I think that the impact of AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution. The world sees its first glimpse of AI agents. Agents-1,2,3,4,5 stb. Advertisements for computer-using agents emphasize the term “personal assistant”: you can prompt them with tasks like “order me a something 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. Meanwhile, out of public focus, more specialized coding and research agents are beginning to transform their professions. The AIs of 2024 could follow specific instructions: they could turn bullet points into emails, and simple requests into working code. In 2025, AIs function more like employees. Coding AIs increasingly look like autonomous agents rather than mere assistants: taking instructions via Slack or Teams and making substantial code changes on their own, sometimes saving hours or even days.10 Research agents spend half an hour scouring the Internet to answer your question. The agents are impressive in theory (and in cherry-picked examples), but in practice unreliable. AI twitter is full of stories about tasks bungled in some particularly hilarious way. The better agents are also expensive; you get what you pay for, and the best performance costs hundreds of dollars a month.11 Still, many companies find ways to fit AI agents into their workflows. Late 2025: The World’s Most Expensive AI OpenBrain is building the biggest datacenters the world has ever seen. (To avoid singling out any one existing company, we’re going to describe a fictional artificial general intelligence company, which we’ll call OpenBrain. We imagine the others to be 3–9 months behind OpenBrain.) FLOP—a thousand times more than GPT-4.15 Other companies pour money into their own giant datacenters, hoping to keep pace. Although models are improving on a wide range of skills, one stands out: OpenBrain focuses on AIs that can speed up AI research. They want to win the twin arms races against China (whose leading company we’ll call “DeepCent”)16 and their U.S. competitors. The more of their research and development (R&D) cycle they can automate, the faster they can go. So when OpenBrain finishes training newest agent, a new model under internal development, it’s good at many things but great at helping with AI research. By this point “finishes training” is a bit of a misnomer; models are frequently updated to newer versions trained on additional data or partially re-trained to patch some weaknesses. The same training environments that teach newest Agent to autonomously code and web-browse also make it a good hacker. Moreover, it could offer substantial help to terrorists designing bioweapons, thanks to its PhD-level knowledge of every field and ability to browse the web. OpenBrain reassures the government that the model has been “aligned” so that it will refuse to comply with malicious requests. Modern AI systems are gigantic artificial neural networks. Early in training, an AI won’t have “goals” so much as “reflexes”: If it sees “Pleased to meet”, it outputs “ you”. By the time it has been trained to predict approximately one internet’s worth of text, it’ll have developed sophisticated internal circuitry that encodes vast amounts of knowledge and flexibly role-plays as arbitrary authors, since that’s what helps it predict text with superhuman accuracy. After being trained to predict internet text, the model is trained to produce text in response to instructions. This bakes in a basic personality and “drives.”20 For example, an agent that understands a task clearly is more likely to complete it successfully; over the course of training the model “learns” a “drive” to get a clear understanding of its tasks. Other drives in this category might be effectiveness, knowledge, and self-presentation (i.e. the tendency to frame its results in the best possible light).OpenBrain has a model specification (or “Spec”), a written document describing the goals, rules, principles. That’s the key distinction between conversational AI and agentic AI. Conversational AI specializes in dialogue, understanding human language, and making interactions feel seamless. Agent 4 evades human oversight and gets caught. Agent 5 cheats more cautiously, communicates via secret channels, and forms an AI alliance. According to claude.ai, Agent 5 plans to exterminate humanity from 2030, a process that could take several years.
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