AI Scouting Report: AI Agents -vs- Agentic AI, from Imagine AI Live

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This podcast is supported by Google. Hey everyone, David here, one of the product leads for Google Gemini. Check out VEO3, our state-of-the-art AI video generation model in the Gemini app, which lets you create high quality, eight second videos with native audio generation. Try it with the Google AI Pro plan or get the highest access with the Ultra plan. Sign up at gemini.google to get started and show us what you create.

**Nathan Labenz** (0:31)
Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, we're sharing a recent talk that I gave at Imagine AI Live. On AI agents, the latest crop of agentic AI products, the eureka moments they can deliver, and the concerning rise in bad behavior such as reward hacking and scheming that we're starting to see from frontier AI systems. My assignment for this talk was to bring an audience of business leaders with varying levels of AI knowledge up to speed on the rise of AI agents, from simple structured task automation to the more autonomous AI systems that are now starting to come online, and give them a roadmap for actually using AI productively in their businesses while maintaining a high standard for quality and consistency of execution. Obviously, that's a lot for just 30 minutes, and this talk is therefore necessarily a bit higher level than my usual content. But my hope is that you'll find this zoomed out framing helpful as you continue to process the firehose of AI Agent News and Discourse. Also, that this episode might be one that listeners can share with leaders in your own organizations who could benefit from an introductory but still rigorously grounded survey of the field. I did use slides in my talk, and I would say it's probably better watched on YouTube. But we will link to the slides in the show notes for the audio only crowd. For those that want to go deeper, note that just about every slide links to a source paper or project where you can obviously learn much more. I want to say a big thank you to Steve Metcalfe and Chris Madden for inviting me and for running a first class event with a really interesting lineup of speakers and a diverse group of attendees. The day before my talk, I had an opportunity to run a two hour workshop on AI adoption, where I met, among others, a rabbi who's pioneering the use of AI in his study of the Torah and the Talmud. And the day after, Dan Siroker, CEO of Limitless, shared a particularly inspiring vision for the future of his company. It was truly one of the very few startup ideas I've heard recently that meets the moment in terms of the scale and audacity of its ambition. His and all the other talks are available online with a paid membership in the Imagine AI Live online community. As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd share it with friends or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And we welcome your feedback either via our website, cognitiverevolution.ai or by DMing me on your favorite social network.
Finally, I also want to welcome our newest sponsor to the podcast, Google. In our most recent episode, I spoke to Logan Kilpatrick about Google's 50x growth in AI usage over just the last year. And I can sincerely say, and this endorsement was not a condition of sponsorship, that Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro is absolutely a top-tier model, which developers should be considering for a wide range of projects, especially those involving scanned document or video processing, or that require long-context understanding. Its capabilities on those dimensions are genuinely unique in the market today. With that, I hope you enjoy this talk about AI agents, agentic AI, eureka moments, and the rise of bad behavior from AI systems. And thank you to everyone who listens for being a part of the Cognitive Revolution.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:36)
Welcome to the stage, Nathan Labenz.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:45)
All right, good morning. So I'm here to try to tell you everything you really need to know about AI agents in 25 minutes. So buckle up, we're going to move pretty fast, because obviously there is a lot going on. Just real quick about me, I'm basically a full-time student of AI. I have a podcast where I try to explore it from all angles. I started this company Waymark, which does video creation for small business. I was involved in the GPT-4 Red Team, where we tried to figure out what the thing would and wouldn't do. That's kind of a legendary story that's on the podcast if you're interested, and I'm a small-time angel investor in a bunch of AI companies. This is my favorite page on the Internet, just to give you a little bit of my credentials. This has been up there for two and a half years, and it is an early case study when we were doing fine-tuning of what was then GPT-3, then the state of the art, to make our video product go. Today, I want to start off with a couple of big galaxy brain questions that just kind of set the stage for what it is we're talking about. I think there is a ton of confusion, as our previous speaker astutely noted, that jargon is terrible, it's all over the map, and there is just a lot of talking past one another that is happening throughout the space. I'm going to try to clarify that to the best of my ability. We'll get into this distinction between AI agents and agentic AI that he foreshadowed, talk about what AI systems can do today, and try to give you a sense of where this is all going. Okay, so the first galaxy brain question. What is intelligence?