The a16z Show
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?
00:42:34 · Josh Elman, David Pawlan
[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? [00:42:52] S1: It's... So it's something that comes to mind. I don't I don't know how much data this would actually provide. Maybe it's more of a habitual thing, and and again, it's it's dependent on the hardware and how smart that hardware is and how much data it's able to store. WeiJoe just released the MCP, the ability to connect to hardware. And I find that, you know, I think it's gonna be really interesting where, okay, if you can connect your assistant to your AC unit or you can connect it to your vacuum, and now your assistant has context on how frequently is your vacuum cleaning or how frequent... You know, what... What's the typical temperature you sleep at night? It's gonna start to develop these, you know, very passive understandings of, oh, you're you're kind of a neat freak or you really prefer cold weather over warm weather. And that's gonna then influence its understanding of your context of shopping. So I think there could be some interesting stuff there. Again, it's heavily dependent on on the hardware itself, and I think we're still at the earliest of innings in in that world.
00:42:52 · David Pawlan, Josh Elman
[00:42:52] S1: It's... So it's something that comes to mind. I don't I don't know how much data this would actually provide. Maybe it's more of a habitual thing, and and again, it's it's dependent on the hardware and how smart that hardware is and how much data it's able to store. WeiJoe just released the MCP, the ability to connect to hardware. And I find that, you know, I think it's gonna be really interesting where, okay, if you can connect your assistant to your AC unit or you can connect it to your vacuum, and now your assistant has context on how frequently is your vacuum cleaning or how frequent... You know, what... What's the typical temperature you sleep at night? It's gonna start to develop these, you know, very passive understandings of, oh, you're you're kind of a neat freak or you really prefer cold weather over warm weather. And that's gonna then influence its understanding of your context of shopping. So I think there could be some interesting stuff there. Again, it's heavily dependent on on the hardware itself, and I think we're still at the earliest of innings in in that world. [00:43:40] S0: So connecting to your home is super interesting. You know, I still think a lot about connecting. And, again, Amazon may be blocking this, but I think connecting to my Amazon history Right. Is something that I haven't heard anybody talk about. But, like, you know, we all have those days where you'd like... You can scroll all the way up and see, like, your very first order ever [00:43:57] S1: Mhmm.
00:43:57 · David Pawlan, Josh Elman, Anish Acharya
[00:43:57] S1: Mhmm. [00:43:57] S0: On Amazon. I actually do this on like the Apple App Store too, where you go back and you see like every app I've ever downloaded. And I think like histories like that, they're very part of my life. But until an agent has access to those, it just doesn't understand all of that. And so I think there's so much more kind of shopping history that if we could package up and give to our agents Right. Could do even richer things for us. Yeah. [00:44:20] S2: Look, think bringing agents to social events is really interesting. You talked about the home, like, have it be there for a family dinner one day. Right. Have it be there when we watch the, you know, Seahawks game on Sunday. Have it be there for a party or a bachelor party or who knows what. So I think, of course, there's all kinds of questions about permission and the Schrodinger's cat thing, which is, you know, does the active observation change the quality of the interactions? Mhmm. [00:44:45] S1: But [00:44:45] S2: I bet even a snapshot of you being yourself in that environment would provide so much more signal than, you know, a lifetime of hardware and Totally. I think. [00:44:54] S1: Yeah. [00:44:55] S0: No. I think it's right. You know, so much of it is [00:44:56] S2: on the written word, and