AI Agents, VC Insights on AI, and Building in Public with Yohei Nakajima, Creator of BabyAGI

**Nathan Labenz** (0:00)
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**Yohei Nakajima** (0:45)
People are just doing what you're actually telling them to do. Could you just remove the person from that equation?
Was the question I asked myself and the challenge I posed myself was, all right, let's prototype an autonomous startup founder this weekend.

**Nathan Labenz** (0:58)
Which is an insane sentence, by the way, but yes, carry on.

**Yohei Nakajima** (1:01)
Then I was like, make the world a better place. I just started building a list and started thinking about ways to make the better place. I was like, okay, I guess this could be more than a startup founder. I think the next one I did was build as many paper clips as possible.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:13)
Canonical.

**Yohei Nakajima** (1:15)
It started by saying this is actually dangerous. Let's first create safety protocols was the first thing it did.
If you give companies the skilled ability to control what a shop bot might nudge a person to think, there's a lot of responsibility on that to nudge humans in the right direction or not take advantage of it.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:35)
Hello and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Hello and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. My guest today is Yohei Nakajima. Yohei is a venture capitalist, founder of Untapped Capital, who's become best known over the last year for what he has personally built, in public, originally mostly for himself, but ultimately inspiring tens of thousands with the potential of AI automation and agents. Yohei, unreasonably modestly, describes himself as lazy. But after this conversation, and after watching all of his project releases, I think his defining qualities are really curiosity, playfulness, and a love of exploration. Over the course of 70 public releases, he's helped the entire AI community get a glimpse of the sort of highly personalized, AI-powered conveniences that seem destined to raise living standards for all. And as much, and perhaps more, than any other creator or builder that I follow, it's always been very clear that he is having a ton of fun along the way.
We cover a lot of ground in this conversation, starting with his recent TED AI talk, then running through the many apps that he's built and how he goes about it, before finally digging in to how he thinks about the AI space as an investor. The first half of this conversation is a great study for any aspiring AI operations specialists. Especially considering what a key role no-code proficiency has played in Yohei's journey. And I personally found a lot of value in his answers to my rapid-fire investment framework questions in the second half.
Overall, though, if there's one thing that everyone should take away from Yohei, it's the way that he's delighted in the process of incorporating AI into his life, in a way that serves his own idiosyncratic and ever-evolving purposes.
If you find value in the show and want to help it grow, I'd suggest sending this episode to a person you know who tried ChatGPT and still says they couldn't figure out what they'd actually use it for. An Apple or a Spotify review would be helpful, too. And of course, you can always reach out to us for any reason at tcr at turpentine.co or by DMing me on your favorite social media platform. Now, here's my conversation with Yohei Nakajima, Venture Capitalist and prolific in public AI Builder. Yohei Nakajima, welcome to The Cognitive Revolution.

**Yohei Nakajima** (4:19)
Thank you.

**Nathan Labenz** (4:20)
Very excited to have you here.
You have been one of my favorite Twitter follows for the last year or more. And I think, you know, you probably really don't need much of an introduction to our AI-obsessed audience, but it has been fun to follow your progress as you've really gone down the rabbit hole of building all sorts of AI projects while also continuing to, you know, to run your VC firm. And increasingly, I understand those are kind of bleeding together as you're, you know, automating more and more of the processes that the firm does. So I want to kind of get into all of that and understand your perspective on building with AI, investing in the AI arena right now. But for starters, I understand that you just are pretty fresh off of a TED Talk at the TED AI event in San Francisco.