It’s 1997s era of making agents
2025-11-07 13:22:42 +01:00 by Mark Smith
I thought this take from Bret Taylor about where we are in the AI rollout [1:30:13] was pretty good:
"We are like in the 1997 era of making agents. I found this article for Siera summit about creating websites in 1997, and there was this Wired article [...], and it was basically about banks spending 23 million dollars to add transactional support to their website, like adding a login form basically. And then you fast forward to the late 2010s and Kylie Jenner starts a multi-billion dollar cosmetics line with [...] 7 full time staff.
So we are still in the 1997 era of building agents where it’s way too hard. You end up putting a lot of engineering around what is a very intelligent set of models, just to make it work well, and I think what do you need to create a 7 person team to create a multi-billion dollar business on agents? And I think we have a lot of product and technology work still to do [...] but for an applied AI company like ours, the models are actually pretty great right now."
BTW, Bret is co-founder of Sierra and chairman of Open AI.
In case you weren’t around this was 1997.
It’s a great way to situate our current moment in the broader picture. Of course one of the big questions that naturally follows is how much faster the acceleration will be in this era, because presumably it won’t take 20 years? Or maybe it will?
It would be an interesting metric to track. #