 2023
Take the biggest open source AI projects you can think of. I don't care which.
AutoGPT **trounces** all of them. It's ~2 weeks old and it's not even close (see below).
And yet: AutoGPT isn't a new… pic.twitter.com/d4fq29BAi9 -
The core difference between them is surprisingly simple:@BabyAGI_ is intentionally smol. Initial MVP was <150 LOC, and its core loop is illustrated below.#AutoGPT is very expansive and has what Liam Neeson would call a particular set of skills, from reasonable ones like… pic.twitter.com/NvKlTC3dQT
— swyx.ai (@swyx) April 19, 2023 -
Fortunately the @OpenAI strategy of building in safety at the foundation model layer has mitigated the immediate threat of paperclips.
— swyx.ai (@swyx) April 19, 2023
Even when blatantly asked to be a paperclip maximizer, BabyAGI refuses.
Incredibly common OpenAI Safety Team W.https://t.co/AoclJEUaZM -
The development of Autonomous AI started with the release of GPT3 just under 3 years ago.
— swyx.ai (@swyx) April 19, 2023
In the beginning, there were Foundation Models. @Francis_YAO_ explains how they provide natural language understanding and generation, store world knowledge, and display in-context… pic.twitter.com/OjxHtDub1F -
Is all this just for fun? Or a serious opportunity?
— swyx.ai (@swyx) April 19, 2023
I argue that it is. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them. By building automations, and autonomous agents, we are extending the reach of our will. pic.twitter.com/fm1Oip4oge -
AI may appear further away than they seem in this funhouse mirror, though.
— swyx.ai (@swyx) April 19, 2023
Self-Driving Cars have been perpetually "5 years away" for a decade. We're seeing that now with Autonomous Agents - 2023 AI Agents are like 2015 Self Driving Cars.
AutoGPT is more like "level 1 Autonomy"… pic.twitter.com/botpm0NFDr