🧙🏼 OpenAI's new agent tools

Howdy, wizards.

I’ve been getting some rather heartwarming feedback from you guys lately. Thank you — it really makes me happy to know that I can make it easier for you to understand AI, and maybe even brings a few chuckles to your day.

One thing that surprised me was someone asked if I have a team helping me. I don’t. I do outsource a couple of small things, but overall, this newsletter, whatplugin, context windows, and several failed projects (RIP) were created by me alone. And I run this as a side project next to a full time job.

In this edition, I want to give you a behind the scenes look at a few examples of how AI helps me handle a bunch of things that wouldn’t be feasible to do by myself.

Here’s what’s brewing in AI this week.

UP CLOSE

How AI helps me run my business, part 1

The main point in sharing these is to get you inspired to get more effective by thoughtfully using AI. You could probably take these approaches and ask ChatGPT how you can do something similar for your work. And importantly, you can do these things without buying a bunch of expensive tools; vanilla ChatGPT & Claude is literally all you need.

• Sales outreach: Sponsors help me keep this newsletter running, but sometimes need a little help to discover me 🤝 I outsource the creation of a list of relevant companies, then use dropcontact.io to find contacts’ emails, and here comes the magical bit: I have a custom GPT that personalise a sequence of 4 emails for each contact, based on a template I’ve had success with in the past. It gives me ready-to-send emails by inputting contact name and company naturally, and scans their websites to highlight why they match my audience. When I get a reply, I always jump in personally.

• Branding: Using DALL-E thoughtfully has helped me maintain visual consistency for this newsletter—even though I don’t have a designer. I say “thoughtfully” because generating random images without a clear idea of concept and aesthetic will cheapen your brand quicker than a racecar; having a clear vision of the message and aesthetic I’m aiming for makes the difference. I’ve streamlined this process by prepping a custom GPT with detailed descriptions of my character and aesthetic guidelines, which I reuse every time I generate a new image. Combined with Figma templates I created, this approach lets me quickly produce visuals and add a signature style to the screenshots and graphics you see here. It’s not as a good as having a human designer, but it’s efficient since it lets me fully manage things on my own.

• Coding: I use Webflow to build my sites and they do have some AI features now, but frankly I haven’t even tried them. When I want some functionality that’s not possible or easy to do natively (e.g. timed popups, animations, advanced styling, conditional logic), I ask ChatGPT (vibe code) to create it and I embed custom code onto the site. I had no experience in html/css/JS prior to this, but I learnt just enough of what I needed to ship while using AI.

Next week: how I make my business more effective using AI for writing, information formatting and data enrichment. 

DARIO’S PICKS

1. OpenAI’s planned $20k agents

Disclaimer: this is fresh off the rumour mill 🐦

Did you think ChatGPT Pro at $200/mo was expensive?

Well—it seems like pocket change compared to what OpenAI has brewing; reportedly, they’re planning to launch some specialised AI agents, with prices ranging from $2,000 to $20,000 a month.

Apparently to The Information, they’re plotting 3 provocatively named agent tiers:

• “High-income knowledge worker”: $2,000/mo

• Software developer agent: $10,000/mo

• PhD-level research: $20,000/mo

It’s still entirely unclear when these agents would be launch or who would be able to purchase them.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ I think we’ll definitely see $2,000+ agents launched this year. As long as the direct benefits outweigh the costs—businesses will keep buying.

Is this going to turn them profitable, from the $5 billion deficit last year? No idea. Their compute costs are likely to rise with agents that do all the work in the background — that’s why the Deep Research functionality in ChatGPT has so limited usage right now (but boy, is it helpful). Also the economics are changing faster than a wizard can say “inference-time compute scaling”—so it’s all speculation.

One thing I’m more certain about is that, while OpenAI might rightfully move away from their current letters-and-numbers salad product names, I don’t think these agent will officially be called “high-income knowledge worker”. That’ll spark a bit too much outrage. Just imagine they called Sora “high-grossing movie director”…

DARIO’S PICKS

2. OpenAI’s new tools for building agents

OpenAI just launched a set of APIs and tools to make it easier for businesses to build agentic AI apps:

• OpenAI’s API will now have built-in functionality for web search, file search and computer use. The latter is a big step forward, as it gives AI the ability to “see” and click around on your computer and do browser-based tasks. It’s essentially enabling putting Operator into apps.

  • Live demos say more than a thousand words: check out this cool website where you can try OpenAI’s computer-use model for free. Sessions can last up to 5 minutes, but it’s enough to understand what it’s all about.

• The Responses API makes it easier to build chat applications that can use external tools

• Agents SDK (formerly called Swarm) is a toolkit that lets devs orchestrate single and multi-agent workflows. It has 3 components: Agents (an LLM with instruction and tools), Handoffs (delegates tasks between agents) and Guardrails (for safety).

Before the release, also OpenAI threw a “hack night” where top developers from SF put the new tools to use—building everything from a Banksy AI to a polling simulator.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ We’re moving into a future where implementing powerful AI applications that can do tasks in the real world is not only possible—it’s becoming easy and user-friendly. Right now it still requires some coding skills, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a wide range of drag and drop UIs a few months from now.

JOIN MY CULT

context windows

A few weeks ago I launched a first-of-its-kind database: the most complete collection of 500 600+ real-world AI implementation case studies anywhere on the web at contextwindows.ai

• Filter by industry, region, agent type, AI provider, and more

• See what's actually working in your industry

• Discover trending AI implementations 6 months before your competitors even notice them

• Dozens of new case studies from major AI labs added weekly (58 new ones added this week)

• Skip the theoretical use cases or companies trying to hype up their shiny new tool — steal ideas from real companies putting AI to work right now

You might notice most of the content on the site is locked. Why? Because I’d rather you pay me directly now, instead of some consultant next year to copy-paste from this database and bill you for innovation.

Just like an exclusive country club—sans the polo shirts—there are just two ways to get access. One is social: refer 6 wizards to the cause and the paywall yields. The other way involves your credit card (but don’t worry, I’m running a promo so you won’t have to pawn your artisanal espresso machine).

Here’s how to get in:

⚫️ Refer 6 subscribers to this newsletter and get free lifetime access (and your friends will thank you later). You can check your referral count below.

⚫️ First 100 users: Get lifetime access with the code WBIA-EARLY-BIRD for $49.99 (50% off). Yes, you read that right. I know my newsletter is usually full of typos, but this isn’t one of them.

Per my last email, this offer is about to go from “available” to “gone”. Grab it before it floats off on a DALL-E generated unicorn.

THAT’S ALL FOLKS!

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