"The Cognitive Revolution"
00:35:31 · Samvit Ramadurgam
[00:35:31] S3: Yeah. Yeah. I think I think that that ties to, like, one of the questions on AI alignment. So AI alignment, I think, has, like, two parts. There was, like, have an AI execute on the genuine intentions of the person who asked to do something in a in a skillful way. To avoid the paperclip stuff and all that. I think that's one one part of it. The other part of it, which I think people talk less about, is obviously, like, who are you aligning the AI to? Like, what what is it being aligned to? Especially when people have disagree over what... How the world should be. And so in that world, I think you need a system that can actually get a measure in some sense of, like, what collective well-being means. And I think the way you get a measure of collective well-being is by having a system that's, like, deeply tied into the lives of many people. It's helping them, like, with their work, helping them do, like, the important stuff that they have to do. So I think that you can't... You cannot optimize something you can't measure. And so in a world where you have, like, agents that are coordinating the world, you have no idea, like, what direction that's headed in, like, what the... Know, you this kinda be like... If you imagine, like, a hand of the market is guiding the market, like, what is the direction? The hand is guiding it. If we don't know and we have no way to measure it, then I think we're in trouble. But I think to get to that as as a certain point, you have to have a really refined understanding. Like, what am I measuring? What am I optimizing for? And I think what we've we've learned mistakes from the social network world, which is that any measurement you can make, which is an objective measurement, is wrong if you're trying to optimize for certain click through rate or engagement rate or metric. Any metric you can measure is wrong because human happiness is, I think, fundamentally immeasurable. But there is a thing you can do, which is you can continually converge towards a bet... A better way of, like, measuring. The the the the the kind of, like, the way to optimize a system is not to have a static metric optimized for, to have it be continually trying to discover, like, an optimal point. Have it, like, converge towards an asymptote of, like, this kind of perfect behavior.
00:37:26 · Samvit Ramadurgam, Prakash Narayanan
Even even in the world of of behavior, I think that there's two components to good behavior. Having good intention and then just making sure you had a good outcome. Having... You can have... You can do something that's well intended and have that cause harm, and it was still, a bad action. And so being able to measure the outcome of your action at a systemic level is totally missing from the kind of zeitgeist of alignment. I think that we would hope to be in a place to contribute to that. [00:37:51] S6: What's your token usage like? [00:37:53] S3: It is very high. I think that we... So we have we have, like, an internal target we're setting for our team. This is obviously not what we're... What... Like, the way to optimize for productivity. As, like as, like, a correlate, we we want our team usage on the on the coding agent side. Each person be doing, like, a little... At this... At the current we have our infrastructure set up, like, between one and two billion tokens per day. [00:38:15] S6: One and two billion tokens per day.
00:38:15 · Prakash Narayanan, Samvit Ramadurgam
[00:38:15] S6: One and two billion tokens per day. [00:38:17] S3: Yeah. Product... Productively deployed. And so in terms of how we're building the company, this is like an agent native company. And so we have not only, like, coding agents, we have, like, coding agents that talk to each other. We have, like, an internal organization we've set up of, like, agents. So I have, like, a a chief marketing officer who reports to me, who's got, like, a bunch of different sub employees reporting to that AI. All of them are, like, long running agents that, like, talk to each other and talk to our coding agent sessions and listen to our team video calls. They're, like, are in the meetings with us and chime in and chat to build things for us while we're... Like, I had a meeting this morning where there's some issue with one of our dashboards. We just said, hey, agent. Like, fix it during the meeting. They got updated while we were talking. I think the gap between work and meetings is converging. It used to be that, like, hey. I wanna get out this meeting so I can get back to work and do real work. It's actually changing. There there is still an element of that for sure, but it's changing. It's changing because when we're in a meeting, if you have, like, a rigorous discussion, that's all creating, like, really rich context from different perspectives for an agent that then goes and, like... Then you can just have a have a debate and say, okay. Go do our conclusion with all the aspects that were mapped out there...
00:39:23 · Prakash Narayanan
[00:39:23] S6: In there. What do you feel... You know, you you had Forged Global, which you built in the kind of pre pre agentic era. What what what do you feel is like the big difference between that era and this era in terms of running a company?
00:39:36 · Samvit Ramadurgam
[00:39:36] S3: Here... Here's the metric we have. We're a small team. We're like five people, soon to be 10 people right now. And so the heuristic I have for hiring someone is, are they going to prompt me to do something different than we would have done before? We don't really... You don't really need people to do, like, work anymore for the kinds of work we're doing. You need people to have, like, visionary insight that adds to the DNA of the company, that really lets you do things that... Really, like, makes you do things that you wouldn't have thought to do otherwise, that no age... You can't prompt an agent to do it for you. So I think that we're not... We wanna build this company a way that's, like, building the machine that builds the machine and eventually have more and more agents to spin it up. So I I I think that, you know, there's there's a type of company you could start now that does with a dozen people, like previously took a thousand people. And so we... We'd like to be one of those companies and have more that go towards tokens just because let's just be really lean and move it, be really agile, and have, like, a concentration of of talent and vision. And it raises the bar too. Another thing that changes is that when you hire people now, the incremental value of interdisciplinary skills increases exponentially. So if someone is an engineer, that's valuable. Someone's an engineer and a product person and a designer, that's much more valuable than before. Because before, that person didn't have the ability to actually make use of the integration of these different skills. In the modern world, the more skills you can integrate into one system, the more you, like, coordinate all... If you cut out a lot of interhuman coordination by having it being done in your head, you can articulate a clear vision. To our agent systems, we have so much leverage that the the bottleneck is not execution manpower. The bottleneck is, like, clear articulation of good ideas. That's like the real bottleneck.
00:41:19 · Nathan Labenz
[00:41:19] S0: Great stuff. It's one of the biggest issues we've heard, so looking forward to following your progress. You gotta love the old act one is coordinating the global economy level of vision. That's really something else. Hey. We'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. The Cognitive Revolution is brought to you and powered by Tasklet. I've been running Tasklet agents for almost a year, and they've become a major part of how the show gets made. Before every recording, one agent researches the guest and sends me a suggested outline of questions, complete with links to all sources. Meanwhile, another agent scores the overwhelming number of pitches that I'm getting from PR firms. And that's really the core idea behind Tasklet. Run your business on agents by giving them real jobs to do on an ongoing basis. Setup is incredibly easy. Just describe the work in plain English, research a new sales lead, update the CRM, and draft a personalized reply. Tasklet connects to your business tools and can run around the clock on a schedule or when something happens, like a new email arrives. Each agent works with your tools and business context and remembers useful information across threads. You can also share agents, connections, and reusable skills with your team so the workflows that one person figures out become something the whole company can use. No developer needed. You decide what agents can do on their own and what needs your approval, and there are no per seat fees. You pay for usage, not for adding teammates. Start with one recurring job, like researching the people you're meeting, and then just keep building from there. Visit tasklet.ai and use code cogrev for $50 in free credits. That's code cogrev at tasklet dot a I. After Samvit left, with Microsoft offering buyouts to some 60,000 employees that week, Prakash argued the economy has to grow fast enough to absorb the white collar workers that agents displace. My reply? I mean, I can see the growth. I have a hard time seeing, you know, the, the job growth picking up enough to offset. I mean, you know, just look at what... He just said he had five people. Right? But wasn't that a number? Soon to be 10. He said, you know, we we could have a dozen person company that could do the work of a thousand. He said, you don't really need people to do work anymore.