I’ve just had a really bizarre experience with AI. It went wrong at the best/worst time, depending on your viewpoint. And I feel like I’ve had a glimpse of some of its inner workings – I just don’t know what to make of it.

Here’s the background – I thought I’d try something a bit different for this month’s newsletter. I wanted to combine two ideas:

First, I’ve been hearing a lot of chat along the lines of “2025 is the Year of the AI Agent”, so I wanted to talk about what AI agents are, and whether 2025 might be a bit premature.

But also, I’ve been really impressed with the live conversation feature of Google’s AI assistant Gemini – the quality and naturalness of its voice, the speed of its responses, and just how easy it is to talk to.

So, I thought, why don’t I have a chat about AI agents – with an AI?

And that’s what you’ll hear when you watch the YouTube link below.

Cogs, circuits, sparks, glitches

I’d be really interested in what you think of the conversation. Does Gemini sound natural? How well did it cope with my deliberately long, convoluted questions? Can it actually make jokes? Did it really sound like I hurt its feelings when I gave it feedback on its comedy?

Personally, as well as the conversation sounding pretty natural, I also hope you’ll find it informative – it does cover some of the latest thinking on AI.

But then there’s the weird thing that happened. As we started talking about AI getting out of control and taking over from humans, Gemini itself seemed to go out of control, ejected the human (me) from the conversation, and started talking to itself about how to deal with replacing people.

It was weird, and rather fitting really.

It brought to mind images of a damaged robot, with cogs and circuits hanging out, glitching and sparking and generally going a bit loopy – you know, like in any sci-fi movie ever.

I’d love to know what you think of it all, how it handled me interrogating that glitch, and what it says about where we are, so please do get in touch.