July 22, 2025 • 6 mins
ABC News tech reporter joins the show for ‘Tech Tuesday.’ Today, Mike talks about OpenAI’s new “agent,” and the first major federal crypto law pushing prices higher.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It is time for Tech Tuesday. Mike Dubuski, ABC News
Technology reporter.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Good morning I Mike, Good morning Bill. How are you.
I'm goo ahead, PEPSI or coke? I'm a coke guy.
I would say, I'm not a huge soda.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Guy though, Okay, but the point is you're a coke.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Guy, and aren't we all yes?
Speaker 1 (00:22):
All right, all right, let's get let's get to it.
Open AI is releasing chat GPT agent.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
What does that.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Mean, what does it do? And what is it going
to look like?
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Yeah, so this kind of requires us to understand what
agent means in the context of the AI space. An
agent is a type of artificial intelligence technology that can
take action on your behalf. In other words, it has
a degree of agency. So this is a technology that
you can ask to book you a flight, or order
(00:55):
your groceries on Instacart, or it can make you a
PowerPoint present for work, for example. And this is in
contrast to the type of AI technology that is popular now,
which is like a chatbot. Right, it can answer you questions,
it can maybe write you out an itinerary, but it
can't go that extra step. Agents are things that do
go that extra step. They can accomplish tasks, they can
(01:18):
execute on requests, and that's where open Aiy's latest tool enters.
The picture. Chat GPT Agent is a setting within chat
ept that the company says can book you a trip
on Expedia, it can run code, it can create sort
of business slideshows and spreadsheets for you, and open ai
says this is a mixture of several existing technologies that
(01:41):
they've been working on, including their deep research tool, as
well as a tool called Operator, which is designed to
kind of click around websites and understand how to enter
things into text boxes and scroll through results and whatnot.
In that spirit, if you give chat GPT Agent a request,
it will actually pull up a little virtual computer and
(02:02):
you can watch it go through your request as it
tries to figure out what to do. If you ask
it to compare the best kitchen tables on Amazon dot com,
you can see it type in Amazon dot com into
a browser, scroll through the kitchen table results, and then
kind of compile that into a list of results for you.
Oday I CEO Sam Alton says that this represents a
(02:24):
new level of capability for AI, but he's also warning
about a lot of potential risks saying that this isn't
really ready for high stakes use cases just yet and
probably shouldn't be given a ton of your personal right.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
So with that being said, industries, I mean, everybody loves
the idea of booking a cruise and the chat GPT
does that. Now, how about taking over employment? My daughter
Pamela is entering a master's degree with a cryptosecurity major
(02:58):
because she's having a bear of time getting work with
her skill set. Amazon just laid off a zillion people.
Other companies aren't hiring entry level because all of the
work is being done by AI. Do you see entire
levels of industry being wiped out? Because AI can do
the thinking, and when you're talking about agency, can go
(03:21):
forward and actually do the process itself.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
That is certainly the concern with specifically a gentic AI
that we're talking about, right, that it can actually go
do the work of a person.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Right.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
If we're using the travel example, right, a travel agent
would go do that for you. But even in the
sort of more advanced sectors, right coding, for example, AI
is pretty good at coding. It can actually write and
execute on code pretty effectively in many cases, and that
does pose a huge threat to a lot of sectors. However,
(03:55):
I think it's also worth mentioning that this is imperfect technology.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Right.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Many people who have gotten access to the early version
of chat GPT agent have reported some strange unforced errors
that this technology has made, inventing fake Amazon links, for example,
pushing back sort of janky, unprofessional looking power point slides.
One tech publication compared this to basically hiring a day
(04:21):
one in turn that you basically have to kind of
lord over or show a bunch of different things before
you ever really trusted to do anything. You can hook
up your personal accounts to this machine and let it
buy plane tickets for you if you trusted to do that.
But the general consensus seems to be that this thing
is not quite ready for prime time yet. And you know,
there's a lot of speculation about where AI is going
(04:44):
to go in the future. But an old adage in
the tech world is that you shouldn't buy something with
the intention that it's going to get better in the future, right,
You should buy something with the capabilities that it has now.
The capabilities that it has now are pretty lacking, it seems.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
And to your point, it's teaching a It's like teaching
an intern the basics, except you don't need the intern. Yeah,
the intern disappears.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Right, but an intern presumably gets better over time, right
whereas this, you know that that's a big question mark.
There is reporting out there that open ai is struggling
to put together its next major model, GPT five, Google
Anthropic and others have run into similar challenges as well.
There's been a lot of reporting out there that we're
running out of things to train these models on, which
(05:32):
kind of raises a question about what you do train
these models on once the entire corpus of the Internet
is exhausted. So there's some reason to think that this
is about as smart as generative AI is going to get,
at least for the immediate future. And again, it is
pretty lacking in that regard. Doesn't necessarily mean that people's
jobs aren't threatened, but it does mean that they are
(05:54):
at threat by a pretty imperfect technology.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
All right, Mike, thank you, we'll talk again. All always
good stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Of course they'll take care
It is time for Tech Tuesday. Mike Dubuski, ABC News
Technology reporter.
Speaker 2 (00:06):
Good morning I Mike, Good morning Bill. How are you.
I'm goo ahead, PEPSI or coke? I'm a coke guy.
I would say, I'm not a huge soda.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Guy though, Okay, but the point is you're a coke.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Guy, and aren't we all yes?
Speaker 1 (00:22):
All right, all right, let's get let's get to it.
Open AI is releasing chat GPT agent.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
What does that.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Mean, what does it do? And what is it going
to look like?
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Yeah, so this kind of requires us to understand what
agent means in the context of the AI space. An
agent is a type of artificial intelligence technology that can
take action on your behalf. In other words, it has
a degree of agency. So this is a technology that
you can ask to book you a flight, or order
(00:55):
your groceries on Instacart, or it can make you a
PowerPoint present for work, for example. And this is in
contrast to the type of AI technology that is popular now,
which is like a chatbot. Right, it can answer you questions,
it can maybe write you out an itinerary, but it
can't go that extra step. Agents are things that do
go that extra step. They can accomplish tasks, they can
(01:18):
execute on requests, and that's where open Aiy's latest tool enters.
The picture. Chat GPT Agent is a setting within chat
ept that the company says can book you a trip
on Expedia, it can run code, it can create sort
of business slideshows and spreadsheets for you, and open ai
says this is a mixture of several existing technologies that
(01:41):
they've been working on, including their deep research tool, as
well as a tool called Operator, which is designed to
kind of click around websites and understand how to enter
things into text boxes and scroll through results and whatnot.
In that spirit, if you give chat GPT Agent a request,
it will actually pull up a little virtual computer and
(02:02):
you can watch it go through your request as it
tries to figure out what to do. If you ask
it to compare the best kitchen tables on Amazon dot com,
you can see it type in Amazon dot com into
a browser, scroll through the kitchen table results, and then
kind of compile that into a list of results for you.
Oday I CEO Sam Alton says that this represents a
(02:24):
new level of capability for AI, but he's also warning
about a lot of potential risks saying that this isn't
really ready for high stakes use cases just yet and
probably shouldn't be given a ton of your personal right.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
So with that being said, industries, I mean, everybody loves
the idea of booking a cruise and the chat GPT
does that. Now, how about taking over employment? My daughter
Pamela is entering a master's degree with a cryptosecurity major
(02:58):
because she's having a bear of time getting work with
her skill set. Amazon just laid off a zillion people.
Other companies aren't hiring entry level because all of the
work is being done by AI. Do you see entire
levels of industry being wiped out? Because AI can do
the thinking, and when you're talking about agency, can go
(03:21):
forward and actually do the process itself.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
That is certainly the concern with specifically a gentic AI
that we're talking about, right, that it can actually go
do the work of a person.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Right.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
If we're using the travel example, right, a travel agent
would go do that for you. But even in the
sort of more advanced sectors, right coding, for example, AI
is pretty good at coding. It can actually write and
execute on code pretty effectively in many cases, and that
does pose a huge threat to a lot of sectors. However,
(03:55):
I think it's also worth mentioning that this is imperfect technology.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
Right.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Many people who have gotten access to the early version
of chat GPT agent have reported some strange unforced errors
that this technology has made, inventing fake Amazon links, for example,
pushing back sort of janky, unprofessional looking power point slides.
One tech publication compared this to basically hiring a day
(04:21):
one in turn that you basically have to kind of
lord over or show a bunch of different things before
you ever really trusted to do anything. You can hook
up your personal accounts to this machine and let it
buy plane tickets for you if you trusted to do that.
But the general consensus seems to be that this thing
is not quite ready for prime time yet. And you know,
there's a lot of speculation about where AI is going
(04:44):
to go in the future. But an old adage in
the tech world is that you shouldn't buy something with
the intention that it's going to get better in the future, right,
You should buy something with the capabilities that it has now.
The capabilities that it has now are pretty lacking, it seems.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
And to your point, it's teaching a It's like teaching
an intern the basics, except you don't need the intern. Yeah,
the intern disappears.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Right, but an intern presumably gets better over time, right
whereas this, you know that that's a big question mark.
There is reporting out there that open ai is struggling
to put together its next major model, GPT five, Google
Anthropic and others have run into similar challenges as well.
There's been a lot of reporting out there that we're
running out of things to train these models on, which
(05:32):
kind of raises a question about what you do train
these models on once the entire corpus of the Internet
is exhausted. So there's some reason to think that this
is about as smart as generative AI is going to get,
at least for the immediate future. And again, it is
pretty lacking in that regard. Doesn't necessarily mean that people's
jobs aren't threatened, but it does mean that they are
(05:54):
at threat by a pretty imperfect technology.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
All right, Mike, thank you, we'll talk again. All always
good stuff.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Of course they'll take care
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