Building AI That Builds Itself - Ep. 35 with Yohei Nakajima
AI and I
Exploring Self-Referential AI and Its Evolution
This chapter delves into self-referential loops within AI development, focusing on the creation of the autonomous agent BabyAsia. It examines the project's unexpected success and potential future branding implications.
Yohei Nakajima leads a double life.
By day, he’s a general partner of a small venture firm, Untapped Capital.
By night, he’s one of the most prolific internet tinkerers in AI. (He also sometimes works on automating his job as a venture capitalist.)
He’s the creator of BabyAGI (@babyAGI_), the first open-source autonomous agent that went viral in March 2023. Yohei has since released seven iterations of BabyAGI (each one named after a different animal), a coding agent called Ditto, a framework for building autonomous agents, and, most recently, BabyAGI 2o, a self-building autonomous agent (that follows OpenAI’s unfortunate naming convention).
Even more incredible, Yohei isn’t a professional developer. His day job is as the general partner of Untapped Capital (@UntappedVC).
I sat down with Yohei to talk about:
- What feeds Yohei’s drive to create new tools
- The evolution of BabyAGI into a more powerful version of itself
- What Yohei learned about himself by tinkering on the internet
- Yohei’s personal philosophy about how the tools we build our extensions of ourselves
- Why founders in AI should think about their products from a modular lens, by addressing immediate problems while enabling growth in the future
- Yohei’s insight into a future where models will train themselves as you use them
We experiment with Ditto live on the show, using the tool to build a game of Snake and a handy scheduling app. Yohei also screenshares a demo of BabyAGI 2o in action.
This is a must-watch for anyone curious about autonomous agents, building cool AI tools on the internet, and the future of AI tooling.
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Timestamps:
- Introduction: (00:00:59)
- BabyAGI and its evolution into a more powerful tool: (00:02:26)
- How better models are changing the way Yohei builds: (00:05:00)
- Using code building agent Ditto to build a game of Snake: (00:08:10)
- The ins and outs of how Ditto works: (00:13:24)
- How Yohei gets a lot done in little time: (00:19:21)
- Yohei’s personal philosophy around building AI tools: (00:21:50)
- How Yohei experiments with AI as a tech-forward parent: (00:33:13)
- Demo of Yohei’s latest release, BabyAGI 2.0: (00:39:29)
- Yohei’s insights on the future of AI tooling: (00:51:24)
Links to resources mentioned in the episode:
Yohei Nakajima: @yoheinakajima, http://yohei.me
Untapped Capital: @UntappedVC, https://www.untapped.vc/
My first interview with Yohei, around the time he released BabyAGI: https://every.to/chain-of-thought/this-vc-is-slowly-automating-their-job
The other AI tools Yohei has created: Ditto, BabyAGI 2, BabyAGI 2o
The tweet thread about AI bots being let loose on a Discord server: https://x.com/AISafetyMemes/status/1847312782049333701
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