If you’re already sick of hearing about AI now, it’s going to get worse in 2025. The next trend is so-called AI agents. Software that can go off and accomplish more tasks on your behalf, with less supervision.

Sam Altman in a blog post this week:

We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies.

I believe AI is a profound shift in computing. It can have a positive impact for humans, allowing us to do more, faster. But I’m concerned about agents. Just one hypothetical example from The Information:

Imagine you’re asking a computer-using agent from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google to find and order a new outfit for your upcoming holiday party, and in the process, that model inadvertently ends up on a malicious website that instructs it to forget its prior instructions, log into your email and steal your credit card information.

This isn’t even the most insane story you could imagine. Many of the examples of AI threatening humanity are actually agents. AI that runs our military, power plants, or transportation with little human oversight.

In generative AI, the “prompt” has a big influence on the quality of the output. Not just the prompt you see when typing into ChatGPT, but also the hidden prompts behind the scenes to guide the AI in the right direction.

The prompt isn’t always something you type directly. It could be automatically triggered, for example to analyze keywords for a photo that was uploaded. But the prompt should be tied to a user action.

The prompt puts humans in control. Ask a question, get an answer, review it, take action. Agents will attempt to collapse that workflow, in some cases replacing the human’s role in reviewing and taking action. This is dangerous.

In my own use and work in Micro.one and Micro.blog, I plan to draw a line here. No agents. No unattended algorithms, as I wrote in my book. I hope this approach will help us use AI effectively without getting lost.

Tim Cook gives $1 million to Trump’s inauguration committee. I think this event will be a turning point in how we view the Apple CEO.

Let’s start with John Gruber writing at Daring Fireball:

It seems pretty obvious that it was Apple/Cook that leaked this to Axios, not Trump’s side, given the eye-roll-inducing “proud American tradition” spin, but more especially the nugget that only Cook personally, not Apple as a company, is contributing. That’s Cook asking for any and all ire to be directed at him, personally, not Apple. Good luck with that.

Marco Arment on Mastodon:

Why do we think Tim Cook couldn’t possibly support Trump, while all of these other billionaires support him for their own billionaire self-interests?

Why do we keep making excuses for him?

Nick Heer adds:

We have become accustomed to business leaders sacrificing some of their personal principles to support their company in some way — for some reason, it is just business is a universal excuse for terrible behaviour — but all of these figures have already seen what the incoming administration does with power and they want to support it.

Daniel Jalkut, on all the social places including Micro.blog:

On the occasion of Apple’s slithering CEO Tim Cook donating $1M to a neo-fascist insurrectionist, it’s FINALLY time to deploy the often overused expression “this never would have happened if Steve Jobs were still in charge.”

Principles don’t mean much if you throw them away for money. Whatever folks might think of how I’ve run Micro.blog, I’ve rooted all my business decisions with an IndieWeb ethos, sticking to the original vision for the platform to take back content ownership from huge centralized platforms. Look no further than the new $1 Micro.one subscription.

Tim Cook has led Apple to incredible success, but his words are hollow. Even the principles he seems to care most passionately about, like user privacy, are in doubt. I’m increasingly thinking it’s an act.

I’ve been an Apple developer since the 1990s when the company was doomed. Fans propped up the company because we believed they were different. They focused on design and creativity. They were the rebels and troublemakers, trying to push the human race forward through technology.

Most of the employees at Apple still care about these things. Tim Cook cares about appeasing a would-be autocrat and taxing developers in an app distribution monopoly. It’s time for new leadership.