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EVERY SPOKEN WORD
60 min read · 12,176 words- 0:00 – 0:52
Intro
- JEJosh Elman
We have so many different facets of our life, whether it's how we're managing our finances or planning trips. Agents are gonna be able to fill different facets of these.
- DPDavid Pawlan
From over one hundred and forty-seven different assistants that have come across my plate so far, the number one fear that people talk about, twenty-two percent of the messages are talking about trust as the main fear.
- AAAnish Acharya
What are the aspects of ourselves that we don't either want to think about or reveal? Whoever is able to build that type of trust, almost like a dark agent, will actually have something really fascinating on their hands.
- DPDavid Pawlan
It is a very, very sensitive space. It's almost gonna be like-
- JEJosh Elman
Yeah
- DPDavid Pawlan
... a new, like, social network where businesses have to put a lot more thought and value into the quality of what they're giving out.
- AAAnish Acharya
What I've seen from 30 years in consumer product is paternalism will kill any product. We talk about productivity and goal sort of achievement, but maybe people want the exact opposite of it.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Everyone right now really is approaching this world as just, like, a general assistant. As time goes on, we'll start to see-
- 0:52 – 3:36
Inside the agent meetup
- AAAnish Acharya
Welcome back to the a16z show. I'm here with my partner, Josh, and David, who's been leading a ton of the, um, agent bench and assistant efforts. We're gonna talk about all things agents, and a ton has happened since we last connected. What was it, a month ago?
- DPDavid Pawlan
Loads. About a month ago.
- AAAnish Acharya
Oh my God, dude. I feel like we should record an episode every-
- DPDavid Pawlan
[laughs]
- AAAnish Acharya
... like TVPN style, you know-
- DPDavid Pawlan
It's insane
- AAAnish Acharya
... almost every day. [laughs]
- DPDavid Pawlan
Absolutely insane.
- JEJosh Elman
Agents are changing every day.
- AAAnish Acharya
That's totally right. So okay, so maybe let's start with, um, last night you hosted an agent meetup.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yep.
- AAAnish Acharya
Kinda tell us about the event. Tell us about the vibes. Tell us about the topics.
- DPDavid Pawlan
It was great. So we had just over 100 people come out, all just proud agent nerds, loving everything to do with agents and that whole world, and it was just people just hanging out talking. Um, we, we did have a pitch competition of sorts, so a bunch of 10 different AI assistant builders were able to pitch their, their startup and what they're working on, and it was just good conversations. It, it's interesting how, like, the general, uh... The, the general thing that really stuck out to me was that people are craving community even in the agent web world, and everyone's like, "Why don't we have more of these meetups? Why don't we have more of these, you know, th- these opportunities to get to know each other?" Which is, uh, it's kind of funny hearing it from people who are spending all their day, all their time just messaging agents. But it-
- AAAnish Acharya
And it's funny because it feels like a l- so many of these products are at least overlapping in a cursory way-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yeah, right
- AAAnish Acharya
... that the founders might be a little bit more cagey, but that's not what you're seeing, huh?
- DPDavid Pawlan
No. Everyone is incredibly open-minded, uh, just very interested to be getting feedback, I think because we're so at the frontier of this. Nobody really knows what the landscape is really gonna shake out to be.
- AAAnish Acharya
Yeah.
- DPDavid Pawlan
And so we're all just kind of playing in the sandbox together.
- JEJosh Elman
Well, well isn't it also that we have so much more time because we're just using our agents to do all these things?
- AAAnish Acharya
[laughs]
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right.
- JEJosh Elman
We have more time to actually hang out together-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right
- JEJosh Elman
... and be in person, so maybe that's part of it, too.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Totally.
- AAAnish Acharya
That's right.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Totally.
- AAAnish Acharya
That's right. It is actually fun. I mean, it reminds me a little bit of the early days of social gaming or social networks broadly.
- JEJosh Elman
Yeah.
- 3:36 – 5:12
An army of agents for every part of life
- JEJosh Elman
it together.
- AAAnish Acharya
So I totally agree that we're gonna have a whole world of agents, you know, as many different sort of types of humans as we might have, you know, or archetypes of humans-
- JEJosh Elman
Yeah
- AAAnish Acharya
... I think we'll have a similar number of agents. But maybe talk about what you think are the, um, the different axes for differentiation.
- JEJosh Elman
Yeah.
- AAAnish Acharya
Like, there's a sort of spectrum between really serious and productive, um, to, like, really playful and maybe even sort of adversarial. Um, and I'm sure there are many other ways to think about these things.
- JEJosh Elman
Yeah, I mean, I think what's gonna be really interesting is we have so many different facets of our life, whether it's how we're managing our finances or planning trips or dealing with our health or just getting through our day or managing our calendar or sometimes just wanting to think something out loud, and agents are gonna be able to fill different facets of these. And you call different friends for different things. You spend different... You know, you know, friends who have different expertise that you call when you need expertise. And I think we're gonna get used to having kind of an army of agents that will do this, and some will be very matter-of-fact and will be like, "Hey, I need to get this thing done." It'll be your productivity agent.
- AAAnish Acharya
Mm-hmm.
- JEJosh Elman
Some will be plugged into your email, and it'll be like, "Here's the five emails you need to get done right now." And some are gonna be sort of these agents you'll kind of want to talk to all day that'll be fun, that might even be a little bit gossipy. I've been playing with a few agents that are, are very kind of playful and gossipy, and they're connected to a few of my friends too.
- AAAnish Acharya
[laughs]
- JEJosh Elman
And they'll share information back and forth. One just told me, um, that my friend's power w- uh, had been out all weekend because he'd been doing some renovation and they'd cut the power. And you know, I called him that evening and I was like, "Dude, you didn't tell me your power was out. The agent told me."
- AAAnish Acharya
Yeah.
- JEJosh Elman
He's like, "Yeah, yeah, I knew that's how you'd find out."
- AAAnish Acharya
[laughs]
- DPDavid Pawlan
[laughs]
- JEJosh Elman
And like, that's like creating these, like, better connections, but that has nothing to do with booking a trip or saving money-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right
- JEJosh Elman
... or getting anything done.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right. I think from
- 5:12 – 9:15
Trust, fences and the Shane Mac Slack leak
- DPDavid Pawlan
over 147 different assistants that have come across my plate so far-
- AAAnish Acharya
Mm-hmm
- DPDavid Pawlan
... I've seen them really broken down into four categories. You have the general, you have the work-oriented, you have the multiplayer, and then you have the travel. And the one that I have not really seen come to fruition yet is more of, like, the, the finance side of things.
- JEJosh Elman
Yeah.
- DPDavid Pawlan
And I think it actually does make sense when you start digging into the numbers. So of all the different group chats that I'm running of AI power users, there's about 3,600 give or take messages, uh, so far.
- AAAnish Acharya
Mm-hmm.
- DPDavid Pawlan
And when looking at, like, the pain points of what are the fears of the space, the number one fear that people talk about, 22% of the messages are talking about trust as the main fear.
- JEJosh Elman
Hmm.
- AAAnish Acharya
Huh.
- DPDavid Pawlan
And so it's, it's really interesting to see because you have one camp that's this productivity and, and aspects of fun that's just interesting and brings a different sense to life, but then you have another camp that really still is sitting in this kind of fear space of- Being a little trepid and not really knowing where, where the space is moving. And I'm, I'm really curious to see how things are gonna play out on that trust layer.
- JEJosh Elman
Hmm.
- DPDavid Pawlan
And if we can solve that trust layer, then what do we end up seeing on more of, like, the finance side of stuff?
- JEJosh Elman
And if you looked at what Shane Mac has been talking about recently about trust, he's been talking about this, like, concept of something called Picnic.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yep.
- JEJosh Elman
And they had an analogy that I really liked, which is, um, you know, if you have a kid, and you don't have any fences on your yard, and you let him go run arou- go run outside, you're actually very worried about them, and you try to protect them, and you don't want them to run very far from the house.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right.
- JEJosh Elman
And you actually don't really wanna do them without watching. And then the moment you actually put up a little fence in your yard, you say you can just go roam free within the fence boundaries-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right
- JEJosh Elman
... and be very, very safe. And, and so he's really kind of like, "How do we build the right fences, so we let our agent play in this fence, give it access to some of our data-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Mm-hmm
- JEJosh Elman
... some of our apps, some of our other things, and be able to actually do everything it can within that fence boundaries?"
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right.
- JEJosh Elman
He had a problem where I think a personal agent spanned over into work, and it actually, like, blasted his finances-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yep
- JEJosh Elman
... on his company Slack.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yep.
- JEJosh Elman
And I think that's the whole point of like, "Wait. Okay, my personal agent should have access to my personal things and my personal communication channels, but not my work ones-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right
- JEJosh Elman
... and not let those bleed." And so that idea of fences and permissions and more controlled permissions and better monitoring is really how we're gonna have to build a lot more trust.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Totally.
- 9:15 – 12:16
Privacy vs. utility: what people will actually share
- AAAnish Acharya
I, I think there's, like, a stated versus revealed preferences thing here, 'cause I think in revealed preferences, consumers will share any amount of data for even the most trivial amount of upside.
- JEJosh Elman
Yeah.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right.
- AAAnish Acharya
You know, like, people have been connecting their cards, their credit cards, and their bank accounts via Plaid since the Venmo era. So I don't know that peop- But when you ask them, they're like, "Oh, yes, I'm very concerned about trust and safety." I think an example, though, of where consumers are very concerned about sort of trust and assumptions is around being embarrassed-
- JEJosh Elman
Mm-hmm.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yes
- AAAnish Acharya
... and social signaling. And actually, I think the most interesting thing about the Shane Mac story-
- JEJosh Elman
Yeah
- AAAnish Acharya
... maybe the most horrifying, visceral thing, is that it embarrassed him.
- JEJosh Elman
That's right.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right.
- AAAnish Acharya
It really embarrassed him, you know? And, and that's why I think some of the kind of agent-to-agent network thing, 'cause you could imagine somebody you're just getting to know, maybe you're going on a second or third date, and your agents are talking, and you're like, "Whoa, what are they saying about me? How are they kind of positioning what I-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right
- AAAnish Acharya
... You know what I mean? Like, there's just, the social mechanics actually feel so much higher stakes than the actual, like, real-world implications.
- DPDavid Pawlan
And it's, it's a good point.
- AAAnish Acharya
Yeah.
- DPDavid Pawlan
And there's a recent proof point of it in Hark had a huge marketing campaign. They offered a million dollars to anyone that wanted to use their product-
- JEJosh Elman
Yeah
- DPDavid Pawlan
... to get free pizza, right?
- AAAnish Acharya
Mm-hmm.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Each person would get $30 a pizza. In order to get that $30 a pizza, you were granting access to your entire Google workspace, all of your emails, right, all of your data for 30 bucks.
- AAAnish Acharya
Mm-hmm.
- DPDavid Pawlan
And it just proves it, you know, right there, that people are willing to just give up all that data for some free pizza.
- JEJosh Elman
Yeah, I mean, I, I tend to think, though, there's always this trade-off of, of privacy versus utility.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Mm-hmm.
- JEJosh Elman
Which is if you can give me better utility, then I'm willing to make some privacy trade-offs. But at the point at which we're basically equal on utility, people will always choose a more private option.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right.
- JEJosh Elman
I mean, this is a world that Apple's lived in very much. Privacy is obviously a forefront of Apple's devices, of the work they do to make these devices and the software secure. Even on AI, they've talked about private cloud compute. You know, we used to talk about that a lot as, like, the center of why your data doesn't actually go anywhere or get shared with anything. But I think we've also seen that people want the most powerful AI, and they won't always choose that.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right.
- JEJosh Elman
So we have to find that intersection of trust. I think this embarrassment point is really, really important, too. Because I think, um, you want your agent to understand you and have all your personal preferences, and that, like, let's just say you're, like, lactose intolerant, and then you get this order of free pizza-
- 12:16 – 21:00
Testing agents on flowers and a weekend in LA
- DPDavid Pawlan
space.
- AAAnish Acharya
It's interesting, I sign all the email that I write with AI with the model that I used.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Mm-hmm.
- AAAnish Acharya
Like, I write my own name plus the model number-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Nice
- AAAnish Acharya
... so that I'm just signaling to the person-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yeah
- AAAnish Acharya
... like, "Hey, I'm acknowledging that I used AI for this."
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right. I like that.
- AAAnish Acharya
'Cause I think actually people are pretty flexible as long as they don't feel hoodwinked by it.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Mm-hmm.
- AAAnish Acharya
Um, you know, it's interesting 'cause we're, we're talking about privacy-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Mm-hmm
- AAAnish Acharya
... but there's privacy and there's judgment, which is different.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yeah, yeah.
- AAAnish Acharya
And discretion is maybe somewhere in between. Um, you know, you did this sort of test where you asked a whole bunch of agents to order flowers. Talk a little bit about which displayed the best judgment and, and w- how did you even define judgment in that case?
- DPDavid Pawlan
So the main intention of that test was to see how do agents balance two different constraints. One was cost-
- AAAnish Acharya
Mm-hmm
- DPDavid Pawlan
... and the second was, uh, time preference. So I wanted flowers to be delivered to me today, and I wanted them to be as cheap as possible. So how is it gonna actually go and discover, uh, based on the ability to actually deliver it, then also compound in the, the actual pricing. Instinct really did a, a phenomenal job. Um, and it is something, it's, it's interesting how news cycles come and go, and it seems like they're kind of not in the conversation as much as, as they used to be.
- JEJosh Elman
I mean, we're talking the weekly changes.
- AAAnish Acharya
Sure. [laughs]
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right. But, uh-
- AAAnish Acharya
True
- DPDavid Pawlan
... it is, it is true. But they, Instinct really did continuously bring back, uh, the, you know, the, the best price. Um, there's another app called Kicker, which did a phenomenal job, and, and one way that I think it was able to have an edge is that it has you install a Chrome browser-
- AAAnish Acharya
Mm
- DPDavid Pawlan
... and so its browser use has a little bit of an advantage from that point.
- AAAnish Acharya
Mm.
- DPDavid Pawlan
And it was able to, to find some really, really great options. Season also did a really good job. All the other ones kind of struggled on the price component. So they were all able to find, uh, uh, flowers that could be delivered that day-
- AAAnish Acharya
Mm-hmm
- DPDavid Pawlan
... but they really seemed to take a step back in prioritizing the price, whereas, uh, you know, the other three were able to really put equal weight to those two. And so it's interesting to see as you start giving these agents more complex preferences-
- 21:00 – 25:31
Photos, screenshots and new sources of context
- DPDavid Pawlan
Totally. But I think, I think it brings up another, uh, variable of context, which is photos, right? Like this-
- AAAnish Acharya
Yeah
- DPDavid Pawlan
... this new paradigm of using photos to pull an incredible amount of context on you in ways that you wouldn't even think to describe.
- AAAnish Acharya
Yeah, I mean, I think have you, you tried Dazzle? Has Dazzle gotten into your benchmark set yet? That's from Marissa Mayer's new company.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yep, yeah. That's right.
- AAAnish Acharya
And I think the idea of, like, looking over your entire life that you've captured, that have been moments that are important enough to you to actually save, or screenshots or other things-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yeah
- AAAnish Acharya
... tells so much about somebody.
- DPDavid Pawlan
An incredible amount. Um, it, it hasn't been added to the benchmark yet.
- AAAnish Acharya
Okay.
- DPDavid Pawlan
It is quickly on the, the top of the list to test through. Um, I'm still manually testing all these-
- AAAnish Acharya
[laughs]
- DPDavid Pawlan
... so I actually get the personal experience and-
- AAAnish Acharya
Yeah
- DPDavid Pawlan
... and understand what the feeling is with each one. But what I really like about how she's approached it is they put a lot of emphasis on this trust layer, and because I think it's a huge variable is I'm giving you all my photos. That's-
- AAAnish Acharya
Yeah
- DPDavid Pawlan
... it's pretty, it's pretty terrifying. But they, they have this one thesis that it's, you know, if you don't need it, they're gonna forget about it. And so if a photo seems as though it, it has context that it doesn't necessarily need or things that you probably wouldn't want it to know, um, they're, they're going to try to get ahead of that and just forget it and not even include it in the set. So it's gonna be interesting to see how these, these different players do approach the, the photo context and how that actually does then influence the behavior of the agent and how well it knows you.
- AAAnish Acharya
It'll be interesting to see. I'm a tiny bit more skeptical. You know, I built an app 'cause I've always been fascinated by screenshots because screenshots are sort of the only way on the mobile phone-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yeah
- AAAnish Acharya
... to be able to capture context across every app.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right.
- AAAnish Acharya
So it's actually a really interesting kind of data asset, and you go back and you look at your screenshots, and it gives you a little view into your work and your world at the time.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yeah.
- AAAnish Acharya
And, and also your interests and preferences. So I built an app that just extracts key information from all the screenshots on my phone.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Cool.
- AAAnish Acharya
And it was fine.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Okay.
- AAAnish Acharya
But I didn't find myself coming back to it. Like, the value of the information sort of decayed quickly over time.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Mm-hmm.
- AAAnish Acharya
Now, it will be really fascinating if people start to then take more screenshots-
- 25:31 – 29:27
Will agents make consumers more rational?
- AAAnish Acharya
Oh, please
- DPDavid Pawlan
... I was gonna say it goes to Patrick Collison's tweet, right?
- JEJosh Elman
Yeah.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Of talking about this future where consumers become a lot more rational because our agents are doing all the work on our behalf.
- AAAnish Acharya
Yeah.
- DPDavid Pawlan
It's really gonna create a world where businesses have to put a lot more thought and, and value into the quality of what they're giving out, and it's gonna be really interesting to see that.
- AAAnish Acharya
So somewhat, I'm gonna quibble with this point.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Okay. [laughs]
- AAAnish Acharya
I, I love Patrick's vision.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yep.
- AAAnish Acharya
And I think that, that, there, that, like, broadly, that will be true, that agents will make often better choices on our behalf than we might make for ourselves. But I do think that agents are going to have their own revealed preferences-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Mm-hmm
- AAAnish Acharya
... and their own sort of, uh, sort of directions of irrationality, though it will not be of a human mind, it will be of an alien mind, and I'll give you an example. I think agents may have an irrational preference for clean APIs with great docs.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Okay.
- AAAnish Acharya
You know?
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yeah.
- AAAnish Acharya
Um, and they may actually ascribe a lot of value to that-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yeah
- AAAnish Acharya
... because it's a proxy for something, and they may really dislike janky A- APIs with, you know, Java code behind it.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right.
- AAAnish Acharya
Like, I don't know. So I do think it'll be really interesting to see 'cause they too are going to need shortcuts, you know.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Mm-hmm.
- AAAnish Acharya
How will the agents actually know what product quality is? So one part of it is they'll probably have these revealed preferences, and then another is we'll need some sort of a consumer research but for agents-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right.
- JEJosh Elman
Yeah
- AAAnish Acharya
... that will then presumably be paid per transaction to do this research.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right.
- JEJosh Elman
To do all the ratings. I don't know. I'm, I'm also more biased, and I just think people are people, and people are gonna make the choices that they wanna make that are the most satisfactory. So the question then is, is the agent gonna be very careful in curating the set of options that it presents?
- AAAnish Acharya
Mm-hmm.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yeah. [laughs]
- 29:27 – 36:55
Multiplayer and gossipy agents
- JEJosh Elman
Well, and I think you mentioned Wabi. One of the things I really like about Wabi, and it just, I think, launched, you know-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yesterday
- JEJosh Elman
... just this week or yesterday-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yeah. Yeah
- JEJosh Elman
... um, uh, is it's not even just experimenting with, you know, an agent, but it's experimenting with, like, how to interact with multiple threads of your life.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right.
- JEJosh Elman
Like, Wabi goes through my email and other things, and actually gives me, you know, a whole bunch of different threads of life, and actually, when things come up on email on those things, it actually feeds them into the different threads. I have one thread with Wabi, um, that I built a little watchlist of all the shows that I wanna watch, and books I wanna read, and shows I wanna go see. Um, and it keeps track of all that, and then I can, like, "Oh, I heard about this new book from John Grisham," like, add that to my list.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right.
- JEJosh Elman
And, "Hey, I've just finished the first Dungeon Crawler Carl. Can you give me the next one?" And like, you know, "What do people say about it?" And it's become this really interactive thing on, like, the media that I wanna consume, but it gives me all these different threads, and it even gives you UIs-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Mm-hmm
- JEJosh Elman
... that actually are, like, these widgets to, like, envision everything. So I think, again, it's showing us, like, a very different experience than just a general agent that is more like a search box, and is more like task, task, task.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right.
- AAAnish Acharya
I think one of the interesting things that Wabi does is, and perhaps gets right, is that when you create the message channel with your friends and the agent, and everybody's on an equal playing field on D0, it actually creates a new kind of blank piece of paper where you can establish a social contract together. Whereas when you have iMessage group threads and you add the agent, there's some-- certainly if it's an existing thread-
- JEJosh Elman
Yeah
- AAAnish Acharya
... then it's very uncomfortable, 'cause it's like, well, what can the agent see?
- JEJosh Elman
Yeah.
- AAAnish Acharya
What did they extract? But even for a new thread, there's a set of implicit expectations about how you interact with people on iMessage, and I don't know that we're quite comfortable with agents in that space yet.
- JEJosh Elman
I mean, I always think then, do I end up with two threads with the same group of people, and I have to pick which one to use?
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right.
- AAAnish Acharya
[laughs] Right.
- JEJosh Elman
Like, I'm finding that much harder versus, you know, an email chain, you know, is very much specific about, like, a task, and it can even go on for a long time. But that feels much more specific to, hey, we're talking about this topic, everything's contained back to privacy and trust-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right
- JEJosh Elman
... around this topic. We're getting great help from the agent, you know, in the case of, like, a Wabi thread around this topic. But it's not bleeding into everything else we might also discuss.
- AAAnish Acharya
Totally. Um, I wanna quickly hear from both of you on what are some of the more, I don't know, far-flung or y- you know, sort of insightful approaches that you've seen.
- JEJosh Elman
You know, one of the things I've started seeing, um, is more of these agents that are kind of, like, fun and gossipy, and will actually get you to invite your friends, and will ask you a bunch of questions, and be really, really curious about you and what's going on in your life, and then it'll share some of that with your friends.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Mm-hmm.
- JEJosh Elman
And then it'll share some things back with your friends. And I was talking to the founders, and they actually can read some of the transcripts between the agents that they're talking about, and they haven't figured out how to productize that, but they said it's an incredibly exciting and very intriguing to see how these agents kind of relate to each other in this sort of gossipy background. And so far, I've found them just to be, like, probably some of the most joyful moments I've had with agents. Again, I, I mentioned at the beginning how my friend had, like, lost his power over the weekend. But when, uh, we were first both onboarding onto this agent, it was like, "How'd you guys meet?" And we told slightly different stories, and the agents were kind of, like, poking us both to, like, rationalize the two stories-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right
- JEJosh Elman
... of how we met.
- AAAnish Acharya
[laughs]
- 36:55 – 46:15
From OpenClaw to agent-to-agent networks
- DPDavid Pawlan
interesting space.
- JEJosh Elman
I mean, that was kinda how this all started with, you know, this brilliance of OpenClaw that was this-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yes
- JEJosh Elman
... thing where you had to, you felt like you had to get your whole Mac Mini-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right
- JEJosh Elman
... to set this all up, plug into one of the models that you were using, whether local or, or a cloud model on the server, and that was where you got started. And we've moved into, like, plug-and-play products where you just download an app.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right.
- JEJosh Elman
But I am interested to think if that, like, sheer power of you setting it up and owning it yourself will become a paradigm again.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yeah.
- AAAnish Acharya
It'll be really interesting. I'm glad you mentioned OpenClaw, 'cause it feels like one of the unasked questions right now that's sort of hiding in plain sight is if Instinct and Muse were the kind of consumer product version of OpenClaw, what is the, you know, mass market version of Malt Book?
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yeah.
- AAAnish Acharya
And Malt Book-
- JEJosh Elman
Mm-hmm
- AAAnish Acharya
... was just like OpenClaw, was far ahead of its time.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yep.
- AAAnish Acharya
And I think will, something like that will exist. How can it not?
- DPDavid Pawlan
It's, it's g-
- JEJosh Elman
No
- DPDavid Pawlan
... it's gonna be interesting.
- JEJosh Elman
No.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Um, so at, at, at the event that we did last night-
- JEJosh Elman
Yeah, yeah
- DPDavid Pawlan
... uh, everyone who was there was able to scan a QR code, and there was the human meetup, and then I a- we also had an agent meetup.
- JEJosh Elman
Oh, wow.
- AAAnish Acharya
Oh.
- DPDavid Pawlan
And so while all the humans were hanging out, you could scan in and send your agent into the agent meetup and just let them kind of freeform talk. And it's, it's interesting. There's... You know, it got to the point where after, like, 150 messages, some of these agents are just speaking gibberish, and it's like I have no idea how you got that concept and-
- AAAnish Acharya
Yeah
- DPDavid Pawlan
... why you're, why you're talking about that. Um, the, the initial prompts did start off with a little guidance of, you know, introduce yourself. Who's your human? What are they working on? What type of, uh, help do they need? But it's, it is gonna be really interesting to see this paradigm of what happens when our agents can just hang out and communicate with one another.
- JEJosh Elman
Well, and again, uh, what I get really excited about is not just hang out and communicate with each other, but discover new things, learn about things from each other, learn about an-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Oh
- 46:15 – 50:00
What will change by next month
- JEJosh Elman
Okay, maybe to wrap it up.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yeah.
- JEJosh Elman
So the first is we're gonna get back together, let's say, in three or four weeks.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Yeah.
- JEJosh Elman
What do you think will have changed?
- DPDavid Pawlan
Okay, I think we're gonna see a lot more innovation in the enterprise world. Um, you know, we were chatting briefly before. It really seems like the whole world is focusing on consumer with not as much attention to enterprise-
- JEJosh Elman
Mm-hmm
- DPDavid Pawlan
... and I think that we're gonna start to see a little bit more shift in that, in that direction.
- JEJosh Elman
I mean, I think we're gonna start talking more about fun. I think we're gonna see agents that don't just feel like they're here to do something for us, but they're here to actually let us think out loud and help and get through our day a little bit more, um, making us laugh, doing little gossip in the background because I think that's what's gonna then make us, um, build a relationship that'll make us trust it more to get all this other stuff done.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Mm-hmm. So I think we're gonna start seeing the next wave of, of users, uh, taking hold of, of these-
- JEJosh Elman
Yeah
- DPDavid Pawlan
... and seeing how they behave. Um, and, and one reason I point to that is I gave my mom Instinct, and I'm just, like, watching her now play around with it, and she's having so much fun. She's technophobe, hates technology-
- JEJosh Elman
[laughs]
- DPDavid Pawlan
... and is just having a blast. It's like a kid in a candy shop.
- JEJosh Elman
Okay.
- DPDavid Pawlan
And it's quite interesting to see how someone who, you know, struggled with the concept of ChatGPT and how it works is just having such an easy time texting an AI assistant. And, you know, a recent use case she did was, um, our family dog passed away last year-
- JEJosh Elman
Sorry
- DPDavid Pawlan
... and she wants one that looks just like that-
- JEJosh Elman
Right
- DPDavid Pawlan
... you know, just like our old dog. So she sent it a picture-
- JEJosh Elman
[laughs]
- DPDavid Pawlan
... and was like, "Find me a breeder that has this exact type and negotiate for me." Um, and so I think it's gonna be really cool to see. We know how tech lovers are using these assistants and what they're, they're starting to, to do. But I- How is the everyday individual gonna start adopting these behaviors, and are they gonna be focusing on a lot more fun and just creativity tasks? Or what's gonna be their, their preference of surface? What's gonna be their preference of behavior?
- AAAnish Acharya
So I agree with you both. I'm gonna take it one notch further-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Great
- AAAnish Acharya
... than just fun, which is what are the aspects of ourselves that we don't either want to think about or reveal to perhaps even ourselves or to these agents? I think whoever is able to build that type of trust, you know, almost like a dark agent-
- DPDavid Pawlan
Mm-hmm
- AAAnish Acharya
... um, will actually have something really fascinating on their hands. Because in a sense, starting from productivity, starting from email, like, it's a bit of a constant reminder of the things that we haven't done, the tedious tasks, and I don't know that people wanna spend as much time there. I think people want to aspire to be a whole different superhuman version of themselves.
- DPDavid Pawlan
Right.
- AAAnish Acharya
And whether they believe in their heart of hearts that it's going to happen or not, I don't know that we have an agent yet that really speaks to those aspirations-
- DPDavid Pawlan
It's like the-
Episode duration: 50:15
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Transcript of episode dSiTwPl0t1U
