The a16z Show
00:28:36 · Josh Elman, David Pawlan
[00:28:36] S0: Right. I'm curious what you're seeing on on that. [00:28:40] S1: Yeah. So, I mean, I think you have... I I kinda see it split up into two categories. You have the commodities, where I think there's going to be a lot of the point where people actually don't care about preference. Right? You're just ordering paper towels to your home, and you're like, I don't really care. Just get me the cheapest, best, highest quality one. Go for it. But then you do have the ones where you wanna actually have some preference, and you have it... Everyone right now really is approaching this world as just like a general assistant, and people are really taking a quite similar approach into how they're how they're thinking about this space. We're seeing some cool stuff with multiplayer. I think Wabi is gonna be really interesting. Yeah. Because it does create a lot more... You know, it creates a a a different world where you can now be interacting with other humans and have crossover in preference and see how it behaves, that it becomes a little bit more like entertainment. Scout is an interesting shopping one, which adds a unique kind of, like, swipe type flavor to learn your preferences and adds a little bit more entertainment there. Mhmm. [00:29:35] S0: So I [00:29:35] S1: think we'll be... We're we're still so early in the space that I think people are jumping on the bandwagon of what's popular at the moment, which is just your general productivity. Mhmm. I think as time goes on, we'll start to see a little bit more experimentation in some other avenues. Well, and
00:29:49 · Josh Elman
[00:29:49] S0: I think you mentioned Wabi. One of the things I really like about Wabi, and it just, I think, launched, you know, just this week or yesterday, is it's not even just experimenting with, you know, an agent, but it's just experimenting with, like, how to interact with multiple threads of your life. Like, Wabi goes through my email and other things and actually gives me, you know, a whole bunch of different threads of life. And actually, when things come up on email on those things, it actually feeds them into the different threads. I have one thread with Wabi, that I built a little watch list of all the shows that I wanna watch and books I wanna read and shows I wanna go see. And it keeps track of all that. Then I can like, oh, I heard about this new book from John Grisham. Like, add that to my list. Right. And hey. I've just finished the first Dungeon Crawler, Carl. Can you give me the next one? And like, you know, what do people say about it? And it's become this really interactive thing on, like, the media that I wanna consume, but it gives me all these different threads and even gives you UIs Mhmm. That actually are like these widgets to, like, envision everything. So I think, again, it's showing us, like, a very different experience than just a general agent that is more like a search box and is more like task, task, task. Right.
00:30:51 · Anish Acharya, Josh Elman
[00:30:51] S2: I think one of the interesting things that Wabi does is and perhaps gets right is that when you create the message channel with your friends and the agent and everybody's on an equal playing field on d zero, it actually creates a new kind of blank piece of paper where you can establish a social contract together. Whereas when you have iMessage group threads and you add the agent, there's some... Certainly, if it's an existing thread, then it's very uncomfortable because it's like, well, what can the agent see? What did they extract? But even for a new thread, there's a set of implicit expectations about how you interact with people on iMessage, and I don't know that we're quite comfortable with agents in that space yet. [00:31:24] S0: I mean, I always think then, do I end up with two threads with the same group of people and I have to pick which one to use? Right. Like, I'm finding that much harder versus, you know, an email chain, is you very much specific about, like, a task. And it can even go on for a long time, but that feels much more specific to, hey. We're talking about this topic. Everything's contained back to privacy and trust around this topic. We're getting great help from the agent, you know, in the case of, like, a Wobby thread around this topic, but it's not bleeding into everything else we might also discuss. [00:31:52] S2: Totally. I wanna quickly hear from both of you on what are some of the more, I don't know, far flung or, you you know, sort of insightful approaches that you've seen? You know, one of the
00:32:03 · Josh Elman
[00:32:03] S0: things I've started seeing is more of these agents that are kind of like fun and gossipy, and will actually get you to invite your friends, and will ask you a bunch of questions and be really, really curious about you and what's going on in your life. Then we'll share some of that with your friends. Mhmm. And then they'll share some things back with your friends. And I was talking to the founders, and they actually can read some of the transcripts between the agents that they're talking about. And they haven't figured out how to productize that, but they said it's an incredibly exciting and very intriguing to see how these agents kind of relate to each other in this sort of gossipy background. And so far, I found them just to be, like, probably some of the most joyful moments I've had with agents. Again, I I mentioned at beginning how my friend had, like, lost his power over the weekend. But when we were first both onboarding onto this agent, it was like, how'd you guys meet? And we told slightly different stories, and the agents were kind of, like, poking us both to, like, rationalize the two stories of how we met. And we met at a friend's house, and they were like, which one of you knew them better? And it was like this really kind of fun curiosity game that made it just like, woah. I'm like having a good experience, and my friend and were texting on the side too. And it was just a thing that if we hadn't had an agent doing it, we wouldn't have had that same moment.
00:33:08 · Anish Acharya, David Pawlan, Josh Elman
[00:33:08] S2: Right. What I love about that is it provides a degree of social indirection that actually makes you closer, you know, because you're a friend, they're like, I don't know how to text Josh until my power's out. It's oversharing, you know. And I think we also have been very trained to be cautious about sharing now with existing social products. So something that can create almost a social lubricant Yeah. In a very sort of low key way is is really cool. [00:33:30] S1: No. It's great. It definitely was bringing us together. Yeah. It's it's almost like the early days of ChatGPT where I remember, like, my friends and we go on and we would just be generating images or doing stuff, and it's, you know, incredibly AI slop images, the the earliest version of them. But you still send it in a group chat, and it's just it's just laughter. It's just pure laughter of of the ability to create a whole new world, and it's just fun. [00:33:51] S0: I mean, I Givelified everybody I could possibly I [00:33:54] S2: was doing a lot of VHS video covers Oh, yeah. [00:33:58] S1: For my friend groups. I love that. [00:34:00] S2: What are some of the wild things that you've seen? I mean, you've seen them all.
00:34:02 · David Pawlan
[00:34:02] S1: So I've been seeing a lot of stuff working at the infrastructure layer. Okay. And I think the interesting point is... So if you look at the pain points of consumers, again, it's not all individuals using them, but at least of the power users I've I've surveyed, Trust, obviously, is a huge one. Mhmm. But another one is just getting blocked in in their day to day, and people get really frustrated when you try to perform a task and it doesn't work, and they're like, well, why am I even using AI at this point? I could have just gone on the browser and done it myself. So seeing some really cool innovation on that layer of commerce of of the browser use of direct integrations to check out against inventory itself. Some, whether it's browsers that are built in and and really... Like, Heart does a really cool way of displaying the browser and seeing it move along, and it it looks to be really fast when you're watching it. Who knows if it's actually that fast behind the scenes? But really cool in that way. Again, Kicker, as I mentioned, Chrome extension to tackle the browser use in that way. Mhmm. So I've seen that as as a really interesting kind of differentiator. I think that something that has stood out to me that isn't necessarily something that's different but has made me kind of question this whole concept that software is becoming a commodity is that there is pretty stark performance difference when you're looking at these products at scale. Mhmm. And I think people are talking about, you know, software is no longer a moat and all of that kind of conversation, but there there really still is some moat there. Maybe that moat will be able to be crossed in a year or so, but at least for today, the the agents that are able to perform with hundreds of thousands of users Yeah. There are some that are starting to scale up, and the performance just degrades immediately. And the founders are dealing with outages and figuring out how to scale, and and there's a pretty clear difference in performance there. And so it's it's really interesting to see as I'm kinda working through these. I feel like I've almost become, you know, blinded from some of the more social components to it because I'm just talking to these agents all day.