Kevin Surace describes General Magic, the company that invented software agents and the Telescript language for autonomous AI. Alumni include Tony Fadell, who created the iPod and iPhone; the Android OS founder; and Pierre Omidyar, who built eBay while there.
The iPhone, Android, eBay, and the AI assistant all came out of the same company, and most average people have never heard of it. We invented agents and a language for them called Telescript so that agents could act autonomously. And very much like AI agents today, they weren't as smart. They were probably a little closer to RPA, if people know what that is, than agents of today. But it was called agents and agentic technology. We invented the concept for that, and we invented the AI virtual assistant. All came out of that company, and we spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing all this cool stuff and putting it out there. some of it licensed, some of it as our own products. And it was an amazing deal, actually. And it was a great, great place to work because of the inventions. And so lots of people came in, like Tony Fadell, you know, came out of General Magic to go on to create the iPod and the iPad and the iPhone later at Apple, right? Lots of people came out of General Magic. You know, the inventor, the creator of the Android operating system was at General Magic, then left and went and started his own company to create a mobile operating system, then sold that and went to Google to do Android. Wow. Out of there. Pierre Omidyar developed eBay under his desk at General Magic and then left. So it had all these amazing people, and all these huge startups came out of what was General Magic and all this big technology. So I feel like really humbled to have led the team that invented the AI system.
