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   OpenAIs Operator is one more step towards AGI, but should we be worried about   
   giving too much power to AI agents?   
      
   Date:   
   Sat, 25 Jan 2025 20:00:00 +0000   
      
   Description:   
   You rang, Sir?   
      
   FULL STORY   
   ======================================================================   
      
   As expected, OpenAI has released its first autonomous AI agent, called   
   Operator this week. Operator can act independently from you on your computer   
   using a web browser doing pretty much anything that can be done in a web   
   browser.    
      
   So, it can perform tasks like booking a restaurant table or buying groceries.   
   You just tell it what you want it to do, and off it goes like a faithful   
   Internet-enabled butler that potters away until the task is complete or it   
   needs to come back to you with a question. Say, theres no table available at   
   7.00pm, would Sir or Madam mind a 7.45pm table instead?    
      
   Of course, Operator doesnt call you Sir or Madam, but it might as well. For   
   all intents and purposes, this is the Internet butler that we were promised   
   almost 30 years ago when Ask Jeeves was around.    
      
   Do you remember Ask Jeeves? It was a search engine from 1997 that had an    
   image of an actual butler who stood ready and willing to find things for you   
   online. The character was named after Jeeves, Bertie Wooster's valet in the   
   fictional works of P. G. Wodehouse. Instead of typing in search terms, Ask   
   Jeeves encouraged you to search for things using natural language questions,   
   like Find me the perfect accompaniment to a roast dinner.    
      
   Of course, we all know that Google won the search engine war, and in 2006,    
   Ask dropped the Jeeves persona and just became Ask.com. But somehow, weve    
   come full circle with AI, and thanks to technologies like ChatGPT search and   
   Perplexity , searching using natural language requests is back in fashion. As   
   our Internet butlers, except now we call them AI agents... The Ask Jeeves   
   search engine.   
      
   AGI is the real goal    
      
   Its no secret that Sam Altman and OpenAI are really interested in AGI,   
   artificial general intelligence , also often referred to as    
   superintelligence. This is the ultimate goal for OpenAI, and why it was   
   founded. Chatbots like ChatGPT might have taken the world by storm, but their   
   popularity is almost like an unintended consequence (a theme Ill return to   
   later) of the race toward AGI.    
      
   In a video to promote the release of Operator, one of the OpenAI employees   
   sitting next to Sam Altman comes right out and says, [Operator is] "about   
   removing one more bottleneck in our path to AGI.    
      
   While agents are clearly exciting, theyre not the destination for OpenAI;   
   theyre just one more step along the path. AGI has the potential to change our   
   world radically. Once we have created an artificial intelligence thats    
   smarter than we are, logically it should be able to construct even smarter   
   versions of itself, and the level of intelligence rises rapidly.    
      
   Weve just got to hope that it doesnt decide to wipe us out. Not to worry you,   
   but Geoffory Hinton, often referred to as the Godfather of AI, recently upped   
   his odds of technology wiping out humanity to 20%.   
      
   And this is where we return to the theme of unintended consequences. Many   
   experts see AI agents as a threat. While speaking at the World Economic Forum   
   in Davos this week, artificial intelligence pioneer Yoshua Bengio warned that   
   AI agents could be catastrophic for humanity.    
      
   Speaking to Business Insider, he said, "All of the catastrophic scenarios    
   with AGI or superintelligence happen if we have agents." Bengio would rather   
   we continue towards building AGI without using agents, which allows them to    
   do things autonomously. "All of the AI for science and medicine, all the   
   things people care about, is not agentic," Bengio said. "And we can continue   
   building more powerful systems that are non-agentic."   
      
   Humanity's downfall    
      
   So, could it really be that something designed to act like an Internet butler   
   and do menial tasks like help me buy my groceries accidentally gives AI the   
   power to take over the world?    
      
   For now, its hard to imagine how an automated program that slowly plods   
   through the process of booking me a table at a restaurant using a web browser   
   is going to end in humanity's downfall, but AI agents will live or die by one   
   thing - if people actually use them  and Im not entirely convinced they will.    
      
   Personally, I dont feel ready to hand over my credit card details to a   
   computer program that will buy things for me to save me time because Im just   
   not sure Im ever going to trust it not to make a mistake. Would you?    
      
   Perhaps OpenAI needs to give its Operator a more human face if it wants me to   
   trust it, and as it turns out, I believe that good old Jeeves might be    
   looking for a job these days...   
      
   ======================================================================   
   Link to news story:   
   https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/openais-operator-i   
   s-one-more-step-towards-agi-but-should-we-be-worried-about-giving-too-much-pow   
   er-to-ai-agents   
      
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