When Ray Kurzweil first mainstreamed The Singularity, the idea of a moment in time when the smartest guy in the room would never again be flesh and bones but bits and silicon, it read more like fiction than possible future.
As stimulating and slightly insane movies like Her and episodes of Black Mirror were, they did little to close that gap for me. When ChatGPT landed a few years ago it really was cool and useful, but never kept me up at night for days on end like when I began building Kabambe and his teammates a little over a month ago.
AI had gone from a clever chat bot with useful responses to self-governing, self-improving agents doing very useful things.
Being the first agent I ever built and played with, Kabambe gave me a glimpse into a very exciting (and scary) future, where the gap had closed and The Singularity lived among us. A future where nothing you wanted to build was too big or too complex or took too long, and limitations only existed in what you could imagine and willingness to follow through.
In that moment a magical box had opened up, snapping me out of this semi-slumber state of a passive observer and manager of things into a strong desire and need to be an active builder again. No idea felt impossible to bring to life.
The last time I was this jacked to the tits about the possibilities in a piece of tech was a little more than a decade ago following a reading of a fairly obscure piece of paper about this little-known Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System that would go on to turn the world of global finance on its head.
Much like the early days of crypto of course, not all is perfect. Quite a lot needs polishing and figuring out still. It is I think fair to say agentic AI today is roughly where the internet was mid 90s! In the beginning especially, the agents themselves were often a pain to set up, constantly breaking, costly to run, and prone to weird episodes of amnesia and hallucination. As I told someone once, it sometimes felt like taking care of a toddler who couldn’t tell their butthole from a hole in the ground.
Things are much better now. Kabambe has since birthed a few other agents (Sarafi, Sir Countsalot, and Fatura). All crazy smart and all doing meaningful, specialized long-running work within our company. They’re our invisible workmates. We chat and talk to them daily, only thing left is the ability to see and touch them. Though with the rapid growth of robotics I’m sure that’s not too far out either.
Early April, Sarafi introducing herself to the partners.
Drawing parallels between the early days of the internet and “internet money“ and the technological singularity is of course quite off target because the first two could never self-improve, resulting in compounding exponential expansion. No one knows the exact shape of this future, that’s the whole point of The Singularity. All I know is this experience for me has felt like trying to drink out of a gushing fire hose, and I don’t see it slowing down, testament to the explosiveness backed right into its DNA.
What’s painfully clear is that the ground is shifting beneath our feet and it’s time to pay very careful attention.