😺 the big AI trend of 2024

PLUS: 5 agents you can try today

Welcome, humans.

It’s Friday. We made it. Frankly, I had an exhausting week, and I’d love to hear one bright thing in your life this week to pick me up.

Hit reply, send me some good vibes, and I’ll send some back!

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

We give you the lowdown on agents, the future of AI.
5 startups with agent-like products that you can try.
Microsoft announced new laptops with dedicated AI keys.
Midjourney hinted at plans to build a 3D world simulator.

Agents: the new hot thing for 2024.

We mean AI agents, not CIA. pause for the spies reading this to swipe away

The word “agents” is taking over the convo faster than United Boeing flights became the world’s biggest red flag.

What they are: AI that can reason, handle higher order goals, come up with action plans, etc. Example:

AI today (specific task): “Write a blog post about X while following these guidelines”
Agents tomorrow (more general goals): “Draft a week’s worth of content based on the latest news in AI”

In other words: If today’s chatbots are like rear view cameras on a car, agents are like automatic parallel parking.

So, why now? The models are getting better. Going from GPT-4 to Claude 3 (and soon GPT-5 this summer, maybe) has led to better and better results in experimenting with agents.

They’re the promised land of AI at work. Chatbots today can do a lot of work for you, but they cap out at ~80% good and require a human to step in and finish or edit the rest.

Agents may cut out the human entirely. One person could command an army of 1,000 AI agents.

It’s more possible than you think. Asking a model to not just write, but plan, research and review improved accuracy from 48% to 95%(!).

Ready to try some AI agents out? We’ve got some tools you can try after this short break…

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Try these emerging agent products.

While agents are super, super early, some startups are already taking a crack at it:

Hyperwrite AI Personal Assistant - Chrome extension that repeats work on your browser
Lindy - A platform to build AI agents that automate work (example)
Air and Sameday - AI-powered receptionists that can handle appointments and integrate into other software
Devin - AI software engineer (example)

Again, our caveat: agents are not reliable yet, so most of these products will be buggy!

We’ll be testing every agents tool we can get our hands on (GPT-5 included) and sharing everything we can find. More soon!

Around the Horn.

Microsoft announced two business laptops with new keys for their Copilot.
The UN adopted its first resolution relating to AI.
Midjourney is graduating from image generation and will build tools for 3D world simulation.
More details have emerged about the strange deal between Microsoft and Inflection AI.
New survey of 70 enterprises shows new patterns in AI adoption.