#75 - Three Breakthroughs: AI Agents—They Came, They Saw, They Conquered

Welcome to the land of tomorrow. This is the Tech Optimist podcast, a show brought to you by Alumni Ventures. This is a time where we discuss the people and innovations shaping our future.

We thought software was static. Now it's, it's, it's basically having an intern on demand for everyone.

That is Naren Ramaswamy, Senior Principal here at Alumni Ventures. A lot of

the times, The people who win are the ones that figure out the new media and the new news.

And that is Mike Collins, co-founder and CEO at Alumni Ventures. And that's me. My name is Samantha Herrick, and I am the guide and editor for this show. All right, everyone, welcome back to this super exciting episode of The Tech Optimist. This is another 3 Breakthroughs episode. We've heard this is a crowd favorite, so we are so happy that everyone is back to spend spend, you know, a little bit of time with us as we discuss the future and future technology and all of that super fun stuff. So of course, before we hop into, uh, Mike and Naren's breakthroughs for today, I'm going to give you a little snippet or a little sneak peek as to what the breakthroughs are. Again, we're going to keep with the process of not spoiling it and sort of letting you discover them for yourselves. So here's some hints for the first breakthroughs. We've got, um, robots underwater. Robots underwater. We've got Iron Man, and we have AI search engines. All right, get those gears turning. Let's see if you can guess the right breakthroughs for this week. Um, but yeah, but without further ado, uh, we're gonna hop into a quick AV ad, um, a little disclaimer, and then right into the conversation. So sit tight, don't go anywhere. We'll be right back.

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Hello, welcome to Tech Optimist and our 3 Breakthroughs show. I'm here with Naren again and we're going to talk about Exciting new things in the area of technology innovation and venture capital. We're venture capitalists at a firm called Alumni Ventures. We're one of the more active venture capital firms on the planet. We co-invest exclusively with really strong lead investors, but we do a lot of deals. So we see a lot of stuff. And we've got exciting things again this week coming up on Halloween. So, Naren, why don't you kick it off today?

Yeah, happy to. Mike, this is an interesting one to start with. We've been talking about the space economy and SpaceX's amazing technological feats over the past few weeks. It got me thinking about what's happening in this field of ocean exploration. And I came across this article of some researchers out of Zurich that developed a robotic fish that is being sent underwater to collect environmental DNA in a non-invasive way.

Okay, so never did I think that we would have an episode of this show or a breakthrough come through One of these weeks that's about robotic fish. I guess it could just be the sort of oxymoron that that brings along, right? Like robots and water normally don't mix. But yeah, so I have some information on this robot fish that I want to share with you before we hop into a quick video which helps summarize it a lot better than I can do. But so this is from a group of students at the ETH In Zurich, and they're engineering students, and they developed an innovative robotic fish named EVE as part of their Surf-E-DNA project. This autonomous underwater vehicle, or an AUV, is designed to revolutionize ocean studies and marine biodiversity monitoring. So some really cool features about EVE. So EVE is a cutting-edge example of biomimetic robotics technology designed to blend seamlessly into the aquatic ecosystem. So it looks like a fish. You'll see it in the video here. It has a soft structure. So the robot features a soft body with a silicone tail that moves naturally, provided by hidden pumps that are within the, you know, body of the fish. And then Eve is equipped with a filter to collect environmental DNA from the water, allowing scientists to gather valuable information about species inhabiting the area without resorting to invasive techniques. And it's got some really cool advanced sensors, I guess, too. So the robot is fitted with a camera and sonar, enabling it to avoid obstacles and navigate effectively underwater. So for its purpose, I think it's already been clear. It monitors an ecosystem. It can help identify certain species that are, you know, living in a body of water, and it can sort of help explore a habitat, right? So EVE's design allows it to access and study sensitive ecosystems with minimal disturbance. Now, future goals and sort of development for this, right? They've been working on this project for 2 years, and EVE has been their most recent creation. So they aim To scale up the technology to make it accessible to scientists worldwide, they want to provide more detailed insights into ocean habitats threatened by climate change and human activity, and they want to potentially help prevent species from becoming endangered or extinct. So Eve represents a significant advancement in underwater robotics, offering a promising new approach to marine research that combines cutting-edge technology with environmental sensitivity. Now I'm going to play a video here. It's a YouTube video from Tuan Nguyen Capital, which is titled Meet Eve, the DNA Collecting Robot. So they'll provide us a little bit more info on this, and they'll get you some imagery, and you'll actually hear from a few of the students and a few of the professors that are on board. So without further ado, here's that. Enjoy.

Meet Belle. She's not your average fish, and neither is her sister Eve. The soft robotic fish were developed by these guys, engineering students from ETH Zurich. Lake Zurich may be some 300 kilometers from the sea, but it's a perfect testing ground for Dennis Baumann and his Surf eDNA team.

The main goal of using this kind of robot is we want to build a reliable tool for biologists. Yeah, I mean, also It's just very cool to have a fish robot, I guess.

The robot can film underwater and collect DNA to monitor marine ecosystems, all while blending in.

By making EVE look like a fish, we are able to be minimally invasive into the ecosystem that we are surveying. That means The fish population is not scared as much by us. The creatures living there are not scared as much by us.

Today, the team are jumping in to test EVE's navigation. It's working quite well

right now. You could say this is autonomous, maybe a bit like your home robot, your home vacuum cleaner robot. So for now, we're just quite happy with, uh, if we can see that the fish can actually move around obstacles, Avoid any collisions, basically.

Eve's fluid swimming motion is thanks to internal pumps hidden in her silicone fin moving the tail from side to side. It's here on campus where the students design and develop almost every aspect of the fish, including the movement of its fin. It works very well now, but it It took a long time. The students took inspiration for the project from their professor, Robert Katchman, who developed a small robotic fish called Sophie when he was a student at MIT.

I think there is a bright future ahead of us where we will see robots that are not built in the way that we think of robots today. And that's what we're trying to do with this project.

The team's robots can also collect DNA samples of the marine environment, known as eDNA.

The fish swims for about 30 minutes, so 10 liters of water can go through this filter, and then this filter collects the particles, the eDNA.

From this small sample, researchers can get a snapshot of what kind of fish live in the body of water.

We are able to identify the species and also how healthy the population is. By identifying that, we can maybe prevent species from being endangered or dying out.

As the students continue to refine their tech, they hope one day this fish will change the way scientists study the deep.

What's really interesting to me about this is the convergence of many different technological trends. We talk about autonomous vehicles on the road, SpaceX launching a rocket, catching it.

Yeah.

All of that stuff happening underwater now.

Yeah.

You have what looks like a fish. It's not threatening to species. It's made with this silicone cyotipo material, so it's, it's not harming or changing the pH of the water around it or anything like that. It's purely for scientists to understand in a non-invasive way What's happening under the water? And I'm thinking about the immense applications of having this as a platform. One of them is just understanding well, understanding how many species there are underwater. We think there are two million. We've humans have only explored, I think, one eighth of that. That's our level of understanding of what's happening in the ocean world. We can talk about economic opportunities for venture. In deep sea mining, which obviously has a negative connotation with regard to the environment. But what if there was a way using these platforms to really understand what's happening under the ocean and do that in a way that is good for the environment, maybe recirculate minerals that are not present in the ocean floor, actually make it beneficial for animals underwater. And so it's just fascinating to me as a conservation tool, as well as Just a platform to explore an unexplored resource.

I also think it's on theme of the importance of sensors and data in a world, you know, we're all super excited about artificial intelligence and machine learning, but you need the data and you need sensors. And whether those are on your body or whether those are in space looking down or whether those are On the surface of the ocean, under the ocean, on the land, in the land, in the air. Sensors, sensors everywhere, right? And developing the appropriate sensor for the appropriate environment is an area of great opportunity and innovation. And again, as land mammals, We have probably given 99% of our attention to the landmass of this planet, but there's so much more to be done, so much more to be understood. And to your point, kind of the future of humanity and the future of the planet is so driven by what covers 75% of it. Yeah. And some of the more forward-thinking environmentalists are really focused on the oceans. So that's a good one. More sensors, please.

Yeah, digitizing part of the world that just hasn't been digitized yet and helping us understand it.

Yeah. And we see the consequences of hurricanes, for example, this year in And just have been devastating. But thank goodness we had the data we had, right? I mean, a couple centuries ago, you wake up in the morning and it looks like a nice day and hell's around the corner, right? So more of that is better. The weather models have gotten a lot better for sure. Yeah. So, my breakthrough of the week is, again, the early indications of the agents are coming. Okay. And so, again, for our listeners, AI agents, in the simplest terms, are bits of software that actually go and do things on your behalf. So, speaking into your phone, saying, you know where I like to eat, make reservations, tell me where we're going, order me the Uber. And they kind of go and do that for you. Something out of Google, Project Jarvis, getting a lot of buzz. Yep. Very strong rumors coming out of some of the larger players in the space, the Apple, the OpenAI folks. I think there's an over-under of about 12 months before these things are starting to really be released in production. And I just want our listeners to know that it will be another step function in what is possible in the world when they start doing stuff for us out in the wild.

Okay, so for this breakthrough, I too am a huge Marvel fan, so I went straight to Iron Man. And Tony Stark and Jarvis, right? But Google's Project Jarvis is an experimental AI-powered tool that is currently in development. So I want to provide a little bit more context onto the actual project of Jarvis before we let the guys sort of dissect it and what it means for the rest of the sector, right? So this ambitious project aims to create an autonomous AI agent capable of interacting with and controlling web browsers and potentially other computer software to complete tasks on behalf of users. So Jarvis is, is designed to navigate web browsers autonomously to perform various tasks. It can handle complex multi-step processes like booking flights or making online purchases. It can manage emails and schedule appointments. It can conduct research and gather information from the internet and like so many more. But it can also interact with onscreen elements such as fields and buttons. The AI agent is expected to be powered by Google's advanced Gemini 2.0 AI model. Which utilizes a transformer-based architecture and mixture of experts technology. So as far as development status, the project is still in development and could be, you know, previewed as early as, you know, this year, like getting more information here soon. And the full release date, you know, is uncertain. It's not, uh, anywhere out there. But an internal preview was accidentally leaked briefly through the Chrome web browser extension store. So we don't know exactly what this looks like yet, but It's definitely on the horizon. And some like potential impact for this. If successful, Project Jarvis could revolutionize how users interact with computers and the internet. So it represents a shift from passive chatbots to active autonomous digital assistants. Literally Jarvis from Iron Man. Just literally think about having Jarvis in your computer instead of into a giant exoskeleton superhero suit, right? So the technology could have significant implications for productivity and task automation. So some industry context first. Google is not alone in developing this type of technology. Other major tech companies and AI research firms are also working on this. So like Microsoft has demonstrated AI agents for email replies. Anthropic has unveiled an early version of agents in Claude. OpenAI is reportedly working on AI agents and predicts they will hit the mainstream in the near future. And so as the development of Project Jarvis continues, it will be interesting to see how Google addresses the technological challenges and potential concerns associated with such powerful AI agents. Now, I agree with this article here, um, that this is definitely going to be interesting. So let's see what the guys think.

And yes, you can create kind of custom software that does versions of this now for you. You can, you can write code that in a very deterministic way goes and makes you a dinner reservation. But I think we're talking about models and model systems and platforms that are going to do this at scale. And I am not going to sit here and tell you what that future looks like in granular detail. But I think we can all let our imaginations go with that. You know, obviously, there's, there's implications in, you know, things like food and entertainment and transportation. But there's huge applications also going on in business, where you're, you're going to have independent agents doing customer service more than just like answering question chatbot-ish stuff, but really fixing customer problems. But I think there's a lot of the business stack that are going to be tasks that are, you know, take something where there's a lot of very repetitive work A lot of white-collar jobs are sitting in front of a screen and moving things around within software systems, for example.

Repetitive labor tasks.

Repetitive labor. Take something just accounts payable at a typical company, right? It's getting in people's expenses, filling— even if it's software-driven, there's still a lot of manual processes there.

Mm-hmm.

Getting that into your general ledger. All of those tasks will be possibly done at least at a basic level with agents. So, I think some of the bots that people are using that they're generating themselves to do tasks are kind of forms of that. They're potentially They do one thing, input here, output there. Yeah. Being able to string these things together with check-in points, I think, is— there's a lot of buzz about that those things are coming and they're right around the corner, which means people are doing them now in beta. It's just in a controlled environment.

Yeah, I mean, Anthropic just announced their computer use model, which if you look at it, it's—

Yeah.

In the bare bones, it takes a screenshot of your screen at any given point and it can understand that, right? It can understand the text, it can parse through the images, and then it finds the button where it says next. It does, it fills out all your information in a secure way eventually and goes to the, you know, you can just tell it in natural language, book me a flight from JFK to London, and it'll take you just all the way to the end to the checkout page and say, look, I've looked at all the websites. This is the best price. This fits your schedule. Here it is.

Do you want me to book it?

Do you want me to book it? And so, we've gone from what we thought software was static. Now, it's basically having an intern on demand for everyone.

Yeah. And then, it's, you know, If you can do it with a keyboard, you can do it with voice, right? Because we're seeing that these things are voice native already, right? And, I know a lot of our people are talking to AI bots on their way home or on the way to work, which is, what are my appointments today? And, it's a dialogue. So, it's like I do think it's interesting. I think the amount of this that's going to be voice activated is going to be quite large. And many of us talking about, do apps fade to the background?

Yeah.

And it's really, you're just talking to a piece of glass to do a lot of the stuff that you're doing today. And then the glass, if you want to watch a video or those kinds of things, it'll obviously be there or if you want to dig into the app for whatever reason, you can, but you don't have to because you're just going to be able to talk to these systems in the same way in very rudimentary ways. You can talk to your speaker and get it to play any song you want or any series of playlists. So, just think about that applied to everything in your life is coming very soon.

We just invested in a company called Whisper Flow alongside NEA. And exactly, they're trying to be that voice interface for all our devices. And it was, they had an explosive first day on Product Hunt, number one product of the day. And yeah, it's a phenomenal product. And I encourage our listeners to go test it out. It's just, I may be biased, but it's really a game changer.

Super cool. Yeah, people should check it out.

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What's your third one, Nouraine?

Third one on our list is about search engines. You know, we've talked about Google's monopoly and, you know, all the antitrust claims against them. I think from a technology standpoint, now Meta just announced that they're developing their own search engine. If you go into Instagram today, they have that search bar now. And what was staggering for me is that Meta said over 180 million users, daily active users, are already using Meta's search engine. And why does Meta need to build one? It's not to compete with Google as the first goal. The first goal is for them to be able to index all the data they have about you across all the platforms and make it accessible to you. And it's a means to an end, really. And I find it fascinating that Now, any company that has a ton of data will create that little search engine on top of it. And that's going to be the future for you to interact with Instagram. You don't have to click, scroll, look for something in a very manual way. Maybe you can speak into it like we talked about, or just use the search bar and it intelligently finds, you know, scrapes through the database and finds exactly what you need. And this is going to eat into Google's old, you know, ads business. But Google is doing some really interesting things with NotebookLM and Gemini as well. So we'll see how it plays out.

I think I've said on this show maybe 2 months ago, which is search is dead. And just somewhat provocatively, right? So on one hand you say, wow, one of the great business models of all time. looks like it's going to be disrupted, not overnight, but it's— I'll just speak personally. I use Google Search way less than I did 6 months ago. I just want the answer. Yeah. Apple Intelligence, which is limited right now. Again, do not underestimate Apple in the medium and long run, but You know, very modest beginnings of Apple Intelligence. But searching photos, which is, you know, we all have a boatload of photos on our iPhones, searching— I don't— searching those just got way better and way easier with Apple Intelligence. So—

Yeah.

If you want to— if you want which is a search I did, show me all of the pictures of my kids in their Halloween costumes. You know, um, done. And, uh, you know, there's just gonna be more and more of that, which is just, you know, I need, uh, tell me about this particular term I've heard over and over again that I don't know what it means. You used to Google that. You don't Google that anymore. You go into— even if you're using Google products, you're using Gemini or you're using Perplexity or Claude or OpenAI to get the answer to that question. And so— That's very bad for Google. The flip side is Google's got a lot of other really cool And I've just made the drug discovery, Nobel Prizes, and this, that, and the other thing. It's just a really tricky transition when you have the golden goose under fire to kind of, how can I maintain it, milk it, twist it? One of the great business models of all time, trillions of dollars of value. Yeah. How do I not lose that too fast while my other stuff comes online?

Innovator's dilemma.

Yeah, innovator's dilemma. And you're playing both sides of that equation. Again, way above my pay grade, but smart people at Google figuring that out.

All right. So, I wanted to hop onto something here. A thing that Mike and Naren both commented on that I had never heard of before, The Innovator's Dilemma. So this is a book, um, that, you know, was written— or it's a concept and a book which is written by Clayton Christensen, and it's an influential book, and it describes a paradox that successful companies face when dealing with disruptive innovation. So I want to kind of talk about the core concept and some elements behind you know, what this sort of phenomenon is, right? So focus on current customers. Successful companies tend to prioritize their existing companies' customers' needs, which can blind them to emerging markets and technologies. Sustaining versus disruptive innovation. Companies excel at improving existing products but struggle with creating groundbreaking new products. The value of innovation follows an S-curve. With rapid improvements in the middle stages but diminishing returns at the beginning and end. Market leaders have a disincentive to innovate as new products might cannibalize their existing successful products. So some challenges with this for established companies, you know, resource allocation, small markets, uncertain future, and organizational inertia. So companies tend to allocate resources based on current customer demands, potentially missing new opportunities. Disruptive innovations often start small. The future potential of disruptive technologies is often unclear, making it a huge risk. And established processes and values can hinder a company's ability to adapt to disruptive changes. So the innovator's dilemma highlights the challenges that even well-managed companies face in staying competitive in rapidly changing markets. It emphasizes the need for organizations to balance their focus on current successful products with investments in potentially disruptive innovations that may shape the future of their industry.

One thing to just touch on that is I'm thinking about how we've talked about how Gen Z interacts with technology differently than millennials or Gen X, Gen Y. And Gen Z is spending most of their time on these platforms like Instagram, for example, and Facebook, parent company Meta, just has access to that data. So they have an understanding of culture. Yeah. better than New York Times, Wall Street Journal. And suddenly, what if they, these companies now, because of the data that they have, become the news outlets?

Yeah.

For culture, for this new swath of people, the growing young individuals around the globe. I think this is, it's beyond technology. It sort of goes into news and media, and we've already seen that play out, going from print to digital. But I think that this is going to be AI is only going to accelerate that further.

Yeah. And that's just a trend that has happened time and time again going way back. It was radio to television. Every generation has its own music, has its own news, has its own technology base. It's just those cycles are getting shorter and shorter. And it's very tricky to figure out where the puck is going and whether that— so many politicians, right? A lot of times, the people who win are the ones that figure out the new media and the new news. Yeah. And in this election cycle, I think it's a story about X versus TikTok. I think it's a story of podcasting being incredibly powerful, right? Yeah. I think it's— and then business, you're always thinking about how is the next generation going to take me and my company? We talk about it here at Alumni Ventures where our customer is boomerish for the most part at the moment. But there's $20 trillion of wealth going to be passed down from boomers to the next generation. And then you even got the generation after that. And how do we— Yeah. Begin to speak to them? How do we get them educated? How do they want to interact? How do they want to be venture capital investors? Not the same way. Not the same way. So, you can use that as a challenge, but I think great leaders view that as a fun challenge. Keeps you young to try and figure this stuff out, to meet people where they are and where they're going.

Yeah, absolutely.

Great conversation, uh, again, Naren. Uh, we'll do it again next week.

Sounds good. Thanks, Mike.

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