E19: The AI Agent Revolution with Matt Welsh of Fixie.ai

Nathan Labenz sits down with Matt Welsh, the CEO and co-founder of Fixie.AI which just raised $17M in seed funding. The technology world's attention has turned en masse to AI agents over the last month, but Matt, a former Harvard professor and ex-Google, has been focused on AI agents for longer over at Fixie. The platform is currently in developer preview mode, where developers can build agents and end users can try them.

Agents hold the promise of handling not only the core cognitive work, but many of the messy implementation details as well – the searching & finding, sorting through & scanning, signing in & navigating, reading documentation & using APIs – all the manual ad hoc routing of information for which we act today as human plumbing.

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TIMESTAMPS:

(00:00) Preview of the episode

(02:08) Why AI Agents are so topical right now, and Matt's prescience with Fixie

(06:40) How Matt started Fixie

(10:55) How AI Agents "figure out the plumbing"

(15:57) How Matt envisions work changing in the near term + concrete examples

(22:40) Building your own agent

(26:00) New threat model and guardrails of this new paradigm

(34:48) Synthetic memories in autonomous agents

(42:39) Examples of incredible use cases

(48:00) Single sign on idea

(51:00) Form factor for AI-assisted living

(54:32) Matt's hopes and fears for AI

TWITTER:

@CogRev_Podcast

@mdwelsh (Matt)

@labenz (Nathan)

@eriktorenberg (Erik)

Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work, customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off. https://www.omneky.com/

More show notes and reading material released in our Substack: https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com

Also, check out the debut of co-host Erik's new long-form interview podcast Upstream, whose guests include David Sacks. Ezra Klein, Balaji Srinivasan, and Marc Andreessen.

Subscribe:

Apple Podcasts: bit.ly/3z8TldL

Spotify: bit.ly/40letd0

Music Credit: OpenAI's Jukebox