OpenAI’s new “agent” is here to help you buy tuxedos, book luxury hotels, and order batches of cupcakes excruciatingly slowly

“Agentic AI” is the latest buzzword in tech, as the industry furiously races to monetize the costly technology. Yesterday OpenAI announced its second offering in the emerging category: “ChatGPT Agent,” which comes on the heels of January’s browser-controlling “Operator” tool.

The promise of a superpowered AI agent is that with a simple prompt, your agent can toil away behind the scenes and take care of the busywork you can’t bother yourself with. That could be boring tasks in your day-to-day life, chores, or the things you actually get paid to do for your job.

In a post on X, OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman said of the new technology:

In the livestream announcing Agent, the OpenAI team demonstrated the tool tackling some of these boring tasks that Agent could spare you from.

For example, you’re probably dreading all of the complex planning and research required to attend your dear friends’ wedding in Hawaii. What outfit should I buy? And what gift? Agent has you covered.

Perhaps Agent was trained to solve problems for people with AI researcher pay packages, but after thinking for about 18 minutes (with a break to ask the user a question), Agent came to the rescue to help find a $1,500 Brooks Brothers tuxedo and a nice hotel to stay at in Maui for $4,600 (five nights).

In a demo for Wired, an OpenAI researcher showed how Agent could order a batch of cupcakes — which took it one hour to complete.

The fact that a newly released, bleeding-edge AI tool like Agent takes so long to execute a query isn’t just about wasting your valuable time.

The kind of “reasoning” that Agent is undertaking while executing these queries is among the most computationally expensive of the services that OpenAI offers.

OpenAI describes the advanced “deep research” queries it offers as “very compute intensive,” which the company says is a part of Agent’s capabilities. OpenAI is currently losing money on its $200 per month all-you-can-eat plan for intensive queries.

That could also be a significant amount of water and energy consumed for what would normally be very lightweight tasks when performed by a human.

The company said Agent would be rolling out to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team users yesterday. Pro and Team subscribers get 400 Agent queries per month, and Plus users get 40 per month. (It wasn’t available for my account to try out before I wrote this.)

Striving to Excel

In addition to the ability to sift through your emails and calendars, OpenAI is playing up Agent’s ability to create and edit documents like slide decks and spreadsheets. The announcement highlighted Agent’s superior accuracy when editing spreadsheets “derived from real-world scenarios” compared to Microsoft Copilot using Excel: “ChatGPT agent outperforms existing models by a significant margin.”

Agent (with .xlsx access) scored a 45.5% accuracy rating, while Copilot in Excel scored only 20%. But ChatGPT Agent’s score is actually not great when you consider that humans scored a 71.3%.

“New risk surface”

OpenAI has always offered frank assessments of the risks of its new tools, and Agent is no exception. Choosing to take a “precautionary approach,” OpenAI is treating Agent as having “High Biological and Chemical capabilities” according to its “Preparedness Framework.” That document describes this new “high” capability as:

“The model can provide meaningful counterfactual assistance (relative to unlimited access to baseline of tools available in 2021) to ‘novice’ actors (anyone with a basic relevant technical background) that enables them to create known biological or chemical threats.”

The “associated risk” of this threshold:

“Significantly increased likelihood and frequency of biological or chemical terror events by non-state actors using known reference-class threats.”

In an email to Sherwood News, OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix explained that Agent mode is not the default model and users are free to choose to use it at any time. Felix said Agent is trained to explicitly ask users for permissions for tasks with real-world consequences, such as online purchases. And for now, Agent is trained to refuse high-risk tasks like banking.

Felix also cited a caveat in the announcement:

“While ChatGPT agent is already a powerful tool for handling complex tasks, today’s launch is just the beginning. We’ll continue to iteratively add significant improvements regularly, making it more capable and useful to more people over time.”

One of the concerns that OpenAI red teams had was the risk of novel “prompt injections” for Agent that could trick users into sharing personal data or taking actions that they shouldn’t.

In a post on X, Altman said he would caution his own family from using Agent for “high-stakes uses” until the company has had a chance to study it in the wild.

“But we do want people to treat this as a new technology and a new risk surface,” Altman said in the livestream video. “But that said, we hope you’ll love it.”