OpenAI To Release AI Agent That Can Help You Book Flights & Write Code
The update is slated to release in January 2025.
By Sukhbir Cheema — 19 Nov 2024, 10:45 AM
The race for smarter, more autonomous AI is heating up, and OpenAI is making a bold stride with its upcoming AI agent, codenamed "Operator"
Set to debut in January next year, this tool could fundamentally change how we interact with our digital devices.
According to Bloomberg, Operator will perform tasks directly on a user's device, from booking flights to writing code, pushing the boundaries of what AI can automate.
This announcement aligns with hints from OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, who called the agent "the next giant breakthrough" during a recent Reddit AMA.
OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil also teased future innovations, suggesting that by 2025, AI tools like ChatGPT may proactively engage users
Although an accidental incident in September involved ChatGPT messaging users first—a behaviour OpenAI described as unintentional—it could foreshadow what's to come.
The push for agents isn't unique to OpenAI.
Microsoft's Copilot lets businesses customise AI assistants to handle tasks, while Anthropic's Claude model now includes a feature to control users' cursors for coding. Even Google appears to be in the mix, reportedly working on "Jarvis", a browser extension that handles shopping, flight bookings, and web browsing.
But as the AI giants race ahead, they're running into a significant hurdle: the limitations of current large language models (LLMs)
Reports suggest that scaling models further is yielding diminishing returns, with issues like hallucinations and accuracy persisting.
AI critic Gary Marcus pointed out that these models may never overcome such flaws without the tools to reason explicitly over facts, even as computing costs soar.
"Sky high valuation of companies like OpenAI and Microsoft are largely based on the notion that LLMs will, with continued scaling, become artificial general intelligence. There is no principled solution to hallucinations in systems that traffic only in the statistics of language without explicit representation of facts and explicit tools to reason over those facts," he said.
Despite this, Altman remains optimistic, asserting that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) could be achieved with today's hardware.
