AI product formats are still in an era of ferment

Transcript

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

1. 24:03

   is one of the issues here that um ai can't seem to settle on a product or a product format um so i like wrote down some of the things that we've been seeing even over the past like two years so we've had the chatbot we had vibe coding voice bots co-work agents and then we have applications in consumer and enterprise it does seem like the ai industry comes up with like a new like for instance let's just take the the sort of um vibe coding thing right so there was this idea a couple of months ago that everyone was just going to vibe code their own software type in a prompt makes your software and then you know you that that's the impact of ai but very quickly moved towards agents thing that things that instead of you coding up software they just take control of your computer and so the interface might fall away to a degree um so what do you

2. 24:51

   think about the fact that the ai industry i don't want to say grasping but there's been just like there's whiplash about all the different product formats that it's throwing out there so i think there's three different things going on the first is that we are what we call in the study of innovation an era of ferment nobody knows the right form for these things to be in so you're going to see all sorts of ideas churning up and by the way being copied right so open claw came out in january it's the idea of personal agents and what's happened is suddenly that has taken root as a form so now we have muse and dot and other things that are basically claw likes right so we're seeing if era of ferment is the first thing the second thing is i think some of this is category differences, right?

3. 25:29

   There's a difference in category between vibe coding and agents. Vibe coding is a human activity. Agents are a capability of AI systems. And they're not like competing product lines, right? There's a lot of debate over how people use AI. I don't think vibe coding in the companies I've talked to was ever viewed as the way they're going to be using AI systems. It was, you know, it's a... And by the way, vibe coding has taken off, right?

4. 25:52

   I vibe code a lot of things that would have been required me to have a coder involved in this before. People are building games, but people are also building very serious projects all the time. So I think it hasn't gone away. It's just there's many things happening at once. And then the last thing I would say, and the most important, is part of what you're tracing is also capability curves, right?

5. 26:10

   My last book, Co-Intelligence, was really... about the chatbot era, because that's as good as models were. This book is about the agentic era in a lot of ways, because that's where models are today. We agents, practical agents were not possible until we reached Opus 4.6 level or 4.5 level about November, December of last year. Like that was when agents became practical. And so what you're partially seeing is views as we move up this exponential ability curve, it changes the kinds of products that are possible.

6. 26:37

   So all that stuff is happening at once. We're trying to figure out which products exist in a world where nobody knows what's happening. You are seeing multiple competing different groups all trying to claim the idea of AI products,