Intelligence emerges from interconnected individual units (like neurons) pursuing their own interests and forming communication pathways.
Similar collective intelligence emerges in markets and companies via interactions among participants.
In computing systems, general intelligence may arise not from larger models, but through interaction and collaboration among multiple independent agents.
Introduction to Apify and the Actor Marketplace 02:45
Apify is a marketplace hosting about 5,000 tools called "actors," which are self-contained Docker-based software units with well-defined input and output.
The majority of actors are web scraping or data extraction tools, but there are also tools for data processing and workflow automation.
The marketplace allows integration via SDKs for various languages and offers easy access through CLI and popular workflow platforms.
Community creators can build and monetize actors, creating a software marketplace dynamic.
Role of MCP in Agentic Interaction and Tool Discovery 05:04
MCP integration enables AI agents and workflows to easily call any actor on Apify's marketplace using a single API key or account.
A key feature is "tool discovery," allowing agents to dynamically find and utilize the right tool for their workflow, overcoming context limits of OpenAPI.
MCP's adoption is increasing rapidly and is emerging as the dominant standard for agentic system interoperability.
Challenges in Agent Autonomy and Service Access 07:27
Despite available tools, agents can't fully autonomously discover and use most services, as access typically requires human-provided API tokens or accounts.
Human intervention remains necessary for connecting agents to third-party services, limiting agents' potential to act independently.
Approaches to Enabling Fully Autonomous Agents 09:04
Letting agents subscribe and pay for services themselves is impractical due to identity and payment requirements often tied to real individuals.
Central identity and payment providers (e.g., Coinbase, Stripe, MasterCard, Visa) are developing standards, but broad adoption will be slow due to marketplace challenges.
Apify proposes a centralized marketplace approach: developers provide payment and identity info once, then their services can be monetized and accessed by all agents via a single API/account, bypassing direct third-party integration.
Demonstration of Agentic Tool Usage and Integration 11:47
Practical examples show AI agents using Apify actors via tool discovery to answer questions, scrape Twitter, or interact with third-party services (e.g., Browserbase) potentially without the latter's awareness.
Nested MCP servers allow tools from multiple sources to be accessible through the marketplace, facilitating ecosystem growth.
The marketplace model enables rapid scaling as new tools or MCP servers can be added without explicit cooperation from original service providers.
Monetization, Ecosystem Growth, and Open Questions 15:45
Anyone can publish and monetize tools on the Apify store, gaining access to a large and fast-growing developer and user ecosystem.
More than $4 million was paid to creators in the last month, with over half a million dollars generated monthly and 1 million monthly visitors.
The real-world value and reliability of autonomous tool discovery remain open questions, but improvements in language models are expected to address these concerns.
Trust among agents and between tools is a major unresolved challenge, as is the broader question of whether agentic interaction can lead to artificial general intelligence (AGI).
The presenter encourages experimentation and participation in the ecosystem.