Dr. Danielle Perszyk, a cognitive scientist at Amazon’s AGI Labs, can’t help but feel anxious every time she opens her computer, where she is greeted by all the usual pop-up distractions: email alerts, Slack messages, social media updates, “productivity” app notifications. Of course, her frustration—which has to do with these obstructive detours between thinking and interfacing—was hardly evident in the 45 minutes we spent chatting about her research. But it’s certainly one of the factors driving her interest in A.I. “I think that part of the solution is making the tech go more in the background,” she told me, noting the irony of developing new technologies designed to make older technologies less obtrusive.
Amazon’s AGI Labs hasn’t been around for long: It was launched at the end of 2024, after the tech behemoth hired away the top executives at A.I. startup Adept. The team is largely focused on long-term research bets centered around the creation of so-called agentic (action-taking) systems that can help mitigate the negative cognitive impacts of all the bullshit clicking and scrolling that suppress higher-level thinking and creativity. “The technology that we’re building allows all of this existing structure to be masked, essentially, by creating what will ultimately be a meta interface,” she explained, describing a generative user interface “where you’re starting from the goal that the human has, and the model understands what that goal is, and it will put everything else on silent and only give you the button that you need to click in this moment.” In other words: an interactive focusing tool that would just work.
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