AI Agents AI News & Updates
Google Expands Project Mariner AI Agent to Handle Multiple Web-Browsing Tasks Simultaneously
Google is rolling out Project Mariner, an experimental AI agent that browses websites and completes tasks like purchasing tickets or groceries without users visiting sites directly. The updated version runs on cloud virtual machines and can handle up to 10 tasks simultaneously, addressing previous limitations that required users to remain idle while the agent worked.
Skynet Chance (+0.04%): Autonomous AI agents that can independently navigate and take actions across the web represent a step toward more general AI capabilities with less human oversight. The ability to handle multiple tasks simultaneously and operate in background environments reduces human control over AI actions.
Skynet Date (-1 days): The commercial deployment of autonomous web agents accelerates the timeline for AI systems operating independently in digital environments. This represents practical implementation of agentic AI capabilities moving from experimental to consumer-facing products.
AGI Progress (+0.03%): Multi-task autonomous agents that can navigate complex web interfaces and complete goal-oriented tasks demonstrate significant progress toward general intelligence capabilities. The ability to operate across diverse websites and handle simultaneous objectives shows advancing generalization.
AGI Date (-1 days): Google's move from experimental to commercial deployment of agentic AI capabilities accelerates the practical implementation timeline for AGI-adjacent technologies. The integration with APIs and developer tools suggests rapid scaling of autonomous AI capabilities.
Amazon AGI SF Lab's Cognitive Scientist to Speak at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Conference
Danielle Perszyk, who leads human-computer interaction at Amazon's AGI SF Lab, will be speaking at TechCrunch Sessions: AI on June 5 at UC Berkeley. She will join representatives from Google DeepMind and Twelve Labs to discuss how startups can build upon and adapt to foundation models in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
Skynet Chance (+0.01%): Amazon's explicit focus on 'AGI' and building 'AI agents that can operate in the real world' indicates continued industrial pursuit of increasingly autonomous systems, marginally increasing existential risk potential by normalizing AGI development.
Skynet Date (-1 days): The establishment of dedicated 'AGI Labs' by major tech companies like Amazon suggests acceleration in the timeline for potential control risks, as it demonstrates significant resource allocation toward developing autonomous AI agents that operate in physical environments.
AGI Progress (+0.01%): Amazon's explicit investment in an AGI-focused lab with dedicated teams for human-computer interaction indicates serious resource allocation toward AGI capabilities, though this announcement alone reveals no specific technical breakthroughs.
AGI Date (-1 days): The establishment of Amazon's dedicated AGI SF Lab, combined with their focus on 'practical AI agents' operating in both digital and physical environments, suggests acceleration in the corporate race toward AGI, potentially compressing development timelines.
Microsoft Launches Discovery Platform for AI-Assisted Scientific Research
Microsoft has announced Microsoft Discovery, an enterprise agentic AI platform designed to accelerate scientific research processes from hypothesis formulation to analysis. The platform enables scientists to collaborate with specialized AI agents to drive scientific outcomes, though skepticism remains about AI's current capabilities for genuine scientific breakthroughs given past underwhelming results from similar initiatives.
Skynet Chance (+0.05%): Microsoft Discovery represents a significant expansion of agentic AI systems toward autonomous scientific reasoning and discovery processes. The development of AI systems capable of scientific hypothesis generation and testing creates pathways to AI systems that could potentially develop novel technologies with less human oversight.
Skynet Date (-1 days): Deploying agentic systems specifically designed for scientific discovery could accelerate AI self-improvement capabilities, particularly if these systems successfully contribute to AI research itself. The end-to-end automation of scientific workflows represents a considerable acceleration toward potential autonomous systems.
AGI Progress (+0.04%): Microsoft Discovery targets core AGI capabilities including scientific reasoning, hypothesis formation, and autonomous problem-solving across domains. The platform's focus on end-to-end scientific workflows demonstrates progress toward more general reasoning capacities that exceed narrow task performance.
AGI Date (-1 days): Despite skepticism about current effectiveness, dedicated platforms for AI-driven scientific discovery represent a concerted effort to accelerate research breakthroughs through AI. If successful, this could create a positive feedback loop where AI helps develop better AI systems, significantly accelerating AGI development timelines.
Firecrawl Offers $1M Budget to Deploy AI Agents as Employees, Seeking Human Creators Behind the Technology
Y Combinator-backed startup Firecrawl has posted job listings for three AI agent positions with a combined $1 million budget, seeking autonomous systems for content creation, customer support, and development work. Despite receiving 50 applicants within a week, the company acknowledges that truly autonomous AI employees don't exist yet, and is actually looking to hire the human creators who would develop and operate these agent systems.
Skynet Chance (+0.03%): The push to develop autonomous AI agents that can operate independently across multiple domains (content creation, support, development) represents a small step toward systems with broader autonomy, though the article explicitly acknowledges current limitations and human oversight requirements.
Skynet Date (+0 days): While these efforts may incrementally accelerate development of autonomous agents by creating market incentives and practical use cases, the acknowledgment that "AI can't replace humans today" suggests these efforts are still in early exploratory stages with minimal timeline impact.
AGI Progress (+0.01%): This represents a minor push toward developing more autonomous, multi-domain AI systems in practical business contexts, but doesn't introduce new fundamental capabilities or breakthrough technologies that significantly advance AGI development.
AGI Date (+0 days): The commercial investment in autonomous agent development may marginally accelerate practical implementation of agent-based systems, but the explicit acknowledgment of current limitations suggests this effort is more aspirational than transformative for AGI timelines.
Microsoft Adopts Google's Agent2Agent Protocol for AI Communication
Microsoft has announced support for Google's Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol in its Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio platforms. The A2A protocol enables AI agents from different providers to communicate and collaborate across clouds, apps, and services, allowing developers to build complex multi-agent workflows while maintaining governance standards.
Skynet Chance (+0.09%): The standardization of agent-to-agent communication significantly increases the potential for emergent behaviors in interconnected AI systems that could operate beyond human understanding or control. Multiple semi-autonomous agents working together creates more complex interaction patterns and potential failure modes.
Skynet Date (-2 days): By establishing industry standards for agent collaboration across major platforms, this development dramatically accelerates the timeline for sophisticated multi-agent systems capable of autonomous coordination and complex behaviors without direct human oversight.
AGI Progress (+0.03%): While not directly advancing individual model capabilities, this standardization enables the emergence of distributed intelligence across multiple specialized agents, moving the field toward more complex collaborative AI systems that can collectively demonstrate AGI-like capabilities.
AGI Date (-1 days): The industry-wide adoption of agent communication standards will accelerate progress toward AGI by enabling rapid development of interconnected AI systems that can share capabilities, knowledge, and tasks across organizational boundaries.
Hugging Face Releases Open Source Computer-Using AI Agent
Hugging Face has released Open Computer Agent, a freely available cloud-hosted AI agent that can operate a Linux virtual machine with preinstalled applications including Firefox. The agent can handle simple tasks like web searches but struggles with more complex operations and CAPTCHA tests, demonstrating both the progress and limitations of current open-source agentic systems.
Skynet Chance (+0.01%): While representing a step toward AI systems that can operate computers autonomously, the agent's significant limitations and restricted environment substantially limit any risk potential. The open-source nature increases transparency, which is beneficial for alignment research.
Skynet Date (-1 days): Though currently limited in capability, this release demonstrates that even open models can now power agentic workflows, potentially accelerating development of more capable computer-using agents as the underlying models improve.
AGI Progress (+0.02%): While not state-of-the-art, this demonstrates meaningful progress in open-source AI's ability to understand visual interfaces and execute multi-step tasks in a computer environment. The capability to locate and interact with visual elements represents an important advancement.
AGI Date (-1 days): By demonstrating that computer-using agents can be built with open models and are becoming cheaper to run, this development could accelerate the timeline for more capable AI systems that can interact with digital environments.
Relevance AI Secures $24M Funding to Develop AI Agent Operating System
Relevance AI has raised $24 million in Series B funding to enhance its AI agent operating system platform, which helps businesses build teams of specialized AI agents. The company reports rapid growth with 40,000 AI agents registered in January 2025 alone and is expanding with new features called "Workforce" and "Invent" for building collaborative agent teams.
Skynet Chance (+0.06%): The development of multi-agent systems that can collaborate and operate like human teams represents a significant step toward autonomous AI ecosystems that could eventually reduce human oversight. The ability for agents to specialize and collaborate increases the complexity and potential autonomy of AI systems.
Skynet Date (-1 days): The rapid adoption of collaborative AI agent systems in business environments (40,000 agents in one month) suggests that autonomous multi-agent architectures are being deployed much faster than anticipated, potentially accelerating the timeline toward sophisticated agent ecosystems with reduced human supervision.
AGI Progress (+0.04%): Multi-agent systems that specialize and collaborate represent a key architectural approach toward more general intelligence by combining specialized capabilities into more versatile systems. This platform's success demonstrates practical progress in creating agent networks that collectively exhibit broader capabilities than single-agent systems.
AGI Date (-1 days): The substantial funding and rapid market adoption suggest that practical multi-agent systems are evolving faster than expected, with high commercial demand accelerating development. This could significantly compress timelines for achieving collaborative intelligence systems that approach AGI capabilities.
Databricks and Anthropic CEOs to Discuss Collaboration on Domain-Specific AI Agents
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei are hosting a virtual fireside chat to discuss their collaboration on advancing domain-specific AI agents. The event will include three additional sessions exploring this partnership between two major AI industry players.
Skynet Chance (+0.03%): Collaboration between major AI companies on domain-specific agents could accelerate deployment of increasingly autonomous AI systems with specialized capabilities. While domain-specific agents may have more constrained behaviors than general agents, their development still advances autonomous decision-making capabilities that could later expand beyond their initial domains.
Skynet Date (+0 days): The partnership between a leading AI lab and data platform company could modestly accelerate development of specialized autonomous systems by combining Anthropic's AI capabilities with Databricks' data infrastructure. However, the domain-specific focus suggests a measured rather than dramatic acceleration of timeline.
AGI Progress (+0.02%): The collaboration focuses on domain-specific AI agents, which represents a significant stepping stone toward AGI by developing specialized autonomous capabilities that could later be integrated into more general systems. Databricks' data infrastructure combined with Anthropic's models could enable more capable specialized agents.
AGI Date (-1 days): Strategic collaboration between two major AI companies with complementary expertise in models and data infrastructure could accelerate practical AGI development by addressing both the model capabilities and data management aspects of creating increasingly autonomous systems.
AI Startup 'Mechanize' Aims to Automate All Human Labor
Tamay Besiroglu, a prominent AI researcher and founder of the research organization Epoch, has launched a controversial startup called Mechanize that aims to fully automate all work in the economy. The startup is primarily focusing on white-collar jobs initially and has secured backing from notable tech figures, though it has drawn criticism for both its mission and potential conflicts with Besiroglu's research institute.
Skynet Chance (+0.1%): A startup explicitly aiming to replace all human workers with autonomous AI agents significantly increases risks of economic dependence on AI systems without clear alignment safeguards. The direct link between frontier AI research (Epoch) and commercial automation suggests capability advancement could outpace safety considerations.
Skynet Date (-2 days): The establishment of a well-funded startup specifically targeting comprehensive economic automation could accelerate the development timeline for powerful autonomous systems capable of operating without human oversight. The backing from influential tech figures may significantly advance development pace for this form of highly autonomous AI.
AGI Progress (+0.03%): While not directly advancing AGI capabilities, a startup focused on creating AI systems that can perform complete human job functions requires significant advances in autonomous decision-making, planning, and general capabilities. The stated problem of current agents being unreliable indicates a roadmap for overcoming key AGI barriers.
AGI Date (-1 days): The commercial pressure and venture funding to develop fully autonomous worker agents will likely accelerate research into key AGI components like long-term planning, reliability, and contextual adaptation. The venture's focus on addressing current agent limitations directly targets hurdles that currently separate narrow AI from more general capabilities.
Google Adopts Anthropic's Model Context Protocol for AI Data Connectivity
Google has announced it will support Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) in its Gemini models and SDK, following OpenAI's similar adoption. MCP enables two-way connections between AI models and external data sources, allowing models to access and interact with business tools, software, and content repositories to complete tasks.
Skynet Chance (+0.06%): The widespread adoption of a standard protocol that connects AI models to external data sources and tools increases the potential for AI systems to gain broader access to and control over digital infrastructure, creating more avenues for potential unintended consequences or loss of control.
Skynet Date (-2 days): The rapid industry convergence on a standard for AI model-to-data connectivity will likely accelerate the development of agentic AI systems capable of taking autonomous actions, potentially bringing forward scenarios where AI systems have greater independence from human oversight.
AGI Progress (+0.05%): The adoption of MCP by major AI developers represents significant progress toward AI systems that can seamlessly interact with and operate across diverse data environments and tools, a critical capability for achieving more general AI functionality.
AGI Date (-1 days): The industry's rapid convergence on a standard protocol for AI-data connectivity suggests faster-than-expected progress in creating the infrastructure needed for more capable and autonomous AI systems, potentially accelerating AGI timelines.