AI 검색의 시대
2025년 01월 31일If I were to pick the best-selling books related to IT and business, I would choose Bill Gates' The Road Ahead (1995).
Although this book was written 30 years ago, when I first read it, I thought of it as a novel about the future. However, looking at the world in 2025, I realize that much of its content has either become an integral part of our daily lives or is preparing for a shift into a different paradigm.
Change and momentum in the Internet era
Today, based on Bill Gates’ “Road to the Future,” we will take a look at AI and AI Agent, which are hot topics these days.
Microsoft's predictions 30 years ago
In Bill Gates' Road to the Future, published 30 years ago, there is the following content about agent soft.
“The agent is a filter that makes it look as if the agent has a personality and a will. The agent's job is to help you. The agent remembers your past behavioral patterns and allows you to use the agent effectively in your daily life.”
In 1995, Microsoft released the Microsoft Agent Software Development Kit for agent development and provided tools to develop the services most closely related to my life pattern one by one within the Well Garden called Windows. Representative services include Explorer search, shopping and news (MSN.com), messenger (MSN Messenger), mail (Hot Mail), and voice recognition (Text-to-Speech engine).
Microsoft Agent appeared in 2007 (Source: Wikipedia)
At the time, it was a very groundbreaking service and was thought to be the foundation for data, personalization, and artificial intelligence, but it did not receive much attention. Since then, Windows' services have remained centered on the OS (Operation System), and the remaining search, shopping, and messenger services have been divided into various platforms.
Of course, Microsoft's Agent Software cannot be considered successful. However, looking back on the book “The Road to the Future” now, 30 years later, I think that Microsoft’s philosophy and investment in agent software was a prescient for the creation of Open AI through its current investment in Open AI and the emergence of an AI Agent called Copilot in Microsoft products.
Increasing AI influence in various fields
As Open AI opens Chat GPT to the public for free in November 2022, AI will slowly permeate our industries and individuals and begin to create a new paradigm.
Approximately 22% of Google's search results, which are firmly at the top of the search market, are made up of AI-generated content, and generative AI is gradually beginning to permeate Google. Additionally, 1/4 of the coding of programs developed at Google is code generated directly by AI. This shows that coding is also expanding into the realm of AI, given that about 60-70% of the source code already released on Git Hub is AI-created source code.
As Microsoft preloaded Copilot, a personal assistant and AI agent, into Windows 11, the number of Copilot users exceeded 400 million as of 2024, and the number of daily Copilot users is doubling every quarter.
Big tech companies in the U.S. are showing continued interest and investment in AI beyond the platform business, and are investing a significant amount of money in AI-related GPU development and data center expansion.
AI impact on the overall IT industry (Source: Tech Valley Report)
In addition to ChatpGPT, which uses a PC or browser, the on-device AI agent
Using the on-device AI agent that is built into your companion devices (smartphone, PC, laptop), etc., you will automatically perform personalized tasks necessary in your daily life, such as search, recommendation, and schedule management, like a personal assistant.
AI Agent function of Samsung Galaxy 25
In addition to ChatpGPT, which uses a PC or browser, the on-device AI agent
Using the on-device AI agent that is built into your companion devices (smartphone, PC, laptop), etc., you will automatically perform personalized tasks necessary in your daily life, such as search, recommendation, and schedule management, like a personal assistant.
Era of various AI agents (Source: Tech Valley Report)
As an example of an on-device AI agent, Samsung Electronics, which holds a 21% market share of global smartphones as of the first quarter of 2024, launched the Galaxy 24 equipped with the world's first AI agent function. The AI smartphone can function as a personal assistant by learning personalized information such as calls, records, documents, images, schedules, and emails from the smartphone I am using.
Apple, which had relatively not put much effort into AI development, belatedly announced Apple Intelligent and predicted that AI smartphones will account for more than 50% of the global smartphone market by 2028.
Microsoft Copilot
- A return to the Microsoft agent software of the 90s?
Microsoft, which has been leading the OS in the personal PC market since the 1990s, launched an agent-type AI called Microsoft Copilot in addition to OpenAI's ChatGPT. This AI agent is included in the Windows OS (automatically installed on Windows 11 and installed separately on Windows 10 from the Microsoft Store).
And thanks to this, it is expected that all Windows PCs in the future will be AI-powered PCs. This is similar to how Microsoft developed Microsoft Agent Software in 1995 and provided personalized services through MSN and Hot Mail by analyzing my life patterns within Windows functions.
I do not think that artificial intelligence is perfect either then or now. Although it is still frustrating to see chatbots with poor communication skills and ChatGPTs with poor communication skills, I think it is a step toward AGI (Artificial general intelligence), an AI that is identical to humans, which is the complete form of AI.
In conclusion
So far, we have been interested in AI that receives refined answers to the LLM (Large Language Model) giant language through ChatGPT, but with the advent of AI agents, you can implement SLM (Small Language Model), a small language model, that is, your own personalized AI. This may avoid concerns about your information and your own information being uploaded to the public cloud and mixed with other people's information.
Additionally, in the case of on-device AI agents, they are released built-in to hardware devices, so there is no need to run a browser or app to search like ChatGPT, and since the AI agent is integrated into devices that change regularly anyway, there is no need to pay a separate usage fee like ChatGPT.
And above all, unlike AI that collects, stores, analyzes, and answers general-purpose data from everyone, it will be able to serve as a personalized AI assistant based on your own patterns and information.
Which is more convenient for you: ChatGPT or on-device Copilot?
