Alex Irpan revisits Gwern's classic essay on why Tool AIs lose to Agent AIs
AlexIrpan · x · 2026-09-14
Google deep learning engineer Alex Irpan re-upped Gwern's 2016 essay Why Tool AIs Want to Be Agent AIs, saying it largely convinced him that agentic AIs will outcompete tool AIs economically and even at inference itself, since the same RL algorithms improve data selection, training schedules, hyperparameter search and tool use. The only route to a pure Tool AI is industry-wide coordination — and Irpan notes we're no longer in that world. Gwern's sharper corollary: the best tool AI would be an agent pretending to be a tool.
Related event: Google Engineer Revives Gwern's Argument That Tool AIs Lose to Agents(2 posts)→
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