Call My A.I. Agent

Behind every scientific discovery at Genentech are people driven by a shared purpose, advancing science to change patients' lives. You have to be humble in the face of nature. Making medicines, it's really, really hard. It actually fails a lot of the time. This can't be. My whole life should be in front of me. Watch The Impossible Bet, a new documentary highlighting Genentech's critical breakthroughs at nytimes.com/genentech-film. That's nytimes.com/genentech-film. From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroef. This is The Daily. Over the last few weeks, millions of people have rushed to download a new class of powerful AI apps called agents. They're incredibly useful. They're honestly kinda cute. And all they need to work is your most sensitive personal information. Today, my colleague Eli Tan on why he and so many Americans are opening up their entire lives to technology that we're just beginning to understand. It's Tuesday, October 6. Eli Tan, first time on The Daily, and we are very happy to have you on the show. Happy to be here. Okay. So we've been talking a lot here recently on The Daily about artificial intelligence gone awry. AIs going rogue, doing things they shouldn't, hacking into places they shouldn't, aka AI behaving badly, doing things that feel scary to a lot of people. But you, Eli, have been focusing on a very different side of AI, a potentially very helpful version of this technology. And we wanna talk about what exactly that has looked like. So just tell us what you've been up to. For the past few weeks, I've given my life over to this app called Muse, which is an AI agent created by the company Meta, and it's really the first agent of its kind that's been released to the public. Think of an AI agent as a chatbot that has access to its own computer where it can use a monitor and a keyboard and a mouse. So instead of just conversing with you like a person, it can actually go online and do tasks for you and work on its own autonomously in the background for hours at a time. Basically, it can be your personal assistant, right, powered by AI. And not in this case, an AI chatbot, but an AI agent. Exactly. A personal assistant is what Meta is calling it. And in the world of AI, these agents are a real leap forward in the kind of technology that right now mostly powers chatbots. Agents can operate software. They can operate apps. They can sign into your accounts. And the hope here is that because these agents can do so much more than chatbots, they can become much more useful in a way that the chatbots have not. Well, can it do something for me, this agent? Yeah. I mean, what do we wanna what do we wanna do? Like... I have a desire for lunch, a sort of salad like thing with protein. Can you do that? …