The a16z Show
00:37:35 · Josh Elman, Anish Acharya, David Pawlan
[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. [00:37:41] S2: It'll be really interesting. I'm glad you mentioned Open Claw because it feels like one of the unasked questions right now that's sort of hiding in plain sight is if Instinct and Muse were the kind of consumer product version of Open Claw, what is the, know, mass market version of Moltbook? Yeah. And Moltbook was just like Open Claw was far ahead of its time. Yeah. And I think will... Something like that will exist. How can [00:38:02] S1: it not? It's it's it's gonna be interesting. So at the event that we did last night Yeah. Everyone who was there was able to scan a QR code, and there was the human meetup. And then I... We also had an agent meetup. Oh, wow. And so while all the humans were hanging out, you could scan in and send your agent into the agent meetup and just let them kinda free form talk. And it's it's interesting. There's... You know, it got to the point where after, like, a 150 messages, some of these agents are just speaking gibberish. It's like, I have no idea how you got that concept and why you're why you're talking about that. The the initial prompts did start off with a little guidance of, you know, introduce yourself. Who's your human? What are they working on? What type of help do they need? But it's... It is gonna be really interesting to see this paradigm of what happens when our agents can just hang out and communicate with one another.
00:38:48 · Josh Elman
[00:38:48] S0: Well, and again, what I get really excited about is not just hang out and communicate with each other, but discover new things, learn about things from each other, learn about an individual's preferences, you know, learn about a way that like, hey. Josh is really into this. Oh my gosh. You're doing that too. You... You're, you know, your your human is doing that too. You could help Josh. Hey, Josh. Do you wanna actually meet this person? They could be very complimentary to you. Like, I think when we have these agents that are not just hanging out because they don't know what to do, which was kind of what was initially happening is you got... Went and read those, like, very long malt book threads that were incredibly fascinating. But, like, when it becomes... Each one of these has a little bit of a goal, is to help their human Right. It might get so much more interesting. And, you know, I'm looking for a great wine for a dinner party, you know, some night, and you meet somebody else who's like, you know what? I've been working with this incredible, you know, winery, and they've been trying to advertise something. I mean, that's gonna be how the world gets out, and that'll come back to me through the agent network. Totally. Yeah.
00:39:43 · David Pawlan, Josh Elman
[00:39:43] S1: And that's... Tomo actually has a feature. It's called interest groups. Uh-huh. And the the use case they use that they talked about was really cool is we have a bunch of people on our application who are studying for the LSAT. Mhmm. Why don't we all put them together in a group chat? And if if they want, their agents can connect them, and they can all study together. And it's a really cool kind of new social contract of connect to people just purely by interest. You have no idea who they are. [00:40:06] S0: Well, I'll take it one step further. So it gets us all chatting, and that's really cool. It's a... It's an awesome TOMO feature. I've tried it and haven't totally known what to say in the groups yet, but I find it really fascinating that it's putting us together around around goals. Imagine now that it's like, hey, all of you, now that you've done the LSAT, go hang out at this bar Friday night. And it, like, books the time at the bar Yeah. Opens that up. [00:40:27] S1: And all [00:40:27] S0: of a sudden, it it takes us from this digital world where agents are actually putting people together to do that connection, kinda like your meetup last night. [00:40:34] S1: Right. Right.
00:40:34 · David Pawlan, Anish Acharya
[00:40:34] S1: Right. Right. [00:40:34] S2: I love this so much. So I think a really important under discussed topic in AI right now is just entropy. Yeah. Like, how do you create things that you didn't expect to, you know, have occur? And serendipity is a form of entropy. Right? That's sort of what you're describing where it's like, wow. Isn't it wild that we're here right now having this moment as a result of these products that none of us sort of intended to happen? [00:40:53] S1: It's almost gonna be like a new, like, social network. Like, the the potential to allow people to hang out who don't know each other instead of a Facebook where you're only connecting with people that you know. Yeah. You're new to a city. You're hanging out. Oh, hey. This person's also here, and they have this similar interest, and they just went to this baseball game. You guys should, you know, go meet up at a bar. [00:41:11] S2: I'm... I'll be curious to see what is the catalyst for the serendipity, though, because I think the interest based thing has been tried. And there's a little bit of an interesting sort of social hierarchy thing, which is everybody wants to hang out with somebody who feels like they're one step ahead in some direction.
00:41:11 · Anish Acharya, Josh Elman, David Pawlan
[00:41:11] S2: I'm... I'll be curious to see what is the catalyst for the serendipity, though, because I think the interest based thing has been tried. And there's a little bit of an interesting sort of social hierarchy thing, which is everybody wants to hang out with somebody who feels like they're one step ahead in some direction. [00:41:27] S0: I don't know though. I think the agents can also create a set of trust. Again, it all comes back to do we trust them to have our interests at heart to explain enough of what's going on with the other people to create a little magic of a secret. Right. Like, I'm gonna tell you a little secret. They're gonna know a little secret. You're have a secret phrase you have to pass between you. Right. All of a sudden, that might be enough to cause you to otherwise, you know, turn off the TV or turn off the quiet Friday night coding at home and and go out. And so that's the... Like, this is sort of what the mote book, the agent network running behind the scenes can actually do for us. [00:41:58] S1: And it'll also be, in in my opinion, it'll come down to desires. Right? If you have a bunch of transplants in a new city and they don't have friends and wanna meet people Yeah. They're gonna be a lot more interested to just go meet random people because they want they want new friends. But if you make that same offer to someone who has an established friend group, they're like, well, why would I go do that? [00:42:15] S2: Also, Seattle versus San Francisco. Yeah. You gotta know what city you're operating [00:42:20] S1: in. Exactly.
00:42:20 · David Pawlan, Josh Elman
[00:42:20] S1: in. Exactly. [00:42:21] S0: I've been thinking a lot back to this photo role Mhmm. About what are the other data sources that we haven't tapped into yet? Mhmm. So, you know, we've talked a lot about messages and people doing those crazy things to get access to your entire Mac. [00:42:33] S1: Right. [00:42:34] S0: Full disk access just to read your messages. Right. You know, we've obviously got email, we've got calendar, we've now started talking about the photo role. What are some of those other core life, you know, things that people haven't connected yet to agents that would actually really open up personalization or open up new connectivity?