> Mid 2025: Stumbling Agents
The world sees its first glimpse of AI agents.
Advertisements for computer-using agents emphasize the term “personal assistant”: you can prompt them with tasks like “order me a burrito on DoorDash” or “open my budget spreadsheet and sum this month’s expenses.” They will check in with you as needed: for example, to ask you to confirm purchases. Though more advanced than previous iterations like Operator, they struggle to get widespread usage.
Especially when the author personally knows the engineers working on the features, and routinely goes to parties with them. And when you consider that Altman said last year that “2025 will be the agentic year”
It was common knowledge that big corps were working on agent-type products when that report was written. Hardly much of a prediction, let alone any sort of technical revolution.
The big crux of AI 2027 is the claims about exponential technological improvement. "Agents" are mostly a new frontend to the same technology openai has been selling for a while. Let's see if we're on track at the start of 2026
the point is that minimizing 4 months as an insufficient timeline along which to prove out ones ability to predict a sequence of events is dumb when the rate of progress is incredibly fast.
They aren't predicting any new capabilities here: all things they mentioned already existed in various demos. They are basically saying that the next iteration of Operator is unlikely to be groundbreaking, which is rather obvious. I.e. "sudden breakthrough is unlikely" is just common sense.
Calling it "The world sees its first glimpse of AI agents" is just bad writing, in my opinion. People have been making some basic agents for years, e.g. Auto-GPT & Baby-AGI were published in 2023: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/12by8mj/i_used...
Yeah, those had much higher error rate, but what's the principal difference here?
Seems rather weird "it's an agent when OpenAI calls it an agent" appeal to authority.
> Mid 2025: Stumbling Agents The world sees its first glimpse of AI agents.
Advertisements for computer-using agents emphasize the term “personal assistant”: you can prompt them with tasks like “order me a burrito on DoorDash” or “open my budget spreadsheet and sum this month’s expenses.” They will check in with you as needed: for example, to ask you to confirm purchases. Though more advanced than previous iterations like Operator, they struggle to get widespread usage.