The world is bored with ChatGPT and is convinced about its utility (or maybe not for some). Now, we are moving the doomsday discussions towards AGI or Artificial General Intelligence – but before we reach there, we have a step of encountering AI Agents or as Mustafa Suleyman (co-founder DeepMind) puts it – Artificial Capable Intelligence (ACI).
I have been digging about AI Agents for quite sometime – and I am so excited and optimistic about its utility. I have shared some insightful quotes from videos, podcasts, thought leadership blogs, and more which highlight various aspects of AI agents – is potential, risks, how it works, how to look at it for our use, and more.
Note: this blog will continue to get updates as and when I find new useful quotes to list. If you happen to use these quotes, it would be great if you mention our blog as the linking source as I have personally spent time going through podcasts, lectures, blogs, and videos to source them 🙂
Quotes on potential of AI Agents
“Agents are not only going to change how everyone interacts with computers. They’re also going to upend the software industry, bringing about the biggest revolution in computing since we went from typing commands to tapping on icons. Agents won’t simply make recommendations; they’ll help you act on them.”
Bill Gates on rise of AI Agents
“Many of you may have had the experience of trying to go to a doctor. You need to wait for many months sometimes, and then when you do get to see a doctor, you get a small, very limited amount of time with the doctor. Furthermore, the doctor, being only human, can have only limited knowledge of all the medical knowledge that exists.
And then by the end of it, you get a very large bill.
Well, if you have an intelligent computer, an AGI, that is built to be a doctor, it will have complete and exhaustive knowledge of all medical literature.
It will have billions of hours of clinical experience, and it will be always available and extremely cheap.
When this happens, we will look back at today’s health care similarly to how we look at 16th century dentistry. You know, when they tied people with belts and then have this drill, that’s how today’s health care will look like.”
Ilya Sutskever, Chief Scientist at OpenAI, in a TED Talk – The Exciting, Perilous Journey Toward AGI
“As agents become more widespread more intelligent and more sophisticated, it’ll likely change the way we think about computers in the first place – in the same way that the transition from a command line interface to a graphical interface completely revolutionized the way we interact with computers. Perhaps the next evolution of that is a kind of AI assisted interface maybe like Tony Stark and his AI Jarvis.”
Daoud Abdel Hadi on his TEDxPSUT talk – Generative AI is just the Beginning AI Agents are what Comes next
“You can look at the difference between GPT-3 and GPT-3.5, and then GPT-4 with vision, and you can just see for yourself it’s easy to forget where things used to be. But certainly the big way in which things are changing is that these models become more and more reliable. Before they were only very partly there, right now they are mostly there, but there are still gaps, and in the future perhaps these models will be there even more. You could trust their answers, they’ll be more reliable, they’ll be able to do more tasks in general across the board, and another thing that they will do is that they’ll have deeper insight as we train them and they gain more and more insight into the true nature of the human world, and their insight will continue to deepen.”
Ilya Sutskever, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at OpenAI, in conversation with No Priors Ep. 39
“Whenever there’s been a real platform shift the core application architectures have changed. I think what’ll happen is these CRUD, I mean, SAAS applications are a CRUD database with a lot of business logic. So the CRUD database will then get orchestrated outside of the business logic tier of just the SAAS application is what I mean is going to happen. Like, right now in my own use case I go to co-pilot I say at sales which is actually touching Dynamic CRM brings back whatever the account information, then it brings back information from Office 365, I put it into pages I share it with people the entire workflow. I mean everybody talks about their CRM database but nobody uses it because you know when was the last time I logged into CRM? Never. Except now, I’m every day querying my CRM database because it’s so much easier – it’s one agent away and it’s working with all the other agents. So, that is what’s going to be the change.”
Satya Nadella, in conversation with Varun Mayya
“The last Turing test simply evaluated for what a machine could say assuming that what it could say represented its intelligence. Now that we’re kind of approaching that moment where these AI models are pretty good arguably they’ve passed the Turing test or they maybe they will in the next few years, the real question is – how can we measure what they can do.
So, I’ve proposed a test which involves them going off and taking a hundred thousand dollar investment and over the course of three months trying to set about creating a new product, researching the market seeing what consumers might like, generating some new images, some blueprints of how to manufacture that product, contacting a manufacturer, getting it made, negotiating the price, drop shipping it, and then ultimately collect the revenue.
I think that over a five-year period it’s quite likely that we will have an ACI or Artificial Capable Intelligence that can do the majority of that task autonomously.”
Mustafa Suleyman, Co-Founder at DeepMind in conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and The Economist
Quotes on how AI Agents work
Bill Gates on how AI Agents work:
“Agents are smarter. They’re proactive—capable of making suggestions before you ask for them. They accomplish tasks across applications. They improve over time because they remember your activities and recognize intent and patterns in your behavior. Based on this information, they offer to provide what they think you need, although you will always make the final decisions.”
Bill Gates on how AI agents work on Gates Notes
Quotes from CEOs, experts, and business leaders on AI Agents:
“We’re basically constantly using a variety of different tools to help us with a given task. This is where agents are a bit different – instead of us using those tools we just describe to an AI what the task is and what the end goal is and then then it plans which tools it needs to use and how to use them and then it actually does it on its own. Not only can they complete the task much quicker than we can, but in theory, we wouldn’t even need to know how to use these tools in the first place.”
Daoud Abdel Hadi on his TEDxPSUT talk – Generative AI is just the Beginning AI Agents are what Comes next
“Agents are like digital labor – capable of automatically browsing the web navigating our files using our applications and potentially even controlling our devices for us.”
Daoud Abdel Hadi on his TEDxPSUT talk – Generative AI is just the Beginning AI Agents are what Comes next
“I don’t think we’ve kind of nailed the the right way to interact with these agent applications. I think a human in the loop is kind of still necessary because they’re not super reliable. But if it’s in the loop too much, then it’s not actually doing that much useful thing. So, there’s kind of like a weird balance there.”
Harrison Chase, Founder of LangChain, in a presentation with Sequoia Capital on how there is no clarity of Ui and UX when it comes to interacting with AI Agents.
Quotes by Andrew NG on AI Agents and how they work:
“I expect that the set of tasks AI could do will expand dramatically this year because of agentic workflows.
One thing that it’s actually difficult people to get used to is when we prompt an LM, we want it to response right away. That’s just human nature, we like that instant feedback. But for a lot of the agent workflows, I think we’ll need to learn to delegate the task to AI agent and patiently wait minutes or maybe even hours for a response. Just like I’ve seen a lot of novice managers delegate something to someone and then check in 5 minutes later right – and that’s not productive.”
Andrew NG, in the talk – What’s next for AI agentic workflows ft. Andrew Ng of AI Fund by Sequoia Fund
Quotes on rise of AGI and its impact on humanity
“What is it that we are actually creating? What does it mean to make something totally new, fundamentally different to any invention that we have known before?
It is clear that we are at an inflection point in the history of humanity. On our current trajectory, we’re headed towards the emergence of something that we are all struggling to describe, and yet we cannot control what we don’t understand.
If we are to prioritize safety above all else, to ensure that this new wave always serves and amplifies humanity, then we need to find the right metaphors for what this might become.
I think AI should best be understood as something like a new digital species. We’ll come to see them as digital companions, new partners in the journeys of all our lives.”
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO at Microsoft AI, on how humankind is struggling to describe the advancements in AI, and provides a definition as a new digital species on his TED Talk – AI Is Turning into Something Totally New
“Things really start to change when they develop what I call AQ, their “actions quotient.” This is their ability to actually get stuff done in the digital and physical world.
And before long, it won’t just be people that have AIs, strange as it may sound, every organization, from small business to nonprofit to national government, each will have their own.
Every town, building and object will be represented by a unique interactive persona.
And these won’t just be mechanistic assistants. They’ll be companions, confidants, colleagues, friends and partners, as varied and unique as we all are.”
Mustafa Suleyman, CEO at Microsoft AI, on how humankind is struggling to describe the advancements in AI, and provides a definition as a new digital species on his TED Talk – AI Is Turning into Something Totally New
“I would advocate not moving fast and breaking things.”
Demis Hassabis, Deepmind CEO, Time, Jan 2023
“A lack of concrete AGI projects is not what worries me, it’s the lack of concrete plans on how to keep these safe that worries me. A massive legion is being assembled at the gate, and the best response we have come up with is an all-star debate team.”
Shane Legg, DeepMind Co-founder and Chief Scientist, SL4 Mailing List, Re: Safety of brain-like AGIs, March 2007
“The core danger with AGI is that it has the potential to cause rapid change. This means we could end up in an undesirable environment before we have a chance to realize where we’re even heading. The exact way the post-AGI world will look is hard to predict — that world will likely be more different from today’s world than today’s is from the 1500s.”
Greg Brockman, CTO and Co-Founder of OpenAI, Testimony of Greg Brockman
“I could give you the usual arguments, but the truth is that the prospect of discovery is too sweet.”
Geoffrey Hinton, Google – his answer on why he continues working on pursuit of AI research knowing its bad consequences.
Quotes on risks of AI Agents
“Today, you can show someone that you care about them by remembering details about their life—say, their birthday. But when they know your agent likely reminded you about it and took care of sending flowers, will it be as meaningful for them?”
Bill Gates on considerations of adopting AI Agents on his Gates Notes blog
“Regulation may slow down AI a little bit, but I think that that might also be a good thing.”
Elon Musk, CEO Tesla, CNBC, Feb 2023
Check out other AI quotes collection across industries
I have (and will continue to ) create a series of blog posts which go further into Generative AI quotes across industry applications. Here are some to check out:
- 30+ Insightful Generative AI quotes 2024 by Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Yuval Noah Harari, and more
- 15+ Generative AI quotes on future of work, impact on jobs and workforce productivity
You can subscribe to our newsletter to get notified when we publish new guides – shared once a month!
This blog post is written using resources of Merrative – a publishing talent marketplace that helps you create publications and content libraries.
Get in touch if you would like to create a content library like ours in the niche of Applied AI, Technology, Machine Learning, or Data Science for your brand.
Leave a Reply