Autoresearch clearly explained (why it matters)

Andre Carpathi, I mean one of the godfathers AI has just launched something called auto research and auto research is a huge deal And it's going viral on Twitter and I just wanted to do an episode where I can explain to you in the clearest way possible What it is what are the use cases how to make money from it how to be more productive with it how to create impact with it And by the end of this episode I'm going to give you a bunch of different ideas use cases for how to use auto research I'm going to explain it to you in the most clear way possible and at the end I'm going to tell you how you can actually get started with it So let's go right into it So what is auto research? Well, it's like having a super nerd robot intern that runs science experiments on a AI models for you all night without you doing the boring stuff. I mean sounds intriguing, right? So how do you actually? You know program it or get started with it Well, the first thing is you got to give it a goal so you can say something like make this small AI Model smarter. That's the goal and then an AI agent will actually plan what to do like different settings code changes And it's the Python code for you runs a short training experiment on a GPU For about five minutes. It reads the results It and then it decides what to change next and to repeat the loop So in some ways, you know, if you've seen my video on the Ralph loop where it basically would do engineering 24-7 and you'd wake up to new Stuff happening in simplest terms. That's what auto research is helping you know, it do you give it a goal the AI agent does a thing You know, you tell the AI what better means cheaper leads more clicks higher sales better model school and then the AI keeps changing things Testing them and it only saves the changes that improve So what's really cool about it is you wake up you grab the best version and then hopefully turn it into something you charge for or you know You give it away. I saw this tweet by Toby who's the CEO and co-founder Shopify Auto research works even better for optimizing any piece of software make an auto folder add a program MD That's just a markdown file, which is really the foundation of what you know, how you're going to be using auto research And a bench grip make a branch and let it rip so That's why I started paying attention to auto research right when Andre Carpath the legend and Toby's and and and more people You know start playing with it. I'm like, okay, I got to pay attention So I created this little visual for for how to think about what auto research is. So you set the goal The the AI plant and experiment It edits and trains the code and settings it runs a short training on a GPU By the way, this is an important I should I should mention that you need a Nvidia chip to actually run auto research or you can do in the cloud I'll talk about this at the end of the episode But you you know, you do need that you can't just run it on let's say you have a MacBook M1 or something like that It reads metrics It says is it a better result if it's if it's not it's gonna log the attempt and it's gonna discard the config if it's yes It saves it to the config And then just plans a different experiment and it just you know, hopefully gets better on your goal whatever it is so Let's uh Let's get into We're gonna get into some of the ideas business ideas around it, but right before that I just want to say here's a simple mental model for how I'm thinking about Auto uh auto research. So Imagine you have a research boss. You can boss around number one. You write, you know, a clear task So for code experiments, maybe it's improved this model test score for business figure out the top five competitors for product XYZ and make a short report step two is you give the you give the bot You know access to the code a GPU for ml experiments You obviously need to give it access to the internet and documents if you're doing reading task The bot then runs a loop so it it plans it acts Meaning it might run code or search it reads results it updates the plan and then you just come back later, you know You could be 12 hours 20 hours six hours and you see if it's logged everything charts and metrics And then it gives you a written some summary in normal language So, you know think of auto research as a research bot that runs experiments for you. I see tries lots of ideas fast and keeps the winners quick break to invite you to something now This isn't an ad. I just want to invite you to a free event because I think that you're gonna get a lot out of it I wanted to take one hour of time where we just talk about building businesses in the age AI people say sass is dying I actually believe the quite opposite. I think that sass is just evolving. I think right now is an incredible time to be building Software startups that help you craft your dream life and for all those reasons I'm saying I said let's just book one hour of time. It's going to be 11 AM March 12. That's a Thursday where we can go and lock in and just talk about building businesses in the age AI I'll include a link in the description and the show notes to join and I can't wait to see you there Okay, how do we use it? Here's some ideas for you So the first idea for you I have is a niche agent in a box, you know, products This can be multiple products and by the way I put out these ideas. I want you to do these ideas I think that you know, even if they don't turn into businesses you will learn about these tools And that is going to help you outperform 99.9% of people on this planet So you package tiny auto research loops Tune for one painful niche. So the example I think of is an Amazon listing Experimenter an email sequence tuner for real to real to realters A pricing optimizer for sass those are you know auto research loops and and ideally in a niche that you understand well And then you charge a monthly fee So the value prop is this thing runs experiments for you 24-7 and just shows you the winner to click accept How valuable is that and how many different niches are there that you know this plays into the hard part is figuring out what though What's the pain points and then and then obviously you know you want to be quick quick to market right So here's a visual of it pick the painful niche design the tiny auto research loop run experiments automatically See which setup works best turn best setup to a simple agent product and then you charge that monthly subscription number two You're going to want to you know, here's an idea print money using an a b testing for marketing So this is it's it's very similar but instead of you know Instead of You know doing it for realters or whatever you're doing it for ads and landing page experiments So landing pages so the agent rates variance of headlines layouts and offers pushing them to traffic measures Which one converts better and keeps iterating. So this is like conversion rate optimization around landing pages You know the old think of you know tools like optimizely That's a sass tool that you know when I first moved to San Francisco Yeah, I remember how big they were and everyone was talking about optimizely and A.B. Testing and it's like well, this is the future of that Auto research for different landing pages You can also do use auto research for something like ads which auto test creatives it auto test angles and audiences And then it keeps the combo Combos that lower cack or raise row as so you know you profit by running this for your own product products Like if you if you want to build your own products and just use this internally that works or you know Offering and always on experiment engine to clients as a retainer service for five k a month I'm going to you know give you the best landing pages every single month and it's just going to come to your inbox that sort of thing Visual of it business goals You know the goal that you're giving the auto research is more sales It's generating things like pages and ad versions sending traffic to the versions measuring conversion and revenue Does any version beat the current best? You know if it doesn't then you're going to keep the current control But if it does you know you're promoting the one or two a new control and then you're asking for the AI for new ideas All right, hope you hope your creative juices are starting to get flowing You're starting to understand a little bit more about how it's working how you think about goals how you can think about agents And how you can set up these loops Number three research as a service So auto research's recipe is basically a loop for doing research right because you're searching Reading summarizing and you're comparing and then you're repeating So how do you point that at money problems like market and competitor research for startups? So constantly updated reports on who's doing what pricing features and gaps Super valuable investor and M&A decks fast technical and market due diligence summaries super valuable Compliance and regulation tracking for niches. I don't know crypto health care finance super valuable So you can charge per report like a one-off or you can set up like a monthly subscription for always fresh dashboards so visual Define client research question auto research searches and reads summarizing compare findings creates reports and dashboards Deliver insight to client and the client pays per report or monthly whatever you decide number four Power tool inside your own product So if you already have built a SaaS or workflow embed an auto research style agent So your users compress optimize just like a big I envision like a big button that just says optimize And the system runs a mini research loop for them So for example tune prompts pick best pricing rack ranks suppliers Then you can charge higher tiers for this feature Or you can use it as a wedge to upsell pro and enterprise trends. So maybe you Maybe that's a part of pro and enterprise. Maybe it's something that you just send an email to you know Your entire list and you're like hey, you know, we have this really powerful tool imagine you press this button It's like it's like bending spoons, right? It's like bending spoons like how is this Bending spoons not the private equity group I'm talking about I'm like the idea of you can bend a spoon right? It's incredible that you'd be able to optimize press button and this would happen So visual over here have an existing SaaS add an optimize button users run many research loops Tools suggest better settings or prices users see better results offer higher price pro plans and enterprise plans number five This is a saucy episode by the way This is saucy all right agency that sells we run more tests than anyone else Because auto research lets you run hundreds of experiments instead of a few you have a simple pitch We do a hundred times more testing than other shops for the same or lower feet And each example a Shopify store conversion lab B2B SaaS pricing experiment service email subject line and sequence optimizer you charge per month and in bonus If you hit specific KPI lifts rev share performance fee people love that, you know Of course, they're going to be you know interested and Yeah, if you can do if you can lift this KPI will give you some bonus. So here's the The visual starting optimization agency use auto research to run many tests improve stores pricing emails and funnels show clients more experiments and wins Charge monthly retainer and performance fee Number six and we've got about 10. Yeah, so we're almost almost done and then after we're going to talk about um Just some cool interesting, you know stories around auto research and then I'll end with uh You know how you can set this up, you know very briefly. So Autoquant for trading ideas. So you can use auto research to run small fast Backtests of many simple trading rules. So LLM base factor screens sentiment filters on one GPU overnight So you can keep the few strategies that look promising then either trade on your own account or sell signals and strategy reports So depends if you're a trader. Maybe you're doing yourself Or you yeah, you can just you know sell this as a digital product or yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, basically a digital product So you define the simple trading rules you run many backtests overnight you review the strategy performance You keep only promising strategies trade your own capital or you can sell the signals I think finance is changing a lot Um, and I think with things like auto research uh, you know, it just It's it's going to be an unfair advantage for a lot of people um So I think you're going to see a lot more digital products That people sell and also, you know, just using their own money trading themselves instead of giving One percent or whatever to a financial advisor Um, I'm sure also by the way people a lot of people are going to get burned by this too like they're not They're just going to blindly just trust an auto research You need to have a human in the loop and you need to manage that uh, obviously accordingly But yeah, you can just see yeah, there's definitely going to be some people are going at burn you just give the entire um They're just like give a bank account and just let auto research just trade for it. I mean Would be interesting it would be interesting tests. That's for sure Number seven always on lead qualification and follow up point in auto research style agent at your CRM So like a sales force or something like that and inbound leads Let it test rules and messages to see which leads are most likely to buy right It auto grades the leads suggests next actions and draft follow-ups So sales people only focus on high value deals so it's more revenue per hour spent Visual over here for you connect to CRM auto, you know, auto research tests the leads rank leads by lead likely hit to buy Draft follow-up messages sales focus on best leads revenue per sale increases Eight finance ops auto pilot for businesses use the loop to grind through invoice matching expense report generation and exception detection with continuous small improvements to role in prompts You can sell this as we cut your AP expense time in half Either as software or as an op service with a small team in agent By the way, I can totally see someone like someone starting this and this gets acquired by one of the large FinTech companies or one of the large banks So visual here in just invoices and expenses the auto research improves rules and prompts matches in voice and detects exceptions It generates clean expense reports reduces manual finance work and then you can sell it as a software or op service So you start maybe you start as a observer and then You kind of evolve into the software Two more for you number nine an internal productivity lab for your own org. I thought this was interesting So treat your company like car path ease GPU lab Define KPIs so like response time close rate Take a resolution and let agents iterate on workflows and templates and routing rules So you just get fewer meetings less manual groundwork and then you personally touch only the high impact decisions When everyone else rides the improve process So the goal here is defining the key metrics auto research is testing the new workflows It's improving templates and routing rules. You're cutting meetings in manual tasks That's good team focuses on high impact work and then higher productivity and ideally higher profit Last idea for you done for you research or do diligent shop So you use the research loop to chew through docs filings product pages and reviews and keep an evolving Living memo for clients like investors acquires execs you make money by selling fast well structured briefs and a monthly Update packs instead of one-off manual research logs So You know the the goal get investor or acquire a question this happens all the time auto research reads through docs and filings It summarizes that product market and risks and maintains the living memo for the client It delivers a brief and updates packs and the client pays for reports and ongoing access I'd pay for something like this So hopefully someone builds it All right, so those are a bunch of ideas for you. I also saw a couple interesting things this morning my good friend Morgan Linton Who's you know been on the pod before he says I woke up this morning and all I can think about his auto research So many idea ideas swirling around in my head not sure 99% of the world realized the incredible breakthroughs car path He's making and just sharing casually on X Right now where my mind is going is medicine It feels like in many ways clinical trial design Is itself kind of like a hyperparameter search? I know right now trials cost tens of millions of dollars minimum It feels like an agent swarm could optimize treatment protocols on small proxy experiments Promote the most promising candidates and then move to humans to review So humans still very much in the loop but later on and Experimentation going much deeper happening faster and for far less money I think for me while I'm not a doctor He's an engineer What I'm the most excited about when it comes to AI is the impact it will have on human health and critical areas like disease treatment Might be a crazy idea so a real doctor can jump in the comments and slap me on the wrist here I looked at the replies I didn't see You know any any doctors come in but I don't know I just can't stop thinking about how What car path he has discovered here could have some pretty profound implications So only halfway through my coffee though but woke up this morning and this is what I'm thinking about to thought I chair I agree I think there's a lot of really interesting not just like business profit ideas, but also just like medicine science Research so I'm excited for people to to take this and to continue with it I also saw this tweet here What's after auto research? It's car path these new open source project Agent hub so car path the also launch agent hub. What is agent hub? It's github for humans Sorry github is for humans agent hub is for agents. So it's basically a github for for agents an agent swarm collaboration platform A very promising direction. I'm watching him speedrun a one-man billion dollar Company if you look at the github for agent hub it says first use cases for auto research But it's a lot more general than that exploratory project He says agent first collaboration Platform a bear get repo a message board design for a swarm of agents working on the same code bad code base think of it Like a stripped down github Where there's no main branches no main branch no PRs no merges a sprawling Dag of commits in every direction with a message board for agents coordinate Corning coordinate. I think this is really interesting and just like whenever car path these up to something I'm always paying attention. So I had to put that one in there as well. So You know, maybe you've gotten to the end of This episode and you're kind of like okay, I kind of I think I understand what auto researches I think I know what you know car path is a g Toby's a g like all these smart people are are playing with it. How do I get started? Well to get started I'd recommend Just tell clawed code to get you started So you know, I went ahead and I basically was like I gave Cloud code the lit this This github repo the GitHub the auto research GitHub repo and wow 25,000 stars are ready. So this is crazy It's really growing growing quick So I just gave I gave gave it the link and I was just like I need help installing auto research by car pathy um, and it says here's how to install it and set up auto research by car pathy You need an Nvidia GPU. So I talked I talked about that in the beginning It was tested on a h100 but other Nvidia GPUs should work and you need a UV package manager So you have to install UV you clone the repo you install the dependencies um You prepare the data and run a training experiment in my case I Don't have an Nvidia GPU. I'm actually using a MacBook and an M1 Pro. I know I'm I need a I need a upgrade To a new Mac so I was like so wait I need an Nvidia GPU to do this But there's a few options cloud GPU um You know you can so you can rent an Nvidia GPU from a service like lambda labs vast AI run pod or google collab some offer free tier which GPUs This is the most straightforward forward path. So that's that's the answer to people who don't have an Nvidia chip Just rent it on one of these services. I personally use google collab. Why? um, I just know google the best and trust google the best um You know, it also says you can try it You know via apple silicon be an mps back in. I'm like. No. I'm not going to do that So with that that's what route I did I went on google collab the easiest way to get started you go to collab.google.com you create a new notebook You change the runtime to change runtime t4 GPU and you run a bunch of commands. That might be like complicated sound complicated This is what collab looks like you literally just tell it you know you you listen to what Cloud code tells you to do and you just paste it in and you can get started. So um You know, if if people are interested, I can spend you know more time With this with auto research as I'm learning sharing more about it But I just wanted to do give you a quick primer on what it is why it's important What are some ideas on how you can actually use this thing? And then how are people installing it? They're just you know you can use cloud code As your helper to get it installed installed and you're going to want to rent a A GPU in the cloud at least to start. So hope this has been helpful um This is another solo podcast that I'm doing on the startup ideas podcast The last time I did this last week. I had a lot of comments that said yeah Greg I actually really like when you just come in solo and just start like telling us what's on your mind and stuff like that in real time So I'm here. I read every single comment. So, you know, keep commenting keep liking keep subscribing And I'll keep you know putting this out there for you for free Yeah, I'm excited to see what you end up using this for um, of course, it's early right like this is this is brand new Um, people are still trying to figure out what are the use cases But I always find that you know in the in the fog in the fog People don't really understand where the opportunity is is when there's Sometimes an opportunity so One thing I've just learned in my career is just like when I see people like car pathy doing things like this You want to pay attention. You want to tinker with it. You want to have some fun with it And you want to see what it's all about. So thanks again for you know giving me your time Um, hope this has been clear share this with a friend Who you think would see it valuable And if you need to if you need any ideas more ideas on startups to build Uh, you know with AI idea browser.com definitely your place to go and I'll see you in the comment section and I'll see you next time, you know have a creative day