Azeem Azhar at Exponential View: I’m at DealBook Summit in NYC today and I just heard Sam Altman speak about his view on the next few years:
I expect that in 2025, we will have systems that people look at, even people who are sceptical of current progress, and say ‘Wow, I did not expect that’. Agents are the thing everyone is talking about for good reason. This idea that you can give an AI system a pretty complicated task, the kind of task you’d give to a very smart human, that takes a while to go off and do and use a bunch of tools and create something of value. That’s the kind of thing I’d expect next year. And that’s a huge deal. If that works as well as we hope it does, that can really transform things.
Agents have been on my roadmap for a while. Last year, I spoke about our billion agent future and invested in a couple of startups building agentic systems. In today’s post, we look at how we think we’ll go from AI assistants like ChatGPT to billions of agents supporting us in the background.
Towards billions of agents
ByNathan Warren and daniel bashir
In the very near future, knowledge workers could be supported by thousands of AI agents, all operating in parallel. This is not speculative futurism. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang recently spoke about the role agents already play at Nvidia and how he sees their future:
Brad: Are you already using chain-of-reasoning and tools like o1 in our own business to improve it?
Jensen: Absolutely. Our cybersecurity system today can’t run without our own agents. We have AI agents helping design chips—Hopper wouldn’t be possible, Blackwell wouldn’t be possible and don’t even think about Rubin. We have AI chip designers, AI software engineers and AI verification engineers, and we build them all internally. We have the ability, and we’d rather use the opportunity to explore the technology ourselves. I’m hoping that Nvidia someday will be a 50,000-employee company with 100 million AI assistants […] AIs will recruit other AIs to solve problems […] and so we’ll just be one large employee base, some of them digital and some biological.
Similarly, Sam Altman anticipates the emergence of a one-person unicorn—a billion-dollar enterprise managed by a single individual leveraging an army of AI agents.
Today’s AI assistants, like ChatGPT, require constant human input—they’re co-pilots, not autonomous actors. The next evolution, already well underway, is of agents that execute tasks independently once given an objective, much like delegating to a seasoned team and stepping back while they handle the rest. And there is no limit to the size of this team.
To help you make sense of this, we teamed up with daniel bashir, ML engineer, writer and managing editor of The Gradient.
More here.
