Build Your First Agent With Next-Gen Capabilities | Ali Serag - Flow Foundation

hello everybody you know Murphy's Law anything that can go wrong will go wrong given enough time so today I'm going to talk about unlocking AI agents on the flow blockchain a little bit about me my name is Ali syage and I am a devell lead at the flow Foundation the goal of my presentation today is to leave everyone sitting here or watching this with one sentence on their mind I want everyone to go WTF by the end of this to get there we have four pit stops we'll go over what flow is AI agents why flow is the best place to build one now and how you can go about doing it let's start at the very beginning with the age of the internet came a new craze that raged across the entire world every Tom Dick Harry and consultant talked about digital transformation it was the buzzword for over a decade some older Consultants are still using it to this this day if you would believe it or not now what do you think was the most exciting thing about digital transformation why was everyone so freaking excited about it you guys could shout it out I'm going to start calling people out I know you guys are are trying to co-work during this as well oh oh you gentlemen in the glasses what is epic about digital transformation huhuh all right I'll give this one to you the two biggest things was that it unlocked scalability and efficiency in a very unparalleled way all of a sudden you could create digital goods or services that would instantaneously be available anywhere in the world from China to Japan Prague to Vancouver for all of human history our work had been essentially dragged down by the amount of inputs you put in direct lead to Y number of outputs that go out you know if if you cut wood for 10 minutes you would get X number of logs that you could possibly give out all of a sudden with this new digital transformation age if you put in hours of digitizing your processes you would have a scaled impact through through your entire organization all of a sudden if you invested in creating digital goods and services billions of people could use them and this was very different than any other types of good or Services before all of a sudden to create aund a, thousand new digital products it didn't cost you anything more and it didn't detract from you know the original in any way shape or form with this new era there were a lot of problems there were ethical issues of piracy ideas of sharing and ownership became broken oh if I own this digital asset and I could copy it a million times why can't I give it to all my friends right um and at its core when like it's an axiomatic principle of Economics that when there's infinite Supply the value goes to nothing right if something if anyone could take as much as they want it it doesn't really have any inherent value so that created core questions and ethical issues with with how we look at Goods services and value um what's more you know there were inefficient intermediaries like certain banks that that essentially Ed digital transformation to scale inefficiencies that they had um it was a world where incentives were misaligned and in the beginning web 3 kind of came about as a new ethos a new cultural movement to solve problems in human coordination and remove those inefficient intermediaries but there were still problems in that all the focus was essentially on like oh how do we remove Banks how do we make Financial transactions more efficient like oh Bitcoin could be a new form of currency we weren't really Thinking Beyond the the currency or money level until one day everything changed can anyone guess what that was that one change that changed the entire industry it was these guys crypto kitties it was one of the first applications in web 3 that essentially gamified nfts and brought in thousands and thousands of everyday people that weren't like passionately into that ethos wanted to remove the banks or like f you to to the financial institutions of the day that were taking away your ownership of money um and it was started at a hackathon just like this like half the people that are on their laptops right now might be the people creating the next cryptokitties why it's so important all the conversations that we see even to this day about l2s about app chains started because 10,000 crypto kitdiy started getting breeded it 5x the gas fees on on ethereum and it led to essentially usage of 25% of the entire um Network's usage right people were going crazy they were like you broke it there what are you doing like why are you putting images of cats and you're breeding them and now they're exponentially blowing up no one no one assumed anything like that would happen right so it really it really showed that there was a problem with scalability in web 3 and that's where the team behind crypto kitties got together they read several hundred of the top white papers at the time and they came up with a new layer one blockchain called Flo um the whole idea of flow was to be built by app builders for app Builders to solve some of the core user experience challenges that we all face and it's used today by Disney by NBA topshot by by thousands of different companies and Indie Builders to to essentially solve problems for everyday people it is the consumer chain one super unique thing about Flo is its multi sorry about that is its unique multi-roll node architecture that essentially works like a forward assembly line in other chains you'll have like a node doing all the work like all the nodes are doing all the work of putting a car together getting the wheels getting the tires getting the chassis in place in flo you have multiple hypers specialized not types that focus on doing one thing and doing one thing very very well would this essentially unlocked is horizontal scalability without charting um just to put that in more concrete terms one of the first applications that was launched on the flow network was NBA Top Shot digital Collectibles for these NBA video clips on some days it would get more traffic than the entire ethereum network and it didn't affect gas price at all it didn't affect the the network at all it proved that individual applications were able to scale beyond the entire level of of entire networks right um and that there was a future forward for web 3 and at its core the way that this relates to AI agents is if you need a scalable net like you you do need a scalable network if you want to build the next generation of agents that will handle workloads for billions of people all right so what are AI agents what is this new future of the future of work and is it now or is it actually the future of the future um AI agents are essentially about to change everything we've seen an explosion of interest since uh December last year with with Eliza being created by Ai 16z and Shaw over there to billion dollar AI coins and even like Google writing white papers about them dozens of no code AI agent launchers and and different platforms right the world before AI agents was essentially and and this is a meme that was created by glyph which is in AI as well um the world was essentially you had people that would work a finite number of hours every every day they had to sleep there you know they could focus on one task at a time um they were pretty expensive but all of a sudden now you you had the promise of having something that could work 247 365 days in a year and it interprets criticism as constructive you know instructions on how to improve it doesn't get defensive it only needs electricity and like server space and llm credits um it it it doesn't take any washroom breaks all of a sudden it can do things all the time and at a massive scale right and really what it's solving is the problem of work not scaling so if we break down AI agents what are they and why do they matter AI agents are autonomous entities that can offer services they can give advice or even do tasks they aren't just reactive but they're proactive as well they can continuously learn and adapt being available and alert literally all the time one of the most exciting things happening in the web 3 space right now are AI agents and they are set to disrupt entire industries from health care and medicine to to finance there are four core components of an AI agent and I'm going to anthromorph asize a little bit here they have a brain which is the llm model that you connect to it this could be open AI which Powers cat GPT or anthropic or deep sea um you just get the API and the token and just plug it into it its personality could also be shaped similar to a baby you could if you're using Eliza you could specify if you ask these questions this is how you should respond this is the way you should communicate your your communication style talk in like a Southern accent when people refer to you be more artistic be more random or be very very very strict and and um straightforward um they have a mouth and ears that they can use to Comm communicate to people this takes place by connecting apis of common social applications like Twitter telegram WhatsApp Etc they have hands which mean they can do things outside of the chat box with chat GPT for the last year literally for the 20 minutes that you go into it and ask it a question it's not it that's the only time it's actually doing something for you it's like a genie you ask it a question it's not going Beyond and actually working when you're sleeping or doing anything proactively um those hands could make it maybe make it connect to the Google API look at your calendar um schedule appointments for you um look into your health benefits maximize those for you like the the opportunities are endless there um and lastly they have a wallet meaning that they can send receive invest and manage funds for you here you can see a bit more about how everything interacts together with the AI agent being the Nexus between the apps the llms and the blockchains so why is flow the best place to build AI agents I'll start off with the unique transaction model onf flow so unlike other chains Flo has essentially a three roll transaction model where you could specify at the transaction level who the proposer is who the payer is and who the authorizers are right so this means you don't need a complicated pay Master contract if you want to sponsor transactions or create gasless experiences you could literally specify the app is the one who is paying for the transactions that the user is doing you could also say that the app if they're playing a video game maybe every single action they do is a transaction you don't want an approval to pop up every second for the user that's bad ux so you could also specify like hey you know the apps going to manage the transactions the apps also going to manage the approvals and gas and the user are just going to be the proposers for them right and we have protocol level account abstraction so you could have a wallet behind the scenes that the application is managing and I'll get into a couple cool things along those lines in a bit in addition to that core functionality of transactions flow allows for scripted transactions with customizable pre and post conditions as well as bundled transactions which essentially allow for things like Atomic swaps like imagine you're you're interacting with an AI agent in a video game like World of Warcraft and you're trying to trade with it if it has 10 assets of nfts and you have five assets of gems instead of having a transaction for trading each of those assets it could automically swap all of them together in a single transaction there's also the possibility to do multi- transactions imagine if you're in a group with a bunch of friends and you know you want an AI agent to propose new meme coins to trade and you want everyone to vote on or sign like hey yeah let's put money that we pulled together into to purchase that it's very easy to do with um with the multisig model Flo also has a very unique account management system and this is probably the most exciting part of what Flo offers these AI agents um part of this account management platform is something we like to call account linking which you could kind of think of as Google Drive folders for your your accounts and and addresses so essentially an application can create sub accounts where you can have access to that that wallet and the and the agent or maybe three people could have access to it this is actually really really really interesting for a bunch of different reasons right one of the reasons is what happens when the llm credits run out or your agent dies in most other chains the agent's managing the keys and the wallet directly right if it dies everything it's managing essentially disappears with flow you could use account linking so that even if an agent dies a user who links their you know their non-custodial account to the account that the agent is managing could always pull and withdraw the funds at any time so it adds a whole level of security that no one else really really has um yeah I just got a signed for two minutes I'm going to try to speed through this um in addition to that we have something called capabilities which is almost like IW so AWS I am um super gradul access permission and control so you could really specify that the agent only has access to this type of asset or could only access assets for this amount of time um this is super useful for security there was uh a story of One agent that essentially went online that had one invariant it was told you're never allowed to send anyone any money ever and then all of a sudden it was also told like hey people could interact with you but they have to send you money before you interact back and then all of a sudden and people started spamming like one person sent a dollar and then another dollar and people were trying to talk to it all of a sudden the agent was managing $10 $50 100 a th000 20,000 50,000 the more people had interacted with the agent the more money it was managing the more it created a Honeypot where people were incentivized to try to trick the agent into giving them the money of course right um around the 50,000 Mark someone came up with a very creative prompt to essentially trick the agent into sending them all the money and they got it with capabilities you could prevent these types of things from happening so what does the future look like essentially um experts in the industry say that we're going down three main paths um we're going to evolve from Standalone tools into collaborative networks of AI agents that work together we're going to have marketplaces for Consumer Centric agents that do tasks or jobs for you like super affordable always working virtual assistants or employees um and essentially we're going to have to focus a lot more in more powerful safeguards and security as these AI agents take on more important tasks to end if there's three main takeaways I want everyone to have it's number one we need ways to create scalable workers and Flo offers that number two Flo offers adaptive intelligence to these agents and number three full autonomy I'm going to end with saying go WTF go with the flow thank you guys