Yohei Nakajima leads a double life.

By day, he’s a general partner of a small venture firm, Untapped Capital.

By night, he’s one of the most prolific internet tinkerers in AI. (He also sometimes works on automating his job as a venture capitalistVC.)

He’s the creator of BabyAGI (@babyAGI_), the first open-source autonomous agent that went viral in March 2023. Yohei has since released seven iterations of BabyAGI (each one named after a different animal), a coding agent called Ditto, a framework for building autonomous agents, and, most recently, BabyAGI 2o, a self-building autonomous agent (that follows OpenAI’s unfortunate naming convention).

Even more incredible, Yohei isn’t a professional developer. His day job is as the general partner of Untapped Capital (@UntappedVC).

I sat down with Yohei to talk about:

What feeds Yohei’s drive to create new tools
The evolution of BabyAGI into a more powerful version of itself
What Yohei learned about himself by tinkering on the internet
Yohei’s personal philosophy about how the tools we build our extensions of ourselves
Why founders in AI should think about their products from a modular lens, by addressing immediate problems while enabling growth in the future
Yohei’s insight into a future where models will train themselves as you use them

We experiment with Ditto live on the show, using the tool to build a game of Snake and a handy scheduling app. Yohei also screenshares a demo of BabyAGI 2o in action.

This is a must-watch for anyone curious about autonomous agents, building cool AI tools on the internet, and the future of AI tooling.

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Timestamps:

Introduction: 00:00:59 BabyAGI and its evolution into a more powerful tool: 00:02:26 How better models are changing the way Yohei builds: 00:05:00 Using code building agent Ditto to build a game of Snake: 00:08:10 The ins and outs of how Ditto works: 00:13:24 How Yohei gets a lot done in little time: 00:19:21 Yohei’s personal philosophy around building AI tools: 00:21:50 How Yohei experiments with AI as a tech-forward parent: 00:33:13 Demo of Yohei’s latest release, BabyAGI 2o: 00:39:29 Yohei’s insights on the future of AI tooling: 00:51:24

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

Yohei Nakajima: @yoheinakajima, http://yohei.me
Untapped Capital: @UntappedVC, https://www.untapped.vc/
My first interview with Yohei, around the time he released BabyAGI: https://every.to/chain-of-thought/this-vc-is-slowly-automating-their-job
The other AI tools Yohei has created: Ditto, BabyAGI 2, BabyAGI 2o
The tweet thread about AI bots being let loose on a Discord server: https://x.com/AISafetyMemes/status/1847312782049333701

Building AI That Builds Itself - Ep. 35 with Yohei Nakajima

AI and I