Autonomous Agent that plays Minecraft, $2mil in funding, and a must read from a16z

Hey AI people!

This week flew by. I’ve been spending most of my time improving a new AI product with the Octane AI team, and conducting lots of experiments around data crunching and AI based simulations for brands. It is very fun to work on and I am having a blast.

It today’s newsletter I have two announcements and plenty of interesting and intriguing developments in the world of autonomous agents and AI. These are the most interesting things that caught my eye this week, I hope they help and inspire you on your own AI journey.

Let’s get to it!

Announcements:

1. Big shoutout to subscriber Damdi Pawlowski! Last week I mentioned that I really wanted to get access to Anthropic’s new 100k token context model, and right after I sent the email out Damdi DMed me on Twitter and made it happen! Make sure to sign up for Damdi’s virtual Anthropic AI Hackathon and maybe you can get access too.

2. Introducing the “Coworking with AI” live cohort, a 2 week class I am teaching alongside Ben Parr for anyone who wants to learn to apply AI to their every day work tasks. I’ve been using AI every day for the past two years as a coworker (I was in OpenAI’s first private beta for GPT-3), and it has completely changed the way I work. You can use AI to write your emails, conduct research, brainstorm strategy and ideas, analyze data, and interface better with your counterparts at work. In the class we’re going to have a lot of fun with hands-on projects, and you’ll get to meet other interesting professionals who are learning about AI too. Sign up for the 2 week cohort, it’s going to be super valuable and a lot of fun.

Autonomous Agents News:

• Voyager: An autonomous agent that plays Minecraft! This looks really interesting. The AI can explore the world, learn new skills, and improve itself. This is a fascinating research paper with lots of fun clips from Minecraft and diagrams of how it works.

• Cognosys AI, an autonomous agent in the browser, announces $2mil fundraise. Lots of autonomous agent startups are fundraising right now, but this is the first one to close the deal. The round was led by Google Ventures and includes investment from Guillermo Rauch (CEO at Vercel), Amjad Masad (CEO at Replit), Aidan Gomez (CEO at Cohere), Ivan Zhang (CTO at Cohere), and Yohei Nakajima (creator of BabyAGI). Big congrats, and excited to see where this journey takes them.

• AutoGPT announces their new development roadmap. Upcoming features include AutoGPT plugins, new methods for handling difficult autonomous tasks, and how AutoGPT is contributing to it’s own code rewrite.

• Waitlyst, an autonomous agent that monitors your users and uses GPT-4 to automatically react to changes in behavior. This looks very cool, and I 100% believe this is what the future of customer retention (and marketing) looks like. I haven’t used the product myself but this is a direction I’m a big believer in.

• A bunch of who’s who in the world of autonomous agents have come together to throw an autonomous agents hackathon in late June. If you’re interested in building autonomous agents then 1000% you should sign up for this.

• Aomni, the autonomous agent for research (who now has paying customers!), made new improvements! Check out founder David’s update.

Interesting AI News

• Venture fund a16z releases “AI Canon”, an index of what they believe to be the best AI resources in the world.

• Character AI releases their iOS app and it is trending in the #2 spot, beating TikTok.

• Elon Musk believes AGI will be here in 3-5 years (an AI that is smarter than a human).

• Obviously AI lets you hire a data scientist for $1,000 a month.

• Some people are attempting to embed the entire internet.

• This AI helps you ace your job interview by listening to the interview and then telling you in real time how you could answer interview questions.

• Tobi Lütke, the CEO of Shopify, interviews Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI.

New to autonomous agents? Start here:

• Read The Complete Beginners Guide to Autonomous Agents

• Watch The Complete Beginners Guide to Autonomous Agents

• Subscribe to my YouTube channel 

• Follow me on Twitter @MattPRD

That’s it for today! I hope you have a fantastic week. Please reach out on email (matt at mattprd dot com) or DM me on Twitter @MattPRD if you want to chat.

Talk to you all soon!
Matt