The a16z Show
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.
00:35:54 · Josh Elman, David Pawlan
[00:35:54] S0: Mhmm. [00:35:54] S1: And I'm starting to geek out a lot more in the actual infrastructure layer behind the scenes of, like, how is it actually working and what are the tweaks that different ones are making. So it'll it'll be interesting to see, like, know, how do we view this space growing from a scalability point of view. Yeah. But then how do we also view it to solve the pain points that currently exist, whether it's trust, whether it's actually being able to complete a task. Memory is another one. Yeah. It's ability to actually continuously have context on you and not forget the little things and all that. [00:36:23] S0: And, you know, you mentioned Kicker, which, you know, you said runs in your current local browser. But have you looked at other on device assistance yet? Whether that's things like Underdog or a lot that are trying to, like, bring models, run locally, you know, totally use your own infrastructure Yeah. As opposed to needing to use something on a cloud and running the browsers on clouds.
00:36:23 · Josh Elman, David Pawlan
[00:36:23] S0: And, you know, you mentioned Kicker, which, you know, you said runs in your current local browser. But have you looked at other on device assistance yet? Whether that's things like Underdog or a lot that are trying to, like, bring models, run locally, you know, totally use your own infrastructure Yeah. As opposed to needing to use something on a cloud and running the browsers on clouds. [00:36:41] S1: Totally. So it's it's a really cool paradigm. I've spent most of my time in the preconfigured, just plug and play type world because I tend to find that it's it's easier to compare them across the board when you're not responsible for the setup itself. But it is really interesting, and I think that there's totally a world where you're gonna start bringing all of that in house. Because if you can control the model, if you can can, you know, tailor it to how you want, right, like Thinking Machines is doing some really cool work of being able to allow people to really tinker their models however they want. And if we can eventually hit a world where that takes into the consumer form in a really easy way, it's gonna be an interesting space.
00:36:41 · David Pawlan, Josh Elman
[00:36:41] S1: Totally. So it's it's a really cool paradigm. I've spent most of my time in the preconfigured, just plug and play type world because I tend to find that it's it's easier to compare them across the board when you're not responsible for the setup itself. But it is really interesting, and I think that there's totally a world where you're gonna start bringing all of that in house. Because if you can control the model, if you can can, you know, tailor it to how you want, right, like Thinking Machines is doing some really cool work of being able to allow people to really tinker their models however they want. And if we can eventually hit a world where that takes into the consumer form in a really easy way, it's gonna be an interesting space. [00:37:16] S0: I mean, that was kinda how this all started with, you know, this brilliance of OpenClaw that was this thing where you had to... You felt like you had to get your whole Mac mini Right. To set this all up, plug in to one of the models that you were using, whether local or or a cloud model on the server, and that was where you got started. And we've moved into, like, plug and play products where you just download an app. [00:37:34] S1: Right. [00:37:35] S0: But I am interested to think if that, like, sheer power of you setting it up and owning it yourself will become a paradigm again. Yeah.