philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Forget Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – the big impact is already here and it’s called AI agents

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The Rabbit r1 was a big hit at the CES show this year. It’s affordably priced, it allowed direct access to an AI engine. But the focus on the device may have missed the real bombshell that Rabbit r1 dropped.

In the video, CEO Jesse Lyu teaches the AI to book a vacation, but he’s not visiting the web-sites, nor is he clicking on any web pages. The “controller” that oversees the interaction of agents and websites is doing all the work. More than that, it’s learning from this interaction how to do this series of tasks to achieve a particular result. After its first training, he is able to just say, “plan a trip” with a few comments and it executest the planning and comes back with appropriate options.

Think about that. There is no need for interfaces or APIs. There is no need for the user to have standalone apps. Once trained on a similar task, the AI system (not the device) is able to learn to do everything necessary – including operating a browser or even a computer – on its own, without intervention, to achieve a specific outcome. Once it’s learned that task, it can adapt it and even modify it. ...

You might remember the scandal that happened when a company called Cambridge Analytics collected Facebook data and claimed they could use likes and dislikes to predict everything from your voting preferences to your sexual preferences. That’s going to seem “so 2016” when you consider that we might all have an agent that no longer has to predict – it will know what you are going to do.

That creates a huge dilemma in terms of privacy. Where will that be stored? Who will “own” it and control it? ...

For those not familiar with it, Metcalfe’s law, simply stated, says that the value of a network is the square of its nodes. Or to put it simply, once you get a critical mass of users in any platform, it becomes really hard for anyone else to compete. ...

How strong is Metcalfe’s law. It is so strong that even Elon Musk has not been able to totally kill X/Twitter. Millions have left for other platforms, but even so, few have actually deleted their Twitter account and totally moved on. Despite many new startups trying to supplant Twitter, as of yet, no-one has. The value of their network is still dwarfed by Twitter.

X/Twitter may lose enough money to destroy itself, but it hasn’t lost enough people. That’s the power of Metcalfe’s law. ...

See the full story here: https://www.itworldcanada.com/article/forget-artificial-general-intelligence-agi-the-big-impact-is-already-here-and-its-called-ai-agents/558707