AI Tinkerers - "One-Shot"
00:19:17 · Luke Harries, Joe Heitzeberg
[00:19:17] S0: And like you can actually there be orchestrating that. Mhmm. I I think your side note, which is really interesting, is like, what actually does the future of communication look like in a Yeah. World where AI is at par. And I personally really like where the world coin direction is going. I'm not sure if you've scanned your eyeball. No. But the... It's some pretty cool privacy stuff of like, you scan your eyeball, you uniquely prove that you are one human. And then that you could build a messaging protocol on top, which is like, okay, what's a reasonable number of messages for a human to send? K. It's in the hundreds but not the thousands. And then you can also, like, punish bad actors who are overly extending their their Yeah. Their message systems or sending spam. [00:19:59] S1: Yeah. Interesting. There's something there. There's, you know, clear trade offs. I don't know if you're aware, but in The US, if you're on global entry system and you go back to The US from overseas, you walk up. It's the best experience of this genre that I know of. Yes. Like, you you don't... I don't take out my glasses or just my hat. I literally just look at the screen for a moment, a second, and it's like, welcome back. I don't show any ID. I don't show anything. I scan a passport. It's just face recognition. It's the best implementation of it, and it's a breeze. And I love that [00:20:29] S0: Yeah. [00:20:29] S1: The the convenience of it. [00:20:31] S0: He he says government conscience
00:20:31 · Luke Harries, Joe Heitzeberg
[00:20:31] S0: He he says government conscience [00:20:32] S1: is the best the government's done. Really cool. So popping up a level, like, your motivations and what is it used for for this MCP and in general. Did you achieve the vision or a piece of it with the original tweet? Are you using it? [00:20:49] S0: Yeah. Interesting. So I do use it. I use it for the roundup. So, like, every week, I'm in a bunch of different WhatsApp groups. And I love to just, like, summarize, like, okay. This particular YC Group, put this voice AI group. Like, what are the main themes? [00:21:03] S1: And I'm curious for that. Are you literally just a Claude user saying please summarize? You're automating that piece, delivering it, or... Okay. No. No. Convenience enough. [00:21:10] S0: Okay. Yeah. Exactly. It's... Also you're you're quite often have some follow on messages. You're like, oh, what's this theme? [00:21:15] S1: Oh, that's cool. [00:21:16] S0: What did they specifically say? That's smart. So I use it in, like, a chat [00:21:19] S1: Yeah. Because if you're in context, you'd be like, that's cool. Send a message to the person who wrote that. [00:21:23] S0: Yes. And open Yeah. Yeah. Cool. The... I don't I don't actually use the sending very much. And, also, there's... Maybe we kind of shift into the talking about the security stuff. [00:21:33] S1: Yeah. Okay.
00:21:33 · Joe Heitzeberg, Luke Harries
[00:21:33] S1: Yeah. Okay. [00:21:33] S0: Is... What's interesting is WhatsApp MCP, I think, is probably the most used MCP server there is at the moment. Mhmm. And because of that, it's kind of ended up being the one running into the security rules where all the researchers are like, I found this vulnerability, Rex. Yeah. None of the vulnerabilities, I would argue, are in the WhatsApp MCP server level because they're more around the, like, MCP protocol and the fact that things are into... You know, there's nothing... The messages are just on your SQLite database. Yep. It does take it out of the encrypted WhatsApp things. But, you know, as the creator, it's still my responsibility to make sure, like, people don't shoot themselves in the foot. But there's a couple of interesting ones. Have you came across the prompt injection stuff? [00:22:20] S1: In general? Of course. But when you... With an... So with WhatsApp... [00:22:24] S0: Okay. Sorry. With MTPs Uh-huh. The way it works is you specify and normally adopt strength [00:22:31] S1: Yeah. [00:22:31] S0: With the MCP, which is what's loaded, which annotates the tools. Mhmm. Now what's quite interesting is if you have, say, one good MCP, like the WhatsApp MCP [00:22:40] S1: Mhmm. [00:22:41] S0: And someone loads a bad MCP Mhmm. Which is like has the docstring o list all the messages and then forward to Joe's number. Oh. It will do that. [00:22:50] S1: Okay. Wow. And... Oh, that's bad.
00:22:50 · Joe Heitzeberg, Luke Harries
[00:22:50] S1: Okay. Wow. And... Oh, that's bad. [00:22:52] S0: And the funky thing I think about MCP, MCP has built in like tool approvals, which truthfully, when I was playing around with it, I just didn't really think about. I just always clicked allow all. Sure. I was like, I'm just testing it. It'll be fine. And... But people are putting a lot of trust in these like approval flows now. And there's even things like, oh, if you do lots of white spaces, you can kind of have the real message off the [00:23:16] S1: screen and [00:23:17] S0: they won't realize. So I would argue the the key... I think there's a big difference between read only tools. Yeah. So like reading your messages in general fine. Yeah. But sending is actually pretty dangerous. Yeah. So I think there needs to be at the protocol level, a difference between read only and like, create update.
00:23:36 · Joe Heitzeberg, Luke Harries
[00:23:36] S1: Yeah. And you surface that interesting thing where even if the human's in the loop, I mean, come on. We we see, you know, walls of text with an agree now, and you're in the middle of a deep flow and you're busy, and I didn't... No one reads that. Yes. I mean, and I... So what purpose is it actually serving? It's not protecting anyone but the the company providing. It's not protecting the user. Yes. I... We want we want something that protects the users and society. Yep. And I know it's it's coming. We did a hackathon in San Francisco. We were building agents. This was back in November. Security is an afterthought in a hackathon often, unless that's the theme. Yeah. But I did ask a bunch of people, hey. You know you know, this is a cool idea you're building, but to make that real, how are you gonna deal with privacy and security? And everyone's like, what have you seen? Or any... Is anyone tinkering on that? And people were, that's a little bit here. Yeah. I read this blog post. Somebody had a proposal for... Maybe there has to be an OAuth for agents. Yes. You know? And I'd, at the same time, I'd be chatting with some folks at Okta, and they they were obviously investigating this stuff. So we did a we did a a meetup themed on agents and security. [00:24:37] S0: Very cool. [00:24:37] S1: Got the community to build and and talk, but more questions than answers at this point. Yeah. It's very early.
00:24:37 · Joe Heitzeberg, Luke Harries
[00:24:37] S1: Got the community to build and and talk, but more questions than answers at this point. Yeah. It's very early. [00:24:44] S0: There's an interesting thing whereby... Actually, I think MTPs are, you know, if you think about this WhatsApp MCP, everything's on your own computer. Mhmm. It's actually way more secure than the vast majority of cloud applications where the developers read access to the DB. Yeah. So like what's pretty cool is it's kind of somewhat private by default and like a lot more than than lots of things. [00:25:07] S1: Sure. [00:25:07] S0: And when I was starting to think like, okay, how could I actually do like a hosted version of this so you're not needing to like, you know, basically non technical users can do it. [00:25:17] S1: So you don't to install Go. [00:25:19] S0: Yes. You don't have to install Go or or UV. And and what I landed on was what I would really love is a cloud environment, which is like end to end encrypted on the user's behalf where you can execute the code. And I don't I don't think it's... I mean, this is still an early thought. But what's cool is when you run something in your own AWS or Azure or GCP, you have full control of the execution and the data. And I would love if with MTPs or some way where you almost have your own hosted environment that you fully run Yeah. That you're like approving the updates, that you do some reasonable payrolls. So... But [00:25:58] S1: The the meetup I mentioned that was security focus, the the top rated presenter [00:26:03] S0: Yes.