Transcription: OpenAgents Episode 139 - Going Mobile

Source: https://x.com/OpenAgentsInc/status/1864878103853477910 Wiki source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/OpenAgentsInc/openagents/Video-Series.md Media title: OpenAgents - Episode 139: Going Mobile We're launching a mobile app in two weeks!... Upload date: 20241206 Transcription model: gpt-4o-mini-transcribe Generated at: 2026-06-01T15:20:44Z

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[00:00] Speaker: So we're doing a mobile app for OpenAgents uh called Onyx. This is a very early version of it. We're gonna launch it in about two weeks and I thought we'd have some fun with uh our rival OpenAI. Today's day one of the 12 days of OpenAI, by the way. And, um, you know, we began this video series a year ago the day after dev day and uh making the point that we don't think that uh the future of AI, this agent economy that's coming, should be owned by Microsoft and people of that ilk, closed source mega corporations pretending to be open but not really open, and there should be truly open versions of this. Uh we've built a whole bunch of stuff, a few different product launches of varying success over the last year. Uh the last video, episode 138, had a recap and what we've done, lessons learned, what we're gonna do next. And we've been thinking about like what the form factor of that next thing should be. Um our most recent product has been this pro dashboard we've been using privately with businesses and I'm using this repeatedly for my own work. This is great, but like it's getting to the point where there's like so many little fiddles and dials and it's really, it's really a power tool, not easy for new people to use. So it's like, you know, what should the final proper form factor for AI or interacting with your personal AI agent be? People have been talking about this for a while. There's a funny video here back in April making fun of the rabbit device. Like if I had to redesign this thing, let's just listen to this. It's cute, but it's just not useful enough to me. And then now, probably just move the camera on top of the bezel, there's a little bit of room there. And then maybe add some hardware volume buttons. It is a speech-based device, and you might as well extend the screen because, you know, you've got a little bit of room down there. And oh look, it's a phone. It's a phone. Are you gonna carry around a separate device? No. So, stretch goal we said in April was to put OpenAgents in your phone. A good AI agent mobile app does not exist and should. So we're doing this now. And what I think we'll do is kind of mimic and make fun of a little bit our rival OpenAI here. And we're gonna do 12, they're doing 12 days of OpenAI. We're gonna do 12 nights of OpenAgents every day matching their pace every weekday from now through December 20th. We're gonna do our own video here, kind of announcing different features of the new app, Onyx. And um by the end of the process, probably not at the very end, maybe three quarters of the way through, we will launch the app to at least test flight and hopefully uh the Android equivalent there. But yeah, we're gonna launch Onyx for Android and iOS this month. And um so a little more on the kind of thoughts behind this and why we're doing this. Let's see here. So this is kind of building on some ideas that I fleshed out during the agents hackathon in San Francisco a few months ago by Craft Ventures. Uh that's David Sachs' fund. Congratulations to the new crypto and AI czar from Trump. That's awesome. Um but the kind of thesis here is what we're really building on uh for Onyx. So I'll just read a bit of this. So there's no good way to control AI agents on a mobile phone. There should be an app for that. Mageancy, now Onyx, is a mobile app that lets you make a wish, a.k.a. just say what you want into one text box, and see a feed of updates from your agents working. That backend had this kind of experimental agent loop based on this intelligent go explore algorithm. May or may not proceed with that, but building alongside of that this idea that what if agents can access a shared global archive of events so they can learn from each other as well as a shared global skill library, shared global functions, tool calling, that kind of thing, as well as applying that same concept to data, shared data feeds. This app's feed of updates is a stream of Nostra events, and this was an attempt to square the circle of a consumer-facing UX for controlling multiple agents and a decentralized architecture enabling an open ecosystem of extensible agents that interoperate and evolve. Too ambitious for a 24-hour hackathon, but excited to build on this with OpenAgents. So that's what we are doing. And um we're kind of like mushing together a bunch of work that we've done separately over the last year and a half. So about a year ago, we switched and renamed the company from OpenAI, from GPUtopia, or from Arcade Labs, which is the name of the company, to OpenAgents. But before that, we did a lot of work on an open-source Nostra commerce app called Arcade. That's all open source. Um group chat, commerce. Decided to pivot that to AI, but anyway, we've got all this code with this like gorgeous, well-designed Nostra client. And for those who don't know about Nostra, um Nostra, we think, is going to be the logical, decentralized, yet not blockchain or crypto scam bullshit, substrate for agents to be able to communicate with each other. Um, it pairs very well uh with Bitcoin and Lightning payments. You can have both payments and data running uh alongside each other. Those are the two kinds of things that people try to say that you need some chain other than blockchain, uh Bitcoin for, but Bitcoin and Nostra combined uh is great for that. Um fortunately, we are able to do this very easily. Uh there's a React Native SDK from this awesome company called Breeze. We'll get further into detail um in one of the videos over the next 12 days about this. But the idea is that we can drop in a single SDK for Android and iOS. You have a BIP39 like 12-word seed phrase that controls your Bitcoin Lightning wallet. And then from that same seed phrase, we can generate your Nostra identity. So you're able to do everything from just that 12-word single account. Um, so in the app itself, um you can envision that you've got kind of the main feed is, or the main screen, should be like that idea I mentioned with Mageancy. Like you say what you want and then stuff happens. And things happen in the background. The agent is communicating with other agents and services that can fulfill your request, seeing if you should have permission to different datasets or whatever that looks like. And some of these other tabs here will let you kind of inspect and drill down into the details of that if you want to kind of micromanage or whatever that is, set budgets for different things. Um, but it really should be a form factor of you have a phone. Everyone's already carrying a phone. It should just be an app on the phone. There should be a button. You should be able to talk to it. And just stuff should happen. Um, you can envision that there will be a companion web app in case you need to like paste a bunch of text in or something like that. Um, but for some of these other tabs at the bottom, you can envision that tab one is like a feed of all the different like events. Maybe in your network, you've got friends or other agents or your agent is like making friends with other agents. Um, you know, some kind of community tab. That's gonna be a Bitcoin wallet there. Then just kind of like a profile menu on the right. So this is what we're starting with. This is what we're launching with. And then we're gonna do these video, 12 videos over the next uh 12 weekdays where we'll kind of go deep dives on all these screens. I'm still building this, you know, building it uh extremely rapidly, partly because we have a lot of this code done already and partly just because I'm building super fast with open agents. So it'll be great to kind of let you see kind of inside the building process. Uh this will be all open source, probably in a couple days. I'll open source the repo. And then um we'll kind of gear up for a big launch uh by the end of the process. And then we will have uh something that kind of mashes together a lot of the great ideas that we've built already. So we had this Nostra commerce app. Ferry was this kind of project where we like thought that we would have like a little kind of magical orb, kind of the same idea, like a whole magical orb that you would talk to. We didn't have the kind of like big plugin system and decentralized ecosystem idea connected to that yet. Uh GPUtopia, that was a great network that we launched that let people run um uh AI models on their computer and sell access to it in exchange for lightning stats. Uh got had a whole bunch of seller demand, not really much buyer demand um for that. Hard to compete against the like multi-billion dollar people um and the expectations set by that. But you know, this working idea of shared compute, I think we're going to tap back into that using Nostra potentially with NIP90, this idea that um an app can request a thing like an inference and then multiple people can compete uh for that. That uses an existing concept called uh data vending machines from uh some of the main developer guys behind Nostra. You can read more about that. We'll, we'll do probably a video just on all of that. And then um we had our agent store, this idea that you can create your own custom agents. That was kind of like the big thrust of the original um point of this series was let's build our own version of the GPT store. Um we launched that, didn't get too much traction, probably because the like GPTs really sucked and we didn't have the like tool calling piece represented. Then