The Quest for Autonomous Web Agents with Div Garg, Cofounder and CEO of MultiOn

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
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**Div Garg** (0:45)
Just because the technology is not there, we are using humans as substitutes to do this. What will happen is that jobs will just transition. Those shitty jobs won't exist because technology will just solve the problems, and that's where we see ourselves. When computers replace typewriters, it actually ended up getting more jobs, but it definitely changed the nature of the jobs.
I think that's what's going to happen in the next couple of years with the agents we are building. It will change the nature of the jobs you're working on, where a lot of the current, I'll call them maybe digital chores, which could be automated, will be automated.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:18)
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 Eric Thornburg. Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. My guest today is Div Garg, founder and CEO of Multion. Div first appeared on the show in July of last year. As post-GPT-4 agent enthusiasm was hitting a fever pitch.
Since then, of course, AI agents in general have hit a small trough of disillusionment. And many agent startups have gone into a heads-down development mode. Div and the Multion team, however, have continued to build and iterate in public. And while Multion is still very limited in capability relative to a human assistant, its successes are becoming ever more impressive, and they are gradually allowing more and more people into their private beta.
As we were chatting in advance of this episode, Div suggested that I try the following prompt. Quote, go to Twitter, parentheses, I'm already signed in. Search for the last tweets I made, parentheses, check the last ten tweets. Remember them, so you can then go and search for super interesting AI news. Search the news on up to three different sources. If you see that the source has not really interesting AI news, or I already made a tweet about that, then go to a different one. When you finish the research, go and make a few small and interesting AI tweets with the info gathered. Make sure the tweet is small but informative and interesting for AI enthusiasts. Don't do more than five tweets. End of prompt. You can see a little video of Multion tackling this task on the YouTube version of this episode. Broadly, it did work, and while I definitely consider the tweet that it posted to be below my usual standards, none of the 5,000 people it reached questioned its origins. Just yesterday, Div offered immediate access to Multion to anyone willing to try this prompt for themselves. His handle is at divgarg9, so you can visit his profile for examples of what other people are doing and request access there if you're interested.
In this conversation, we jump right into the thick of things. From the reasons that AI agents have struggled, to the things that Multion already does well, to the scaffolding techniques they are using to support tasks that require hundreds of individual steps, to the reasons they are focused on speed and efficiency, as opposed to purely focused on performance, to the importance of manual testing, the cost associated with typical tasks, what makes GPT-4 special still today, and even some teasers on the hyper ambitious roadmap that Multion has laid out for themselves for the year ahead.
There are some really great nuggets in this conversation, and to be honest, I only fully appreciated some of them while listening back to the episode myself.
As always, if you're finding value in the show, we appreciate it when you share it with friends. I think this episode will be interesting and valuable to anyone who's interested in the frontier of AI capabilities, as well as the techniques that visionary builders believe will get us past AI's current limits. With that, I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Div Garg of Multion. Div Garg, Founder and CEO of Multion, welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution.