As expected, Operai has launched its first AI Autonomous agent, called operator this week. The operator can act independently on your computer using a web browser that does almost anything that can be done in a web browser.
Therefore, you can perform tasks such as booking a restaurant table or buying edible. He simply tells him what he wants to do, and he leaves as a faithful butler enabled for the Internet that is avoma until the task is complete or should return to you with a question. Let's say there is no table available at 7.00 pm, the Lord or the lady would care about a table of 7.45pm?
Of course, the operator does not call him Lord or Lady, but he could also. For all purposes, this is the Internet butler that promised us almost 30 years ago when Ask Jeeves was close.
Do you remember asking Jeeves? It was a 1997 search engine that had an image of a real butler that was ready and willing to find things for you online. The character is named after Jeeves, Bertie Wooster's valet in the fictitious works of PG Wodehouse. Instead of writing in terms of search, I asked Jeeves encouraged to look for things using natural language questions, such as “find the perfect accompaniment for roasted dinner.”
Of course, we all know that Google won the War of the Search Motors, and in 2006, Ask dropped the person of Jeeves and became Ask.com. But somehow, we have completed the circle with AI, and thanks to technologies such as the search for Chatgpt and perplexity, the search for the use of natural language requests is back in fashion. Like our Internet butlers, except that we now call them ia agents …
AGI is the real objective
It is no secret that Sam Altman and Openai are really interested in Agi's general artificial intelligence, also often known as superintelligence. This is the ultimate goal for OpenAI, and why it was founded. Chatbots like Chatgpt could have taken the world by assault, but their popularity is almost like an involuntary consequence (an issue I will return later) of the race towards AGI.
In a video to promote the launch of the operator, one of the operai employees sitting next to Sam Altman comes out and says, [Operator is] “About eliminating a bottleneck more on our way to Agi.”
While the agents are clearly exciting, they are not the destiny of OpenAI; They are just one more step along the way. AGI has the potential to change our world radically. Once we have created artificial intelligence that is smarter than us, it should logically be able to build even more intelligent versions of itself, and the level of intelligence increases rapidly.
We have to wait for you not to eliminate ourselves. Do not worry, but Geoffory Hinton, often known as the 'godfather of AI', recently increased its probabilities of technology that eliminated humanity to 20%.
And this is where we return to the issue of involuntary consequences. Many experts see AI agents as a threat. While talking in the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, the pioneer of artificial intelligence Yoshua Bengio warned that AI agents could be catastrophic for humanity.
In statements to Business Insider, he said: “All catastrophic scenarios with AGI or superintelligence occur if we have agents.” Bengio would prefer that we continue towards the construction of AGI without using agents, which allows them to do things autonomously. “All AI for science and medicine, all things that care about people, is not agent,” said Bengio. “And we can continue to build more powerful systems than are not agthic.”
The fall of humanity
So, could it really be that something designed to act as an Internet butler and do servile tasks such as helping me buy my groceryables accidentally gives the power to seize the world?
For now, it is difficult to imagine how an automated program that advances slowly through the process of reserving a table in a restaurant using a web browser will end in the fall of humanity, but the agents of AI will live or die for one thing, if the people actually, use them, and I am not completely convinced that they will.
Personally, I do not feel ready to deliver my credit card details to a computer program that will buy me things to save me time because I am not sure that I will ever trust that I do not make a mistake. Would you do it?
Maybe Operai needs to give his operator a more human face if he wants him to trust him, and it turns out that the good old jeeves could be looking for a job these days …
