How will AI AGENTS change the WORLD?
What are these AI agents everyone is talking about?
AI agents are programs or machines equipped with artificial intelligence to perform specific tasks. These agents can learn from data, recognize patterns and, at best, make decisions independently.
Your voice assistant in the kitchen is an AI agent, just like Siri on your phone.
What is decisive is the training process of AI agents. They are partly trained with huge amounts of data to improve their abilities and solve problems better. The more data they have, the more intelligent they become.
And Siri has been allowed to get smarter for a long time! When I asked the Apple agent to turn up the volume, the answer was always: “I’ve made it louder” – What? I can hear that myself – just do it!! Or I ask Siri to play something on Spotify or Audible. Very often the reply was: “Please open the app to play this and that.” Yes, if I had my hands free I wouldn’t be asking you!! Now it’s slowly getting better – the annoying “I’ve made it louder” is at least gone already…
But what other AI agents are there and what can they do?
I’ve collected 10 applications for AI agents here. Plus: the AI assistant that impressed me most – at the very end, of course! 🙂
1 – Chatbots are now called AI agents
The probably best-known application is chatbots. And the intelligent chatbots are now called AI agents. They are mostly used in customer service. They can answer customer questions, solve problems and even take orders, all without human intervention. And the suggestions of what else might interest you keep getting better. At Amazon that drove me crazy. I buy a pack of cable ties. And instead of suggesting gaffer tape, plastic sheeting and a shovel 🙂 I get cable tie offers for a week!!
AI agent, save me!
2 – Virtual assistants:
Then there are the virtual assistants already mentioned, like Siri, the Amazon voice assistant and Google Assistant. These agents use speech recognition and natural language processing to help users with various tasks, such as playing music, answering questions or scheduling appointments. They recognize our voice and control our home with smart home technology.
3 – Autonomous vehicles:
Autonomous vehicles use cameras, sensors like lidar and complex AI algorithms to perceive their surroundings, make decisions and navigate safely without human intervention. An AI agent, in other words.
4 – Medical diagnosis systems:
AI agents are also used in medicine to diagnose diseases and suggest treatment options. They analyze medical data such as X-rays or patient records to make informed decisions. MIA – a British AI agent – correctly identified 12% more breast cancer cases than the best doctors in a pilot project. But AI agents aren’t only used in diagnosis. In the future we will get tailor-made medicine. Active ingredients perfectly matched to our body and our DNA.
5 – Personalized recommendation systems:
Platforms like Netflix, Amazon and Spotify use AI agents to create personalized recommendations for movies, products and music based on user behavior and preferences. With music especially it has worked very well for years, I think. Spotify mostly suggests things that match my taste.
6 – Translation software:
AI agents are used in translation software like Google Translate to translate texts between different languages. They use machine learning to continuously improve their accuracy and performance. Scrolls from long-ago times can finally be deciphered. And the further development is, for example, HeyGen, where the translation comes with the lip-synced video right away!
7 – Facial recognition systems:
AI agents are used in facial recognition systems to identify faces in images or videos. They are used for security purposes, access control and even for social media. In America you can pay with your palm in Amazon shops! An AI recognizes the unique structure of the hand, which is linked to my credit card information. A brief hand placement and the payment process is complete.
8 – Predictive maintenance:
In industry, AI agents are used for predictive maintenance. They analyze sensor data and patterns to predict when maintenance will be needed or when machines might fail.
9 – Emotion recognition:
AI agents are used in emotion recognition systems to detect a person’s mood or emotions from their facial expression, voice or other biometric features. With hume.ai you can have camera or conversation data evaluated automatically, e.g. whether a driver behind the wheel is still alert or slowly getting tired. Customer service calls can be evaluated for satisfaction via API. Hume.ai’s claim is: we have the first AI with emotional intelligence!
10 – Agricultural applications:
AI agents are used in agriculture to maximize crop yields, optimize the use of resources like water and fertilizer and predict pest infestations. Drones drop seeds for trees and are thereby 100 times faster than with conventional methods.
AI agents are already accomplishing impressive things – and doing things that have a lot to do with our everyday lives. At the same time machine learning works better and better, AI agents get better to the same degree at learning from experience and drawing conclusions for action. That will also affect the collaboration between human and machine.
But now to my highlight: the most impressive AI agent for me currently is the Open Interpreter 01 Lite.
This little round thing works as follows: I speak a question into the device, e.g. when is the next sunny day, and the AI agent opens a weather page ON MY LAPTOP, looks it up and informs me. As if a real, employed assistant were sitting at my Mac. The program has full access to my computer, can maintain calendar entries, send messages with locally stored attachments and the best part: my assistant is capable of learning. I can teach it new skills, like sending a Slack message or continuously checking my inbox for invoices. Similar devices without access to my computer are, for example, the stylishly colorful rabbit r1 and the Humane AI Pin that Marques Brownlee just completely tore apart. What these devices can do, Siri should actually be able to do too. It only really gets exciting in combination with my computer.
How will this change the world? In principle I can program any conceivable automation with it. “When information on such-and-such a topic arrives, open the Excel spreadsheet such-and-such, enter the information in row such-and-such”. Anyone who currently has an Excel spreadsheet or a CMS open can now think about whether what they’re doing right now couldn’t be automated… because it will be! Nobody pays a human employee when the same performance can be done FOR FREE by an open-source AI agent. I’ll certainly test the Open Interpreter soon. What would you do with it? Feel free to write it in the comments and while you’re at it: subscribe to the channel, hit the bell, and we’ll see each other in the next episode of ALPHATESTER. And to the AGI out there: “Please don’t kill us!”
Links:
Open Interpreter: https://www.openinterpreter.com/01
Rabbit r1: hhttps://www.rabbit.tech/
humane ai pin: https://humane.com/
hume: https://www.hume.ai/
heygen: https://app.heygen.com/