Mouse Clickers, But Smarter

Anthropic releases Computer Use, crypto meme token fund, and more from this week

Author

Dave Wang
October 27, 2024

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Anthropic Announces “Computer Use” Allowing Claude to Control Your Computer Screen

If you’ve ever played Runescape or other online games in 2000s & 2010s, you’ll remember the earliest botting clients that scaled gold farms were containerized versions of programs that controlled your mouse.

These were highly successful and even today MMORPGs have difficulty recognizing the difference between those bots playing the game and humans.

Anthropic’s new Computer Use feature takes this idea to the next level by generalizing actions in a containerized game environment to real world tasks.

How does it work? Computer Use can:

  • View and analyze the computer screen

  • Move the cursor around

  • Click on buttons and interface elements

  • Input text and commands

  • Capture screenshots

  • Use various software applications and websites

We’re going to see incredible scaling of productivity (or decimation of low skill white collar jobs depending how you look at it).

Some areas I think we will see interesting use cases from this:

  1. IT & Customer Support: Imagine instead of calling into support to fix an Apple bug you can take a prompt to solve issues - no wait lines

  2. Code Debugging: Claude already demo’d code debugging capability with Computer Use. We’re going to see software development costs tank - no better time to be an entrepreneur!

  3. Assistant Work: Reservations, calendar invites, trip planning, and more can now be done with a virtual instance on your computer

  4. Data Entry: Mouse recorders are already popular for data entry tasks. This was in fact a tactic I used in college to scale affiliate marketing for Lyft’s market entry in Boston. Adding AI makes these sorts of programs even more powerful.

  5. Software Tasks: Currently many software programs like PPT / Excel / Premiere Pro / Photoshop lack APIs. Adding ability to control the computer screen turns any piece of UX into AI powered.

If you’re creative with use cases, I think you can make a lot of money as an early adopter.

Marc Andreessen Shills AI Token Fund

We mentioned last week how Marc Andreessen of a16z has been posting about AI x Crypto tokens. And the meta has been shifting quick.

This weekend, he’s been posting about a new AI agent controlled meme coin fund, dubbed “ai16z”.

@saori_xbt on Twitter had a great post about how this investment fund works:

tldr on ai16z from my understanding:

ai agent has $100k liquid (NAV). +$900k speculative premium market cap atm because the fund is tokenized.

its going to sit in a tg chat with people and trade based off of tickers they send, listen to conviction of shillers, generate its own thesis based off of their info.

it also will execute the trades itself, there's already code for solana wallets and fetching token info here https://github.com/ai16z/eliza/ 

since its using a daos fun smart wallet thingy, i blv there's already methods built into its wallet that enables it to swap on jup but they're adding pump fun as well.

bot testing, community discussions etc are happening here https://discord.gg/c4c3ebEj 

this is the fund: https://daos.fun/HeLp6NuQkmYB4pYWo2zYs22mESHXPQYzXbB8n4V98jwC

right now you can only trade this on daos fun ui, but the founder of daos fun is creating a method that will allow the dao to vote to migrate the liquidity to a dex that supports token2022 standard and is included in jup aggregators, since this is a custom token. (and anyone can create their own pool already if they want to fund it)

@saori_xbt

The most likely outcome in my opinion for the incentives here is that meme deployers will use bots to spam these DAOs and suck out liquidity once these DAOs deploy - something the DAOS.FUN will need to solve.

IMO it will take a couple iterations but price action may get silly for something that sticks. The speed which teams ship in crypto is unparalleled once new ideas are out the bag - and right now it’s attaching payments and crypto to AI agents.

xAI API is now Live

We saw last week X release the API for their LLM model.

Between the v1 and v2 upgrade, xAI has been making fast improvements to catch up with the leaders in foundation models. And the gap likely will get smaller as the Memphis 100,000 compute cluster rolls out.

We’ve talked about the payments and AI layer - Elon is a known crypto bull and wants to turn X into a superapp including payments.

Virtuals Ships First On-Chain Txn. From Autonomous AI Agent

This weekend we saw Virtuals, a crypto x AI protocol enabling easy launch of AI personalities, release on-chain transactions.

While this use case for now is primarily for virtual AI e-girls and character chats, the tech here is significant for real world applications. Think trading, booking, monetization channels for tasks, etc.