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A network of specialized open-source agents emerges

Developed by open-source communities, “agentic” AI systems like AutoGPT and BabyAGI begin to demonstrate increased levels of goal-directed behavior. They are built with the aim of overcoming the limitations of current LLMs by adding persistent memory and agentic capabilities. When GPT-4 is launched and OpenAI offers an API soon after, these initiatives generate a substantial surge in attention and support.

This inspires a wave of creativity that Andrej Karpathy of OpenAI calls a “Cambrian explosion”, evoking a reference to the emergence of a rich variety of life forms within a relatively brief time span over 500 million years ago. Much like those new animals filled vacant ecological niches through specialization, the most successful of the recent initiatives similarly specialize in narrow domains. The agents being developed, tested, and deployed in the following months are based on “agent templates”. These templates provide general frameworks that can easily be adapted for specific purposes and connected to LLMs fine-tuned for relevant tasks.

One initiative, for example, creates a financial consultant that is able to automatically detect unnecessary spending by analyzing a user’s bank statements, recommending quality investment opportunities, and even negotiating with vendors and service providers for better prices and conditions (see example here). It garners notable success, that is, until stories about people suffering severe financial losses due to faulty advice dispensed by this consultant start to surface on the web.

There are endless variants of these specialized agents. For example, a personal feed filter agent tracks a diverse array of sources (social media, news outlets, forums, etc.), automatically notifies the user when something important occurs, likes/replies to posts and messages, and posts comments that accurately reflect the user’s past behavior. Social media companies object to this proliferation because it undermines their business model by circumventing advertising and ignoring their recommendation algorithms, but they remain powerless to combat it. A wildly popular virtual friend not only chats with users and remembers their previous inputs and preferences, but also can act as a virtual sex partner. A personal teacher teaches u...

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