Silicon Valley Builds Amazon and Gmail Copycats to Train A.I. Agents
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This summer, lawyers at United Airlines noticed that someone had built an almost perfect replica of the company’s website.
This digital clone offered all the same buttons and menus for booking flights, hotels and rental cars. It included the same blue links for tracking frequent flier miles and browsing discount deals. It even used the United brand name and logo.
So United’s lawyers sent a formal takedown notice accusing the site of violating its copyrights.
Div Garg, whose tiny company built the replica site, promptly changed the site’s name to “Fly Unified” and removed the United logo. He was not interested in stepping on United’s copyrights. He and his company built their United.com replica as a training ground for artificial intelligence.
Mr. Garg’s company, AGI, is among a number of Silicon Valley start-ups that have spent the past several months recreating popular websites so that A.I. systems can learn to navigate the internet and complete specific tasks on their own, like booking flights. If an A.I. system learns to use a replica of United.com, it can use the real site, too.
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These companies are shooting first and asking questions later,” Ms. Feldman said. “The field is expanding much faster than the legal system can keep up with. Some of the decisions being made along the way end up biting the companies that have made those decisions.”
Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have already released experimental technologies that can shop on Instacart or take notes using online word processors like Google Docs. But these technologies frequently make mistakes. Sometimes, this prevents them from completing the requested task.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
“There is a big gap between what companies want these agents to do and what they are capable of today,” said Rayan Krishnan, chief executive of Vals AI, a company that tests the performance of the latest A.I. technologies. “Today, these systems are way too slow for them to be useful. You can just do the clicks yourself.”
Experts disagree on how quickly this work will progress, whether consumers and businesses want or need this kind of automation and whether popular websites will even allow it to happen. Last month, Amazon sued a start-up called Perplexity over A.I. that aimed to automate shopping on the Amazon site.
But the goal is to build systems that automate almost any white-collar work.
“If you can recreate all the software and websites that people use, you can train A.I. to do the jobs and start to do them even better than a human,” Mr. Farlow said.