Meet The AI Agent With Multiple Personalities

In the coming years, agents are widely expected to take over more and more chores on behalf of humans, including using computers and smartphones. For now, though, they're too error prone to be much use. A new agent called S2, created by the startup Simular AI, combines frontier models with models specialized for using computers. The agent achieves state-of-the-art performance on tasks like using apps and manipulating files--and suggests that turning to different models in different situations may help agents advance. "Computer-using agents are different from large language models and different from coding," says Ang Li, cofounder and CEO of Simular. In Simular's approach, a powerful general-purpose AI model, like OpenAI's GPT-4o or Anthropic's Claude 3.7, is used to reason about how best to complete the task at hand--while smaller open source models step in for tasks like interpreting web pages.