The Butterfly Effect in AI: How 1 User Input Shapes 1000 AI Decisions

In this episode, we're joined by Brooke Hopkins, CEO and co-founder of Coval, an agent simulation company. Brooke shares her experience at Waymo, where she led the evaluation infrastructure team, and how that experience inspired her to create Coval. 

Brooke explains the concept of AI agents, distinguishing between reasoning agents and autonomous agents. She highlights the critical role of simulation in developing and testing AI agents, particularly for tasks where precision and reliability are crucial. 

The episode also touches on Brooke's experience as a founder, her journey through Y Combinator, and the valuable lessons learned from being part of a supportive startup community

Chapters:

(00:57) AI agents are defined as objective-oriented systems that try to achieve tasks on behalf of users.

(15:22) Simulation is critical for testing autonomous agents as it allows creating a simulated environment to test agents in various scenarios.

(19:18) The Coval platform enables simulating thousands of conversations with an AI agent to create more dynamic, robust and durable tests.

(26:01) Being surrounded by other ambitious founders during YC accelerates learning by allowing you to see "200 simulations of other companies" play out in real time.

(36:26) For enterprise AI agents executing tasks on behalf of users, thorough simulation and testing is crucial to ensure the system gets things right consistently.

Host Links:

https://casperstudios.xyz/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaysingh10125

https://x.com/jsingh_08

Guest Links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bnhop/

https://www.coval.dev/

Keywords:

AI agents, simulation, Waymo, autonomous agents, evaluation, YC Demo Day, agent architectures, voice agents, iteration time, customer confidence, self-driving cars, edge cases, developer tools