Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:38:40 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:38:40] S1: As you say that, I have my Mac mini with my formerly live OpenClaw on there and that was an era and it's so awesome the work that it has inspired. I know it continues. I know there's still a lot of value to OpenClaw, but when I saw Claire Vo, who's been the biggest proponent of Open Claw and it's become a core part of the way she lives and works with her kids and does all her work, she just switched all over OpenClaws. She shut them all down and switched to Grok Bot. It sounds funny, but that's actually a huge milestone of just how much things have shifted. What's the vision for Grok Bot? Where does this go? What does this look like in the future? What's the ideal platonic version of Grok Bot?
00:39:31 · Roman Ugarte
[00:39:31] S0: The ultimate vision of Grok Bot is incredibly simple, which is you should have a team of AI bots that help you with your job and help you with your life. And it should really feel like a team. It should really feel like teammates that are autonomous are helping you. You can steer them in various ways. You don't have to micromanage them. They have access to the tools necessary to do great ambitious work. And one thing we really use as a north star on the product side in building this is as we kind of get closer to this teammate future, how can we, in every product decision we make, think about this less from the perspective of a SaaS product and more from the perspective of we're trying to build useful AI teammates. And so there have been a bunch of examples where we kind of have to push ourselves to be more like colleague pilled in a way. We sometimes use that term where we're having a product debate about something, there are good arguments on one side, there are good arguments on another side, both paths feel sensible. In product land, this maybe doesn't feel like there's a clear cut answer. And then you zoom out a little bit and you remove yourself from the tech company-ness of it all and you start thinking, how would a human do this? What would you want from your teammate in this exact situation? And oftentimes the answer is really clarifying and pretty unanimous. There's oftentimes not a lot of disagreement among the room of how a human teammate you would prefer to work with in a certain way. And then once that answer is there, well then we just need to build it and there are product implications, there are model implications, there's a lot of things that need to go right to actually deliver on that experience. But in some ways it's not a rocket science, doesn't require you being a genius. You just need to ask the question of what would you want from a human teammate and can we push AI to behave in a similar way? And so to give some examples of that, we've been thinking about what the right voice experience with these bots should be. And I think in the context of a human, for example, we have a really good analog of a lot of times I'm slacking back and forth with a teammate, we're sharing context, and a lot of times it's just much simpler to get on a five-minute huddle with them and just press huddle, talk back and forth.
00:41:51 · Roman Ugarte, Lenny Rachitsky
I share my screen, I show exactly what's on my mind, they share their screen, we hop off, and then we continue async from there. And that's not really an experience that any AI product has gotten right right now, and it is deeply integral to the way that I think humans collaborate. And so we want to build something like that. And there are a bunch of other examples of these very clear patterns that just work that I think you should also feel when working with AI. [00:42:19] S1: I love this term colleague build, and it's come up so many times over the course of this chat already how that is kind of a through line to making these decisions. For example, the computer example you gave is so good. Obviously people would have their own computer. The naming piece is also very important part of that. A big question on my mind in this space, and I'm so curious to get your take, is the separation between work and personal. Do you think people will have two different assistants, a work and a personal, or do you think it'll be one?
00:42:49 · Roman Ugarte
[00:42:49] S0: When people think about a work product versus a consumer product, I think there's just a lot of baggage that comes from the last decade or two of horrible B2B software that leads to people seeing a product that is very simple. In some ways ChatGPT was like this. I think Grok Bot has many of these properties. And assuming that it's not a work product or assuming that it's not a power tool. And when you think of a power tool in this kind of last generation, I, in my head, picture something a bit like Photoshop, for example, where there are all of these different dials to turn very precisely. The user of the tool is this kind of ultimate cockpit flyer who knows exactly what all the knobs do and can use them perfectly. And I think power tools of the future will actually be very different from that, where it is mostly just intent being expressed and good steering on the part of the human and these AI tools abstract away all of the knobs. You should never see them unless you need to directly manipulate it, which might happen and there should be a great affordance for that. But ultimately, it really is just working with a teammate. And so the interface for that is quite conversational. And so in a lot of ways, Grok Bot, when you look at it, when I walk by someone's desk and I see Grok Bot up on their computer, for me for a split second, I'm like, "Oh, are they on a messaging app?" And it's like, no, this is actually the primary tool that they're using to do much of their work. And so I think to your question of are you going to have a different set of bots for your personal life and a different set of bots for your work life. I do think there will be a separation for many people. They want a separation between personal and work life, and I think that's great. I think that's important. And I think there are a lot of common sense reasons why those things should be separate, even from the perspective of an enterprise. But I think our goal and the thing we're trying to build towards is Grok Bot should be the way that a large portion of the things you do day-to-day in your work, you should be able to delegate a lot of that to Grok Bot and focus on the higher leverage things. And then it should similarly be the way that you delegate a lot of the low leverage parts of your personal life. And those two things actually are not different problem sets.
00:45:14 · Roman Ugarte, Lenny Rachitsky
In a lot of ways, the product form factor and the ways of solving those problems is pretty much the same. And so my instinct is that I think one product will be the best form factor for both of those things, and that's really what we want to build. [00:45:30] S1: Bam, that's a big TAM right there. I love to hear. It makes so much sense. Obviously the question is how do you avoid cross-contamination, personal stuff somehow infiltrating, ex-filtrating stuff from work, but it feels like that's kind of okay. So what I'm hearing is that's the direction. The question is just how to do that and make people feel super safe, have the SOC 2 stuff in place and also just feel really fun.
00:47:33 · Roman Ugarte
[00:47:33] S0: Yeah, I think to go back to the teammate frame of the product, to extend the analogy even further, if we were on a team together, you and me, I think the number of times that you would have to manually take over my computer and start clicking on things and you're doing this wrong, you should go here instead and type in manually, hopefully it's pretty close to zero. Hopefully that is not something you have to really do with a colleague or a teammate. And so similarly, I think right now we're in a place where computer use is good, it's getting much better, and in very short order, I think the computer concept will be completely abstracted away from the user. You should never be clicking into a remote virtual machine. You should never have to take control if there's a wasteful path and you have to steer it into the correct path. So in the medium term, I think the computer concept will be an important concept for users to have, but will not actually be something that they're interacting with. So I think the right way of thinking about Grok Bot is it's a team of bots, it's a team of agents that do work for you. And in terms of what they have access to, they have access to a very long memory set of your past interactions with them. And so I think there's a current paradigm if you create a new chat for each discrete unit of work, I think there are a lot of problems with that. I find myself copying and pasting between chats all the time. I think it's just not a great way of grouping categories of work. Instead, the same way on a team, you have a good way of grouping categories of work of roles. You should have roles of different swim lanes of work that you do, and it should learn from you and it should get smarter over time. So I think that's one very critical thing is these are long-lived agents. These are not individual one-off sessions, and these agents get smarter over time. And then the second thing is those agents have access to all of the tools that you would expect a human colleague to have, which is the APIs, the MCPs, that's great, but then access to its own computer, which it can freely manipulate the way that you would.