AI Agents Are the Future
This week a startup called Cognition AI caused a bit of a stir by releasing a demo showing an artificial intelligence program called Devin performing work usually done by well-paid software engineers. Chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini can generate code, but Devin went further, planning how to solve a problem, writing the code, and then testing and implementing it.
Devin’s creators brand it as an “AI software developer.” When asked to test how Meta’s open source language model Llama 2 performed when accessed via different companies hosting it, Devin generated a step-by-step plan for the project, generated code needed to access the APIs and run benchmarking tests, and created a website summarizing the results.
It’s always hard to judge staged demos, but Cognition has shown Devin handling a wide range of impressive tasks. It wowed investors and engineers on X, receiving plenty of endorsements.
Not only startups are building AI agents. Earlier this week I wrote about an agent called SIMA, developed by Google DeepMind, which plays video games including the truly bonkers title Goat Simulator 3. SIMA learned from watching human players how to do more than 600 fairly complicated tasks such as chopping down a tree or shooting an asteroid. Most significantly, it can do many of these actions successfully even in an unfamiliar game. Google DeepMind calls it a “generalist.”