Hey everybody, welcome back to the Elon Musk Podcast. This is a show where we discuss the critical crossroads that shape SpaceX, Tesla X, The Boring Company, and Neurolink. I'm your host, Will Walden. What if ChatGPT could become your personal agent and independently complete your daily tasks without your direct guidance? So on Wednesday, Open AI unveiled a new ChatGPT feature called Agent, designed specifically to autonomously carry out tasks on behalf of you, its user.
Moving beyond simple chat bot conversations. And Open AI released the Agent function officially after months of internal testing and testing with users on a very short list. And now they aim to push AI capabilities towards performing real world actions without continuous human oversight. Now this agent is really cool it it lets users delegate complex multi step tasks directly to ChatGPT, such as booking travel reservations, conducting detailed research, or managing
personal scheduling. Now once given a task, the agent navigates multiple websites, gathers relevant information, makes decisions and completes actions online independently. For example, a user might instruct the agent to plan a weekend trip to San Francisco and it would book the best rated flights, hotels, and activities entirely without user intervention beyond the initial request.
Now what you could do is you could tell it what airline you would like to use, what your price race, what your price range is for your flight in your hotel and how much money you can spend on your activities and what kind of activities you like. And it will search for all of that for you without any intervention beyond the initial prompt. Now, Open AI designed the agent to understand the user's preferences and to act accordingly, refining its actions over time by analyzing
past interactions with you. Now, this personalization allows it to better anticipate individual users needs, selecting choices closely aligned with specific habits that you have, and also your tastes. How the agent's effectiveness depends on its ability to continuously learn from each action, gradually reducing the
need for explicit instructions. So if ChatGPT sends you an airline that's a little bit out of your price range for the flight, then you can go back and you can prompt it again and say that flight was a little bit too expensive. Please find me one that's less expensive.
Here's my price range now. Also, if they book you on trips and you don't like the activities that they assigned for you or they want you to do, then of course you can tell them you don't like it. It's like having literally a personal assistant right in the palm of your hand, right in your phone, which is incredible. I remember, OK, so this is kind of dating me, but my mom and I used to go to the travel agent in town. This is before the Internet was
even a thing. There were things called travel agents. There was no Google Flights. There was no like just Google a trip that you want to do. You'd have to go into an office. And these services are still available, but it's, you know, it's like you pay extra for it and it's not democratized like flights are now. But you'd go into an office and you'd talk to somebody and you tell them where you want to go one time. You want to go to Niagara Falls? This is a real world example.
We had to go to. We want to go to Niagara Falls. My mom and dad hadn't been there in 10 years. They didn't really know what to do. There's no Internet, so you don't know what's there right now. And we lived 3 or 4 hours away from Niagara Falls, so we didn't really know what to do. We didn't know where to look. So we went to a travel agent and we told the travel agent what our budget was. I remember the lady was very nice.
She complimented me on my Montego Bay T-shirt that I had when I was a kid, which I bought not in Montego Bay, but at a department store in town. And she was very courteous. She gave us maps. She, which is incredible as well, like a paper map. And you have to, you know, you unfolded it. And she told us, you know, you shouldn't fly. You should probably drive there because it's cheaper to drive. And here's a map. Can your car make it there? And my mom said, yeah, of course
I can. So she gave us a map, told us along the way, she circled things along the way, like, you want to stop here? You want to stop, you know, these 5 or 6 different places, Here's a great place to eat. You know, you're going to have three kids in the car. They're going to be bathroom breaks. So within the first two hours, like, pull over here, go, you know, go get McDonald's or whatever it was.
But sure enough, after that interaction was done, my mom had a whole plan for the trip to Niagara Falls. 4 hours there, 4 hours home, things to do In between. We went to the Ripley's Believe It or Not museum, which had a bunch of like really interesting crazy stuff. I remember that and I was a little kid, so I can still
remember this vividly. There's a wax museum we went to and there's like a like a, a restaurant that was, I think it was sort of like a Space Needle kind of thing, like a Seattle Space Needle. I can't really remember exactly what it was, but I remember we did that cool trip and when my mom got back, she was very excited that everything was taken care of. The travel agent had booked a hotel for us. The travel agent had booked a restaurant for us that night when we got into town.
When we got in Niagara Falls, they also booked us reservations for some of the attractions, which is really cool. And this is what Open AI does with the, with this new agent thing. It's not just for trips, though. You can have it do whatever you want it to do. You know, trips are just one of the things that it can do. You can, you can instruct it to do anything for you, anything like a personal assistant would do for you.
So if you need to make appointments, you know, I have a, here's my, here's my doctor's appointment coming up. You know, I need to get, I need to book a doctor's appointment. Can you see if it's available or something like that? And they would contact the doctor's office for you through the contact form or maybe even do a call eventually. I'm not sure if they could do phone calls yet, but possibly. But those things are in the future.
I'm sure this is going to be a breakthrough product for Open AI. Now, this functionality requires integrating ChatGPT with external services. Services though, leverages application programming interfaces, which are APIs to interact directly with other apps and platforms. Now Open AI had to establish partnerships with major travel sites, booking services, productivity platforms, and also financial tools.
And these integrations enable the agent to execute tests seamlessly, automating processes that previously required manual
operations by users. So in the morning, if you wake up, you can just give it a prompt like, hey, I'm I need to rent a house in Atlanta, GA September 15th through the 30th because I'm just going to stay there for a couple weeks and I just want a house to stay at. Go find me a house to rent and ChatGPT can find you that house and also give you the information about which house you know. Send you back some links and let you know which one is the best option for you and for your taste.
Pretty impressive so far. So they have to have security and privacy. It's a major focus right now during the agents development phase. And this is all sensitive automated actions with personal data. Opening Eye implemented strict guidelines for this though, and there's technical safeguards to protect user information, employing encryption and rigorous data protection standards to achieve this. The company is transparent about this.
They tell you all the information that's collected and they clearly explain how and why user data is stored, accessed, and utilized during these automated tasks. Now to facilitate the responsible use, Open AI designed built in boundaries, restricting agent functionality and sensitive or high risk scenarios. These built in constraints prevent unauthorized purchases of transactions above predefined limits without additional user
verification. The users retained full visibility over the agent's activity while it's happening, and they received regular summaries detailing actions completed and decisions that were made by the agent. So unlike a person, that's your agent who probably doesn't check in all the time, open AI, enchant GPT, check in with you after every part of the task, which is really great.
And you can tell them along the way, you know, if if you don't like a part of what they're doing, and then you can tell them to stop. Now there's challenges though, on potential criticisms concerning automated decision making. So the accuracy of some of the things that they're going to come up with right off the bat, probably not going to be great, probably going to be pretty good and probably going to point you in the right direction.
And then you can tweak it in the appropriateness of the agents independent actions as well. So you have to be careful about how you prompt this thing because if you say, I just want to stay in a place that's under $300, it's going to send you every motel, then hotel under $300.00 for per night. So, you know, that's then you're gonna have a huge list of like roadside motels that are, you know, paid by the hour, which wink, wink, you know what those kind are.
And also, you know, paid by the night and they're $70.00. But like, they might not be the best place for you and your kids to be. So ChatGPT, like you got to be accurate and appropriate with your prompting as you tell ChatGPT and the agent what to search for. That's what we have to be really careful about, South. Don't be broad with your statements. Be very analytical with them and give them absolutely everything that you can think of, and then they'll do the actual work for
you. I'm going to test it out and I'll come back with some more information for you on the next episode, which will be dropping later today. So please stay tuned for that. I'm going to go over the whole thing and I'm going to work out the agent workflow as much as possible and I'll let you know how that all works out. So thank you so much for listening. I have one ask of you, actually, I asked this yesterday, but I never really ask for these kind of things.
I usually do it like once a week just because I don't want to really. I don't really want to get into it too much, but I've been doing this show, I think we're at 900 episodes, something like that. Some ridiculous amount of episodes. I've been doing it for like 4 years and in those four years I haven't really asked for anything. I've never, you know, maybe Patreon here and there or you know, follow the channel,
something like that. But I continue to do it every morning, drop episodes every morning at 4:30 AM EST. And I just need a favor from you. If you could hit the follow or the subscribe button, that would be great. That's one favor I need to ask. 2 favors actually, and that'll only take you a second, but the channel is in this. This show is in dire need of some financial backing and I'm going to ask this one more time this week and this is the final time I'm going to ask this week.
If you have Venmo and you can send anything at all to Will Wil Dash WALDON help support the show. It goes directly into all of my costs for the show and it's been really helpful. A few people have done it and I want to give them shout outs because I told them I would last time I did this and I didn't do it yesterday. So I feel kind of bad about that. But you know, I had JW again with another $5 donation, have JS with A10, we have MH with 50, BSI can't say the full names,
but BS with $75. Thank you so much for all of your donations and all of this helps me continue doing the show. That's all I'm saying. I put all my time and effort into this and I spend a lot of a lot of time that I could be spending with my family I spent doing the show and like getting ready for the show. So I do sacrifice a lot for the show, even though it's only around 10 minutes every day. So if you're new here, thank you
for listening. If you've been here for a while and you've heard so many episodes, thank you for listening as well. Thank you for being part of this great community and thank you to everybody who's supporting me and supporting the show on Venmo. I really do appreciate you and I'm going to find some people have been D Ming me and asking me to find other ways for them to help out, but they because they don't have Venmo. So I'm going to get I'm going to get some other apps, cash app,
etcetera. So it can be very helpful that way and I'll get it. I'll make a website for you so you can go visit it and donate or whatever. So that's it for now, everybody, thank you so much. Hey, thank you so much for listening today. I really do appreciate your support. If you could take a second and hit the subscribe or the follow button on whatever podcast platform that you're listening on right now, I greatly appreciate it. It helps out the show tremendously and you'll never
miss an episode. And each episode is about 10 minutes or less to get you caught up quickly. And please, if you want to support the show even more, go to patreon.com/stage Zero. And please take care of yourselves and each other. And I'll see you tomorrow.