Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:44:06 · Lenny Rachitsky, Anish Acharya
[00:44:06] S0: Yeah, I always think about that when I have folks from Anthropic and OpenAI on the podcast, just how an advantage they have when they have the best model- [00:44:14] S1: It's crazy. [00:44:15] S0: It's crazy, right? Just that's a loop right there is just have the best model for longer and they can move so much faster. [00:44:20] S1: It's crazy though, to take the other side for a moment, it felt like Anthropic was unassailable and now OpenAI's had an amazing six months, and open weights are also ripping. So, despite the sort of scary concept of this supremely intelligent model that's totally proprietary to one company, so far the kind of industry trends haven't played that way at all. [00:44:41] S0: Yeah. Grok Bot just came out of nowhere and is now the most amazing AI kind of assistant tool. I'm just hooked on it. [00:44:48] S1: Oh, man. I mean, we should talk about the personal agents thing. Actually, the three big products that I love here, Grok Bot's totally nailed it, and also the model underneath it is awesome. They came out of, you're right, out of left field. And that's I know a lot of the good work the Cursor team did. I think ChatGPT Work, it's kind of buried in the UI but it's really, really good. It's one of the best products they've released. And then there's a startup that's really getting some buzz called Instinct, which has made some more aggressive and interesting trade-offs, but all in the same domain.
00:44:48 · Anish Acharya, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:44:48] S1: Oh, man. I mean, we should talk about the personal agents thing. Actually, the three big products that I love here, Grok Bot's totally nailed it, and also the model underneath it is awesome. They came out of, you're right, out of left field. And that's I know a lot of the good work the Cursor team did. I think ChatGPT Work, it's kind of buried in the UI but it's really, really good. It's one of the best products they've released. And then there's a startup that's really getting some buzz called Instinct, which has made some more aggressive and interesting trade-offs, but all in the same domain. [00:45:17] S0: That's amazing. I don't know if it was a strategy for someone tweeting this vague tweet about how awesome it is and everyone's like, "What the hell are you talking about?" That was really effective, because I was like, "How do I get that?" [00:45:29] S1: [inaudible 00:45:29] [00:45:29] S0: ChatGPT Work, the episode that will come out right before this is the PM in charge of that, Tara. [00:45:36] S1: Oh, really? [00:45:36] S0: Yeah. [00:45:37] S1: Oh man, they did such a good job on it. I don't know how much you use it, but it's really well done. [00:45:44] S0: What is better than Cowork there? Is it that it runs in the cloud? Is that the big differentiator?
00:45:44 · Lenny Rachitsky, Anish Acharya
[00:45:44] S0: What is better than Cowork there? Is it that it runs in the cloud? Is that the big differentiator? [00:45:49] S1: It runs in the cloud, it does a good job of caching browser credentials so it's not as aggressive as Grok or Instinct. And it also, the remote feature, it's got the full duplex voice mode. So, you can actually just call it and it could see all your threads, and you can just talk to it and say, "Hey, what's happening across all my coding agents, across this? Can you change that?" So, just because the full duplex voice is so good, you really feel like you're calling your assistant who knows everything that's happening in your world. Whereas with Grok, it's a sort of one-way transcription. Or with some of the other assistants, it's a text. So, the voice plus the kind of model of it can see all threads is really well done. [00:46:25] S0: Awesome, okay. I'm going to come back to this AI assistant consumer stuff, but just something I wanted to close the thread on. I feel like in terms of jobs and the economy as a result of AI, I see it almost as the spectrum of, there's the Dario end of the spectrum of 50% of knowledge work will be disrupted and we're going to have massive unemployment, to the David Sacks spectrum of it's going to be incredible, jobs are going to be fine. So far everything is pointing in a good direction. Clearly you're closer to the Sacks direction. Is there anything else just along the lines that you think might make people feel better about jobs in the future?
00:47:04 · Anish Acharya
[00:47:04] S1: I mean, I think that the entire trend of human existence has been that our desires grow faster than our ability to fulfill them. If you look at the things that are expectations today, they were unimaginable luxuries 500 years ago, even 50 years ago for things like therapy or things like antibiotics 100 years ago. I mean, didn't matter how rich you were, you simply didn't have access to it. So, I think we're underestimating human ambition, human desire. People are going to be mad that they don't have a vacation home in Mars in 20 years. Really mad, viscerally mad. They'll be seeing it on Insta and be like, "Come on, babe. We got to work harder and make this happen." Every CEO is going to want to build a much bigger company. So, I don't think already it feels like we're living a much larger form of human existence than we could have imagined 100 years ago, and there's no reason that trend won't continue or accelerate.
00:47:53 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:47:53] S0: This idea of ambition, I'm glad you brought that word up again, it's something that's coming up a lot on this podcast that not only is AI making it easy to be a lot more ambitious, it's almost making us have to be more ambitious, because everybody else can just do all the easy stuff now. And now what separates us is just how big can you go? Okay, I'm going to make a personal website. Okay, it's cool. It'll be this white, simple background. No, okay, I'm going to make it this 3D game where you have to walk through a world and discover all the things they do. Everything is just getting more epic. Thoughts on just this idea of ambition becoming a bigger, I don't know, skill and habit.
00:48:27 · Anish Acharya, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:48:27] S1: A lot of things get conflated, because when you and I say ambition on this pod I think people have a very specific idea of what that ambition is. Ambition to be a founder, ambitious to build a beautiful software product. Those are types of ambition, but there are other types of ambition. Let's talk about creative ambition. When you're five nobody says, "Lenny, you're good at painting but you're bad at drawing." You just have an ambition or a desire to make something and you make it. That's something that's very unique and can now actually be encouraged. Think of very local ambition. So, they have the NHS in the United Kingdom. I think it's a sort of treasured institution that's not working well. Maybe the way AI shows up in their society is making the NHS as good as the iPhone. That's very specific and local to them, or simply the ambition to be more connected to our family, to be more present parents. So, I think ambition doesn't have to be sort of ambition in the narrow economic sense, it can be really anything that we want to do more of, and who doesn't have that in their bones? [00:49:23] S0: Yeah, my example is so dumb now that I think about it. It feels like the thing we have to unblock in our brain is like, "Okay, AI, solve cancer." That's where we can start to think now, and it's so unnatural to us, especially as product people that always have to think about the MVP and the constraints. Now we have to think big. Okay, what's the 10X, the 1,000X version of this?