Adept founder David Luan explains why building AI agents to control graphical user interfaces like humans do is necessary, comparing it to humanoid robotics.
What-if
Google would have crushed OpenAI by giving Noam Shazeer half its TPUs
“That muscle did not exist during my time at Google. And I think had they had it, what they would have done would be say, hey, Noam Shazir, you're a brilliant guy. You know how to scale these things up? Like, here's half of all of our TPUs. And then I think the…”
Insight
Luan: AGI means performing any task a human can do on a computer
“I think agents are just absolutely the correct long-term direction, right? You just go to find what AGI is, right? You're like, hey, like, Well, first off, actually, I don't love AGI definitions that involve human replacement because I don't think that's actua…”
Insight
Luan: LLMs shortcut evolutionary RL by behaviorally cloning all human knowledge
“Like de novo RL is like a pretty terrible way to get there quickly. Why are we rediscovering all the knowledge about the world? Like years ago, I had a debate with a Berkeley professor as to like what will it actually take to build HCI? And his view is basical…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Luan: AI will converge into a universal byte model across all modalities
“Multimodal models are becoming more of a thing, we're behavioral cloning the visual world, but really what we're just going to have is this like universal byte model, right? Where like tokens of data that have high signal come in, and then all of those pattern…”
Insight
Luan: Augmentation develops core AI capabilities faster than full automation
“I actually think that being an augmentation company Forces you to go develop your core AI capabilities faster than someone who's saying, ah, ok, my job is to deliver you a lights off solution for X.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Luan: Future AI value will shift from base models to agents
“In a world where foundation models are looking more and more commodity. And if, and I think a huge amount of gain is going to happen from how do you use foundation models as like the, like well learned behavioral cloner to go solve agents.”