Building AI That Builds Itself - Ep. 35 with Yohei Nakajima

Yohei Nakajima leads a double life.

By day, he’s a general partner of a small venture firm, Untapped Capital.

By night, he’s one of the most prolific internet tinkerers in AI. (He also sometimes works on automating his job as a venture capitalist.)

He’s the creator of BabyAGI (@babyAGI_), the first open-source autonomous agent that went viral in March 2023. Yohei has since released seven iterations of BabyAGI (each one named after a different animal), a coding agent called Ditto, a framework for building autonomous agents, and, most recently, BabyAGI 2o, a self-building autonomous agent (that follows OpenAI’s unfortunate naming convention).

Even more incredible, Yohei isn’t a professional developer. His day job is as the general partner of Untapped Capital (@UntappedVC).

I sat down with Yohei to talk about:

• What feeds Yohei’s drive to create new tools
• The evolution of BabyAGI into a more powerful version of itself
• What Yohei learned about himself by tinkering on the internet
• Yohei’s personal philosophy about how the tools we build our extensions of ourselves
• Why founders in AI should think about their products from a modular lens, by addressing immediate problems while enabling growth in the future
• Yohei’s insight into a future where models will train themselves as you use them

We experiment with Ditto live on the show, using the tool to build a game of Snake and a handy scheduling app. Yohei also screenshares a demo of BabyAGI 2o in action.

This is a must-watch for anyone curious about autonomous agents, building cool AI tools on the internet, and the future of AI tooling.

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Timestamps:

1. Introduction: (00:00:59)
2. BabyAGI and its evolution into a more powerful tool: (00:02:26)
3. How better models are changing the way Yohei builds: (00:05:00)
4. Using code building agent Ditto to build a game of Snake: (00:08:10)
5. The ins and outs of how Ditto works: (00:13:24)
6. How Yohei gets a lot done in little time: (00:19:21)
7. Yohei’s personal philosophy around building AI tools: (00:21:50)
8. How Yohei experiments with AI as a tech-forward parent: (00:33:13)
9. Demo of Yohei’s latest release, BabyAGI 2.0: (00:39:29)
10. Yohei’s insights on the future of AI tooling: (00:51:24)

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Yohei Nakajima: @yoheinakajima, http://yohei.me

• Untapped Capital: @UntappedVC, https://www.untapped.vc/

• My first interview with Yohei, around the time he released BabyAGI: https://every.to/chain-of-thought/this-vc-is-slowly-automating-their-job

• The other AI tools Yohei has created: Ditto, BabyAGI 2, BabyAGI 2o

• The tweet thread about AI bots being let loose on a Discord server: https://x.com/AISafetyMemes/status/1847312782049333701