The a16z Show
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.
00:07:44 · Josh Elman, Anish Acharya, David Pawlan
[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. [00:07:53] S2: It's interesting though because I think we have this traditional mental model of what it means to have a sandbox Yeah. Which is you have a hard set of constraints and rules that must be followed or not followed. And somebody was describing this framing of instead of giving models rules, we should give them laws and principles. Yeah. And I think a similar thing may apply here, which is like, look, here's how to dial in your presumptuousness, and it's very qualitative. [00:08:16] S1: And the [00:08:16] S2: model will have to make a judgment call based on your qualitative sort of advice to it just as an employee would have to.
00:08:16 · Anish Acharya, Josh Elman, David Pawlan
[00:08:16] S2: model will have to make a judgment call based on your qualitative sort of advice to it just as an employee would have to. [00:08:22] S0: Yeah. I mean, I think that's part of why the analogy is, you know, a fence for children. Because in some ways, these agents, they're incredibly capable. Yeah. But at the same time, they're kind of children sometimes, and how they may behave and not know all the nuances of like, hey, is this a good idea or not? And they don't always have that logic. And the most important thing, I think, we keep talking about agents being autonomous. Book me the trip. Yeah. Make me the reservation. And I think as humans, we actually don't wanna give away that sense of control. I think we actually want it to check-in with us, but do all the groundwork. Save me all the time in coming up with the best options and the right trade offs. And now let me make the final decision, and also let me make sure I've qualified the final decision, the cost Mhmm. Anything else before my agent acts, is I think a place... And maybe over time, we'll even learn to trust it. [00:09:09] S1: Right. [00:09:10] S0: But I think right now, we don't need to to still have a really, really effective agent.
00:09:10 · Josh Elman, David Pawlan, Anish Acharya
[00:09:10] S0: But I think right now, we don't need to to still have a really, really effective agent. [00:09:14] S1: Right. I mean, it's it's... We're at, like, the nineteen nineties of ecommerce where I think the, like, last stat I read was in 1997 or so. Was 60 to 90% of individuals on the Internet thought that putting your credit card online was a preposterous idea. Mhmm. And here we are today. It's just everyone's tossing their credit card wherever you want. Yeah. And I think we'll we'll eventually hit that in this era as well, but it's gonna take a little bit of time. [00:09:37] S2: I think there's, like, a stated versus revealed preferences thing here. Because I think in revealed preferences, consumers will share any amount of data for even the most trivial amount of upside. [00:09:45] S1: Right. [00:09:46] S2: You know, like, people have been connecting their cards, their credit cards, and the bank accounts via Plaid since the Venmo era. So I don't know that people... But when you ask them, they're like, oh, yes. I'm very concerned about trust and safety. I think an example though of where consumers are very concerned about sort of trust and assumptions is around being embarrassed [00:10:04] S0: Mhmm. [00:10:04] S2: Yes. And social signaling. And, actually, the most interesting thing about the Shane Mac story, the most horrifying visceral thing is that it embarrassed him. [00:10:11] S0: That's right.
00:10:11 · Josh Elman, Anish Acharya, David Pawlan
[00:10:11] S0: That's right. [00:10:11] S2: It really embarrassed him. And that's why I think some of the kind of agent to agent network thing... Because you can imagine somebody you're just getting to know. Maybe you're going on a second or third date, and your agents are talking. You're like, woah. What are they saying about me? How are they kinda positioning what I... See what I mean? Like, there's just... The social mechanics actually feel so much higher stakes than the actual, like, real world implications. [00:10:31] S1: And it's it's a good point, and there is a recent proof point of it, and Hark had a huge marketing campaign. They offered a million dollars to anyone that wanted to use their product to get free pizza. Right? Each person get $30 a pizza. In order to get that $30 a pizza, you were granting access to your entire Google Workspace, all of your emails, right, all of your data for $30. [00:10:52] S2: Mhmm. [00:10:53] S1: And it just proves it, you know, right there that people are willing to just give up all that data for some free pizza.
00:10:53 · David Pawlan, Josh Elman
[00:10:53] S1: And it just proves it, you know, right there that people are willing to just give up all that data for some free pizza. [00:10:59] S0: Yeah. I mean, I I tend to think though there's always this trade off of of privacy versus utility. Mhmm. Which is if you can give me better utility, then I'm willing to make some privacy trade offs. But at the point at which we're basically equal on utility, people will always choose a more private option. I mean, it is a world that Apple's lived in very much. Privacy is obviously a forefront of Apple's devices, of the work they do to make these devices and the software secure. Even on AI, they've talked about private cloud compute. We used to talk about that a lot. It's like the center of why your data doesn't actually go anywhere or get shared with anything. But I think we've also seen that people want the most powerful AI and they won't always choose that. Right. So we have to find that intersection of trust. I think this embarrassment point is really, really important too. Because I think you want your agent to understand you and have all your personal preferences. And that, like, let's just say you're, like, lactose intolerant, and then you get this order of free pizza. Yeah. And you're, like, you're doing it with a friend, and, like, what do you do there? [00:11:51] S1: Do you