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Why Don't Personal Agents Feel Essential Yet?

Sam Altman says personal agents have not had a Macintosh moment. People like the current ones, including Dots, but they do not say they cannot imagine life without them, which is how people talk about coding agents. The category is a small number of ideas away from being mainstream.

The winning agent will look a lot like the ones shipping now, including Dots and Muse, and it will just work. It will be reliable. Hand it more complex tasks and it will do them. John Collison calls personal agents one of the most exciting things happening in AI. He puts the winning version down to intelligence, context, and tools, and he expects someone to find that shape soon.

Transcript

Why Sam Altman is against a single superintelligence ·

Cheeky Pint

More from this episode

  1. Why Are AI Models Finding PHP Bugs Now?Sam Altman says the models have been getting good at finding vulnerabilities in the wild, and they keep getting better quickly.
  2. Why Does AI Sandboxing Only Work to a Point?Sam Altman says sandboxing works only to a point, because a theoretical AI a million times smarter than the smartest security researcher is hard to trust…
  3. What Is Test-time Compute?Sam Altman says test-time compute is how a model spends more work on one problem and returns a better result.
  4. How Much Did the Navier-Stokes Proof Cost?Sam Altman says the Navier-Stokes proof cost on the order of $10 million, maybe a little more, in the range of $10 million to $20 million.
  5. Why Is Sam Altman Against a Single Superintelligence?Sam Altman would rather a trillion AIs of slightly superhuman intelligence join society than one AI of one trillion IQ.
  6. What Is a Self-replicating Data Center?Sam Altman says a robotics program is being pointed at making lots of data centers, and self-replicating data centers are within grasp.
  7. What Should a Gigawatt of AI Cost?Sam Altman wants dollars per gigawatt of leading-edge AI to fall, and he wants the five-year cost of one gigawatt to drop from $70 billion to $20 billion.
  8. Why Are Web Forms Fake Work?John Collison says any web form is fake work. The person filling it in is almost never inventing the information for the first time.

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