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

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 capitalist.)

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.

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.

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Timestamps:

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

What is AI & I?

Learn how the smartest people in the world are using AI to think, create, and relate. Each week I interview founders, filmmakers, writers, investors, and others about how they use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Midjourney in their work and in their lives. We screen-share through their historical chats and then experiment with AI live on the show. Join us to discover how AI is changing how we think about our world—and ourselves.

For more essays, interviews, and experiments at the forefront of AI: https://every.to/chain-of-thought?sort=newest.