Meet Mark and Sam, the AI agents that ran my errands for a week

“Let me ask Mark and Sam.”

For a week, it was my answer to everything, and my friends and family groaned every time.

Mark and Sam are my assistants—they make grocery lists, organize e-mails, run errands and the like. But no, 22-year-old journalists are not making assistant-hiring money. Mark (à la Zuckerberg) and Sam (à la Altman) are artificial intelligence agents, the newest brainchildren of Meta and OpenAI, respectively.

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In September Meta introduced Muse, an AI agent that can do a lot more than chat: it has its own “computer” and can make purchases, send e-mails and fill out forms for you—if you give it access.

A few weeks later, OpenAI answered with dots, its “always-on agents built to handle everything,” in the company’s words, for its highest-paying subscribers. Dots, too, can work more autonomously, and they do “proactive research” on your tasks even when you’re not using them.

Agent technology itself isn’t new or more advanced than other chatbots, says Nikhil Singh, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College. People have been building agents to help with all sorts of tasks for years, and earlier this year a free open-source agent called OpenClaw became a Silicon Valley obsession.