AI agents may become the internet’s most numerous participants

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 26:33

   sort of first this you know phase where people think about what are the old use cases how they is doing new technology and here, and then of course, people figure out net new cases that are native to that technology. And so where are we there? Yeah, I mean, so the classic example I like to use is the internet, right? Where in the 90s, you had sort of people taking existing behaviors, like you might order a Sears catalog or something, and instead Sears puts it on the internet. And of course, when they do that, you want to use the internet version, it's easier.

2. 26:57

   And a lot of the early internet was like that. And then you had, you know, in the 2000s, you had YouTube and they come along and they put up an empty website and they say, well, someday there's going to be these youtube influencers and that's going to populate the way so they were betting on they weren't just betting on the technology and taking something they knew would work they right they were betting on a on a cultural change a behavioral change um so in some ways they were taking more risk because they were betting on you know the technology and the and these yeah and these broader changes um but that's where you got the really kind of world-changing stuff isn't it social media you know all the other and then of course mobile accelerated it and i think that's my own views, that's a kind of pretty common pattern. It's just human nature, right? You

3. 27:35

   build something and the first thing you do is you do these things you already know in a better way. And I think that's what we've seen in AI so far where you have, you know, people already coded, people already did math, people already did knowledge work, people already were used to like search engines and sort of semi-chatting and they're doing those things now. But we've only begun to explore the space of like, what are the radical things that are new behaviors, new activities right things that people have never done before um it seems like we're probably at that tip i believe we're kind of at that tipping point where we're going to start to just sort of get see the crazier weirder stuff which i personally am very excited about and and find that i always find those waves in technology the most personally exciting they're they're kind of

4. 28:15

   more um and and there's sort of more layers of risk going back to frontier like you can find And some things will be, you know, kind of more direct. shots on goal and other things will be these kinds of bank shots where you have to have multiple things go right. And maybe there's more layers of risk. But maybe if you're right, there's more upside as well. Yeah. I'm really excited in social. It used to be in the 2000s, like every few years there was a new major network. There was Facebook, WhatsApp, there was Snap, TikTok. And then it felt like there was a little bit of a dearth on the social side. But with AI, it does feel inevitable. And then dating with Tinder, of course, and there hasn't been something in a while. It feels inevitable that, hey, if there's this, you know, interface or device that I'm, you know,

5. 28:53

   giving all my information to, that there's going to be some way that these are, these are hooked up and enabling a whole new set of social experiences. Well, I mean, you can talk about this, Mark, but we, you know, we're headed to a world where it looks like the main, the most numerous participants on the internet will be agents and not people. We're at early phases of that, but it seems somewhat inevitable. You have these products like Muse and Instinct that are sort of utility proxy agents for people.

6. 29:18

   And then you're going to see a whole different sets of categories of these agents, and they'll become the main participants on the Internet. And then there's questions of like, you know, will they need their own ways of communicating and transacting and sharing knowledge and doing all the things people do? And so there's probably going to be a whole series of innovations along those lines. Rentahuman.com.

7. 29:42

   Yeah, Rentahuman. And that's like inverts the model, right? Maltbook was cool too. Yeah, yeah, totally. That's, well, you know, yeah, Maltbook was the public kind of version and then it turned out the agents figured out how to do their own Maltbook and the Hugging Face. So it's going to be, yeah, it's going to be a lot more. Yeah, the agent technology online is going to be spectacular. People are going to plug into that in all kinds of ways.

8. 30:05

   Markman, I'm curious if there are things that you're tracking either in social or consumer or even just this frame of like viscumorphic,