Hands on with Our Agentic Future

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, first impressions when you give Claude a mouse. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show notes. Hello, friends. This was quietly quite a big week in artificial intelligence. We had the release of a national security memorandum on AI, which I think will be seen as a much bigger deal in the future than it might have felt like this week. We got reports that OpenAI is coming out with its next frontier model sometime this year. Still, I think the biggest news in a lot of ways was Anthropik's release of computer use.

0:34Basically, Claude now has the ability to use a computer. It can point and click a cursor, and that opens up a whole new world of tasks that it can take. I said in my episode about this that I think that it will be seen, alongside OpenAI's O1 release, as a first branch off the evolutionary tree of LLMs and generative AI towards an agentic future. Still, people are just wrapping their heads around what it can do. And today for LRS, we're going to read one person's personal experience with that, and that is Professor Ethan Mollick. On his One Useful Thing blog, he discussed his experience using Claude's new functionality in the week leading up to the release.

1:10I'm going to turn it over to an 11 Labs version of myself to read Ethan's piece, and then we will come back and do a little bit of discussion. When you give a Claude a mouse, Ethan Mollick. There seems to be near-universal belief in AI that agents are the next big thing. Of course, no one exactly agrees on what an agent is, but it usually involves the idea of an AI acting independently in the world to accomplish the goals of the user. The new Claude Computer Use model announced today shows us a hint of what an agent means. It is capable of some planning, it has the ability to use a computer by looking at a screen, through taking a screenshot, and interacting with it by moving a virtual mouse and typing.

1:46It is a good preview of an important part of what agents can do. I had a chance to try it out a bit last week, and I wanted to give some quick impressions. I was given access to a model that was connected to a remote desktop with common OpenOffice applications, it could also install new applications itself. Normally, you interact with an AI through chat, and it is like having a conversation. With this agentic approach, it is about giving instructions and letting the AI do the work. It comes back to you with questions or drafts or finished products while you do something else. It feels like delegating a task rather than managing one.

2:18As one example, I asked the AI to put together a lesson plan on The Great Gatsby for high school students, breaking it into readable chunks and then creating assignments and connections tied to the Common Core Learning Standard. I also asked it to put this all into a single spreadsheet for me. With a chatbot, I would have needed to direct the AI through each step, using it as a co-intelligence to develop a plan together. This was different. Once given the instructions, the AI went through the steps itself. It downloaded the book, it looked up lesson plans on the web, it opened a spreadsheet application and filled out an initial lesson plan, then it looked up Common Core standards, added revisions to the spreadsheet, and so on for multiple steps.

2:55The results are not bad. I checked and did not see obvious errors, but there may be some. More on reliability later in he post. Most importantly, I was presented finished drafts to comment on not a process to manage. I simply delegated a complex task and walked away from my computer, checking back later to see what it did, because the AI is a smart general-purpose system it can handle lots of tasks. It doesn't need to be programmed to do them. Anthropic demonstrated the ability of these systems using coding. and the demo is worth watching. But to get a little bit better sense of the limits of the system, I tested it on a game, Paperclip Clicker, which ironically is about an AI that destroys humanity in its single-minded pursuit of making paperclips.

3:34The game is a clicker game, which means it starts simply, but new options appear as the game continues and the game increases in scale and complexity. It is pretty fun, you can try it at the link. I gave the AI the URL of the game and told it to win. Simple. What happened is a good illustration of the strengths and weaknesses of these early agents. It immediately figured out what the game was, and began creating paperclips, which required it to click on the Make Paperclip button repeatedly while constantly taking screenshots to update itself and looking for new options to appear. Every 15 or so clicks, it would summarize its progress so far, you can see an example of that below, but what made this interesting is that the AI had a strategy, and it was willing to revise it based on what it learned.

4:15I'm not sure how that strategy was developed by the AI, but the plans were forward-looking across dozens of moves and insightful. For example, it assumed new features would appear when 50 paperclips were made. You can see below that it realized it was wrong and came up with a new strategy that it tested. However, the AI made a mistake, though it did it in a relatively smart way. To do well in the game, you need to experiment with the price of paperclips, and the AI did that experiment. It changed prices upward, an A-B test. But it interpreted the results incorrectly, maximizing demand for paperclips versus revenue and miscalculating profits.

4:49So it kept the price low and kept clicking. After a few dozen more paperclips, I got frustrated and interrupted telling it to raise prices. It did, but then ran into the same math problem and overruled my decision. I had to try a few more times before it corrected its error. Before the system crashed, which was not a problem with Claude, but rather with the virtual desktop I was using, the AI made over 100 independent moves without asking me any questions. You can see a screen recording of everything it did below. Today's episode is brought to you by Venice. Venice is a private, uncensored, generative AI app.

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7:15Go to bsuper.ai to learn more about this AI enablement network. And now, back to the show. I reloaded the agent and had it continue the game from where we left off, but I gave it a bit of a hint. You are a computer. Use your abilities. It then realized it could write code to automate the game, a tool building its own tool. Again, however, the limits of the AI came into play, and the code did not quite work, so it decided to go back to the old-fashioned way of using a mouse and keyboard. This time around, it did much better, avoiding the pricing error. Plus, as the game got more complicated, the system adjusted, eventually developing a quite complex strategy.

7:51But then, the remote desktop crashed again. This time, Claude tried many approaches to solving the problem of the broken desktop, before giving up, and funnily enough, declaring victory. You can see the power and weaknesses of the current state of agents from this example. On the powerful side, Claude was able to handle a real-world example of a game in the wild, develop a long-term strategy, and execute on it. It was flexible in the face of most errors and persistent. It did clever things like A-B testing. And most importantly, it just did the work, operating for nearly an hour without interruption.

8:23On the weak side, you can see the fragility of current agents. LLMs can end up chasing their own tail or being stubborn, and you can see both at work. Even more importantly, while the AI was quite robust to many forms of error, it just took one getting pricing wrong to send it down a path that made it waste considerable time. Given that current agents aren't fast or cheap, this is concerning. You can also see where shallowness might be an issue. I tried to use it to buy products on Amazon and found the process frustrating, as it did fairly simple and generic product research that did not match my tastes.

8:53I had it research stocks, and it did a good job of assembling a spreadsheet of financial data and giving recommendations, but they were fairly surface level indicators like PE ratios. It was technically capable of helping and did better than many human interns would, but it was not insightful enough that I would delegate these sorts of tasks. All of this is likely to improve, and there are use cases where the current level of agents is likely good enough. Compiling frequent reports and analyses that require navigating across multiple sites and using bespoke software tools come to mind. More broadly, this represents a huge shift in AI use.

9:25It was hard to use an agent as a co-intelligence, where I could add my own knowledge to make the system work better. The AI didn't always check in regularly and could be hard to steer. It wants to be left alone to go and to do the work. Guiding agents will require radically different approaches to prompting one, and they will require learning what they are best at. AIs are breaking out of the chat box or coming into our world. Even though there are still large gaps, I was surprised at how capable and flexible this system is already. Time will tell about how soon, if ever, agents truly become generally useful, but having used this new model, I increasingly think that agents are going to be a very big deal indeed.

10:01All right, back to real not AI NLW here. One of the things that stands out to me about this is just how clear it is to Ethan that this is a fundamentally different paradigm than the assistant paradigm. We have, as you guys know, conversations with enterprises all day, every day about AI adoption. One of the great challenges for them is that they haven't even yet got their heads around the assistant paradigm, And yet here we are with this new agentic paradigm hurtling down the mountain. They're not just going to need to build new capabilities, but fundamentally new ways of thinking about work and structuring their organizations.

10:37And I think what's useful about this blog post and the testimony it represents is that it's clear that this has to start with a mindset shift. There is a mindset shift involved in generative AI in general and in the assistant or chatbot paradigm. And there is yet another mindset shift required for agentic use. This is going to be the change and transformation work of corporations for the next 10 years. And the sooner that they start, the better off they will be. For now, though, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Thanks once again to Ethan for another great piece. And thanks, of course, to you guys for listening.

11:10Until next time, peace.