The Stack Overflow Podcast AI agents for your digital chores
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Oct 14, 2025 Dhruv Batra, co-founder and chief scientist at Yutori, dives into the fascinating world of AI agents and their potential to transform our digital tasks. He discusses proactive agents that automate mundane web activities, such as tracking reservations and price drops. Dhruv contrasts historical AI developments and critiques current definitions of AGI. He also shares insights on training agents using simulated environments, the challenges of integrating AI into workflows, and the future of personalized generative interfaces.
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Two Decades Of AI Work
- Dhruv describes a 20-year AI research career spanning computer vision, chatbots, and embodied AI at Meta and Georgia Tech.
- He recounts shipping image question answering on Ray-Ban Meta sunglasses and building the Habitat simulator used on Boston Dynamics robots.
AGI Is Being Narrowly Redefined
- Dhruv warns that many redefine AGI to exclude physical and embodied intelligence, narrowing its original scope.
- He argues current language-and-code models are powerful but are a limited subset of true general intelligence.
Describe Monitoring Goals Clearly
- Tell your agent in natural language what to monitor and let it run continually like a smart Google Alert.
- Use Scouts to track dates, prices, news, or niche events and receive updates without manual checks.