The a16z Show
00:02:58 · David Pawlan, Josh Elman, Anish Acharya
[00:02:58] S1: No. Everyone is incredibly open minded, just very interested to be getting feedback. I think because we're we're so at the frontier of this, nobody really knows what the landscape is really gonna shake out to be. Yeah. And so we're all just kinda playing in the sandbox together. [00:03:11] S0: Well, isn't it also that we have so much more time because we're just using our agents to do all these things? Right. We have more time to actually hang out together Right. And be in person. So maybe that's part of it too. [00:03:19] S1: That's right. That's right. [00:03:20] S2: It is actually fun. I mean, it reminds me a little bit of the early days of social gaming or social networks broadly. I mean, do you think that's right, Josh?
00:03:20 · Anish Acharya, Josh Elman
[00:03:20] S2: It is actually fun. I mean, it reminds me a little bit of the early days of social gaming or social networks broadly. I mean, do you think that's right, Josh? [00:03:28] S0: I mean, I think what's really cool is this is not a zero sum game. I mean, at at some point, it might be that there might be one or some agents that have the majority of the behavior. But right now, we're at such a beginning, like Cambrian phase of we're inventing so much. And we're trying to figure out so many things that everybody can learn from each other, can share these best practices, can figure out what things people are enjoying, what things are work once but don't actually work reliably. And these are gonna be built in so many directions. I mean, we're not just gonna all have one agent that does one thing in our lives, and I'll use it, and you guys will only all have to use the same agent. We're gonna have so many different products that do so many things for us that I'm excited for why we're all inventing it together. [00:04:10] S2: So I totally agree that we're gonna have a whole world of agents, as many different sort of types of humans as we might have or archetypes of humans. I think we'll have a similar number of agents. But maybe talk about what you think are the different axes for differentiation. Like, there's a sort of spectrum between really serious and productive to really playful and maybe even sort of adversarial. And I'm sure there are many other ways to think about these things.
00:04:10 · Anish Acharya, Josh Elman, David Pawlan
[00:04:10] S2: So I totally agree that we're gonna have a whole world of agents, as many different sort of types of humans as we might have or archetypes of humans. I think we'll have a similar number of agents. But maybe talk about what you think are the different axes for differentiation. Like, there's a sort of spectrum between really serious and productive to really playful and maybe even sort of adversarial. And I'm sure there are many other ways to think about these things. [00:04:32] S0: 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 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 we'll be like, hey, I need to get this thing done. It'll be your productivity agent. [00:05:03] S1: Mhmm.
00:05:03 · David Pawlan, Josh Elman, Anish Acharya
[00:05:03] S1: Mhmm. [00:05:03] S0: 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 kinda wanna 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 kinda playful and gossipy, and they're connected to a few of my friends too. And they'll share information back and forth. One just told me that my friend's power had been out all weekend because he'd been doing some renovation, and they'd cut the power. And I called him that evening, and I was like, dude, you didn't tell me your power's out. The agent told me. He was like, yeah, yeah, I I knew that's how you'd find out. I'm like, that's like creating these better connections, but that has nothing to do with booking a trip or saving money or getting anything done. [00:05:40] S1: Right. I think from over a 147 different assistants that have come across my plate so far Mhmm. 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 finance side of things. Yeah. 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 powered users, there's about 3,600 give or take messages so far. [00:06:14] S2: Mhmm.
00:06:14 · Anish Acharya, David Pawlan
[00:06:14] S2: Mhmm. [00:06:14] S1: And when looking at 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. And so it's really interesting to see because you have one camp that's this productivity 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 the space is moving. And I'm really curious to see how things are gonna play out on that trust layer. And if we can solve that trust layer, then what do we end up seeing on more of the finance side of stuff?
00:06:49 · Josh Elman, David Pawlan
[00:06:49] S0: And if you looked at what Shane Mack has been talking about recently about trust, he's been talking about this concept of something called picnic. Yep. And they had an analogy that I really liked, which is if you have a kid and you don't have any fences on your yards and you let them 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 and you actually don't really wanna do them without watching. 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 and be very, very safe. 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, some of our apps, some of our other things, and be able to actually do everything it can within that fence boundaries. He had a problem where I think a personal agent spanned over into work, and he actually, like, blasted his finances on his company Slack. Yep. And I think that's the whole point of like, okay, my personal agent should have access to my personal things and my personal communication channels, but not my work ones. [00:07:43] S1: Right. [00:07:44] S0: And not let those bleed. And so that idea of fences and permissions and more controlled permissions and better monitoring really how we're gonna have to build a lot more trust. Totally.