"High level, we want this to become something like your personal AI friend," said developer Div Garg, whose company MultiOn is beta-testing an AI agent. The race towards increasingly autonomous AI agents has been supercharged by the March release of GPT-4 by developer OpenAI, a powerful upgrade of the model behind ChatGPT - the chatbot that became a sensation when released last November. GPT-4 facilitates the type of strategic and adaptable thinking required to navigate the unpredictable real world, said Vivian Cheng, an investor at venture capital firm CRV who has a focus on AI agents. OpenAI itself is very interested in AI agent technology, according to four people briefed on its plans. There are at least 100 serious projects working to commercialize agents, said Matt Schlicht, who writes a newsletter on AI.

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Persons: Siri, Alexa, Tony Stark's, Kanjun Qiu, Reid Hoffman, Mustafa Suleyman, Qiu, OpenAI, Vivian Cheng, CRV, Aravind Srinivas, Jarvis, Yoshua Bengio, Satya Nadella, Apple's Siri, it's, Google, Edward Grefenstette, Jason Franklin, WVV Capital, Hesam Motlagh, Matt Schlicht, Anna Tong, Jeffrey Dastin, Kenneth Li Organizations: Microsoft, Google, U.S . Federal Trade Commission, Reuters, FTC, OpenAI's, Financial Times, Amazon, Alexa, Investors, WVV, Google Ventures, Entrepreneurs, Thomson Locations: Silicon, Jarvis, GPT, Cognosys, San Francisco, Palo Alto