The agentic Internet is already starting. We covered this in Web 3.0: The Agentic Internet. It is something that was put out there as a direction for blockchain based applications.
Here is where things are going. That article was written two days ago.
A little over 24 hours later, Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, brings up this concept on its earnings call. What this tells us is we are not dealing with something that is theory. Big Tech is going to be jumping all over this.
Hence, we revert back to the fundamental question that is confronting all of humanity: who do you want in control of this stuff?
That is ultimately what it all boils down to.
Image generated by Ideogram
The Internet today is mostly human driven. By that I mean that most actions taken on one's behalf are done by the individual. If you want to watch something on Netflix, while the recommend engine is there, you still have to select the film. For the most part, responding to email is a manual task. Then we have the ordering of products. While some entities allow for scheduled purchases, the overwhelming majority are done by human interaction.
This is going to change.
Amazon is the largest e-commerce company in the world. Actually, it is one of the largest retailers (by sales volume) along with being one of the leading technology firms.
All of this is aligning where it will change shopping forever. Of course, it is not the only one.
Alexa is Amazon's "personal" assistant. So far, it is a rather unsophisticated bot. It is basically a verbal search engine while adding reminders or playing music. Like much of this technology, we are still in the first stages.
That is about to change. With the advancement of LLMs, we are seeing new opportunities opening up. At the same time, the advancement of vector databases is bringing us to the point where new capabilities are possible.
Here is where Jassy is looking at a change in Alexa.
“I think that the next generation of these assistants and generative AI applications will be better at not just answering questions and summarizing, indexing, and aggregating data, but also taking actions,” he said during Amazon’s Q3 2024 earnings call. “And you can imagine us being pretty good at that with Alexa.”
There you have it. He is not keeping it a secret.
This is aligning with what Eric Schmidt said in an interview at Stamford. One of his 3 predictions within a year was the emergence of what he called "text-to-action". Basically, he was talking about prompting an AI agent.
Naturally, for Alexa, that is a voice activated mechanism but the result is the same.
We can step further into the future by looking at AI swarms.
This is an idea that OpenAI is already starting to play with. I believe they discussed it on a GitHub page.
Either way, this is the concept of specialized AI agents getting together in a "swarm" to complete autonomous work. Think of this as an AI project team. Instead of assembling a group of humans together, AI agents are designed.
For example, this could be done for an online marketing campaign. Rather than utilize human resources, it could be done autonomously. AI agents could be set up to handle online posting, fulfilling requires for information, submitting orders, and handling billing/payments.
All could work in tandem and keep evolving to improve the results.
And people still question whether jobs are going to be destroyed in large numbers?
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) were long discussed within the blockchain and cryptocurrency community. So far, it is all talk.
Many tried to establish DAOs without much success. There were a few examples which did work, providing optimism. However, the overwhelming majority failed.
In my view, the reason for this is simple: they were not autonomous.
So far, we haven't really reached the age of autonomy. Most who discussed DAOs were actually trying to establish a new business structure to something that was more traditional, i.e. had a lot of humans.
To be a DAO, autonomy is required. This is not hidden since it is in the title.
Of course, we can see how this is difficult to achieve. Technology really does not allow this. Sure, the Internet is full of bots but, so far, we can't really call them fully autonomous. There is still a lot of human interaction required.
Many state the best example of a DAO is the Bitcoin network. This is a statement that I have a tough time arguing against. Certainly, at this point, it is full autonomous. Bitcoin is like the Energizer bunny, it just keeps going regardless of what humans do.
The point here is that Web 3.0 based upon decentralized networks is crucial. AI agents are going to be everywhere. They will be in centralized platforms. Entire companies will be little more than a swarm of agents.
However, this needs to be counterbalanced. DAOs could be the formula that mitigates the risk associated with centralization. Decentralized systems built on blockchains could be the answer to a lot of what potentially could plague humanity.
Amazon certainly will incorporate AI agents into Alexa. In fact, they will be throughout all facets of the business.
There is one problem: this is only going to provide even more data to Amazon. Think about that for a second. Every action taken on your behalf is recorded by the company. This is how we are going to see the amount of data keep multiplying.
Once again, how much are we going to feed Big Tech? They are setting up the system in such a way that keeps feeding them more. Data is the new oil. That means they are positioning themselves to have major wells everywhere.
People need to decide if they are going to counteract this.
Andy Jassy of Amazon is already talking about this publicly. He is not going to be the last one.
