Agents @ Work: Lindy.ai
Alessio will be at AWS re:Invent next week and hosting a casual coffee meetup on Wednesday, RSVP here! And subscribe to our calendar for our Singapore, NeurIPS, and all upcoming meetups!
We are still taking questions for our next big recap episode! Submit questions and messages on Speakpipe here for a chance to appear on the show!
If you've been following the AI agents space, you have heard of Lindy AI; while founder Flo Crivello is hesitant to call it "blowing up," when folks like Andrew Wilkinson start obsessing over your product, you're definitely onto something.
In our latest episode, Flo walked us through Lindy's evolution from late 2022 to now, revealing some design choices about agent platform design that go against conventional wisdom in the space.
The Great Reset: From Text Fields to Rails
Remember late 2022? Everyone was "LLM-pilled," believing that if you just gave a language model enough context and tools, it could do anything. Lindy 1.0 followed this pattern:
* Big prompt field ✅
* Bunch of tools ✅
* Prayer to the LLM gods ✅
Fast forward to today, and Lindy 2.0 looks radically different. As Flo put it (~17:00 in the episode): "The more you can put your agent on rails, one, the more reliable it's going to be, obviously, but two, it's also going to be easier to use for the user."
Instead of a giant, intimidating text field, users now build workflows visually:
* Trigger (e.g., "Zendesk ticket received")
* Required actions (e.g., "Check knowledge base")
* Response generation
This isn't just a UI change - it's a fundamental rethinking of how to make AI agents reliable. As Swyx noted during our discussion: "Put Shoggoth in a box and make it a very small, minimal viable box. Everything else should be traditional if-this-then-that software."
The Surprising Truth About Model Limitations
Here's something that might shock folks building in the space: with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, the model is no longer the bottleneck. Flo's exact words (~31:00): "It is actually shocking the extent to which the model is no longer the limit. It was the limit a year ago. It was too expensive. The context window was too small."
Some context: Lindy started when context windows were 4K tokens. Today, their system prompt alone is larger than that. But what's really interesting is what this means for platform builders:
* Raw capabilities aren't the constraint anymore
* Integration quality matters more than model performance
* User experience and workflow design are the new bottlenecks
The Search Engine Parallel: Why Horizontal Platforms Might Win
One of the spiciest takes from our conversation was Flo's thesis on horizontal vs. vertical agent platforms. He draws a fascinating parallel to search engines (~56:00):
"I find it surprising the extent to which a horizontal search engine has won... You go through Google to search Reddit. You go through Google to search Wikipedia... search in each vertical has more in common with search than it does with each vertical."
His argument: agent platforms might follow the same pattern because:
* Agents across verticals share more commonalities than differences
* There's value in having agents that can work together under one roof
* The R&D cost of getting agents right is better amortized across use cases
This might explain why we're seeing early vertical AI companies starting to expand horizontally. The core agent capabilities - reliability, context management, tool integration - are universal needs.
What This Means for Builders
If you're building in the AI agents space, here are the key takeaways:
* Constrain First: Rather than maximizing capabilities, focus on reliable execution within narrow bounds
* Integration Quality Matters: With model capabilities plateauing, your competitive advantage lies in how well you integrate with existing tools
* Memory Management is Key: Flo revealed they actively prune agent memories - even with larger context windows, not all memories are useful
* Design for Discovery: Lindy's visual workflow builder shows how important interface design is for adoption
The Meta Layer
There's a broader lesson here about AI product development. Just as Lindy evolved from "give the LLM everything" to "constrain intelligently," we might see similar evolution across the AI tooling space. The winners might not be those with the most powerful models, but those who best understand how to package AI capabilities in ways that solve real problems reliably.
Full Video Podcast
Flo’s talk at AI Engineer Summit
Chapters
* 00:00:00 Introductions
* 00:04:05 AI engineering and deterministic software
* 00:08:36 Lindys demo
* 00:13:21 Memory management in AI agents
* 00:18:48 Hierarchy and collaboration between Lindys
* 00:21:19 Vertical vs. horizontal AI tools
* 00:24:03 Community and user engagement strategies
* 00:26:16 Rickrolling incident with Lindy
* 00:28:12 Evals and quality control in AI systems
* 00:31:52 Model capabilities and their impact on Lindy
* 00:39:27 Competition and market positioning
* 00:42:40 Relationship between Factorio and business strategy
* 00:44:05 Remote work vs. in-person collaboration
* 00:49:03 Europe vs US Tech
* 00:58:59 Testing the Overton window and free speech
* 01:04:20 Balancing AI safety concerns with business innovation
Show Notes
* Lindy.ai
* Rick Rolling
* Flo on X
* TeamFlow
* Andrew Wilkinson
* Dust
* Poolside.ai
* SB1047
* Gathertown
* Sid Sijbrandij
* Matt Mullenweg
* Factorio
* Seeing Like a State
Transcript
Alessio [00:00:00]: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO at Decibel Partners, and I'm joined by my co-host Swyx, founder of Smol.ai.
Swyx [00:00:12]: Hey, and today we're joined in the studio by Florent Crivello. Welcome.
Flo [00:00:15]: Hey, yeah, thanks for having me.
Swyx [00:00:17]: Also known as Altimore. I always wanted to ask, what is Altimore?
Flo [00:00:21]: It was the name of my character when I was playing Dungeons & Dragons. Always. I was like 11 years old.
Swyx [00:00:26]: What was your classes?
Flo [00:00:27]: I was an elf. I was a magician elf.
Swyx [00:00:30]: Well, you're still spinning magic. Right now, you're a solo founder and CEO of Lindy.ai. What is Lindy?
Flo [00:00:36]: Yeah, we are a no-code platform letting you build your own AI agents easily. So you can think of we are to LangChain as Airtable is to MySQL. Like you can just pin up AI agents super easily by clicking around and no code required. You don't have to be an engineer and you can automate business workflows that you simply could not automate before in a few minutes.
Swyx [00:00:55]: You've been in our orbit a few times. I think you spoke at our Latent Space anniversary. You spoke at my summit, the first summit, which was a really good keynote. And most recently, like we actually already scheduled this podcast before this happened. But Andrew Wilkinson was like, I'm obsessed by Lindy. He's just created a whole bunch of agents. So basically, why are you blowing up?
Flo [00:01:16]: Well, thank you. I think we are having a little bit of a moment. I think it's a bit premature to say we're blowing up. But why are things going well? We revamped the product majorly. We called it Lindy 2.0. I would say we started working on that six months ago. We've actually not really announced it yet. It's just, I guess, I guess that's what we're doing now. And so we've basically been cooking for the last six months, like really rebuilding the product from scratch. I think I'll list you, actually, the last time you tried the product, it was still Lindy 1.0. Oh, yeah. If you log in now, the platform looks very different. There's like a ton more features. And I think one realization that we made, and I think a lot of folks in the agent space made the same realization, is that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. I think many people, when they started working on agents, they were very LLM peeled and chat GPT peeled, right? They got ahead of themselves in a way, and us included, and they thought that agents were actually, and LLMs were actually more advanced than they actually were. And so the first version of Lindy was like just a giant prompt and a bunch of tools. And then the realization we had was like, hey, actually, the more you can put your agent on Rails, one, the more reliable it's going to be, obviously, but two, it's also going to be easier to use for the user, because you can really, as a user, you get, instead of just getting this big, giant, intimidating text field, and you type words in there, and you have no idea if you're typing the right word or not, here you can really click and select step by step, and tell your agent what to do, and really give as narrow or as wide a guardrail as you want for your agent. We started working on that. We called it Lindy on Rails about six months ago, and we started putting it into the hands of users over the last, I would say, two months or so, and I think things really started going pretty well at that point. The agent is way more reliable, way easier to set up, and we're already seeing a ton of new use cases pop up.
Swyx [00:03:00]: Yeah, just a quick follow-up on that. You launched the first Lindy in November last year, and you were already talking about having a DSL, right? I remember having this discussion with you, and you were like, it's just much more reliable. Is this still the DSL under the hood? Is this a UI-level change, or is it a bigger rewrite?
Flo [00:03:17]: No, it is a much bigger rewrite. I'll give you a concrete example. Suppose you want to have an agent that observes your Zendesk tickets, and it's like, hey, every time you receive a Zendesk ticket, I want you to check my knowledge base, so it's like a RAG module and whatnot, and then answer the ticket. The way it used to work with Lindy before was, you would type the prompt asking it to do that. You check my knowledge base, and so on and so forth. The problem with doing that is that it can always go wrong. You're praying the LLM gods that they will actually invoke your knowledge base, but I don't want to ask it. I want it to always, 100% of the time, consult the knowledge base after it receives a Zendesk ticket. And so with Lindy, you can actually have the trigger, which is Zendesk ticket received, have the knowledge base consult, which is always there, and then have the agent. So you can really set up your agent any way you want like that.
Swyx [00:04:05]: This is something I think about for AI engineering as well, which is the big labs want you to hand over everything in the prompts, and only code of English, and then the smaller brains, the GPU pours, always want to write more code to make things more deterministic and reliable and controllable. One way I put it is put Shoggoth in a box and make it a very small, the minimal viable box. Everything else should be traditional, if this, then that software.
Flo [00:04:29]: I love that characterization, put the Shoggoth in the box. Yeah, we talk about using as much AI as necessary and as little as possible.
Alessio [00:04:37]: And what was the choosing between kind of like this drag and drop, low code, whatever, super code-driven, maybe like the Lang chains, auto-GPT of the world, and maybe the flip side of it, which you don't really do, it's like just text to agent, it's like build the workflow for me. Like what have you learned actually putting this in front of users and figuring out how much do they actually want to add it versus like how much, you know, kind of like Ruby on Rails instead of Lindy on Rails, it's kind of like, you know, defaults over configuration.
Flo [00:05:06]: I actually used to dislike when people said, oh, text is not a great interface. I was like, ah, this is such a mid-take, I think text is awesome. And I've actually come around, I actually sort of agree now that text is really not great. I think for people like you and me, because we sort of have a mental model, okay, when I type a prompt into this text box, this is what it's going to do, it's going to map it to this kind of data structure under the hood and so forth. I guess it's a little bit blackmailing towards humans. You jump on these calls with humans and you're like, here's a text box, this is going to set up an agent for you, do it. And then they type words like, I want you to help me put order in my inbox. Oh, actually, this is a good one. This is actually a good one. What's a bad one? I would say 60 or 70% of the prompts that people type don't mean anything. Me as a human, as AGI, I don't understand what they mean. I don't know what they mean. It is actually, I think whenever you can have a GUI, it is better than to have just a pure text interface.
Alessio [00:05:58]: And then how do you decide how much to expose? So even with the tools, you have Slack, you have Google Calendar, you have Gmail. Should people by default just turn over access to everything and then you help them figure out what to use? I think that's the question. When I tried to set up Slack, it was like, hey, give me access to all channels and everything, which for the average person probably makes sense because you don't want to re-prompt them every time you add new channels. But at the same time, for maybe the more sophisticated enterprise use cases, people are like, hey, I want to really limit what you have access to. How do you kind of thread that balance?
Flo [00:06:35]: The general philosophy is we ask for the least amount of permissions needed at any given moment. I don't think Slack, I could be mistaken, but I don't think Slack lets you request permissions for just one channel. But for example, for Google, obviously there are hundreds of scopes that you could require for Google. There's a lot of scopes. And sometimes it's actually painful to set up your Lindy because you're going to have to ask Google and add scopes five or six times. We've had sessions like this. But that's what we do because, for example, the Lindy email drafter, she's going to ask you for your authorization once for, I need to be able to read your email so I can draft a reply, and then another time for I need to be able to write a draft for them. We just try to do it very incrementally like that.
Alessio [00:07:15]: Do you think OAuth is just overall going to change? I think maybe before it was like, hey, we need to set up OAuth that humans only want to kind of do once. So we try to jam-pack things all at once versus what if you could on-demand get different permissions every time from different parts? Do you ever think about designing things knowing that maybe AI will use it instead of humans will use it? Yeah, for sure.
Flo [00:07:37]: One pattern we've started to see is people provisioning accounts for their AI agents. And so, in particular, Google Workspace accounts. So, for example, Lindy can be used as a scheduling assistant. So you can just CC her to your emails when you're trying to find time with someone. And just like a human assistant, she's going to go back and forth and offer other abilities and so forth. Very often, people don't want the other party to know that it's an AI. So it's actually funny. They introduce delays. They ask the agent to wait before replying, so it's not too obvious that it's an AI. And they provision an account on Google Suite, which costs them like $10 a month or something like that. So we're seeing that pattern more and more. I think that does the job for now. I'm not optimistic on us actually patching OAuth. Because I agree with you, ultimately, we would want to patch OAuth because the new account thing is kind of a clutch. It's really a hack. You would want to patch OAuth to have more granular access control and really be able to put your sugar in the box. I'm not optimistic on us doing that before AGI, I think. That's a very close timeline.
Swyx [00:08:36]: I'm mindful of talking about a thing without showing it. And we already have the setup to show it. Why don't we jump into a screen share? For listeners, you can jump on the YouTube and like and subscribe. But also, let's have a look at how you show off Lindy. Yeah, absolutely.
Flo [00:08:51]: I'll give an example of a very simple Lindy and then I'll graduate to a much more complicated one. A super simple Lindy that I have is, I unfortunately bought some investment properties in the south of France. It was a really, really bad idea. And I put them on a Holydew, which is like the French Airbnb, if you will. And so I received these emails from time to time telling me like, oh, hey, you made 200 bucks. Someone booked your place. When I receive these emails, I want to log this reservation in a spreadsheet. Doing this without an AI agent or without AI in general is a pain in the butt because you must write an HTML parser for this email. And so it's just hard. You may not be able to do it and it's going to break the moment the email changes. By contrast, the way it works with Lindy, it's really simple. It's two steps. It's like, okay, I receive an email. If it is a reservation confirmation, I have this filter here. Then I append a row to this spreadsheet. And so this is where you can see the AI part where the way this action is configured here, you see these purple fields on the right. Each of these fields is a prompt. And so I can say, okay, you extract from the email the day the reservation begins on. You extract the amount of the reservation. You extract the number of travelers of the reservation. And now you can see when I look at the task history of this Lindy, it's really simple. It's like, okay, you do this and boom, appending this row to this spreadsheet. And this is the information extracted. So effectively, this node here, this append row node is a mini agent. It can see everything that just happened. It has context over the task and it's appending the row. And then it's going to send a reply to the thread. That's a very simple example of an agent.
Swyx [00:10:34]: A quick follow-up question on this one while we're still on this page. Is that one call? Is that a structured output call? Yeah. Okay, nice. Yeah.
Flo [00:10:41]: And you can see here for every node, you can configure which model you want to power the node. Here I use cloud. For this, I use GPT-4 Turbo. Much more complex example, my meeting recorder. It looks very complex because I've added to it over time, but at a high level, it's really simple. It's like when a meeting begins, you record the meeting. And after the meeting, you send me a summary and you send me coaching notes. So I receive, like my Lindy is constantly coaching me. And so you can see here in the prompt of the coaching notes, I've told it, hey, you know, was I unnecessarily confrontational at any point? I'm French, so I have to watch out for that. Or not confrontational enough. Should I have double-clicked on any issue, right? So I can really give it exactly the kind of coaching that I'm expecting. And then the interesting thing here is, like, you can see the agent here, after it sent me these coaching notes, moves on. And it does a bunch of other stuff. So it goes on Slack. It disseminates the notes on Slack. It does a bunch of other stuff. But it's actually able to backtrack and resume the automation at the coaching notes email if I responded to that email. So I'll give a super concrete example. This is an actual coaching feedback that I received from Lindy. She was like, hey, this was a sales call I had with a customer. And she was like, I found your explanation of Lindy too technical. And I was able to follow up and just ask a follow-up question in the thread here. And I was like, why did you find too technical about my explanation? And Lindy restored the context. And so she basically picked up the automation back up here in the tree. And she has all of the context of everything that happened, including the meeting in which I was. So she was like, oh, you used the words deterministic and context window and agent state. And that concept exists at every level for every channel and every action that Lindy takes. So another example here is, I mentioned she also disseminates the notes on Slack. So this was a meeting where I was not, right? So this was a teammate. He's an indie meeting recorder, posts the meeting notes in this customer discovery channel on Slack. So you can see, okay, this is the onboarding call we had. This was the use case. Look at the questions. How do I make Lindy slower? How do I add delays to make Lindy slower? And I was able, in the Slack thread, to ask follow-up questions like, oh, what did we answer to these questions? And it's really handy because I know I can have this sort of interactive Q&A with these meetings. It means that very often now, I don't go to meetings anymore. I just send my Lindy. And instead of going to like a 60-minute meeting, I have like a five-minute chat with my Lindy afterwards. And she just replied. She was like, well, this is what we replied to this customer. And I can just be like, okay, good job, Jack. Like, no notes about your answers. So that's the kind of use cases people have with Lindy. It's a lot of like, there's a lot of sales automations, customer support automations, and a lot of this, which is basically personal assistance automations, like meeting scheduling and so forth.
Alessio [00:13:21]: Yeah, and I think the question that people might have is memory. So as you get coaching, how does it track whether or not you're improving? You know, if these are like mistakes you made in the past, like, how do you think about that?
Flo [00:13:31]: Yeah, we have a memory module. So I'll show you my meeting scheduler, Lindy, which has a lot of memories because by now I've used her for so long. And so every time I talk to her, she saves a memory. If I tell her, you screwed up, please don't do this. So you can see here, oh, it's got a double memory here. This is the meeting link I have, or this is the address of the office. If I tell someone to meet me at home, this is the address of my place. This is the code. I guess we'll have to edit that out. This is not the code of my place. No dogs. Yeah, so Lindy can just manage her own memory and decide when she's remembering things between executions. Okay.
Swyx [00:14:11]: I mean, I'm just going to take the opportunity to ask you, since you are the creator of this thing, how come there's so few memories, right? Like, if you've been using this for two years, there should be thousands of thousands of things. That is a good question.
Flo [00:14:22]: Agents still get confused if they have too many memories, to my point earlier about that. So I just am out of a call with a member of the Lama team at Meta, and we were chatting about Lindy, and we were going into the system prompt that we sent to Lindy, and all of that stuff. And he was amazed, and he was like, it's a miracle that it's working, guys. He was like, this kind of system prompt, this does not exist, either pre-training or post-training. These models were never trained to do this kind of stuff. It's a miracle that they can be agents at all. And so what I do, I actually prune the memories. You know, it's actually something I've gotten into the habit of doing from back when we had GPT 3.5, being Lindy agents. I suspect it's probably not as necessary in the Cloud 3.5 Sunette days, but I prune the memories. Yeah, okay.
Swyx [00:15:05]: The reason is because I have another assistant that also is recording and trying to come up with facts about me. It comes up with a lot of trivial, useless facts that I... So I spend most of my time pruning. Actually, it's not super useful. I'd much rather have high-quality facts that it accepts. Or maybe I was even thinking, were you ever tempted to add a wake word to only memorize this when I say memorize this? And otherwise, don't even bother.
Flo [00:15:30]: I have a Lindy that does this. So this is my inbox processor, Lindy. It's kind of beefy because there's a lot of different emails. But somewhere in here,
Swyx [00:15:38]: there is a rule where I'm like,
Flo [00:15:39]: aha, I can email my inbox processor, Lindy. It's really handy. So she has her own email address. And so when I process my email inbox, I sometimes forward an email to her. And it's a newsletter, or it's like a cold outreach from a recruiter that I don't care about, or anything like that. And I can give her a rule. And I can be like, hey, this email I want you to archive, moving forward. Or I want you to alert me on Slack when I have this kind of email. It's really important. And so you can see here, the prompt is, if I give you a rule about a kind of email, like archive emails from X, save it as a new memory. And I give it to the memory saving skill. And yeah.
Swyx [00:16:13]: One thing that just occurred to me, so I'm a big fan of virtual mailboxes. I recommend that everybody have a virtual mailbox. You could set up a physical mail receive thing for Lindy. And so then Lindy can process your physical mail.
Flo [00:16:26]: That's actually a good idea. I actually already have something like that. I use like health class mail. Yeah. So yeah, most likely, I can process my physical mail. Yeah.
Swyx [00:16:35]: And then the other product's idea I have, looking at this thing, is people want to brag about the complexity of their Lindys. So this would be like a 65 point Lindy, right?
Flo [00:16:43]: What's a 65 point?
Swyx [00:16:44]: Complexity counting. Like how many nodes, how many things, how many conditions, right? Yeah.
Flo [00:16:49]: This is not the most complex one. I have another one. This designer recruiter here is kind of beefy as well. Right, right, right. So I'm just saying,
Swyx [00:16:56]: let people brag. Let people be super users. Oh, right.
Flo [00:16:59]: Give them a score. Give them a score.
Swyx [00:17:01]: Then they'll just be like, okay, how high can you make this score?
Flo [00:17:04]: Yeah, that's a good point. And I think that's, again, the beauty of this on-rails phenomenon. It's like, think of the equivalent, the prompt equivalent of this Lindy here, for example, that we're looking at. It'd be monstrous. And the odds that it gets it right are so low. But here, because we're really holding the agent's hand step by step by step, it's actually super reliable. Yeah.
Swyx [00:17:22]: And is it all structured output-based? Yeah. As far as possible? Basically. Like, there's no non-structured output?
Flo [00:17:27]: There is. So, for example, here, this AI agent step, right, or this send message step, sometimes it gets to... That's just plain text.
Swyx [00:17:35]: That's right.
Flo [00:17:36]: Yeah. So I'll give you an example. Maybe it's TMI. I'm having blood pressure issues these days. And so this Lindy here, I give it my blood pressure readings, and it updates a log that I have of my blood pressure that it sends to my doctor.
Swyx [00:17:49]: Oh, so every Lindy comes with a to-do list?
Flo [00:17:52]: Yeah. Every Lindy has its own task history. Huh. Yeah. And so you can see here, this is my main Lindy, my personal assistant, and I've told it, where is this? There is a point where I'm like, if I am giving you a health-related fact, right here, I'm giving you health information, so then you update this log that I have in this Google Doc, and then you send me a message. And you can see, I've actually not configured this send message node. I haven't told it what to send me a message for. Right? And you can see, it's actually lecturing me. It's like, I'm giving it my blood pressure ratings. It's like, hey, it's a bit high. Here are some lifestyle changes you may want to consider.
Alessio [00:18:27]: I think maybe this is the most confusing or new thing for people. So even I use Lindy and I didn't even know you could have multiple workflows in one Lindy. I think the mental model is kind of like the Zapier workflows. It starts and it ends. It doesn't choose between. How do you think about what's a Lindy versus what's a sub-function of a Lindy? Like, what's the hierarchy?
Flo [00:18:48]: Yeah. Frankly, I think the line is a little arbitrary. It's kind of like when you code, like when do you start to create a new class versus when do you overload your current class. I think of it in terms of like jobs to be done and I think of it in terms of who is the Lindy serving. This Lindy is serving me personally. It's really my day-to-day Lindy. I give it a bunch of stuff, like very easy tasks. And so this is just the Lindy I go to. Sometimes when a task is really more specialized, so for example, I have this like summarizer Lindy or this designer recruiter Lindy. These tasks are really beefy. I wouldn't want to add this to my main Lindy, so I just created a separate Lindy for it. Or when it's a Lindy that serves another constituency, like our customer support Lindy, I don't want to add that to my personal assistant Lindy. These are two very different Lindys.
Alessio [00:19:31]: And you can call a Lindy from within another Lindy. That's right. You can kind of chain them together.
Flo [00:19:36]: Lindys can work together, absolutely.
Swyx [00:19:38]: A couple more things for the video portion. I noticed you have a podcast follower. We have to ask about that. What is that?
Flo [00:19:46]: So this one wakes me up every... So wakes herself up every week. And she sends me... So she woke up yesterday, actually. And she searches for Lenny's podcast. And she looks for like the latest episode on YouTube. And once she finds it, she transcribes the video and then she sends me the summary by email. I don't listen to podcasts as much anymore. I just like read these summaries. Yeah.
Alessio [00:20:09]: We should make a latent space Lindy. Marketplace.
Swyx [00:20:12]: Yeah. And then you have a whole bunch of connectors. I saw the list briefly. Any interesting one? Complicated one that you're proud of? Anything that you want to just share? Connector stories.
Flo [00:20:23]: So many of our workflows are about meeting scheduling. So we had to build some very open unity tools around meeting scheduling. So for example, one that is surprisingly hard is this find available times action. You would not believe... This is like a thousand lines of code or something. It's just a very beefy action. And you can pass it a bunch of parameters about how long is the meeting? When does it start? When does it end? What are the meetings? The weekdays in which I meet? How many time slots do you return? What's the buffer between my meetings? It's just a very, very, very complex action. I really like our GitHub action. So we have a Lindy PR reviewer. And it's really handy because anytime any bug happens... So the Lindy reads our guidelines on Google Docs. By now, the guidelines are like 40 pages long or something. And so every time any new kind of bug happens, we just go to the guideline and we add the lines. Like, hey, this has happened before. Please watch out for this category of bugs. And it's saving us so much time every day.
Alessio [00:21:19]: There's companies doing PR reviews. Where does a Lindy start? When does a company start? Or maybe how do you think about the complexity of these tasks when it's going to be worth having kind of like a vertical standalone company versus just like, hey, a Lindy is going to do a good job 99% of the time?
Flo [00:21:34]: That's a good question. We think about this one all the time. I can't say that we've really come up with a very crisp articulation of when do you want to use a vertical tool versus when do you want to use a horizontal tool. I think of it as very similar to the internet. I find it surprising the extent to which a horizontal search engine has won. But I think that Google, right? But I think the even more surprising fact is that the horizontal search engine has won in almost every vertical, right? You go through Google to search Reddit. You go through Google to search Wikipedia. I think maybe the biggest exception is e-commerce. Like you go to Amazon to search e-commerce, but otherwise you go through Google. And I think that the reason for that is because search in each vertical has more in common with search than it does with each vertical. And search is so expensive to get right. Like Google is a big company that it makes a lot of sense to aggregate all of these different use cases and to spread your R&D budget across all of these different use cases. I have a thesis, which is, it's a really cool thesis for Lindy, is that the same thing is true for agents. I think that by and large, in a lot of verticals, agents in each vertical have more in common with agents than they do with each vertical. I also think there are benefits in having a single agent platform because that way your agents can work together. They're all like under one roof. That way you only learn one platform and so you can create agents for everything that you want. And you don't have to like pay for like a bunch of different platforms and so forth. So I think ultimately, it is actually going to shake out in a way that is similar to search in that search is everywhere on the internet. Every website has a search box, right? So there's going to be a lot of vertical agents for everything. I think AI is going to completely penetrate every category of software. But then I also think there are going to be a few very, very, very big horizontal agents that serve a lot of functions for people.
Swyx [00:23:14]: That is actually one of the questions that we had about the agent stuff. So I guess we can transition away from the screen and I'll just ask the follow-up, which is, that is a hot topic. You're basically saying that the current VC obsession of the day, which is vertical AI enabled SaaS, is mostly not going to work out. And then there are going to be some super giant horizontal SaaS.
Flo [00:23:34]: Oh, no, I'm not saying it's either or. Like SaaS today, vertical SaaS is huge and there's also a lot of horizontal platforms. If you look at like Airtable or Notion, basically the entire no-code space is very horizontal. I mean, Loom and Zoom and Slack, there's a lot of very horizontal tools out there. Okay.
Swyx [00:23:49]: I was just trying to get a reaction out of you for hot takes. Trying to get a hot take.
Flo [00:23:54]: No, I also think it is natural for the vertical solutions to emerge first because it's just easier to build. It's just much, much, much harder to build something horizontal. Cool.
Swyx [00:24:03]: Some more Lindy-specific questions. So we covered most of the top use cases and you have an academy. That was nice to see. I also see some other people doing it for you for free. So like Ben Spites is doing it and then there's some other guy who's also doing like lessons. Yeah. Which is kind of nice, right? Yeah, absolutely. You don't have to do any of that.
Flo [00:24:20]: Oh, we've been seeing it more and more on like LinkedIn and Twitter, like people posting their Lindys and so forth.
Swyx [00:24:24]: I think that's the flywheel that you built the platform where creators see value in allying themselves to you. And so then, you know, your incentive is to make them successful so that they can make other people successful and then it just drives more and more engagement. Like it's earned media. Like you don't have to do anything.
Flo [00:24:39]: Yeah, yeah. I mean, community is everything.
Swyx [00:24:41]: Are you doing anything special there? Any big wins?
Flo [00:24:44]: We have a Slack community that's pretty active. I can't say we've invested much more than that so far.
Swyx [00:24:49]: I would say from having, so I have some involvement in the no-code community. I would say that Webflow going very hard after no-code as a category got them a lot more allies than just the people using Webflow. So it helps you to grow the community beyond just Lindy. And I don't know what this is called. Maybe it's just no-code again. Maybe you want to call it something different. But there's definitely an appetite for this and you are one of a broad category, right? Like just before you, we had Dust and, you know, they're also kind of going after a similar market. Zapier obviously is not going to try to also compete with you. Yeah. There's no question there. It's just like a reaction about community. Like I think a lot about community. Lanespace is growing the community of AI engineers. And I think you have a slightly different audience of, I don't know what.
Flo [00:25:33]: Yeah. I think the no-code tinkerers is the community. Yeah. It is going to be the same sort of community as what Webflow, Zapier, Airtable, Notion to some extent.
Swyx [00:25:43]: Yeah. The framing can be different if you were, so I think tinkerers has this connotation of not serious or like small. And if you framed it to like no-code EA, we're exclusively only for CEOs with a certain budget, then you just have, you tap into a different budget.
Flo [00:25:58]: That's true. The problem with EA is like, the CEO has no willingness to actually tinker and play with the platform.
Swyx [00:26:05]: Maybe Andrew's doing that. Like a lot of your biggest advocates are CEOs, right?
Flo [00:26:09]: A solopreneur, you know, small business owners, I think Andrew is an exception. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he is.
Swyx [00:26:14]: He's an exception in many ways. Yep.
Alessio [00:26:16]: Just before we wrap on the use cases, is Rick rolling your customers? Like a officially supported use case or maybe tell that story?
Flo [00:26:24]: It's one of the main jobs to be done, really. Yeah, we woke up recently, so we have a Lindy obviously doing our customer support and we do check after the Lindy. And so we caught this email exchange where someone was asking Lindy for video tutorials. And at the time, actually, we did not have video tutorials. We do now on the Lindy Academy. And Lindy responded to the email. It's like, oh, absolutely, here's a link. And we were like, what? Like, what kind of link did you send? And so we clicked on the link and it was a recall. We actually reacted fast enough that the customer had not yet opened the email. And so we reacted immediately. Like, oh, hey, actually, sorry, this is the right link. And so the customer never reacted to the first link. And so, yeah, I tweeted about that. It went surprisingly viral. And I checked afterwards in the logs. We did like a database query and we found, I think, like three or four other instances of it having happened before.
Swyx [00:27:12]: That's surprisingly low.
Flo [00:27:13]: It is low. And we fixed it across the board by just adding a line to the system prompt that's like, hey, don't recall people, please don't recall.
Swyx [00:27:21]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so, you know, you can explain it retroactively, right? Like, that YouTube slug has been pasted in so many different corpuses that obviously it learned to hallucinate that.
Alessio [00:27:31]: And it pretended to be so many things. That's the thing.
Swyx [00:27:34]: I wouldn't be surprised if that takes one token. Like, there's this one slug in the tokenizer and it's just one token.
Flo [00:27:41]: That's the idea of a YouTube video.
Swyx [00:27:43]: Because it's used so much, right? And you have to basically get it exactly correct. It's probably not. That's a long speech.
Flo [00:27:52]: It would have been so good.
Alessio [00:27:55]: So this is just a jump maybe into evals from here. How could you possibly come up for an eval that says, make sure my AI does not recall my customer? I feel like when people are writing evals, that's not something that they come up with. So how do you think about evals when it's such like an open-ended problem space?
Flo [00:28:12]: Yeah, it is tough. We built quite a bit of infrastructure for us to create evals in one click from any conversation history. So we can point to a conversation and we can be like, in one click we can turn it into effectively a unit test. It's like, this is a good conversation. This is how you're supposed to handle things like this. Or if it's a negative example, then we modify a little bit the conversation after generating the eval. So it's very easy for us to spin up this kind of eval.
Alessio [00:28:36]: Do you use an off-the-shelf tool which is like Brain Trust on the podcast? Or did you just build your own?
Flo [00:28:41]: We unfortunately built our own. We're most likely going to switch to Brain Trust. Well, when we built it, there was nothing. Like there was no eval tool, frankly. I mean, we started this project at the end of 2022. It was like, it was very, very, very early. I wouldn't recommend it to build your own eval tool. There's better solutions out there and our eval tool breaks all the time and it's a nightmare to maintain. And that's not something we want to be spending our time on.
Swyx [00:29:04]: I was going to ask that basically because I think my first conversations with you about Lindy was that you had a strong opinion that everyone should build their own tools. And you were very proud of your evals. You're kind of showing off to me like how many evals you were running, right?
Flo [00:29:16]: Yeah, I think that was before all of these tools came around. I think the ecosystem has matured a fair bit.
Swyx [00:29:21]: What is one thing that Brain Trust has nailed that you always struggled to do?
Flo [00:29:25]: We're not using them yet, so I couldn't tell. But from what I've gathered from the conversations I've had, like they're doing what we do with our eval tool, but better.
Swyx [00:29:33]: And like they do it, but also like 60 other companies do it, right? So I don't know how to shop apart from brand. Word of mouth.
Flo [00:29:41]: Same here.
Swyx [00:29:42]: Yeah, like evals or Lindys, there's two kinds of evals, right? Like in some way, you don't have to eval your system as much because you've constrained the language model so much. And you can rely on open AI to guarantee that the structured outputs are going to be good, right? We had Michelle sit where you sit and she explained exactly how they do constraint grammar sampling and all that good stuff. So actually, I think it's more important for your customers to eval their Lindys than you evaling your Lindy platform because you just built the platform. You don't actually need to eval that much.
Flo [00:30:14]: Yeah. In an ideal world, our customers don't need to care about this. And I think the bar is not like, look, it needs to be at 100%. I think the bar is it needs to be better than a human. And for most use cases we serve today, it is better than a human, especially if you put it on Rails.
Swyx [00:30:30]: Is there a limiting factor of Lindy at the business? Like, is it adding new connectors? Is it adding new node types? Like how do you prioritize what is the most impactful to your company?
Flo [00:30:41]: Yeah. The raw capabilities for sure are a big limit. It is actually shocking the extent to which the model is no longer the limit. It was the limit a year ago. It was too expensive. The context window was too small. It's kind of insane that we started building this when the context windows were like 4,000 tokens. Like today, our system prompt is more than 4,000 tokens. So yeah, the model is actually very much not a limit anymore. It almost gives me pause because I'm like, I want the model to be a limit. And so no, the integrations are ones, the core capabilities are ones. So for example, we are investing in a system that's basically, I call it like the, it's a J hack. Give me these names, like the poor man's RLHF. So you can turn on a toggle on any step of your Lindy workflow to be like, ask me for confirmation before you actually execute this step. So it's like, hey, I receive an email, you send a reply, ask me for confirmation before actually sending it. And so today you see the email that's about to get sent and you can either approve, deny, or change it and then approve. And we are making it so that when you make a change, we are then saving this change that you're making or embedding it in the vector database. And then we are retrieving these examples for future tasks and injecting them into the context window. So that's the kind of capability that makes a huge difference for users. That's the bottleneck today. It's really like good old engineering and product work.
Swyx [00:31:52]: I assume you're hiring. We'll do a call for hiring at the end.
Alessio [00:31:54]: Any other comments on the model side? When did you start feeling like the model was not a bottleneck anymore? Was it 4.0? Was it 3.5? 3.5.
Flo [00:32:04]: 3.5 Sonnet, definitely. I think 4.0 is overhyped, frankly. We don't use 4.0. I don't think it's good for agentic behavior. Yeah, 3.5 Sonnet is when I started feeling that. And then with prompt caching with 3.5 Sonnet, like that fills the cost, cut the cost again. Just cut it in half. Yeah.
Swyx [00:32:21]: Your prompts are... Some of the problems with agentic uses is that your prompts are kind of dynamic, right? Like from caching to work, you need the front prefix portion to be stable.
Flo [00:32:32]: Yes, but we have this append-only ledger paradigm. So every node keeps appending to that ledger and every filled node inherits all the context built up by all the previous nodes. And so we can just decide, like, hey, every X thousand nodes, we trigger prompt caching again.
Swyx [00:32:47]: Oh, so you do it like programmatically, not all the time.
Flo [00:32:50]: No, sorry. Anthropic manages that for us. But basically, it's like, because we keep appending to the prompt, the prompt caching works pretty well.
Alessio [00:32:57]: We have this small podcaster tool that I built for the podcast and I rewrote all of our prompts because I noticed, you know, I was inputting stuff early on. I wonder how much more money OpenAN and Anthropic are making just because people don't rewrite their prompts to be like static at the top and like dynamic at the bottom.
Flo [00:33:13]: I think that's the remarkable thing about what we're having right now. It's insane that these companies are routinely cutting their costs by two, four, five. Like, they basically just apply constraints. They want people to take advantage of these innovations. Very good.
Swyx [00:33:25]: Do you have any other competitive commentary? Commentary? Dust, WordWare, Gumloop, Zapier? If not, we can move on.
Flo [00:33:31]: No comment.
Alessio [00:33:32]: I think the market is,
Flo [00:33:33]: look, I mean, AGI is coming. All right, that's what I'm talking about.
Swyx [00:33:38]: I think you're helping. Like, you're paving the road to AGI.
Flo [00:33:41]: I'm playing my small role. I'm adding my small brick to this giant, giant, giant castle. Yeah, look, when it's here, we are going to, this entire category of software is going to create, it's going to sound like an exaggeration, but it is a fact it is going to create trillions of dollars of value in a few years, right? It's going to, for the first time, we're actually having software directly replace human labor. I see it every day in sales calls. It's like, Lindy is today replacing, like, we talk to even small teams. It's like, oh, like, stop, this is a 12-people team here. I guess we'll set up this Lindy for one or two days, and then we'll have to decide what to do with this 12-people team. And so, yeah. To me, there's this immense uncapped market opportunity. It's just such a huge ocean, and there's like three sharks in the ocean. I'm focused on the ocean more than on the sharks.
Swyx [00:34:25]: So we're moving on to hot topics, like, kind of broadening out from Lindy, but obviously informed by Lindy. What are the high-order bits of good agent design?
Flo [00:34:31]: The model, the model, the model, the model. I think people fail to truly, and me included, they fail to truly internalize the bitter lesson. So for the listeners out there who don't know about it, it's basically like, you just scale the model. Like, GPUs go brr, it's all that matters. I think it also holds for the cognitive architecture. I used to be very cognitive architecture-filled, and I was like, ah, and I was like a critic, and I was like a generator, and all this, and then it's just like, GPUs go brr, like, just like let the model do its job. I think we're seeing it a little bit right now with O1. I'm seeing some tweets that say that the new 3.5 SONNET is as good as O1, but with none of all the crazy...
Swyx [00:35:09]: It beats O1 on some measures. On some reasoning tasks. On AIME, it's still a lot lower. Like, it's like 14 on AIME versus O1, it's like 83.
Flo [00:35:17]: Got it. Right. But even O1 is still the model. Yeah.
Swyx [00:35:22]: Like, there's no cognitive architecture on top of it.
Flo [00:35:23]: You can just wait for O1 to get better.
Alessio [00:35:25]: And so, as a founder, how do you think about that, right? Because now, knowing this, wouldn't you just wait to start Lindy? You know, you start Lindy, it's like 4K context, the models are not that good. It's like, but you're still kind of like going along and building and just like waiting for the models to get better. How do you today decide, again, what to build next, knowing that, hey, the models are going to get better, so maybe we just shouldn't focus on improving our prompt design and all that stuff and just build the connectors instead or whatever? Yeah.
Flo [00:35:51]: I mean, that's exactly what we do. Like, all day, we always ask ourselves, oh, when we have a feature idea or a feature request, we ask ourselves, like, is this the kind of thing that just gets better while we sleep because models get better? I'm reminded, again, when we started this in 2022, we spent a lot of time because we had to around context pruning because 4,000 tokens is really nothing. You really can't do anything with 4,000 tokens. All that work was throwaway work. Like, now it's like it was for nothing, right? Now we just assume that infinite context windows are going to be here in a year or something, a year and a half, and infinitely cheap as well, and dynamic compute is going to be here. Like, we just assume all of these things are going to happen, and so we really focus, our job to be done in the industry is to provide the input and output to the model. I really compare it all the time to the PC and the CPU, right? Apple is busy all day. They're not like a CPU wrapper. They have a lot to build, but they don't, well, now actually they do build the CPU as well, but leaving that aside, they're busy building a laptop. It's just a lot of work to build these things. It's interesting because, like,
Swyx [00:36:45]: for example, another person that we're close to, Mihaly from Repl.it, he often says that the biggest jump for him was having a multi-agent approach, like the critique thing that you just said that you don't need, and I wonder when, in what situations you do need that and what situations you don't. Obviously, the simple answer is for coding, it helps, and you're not coding, except for, are you still generating code? In Indy? Yeah.
Flo [00:37:09]: No, we do. Oh, right. No, no, no, the cognitive architecture changed. We don't, yeah.
Swyx [00:37:13]: Yeah, okay. For you, you're one shot, and you chain tools together, and that's it. And if the user really wants
Flo [00:37:18]: to have this kind of critique thing, you can also edit the prompt, you're welcome to. I have some of my Lindys, I've told them, like, hey, be careful, think step by step about what you're about to do, but that gives you a little bump for some use cases, but, yeah.
Alessio [00:37:30]: What about unexpected model releases? So, Anthropic released computer use today. Yeah. I don't know if many people were expecting computer use to come out today. Do these things make you rethink how to design, like, your roadmap and things like that, or are you just like, hey, look, whatever, that's just, like, a small thing in their, like, AGI pursuit, that, like, maybe they're not even going to support, and, like, it's still better for us to build our own integrations into systems and things like that. Because maybe people will say, hey, look, why am I building all these API integrations
Flo [00:38:02]: when I can just do computer use and never go to the product? Yeah. No, I mean, we did take into account computer use. We were talking about this a year ago or something, like, we've been talking about it as part of our roadmap. It's been clear to us that it was coming, My philosophy about it is anything that can be done with an API must be done by an API or should be done by an API for a very long time. I think it is dangerous to be overly cavalier about improvements of model capabilities. I'm reminded of iOS versus Android. Android was built on the JVM. There was a garbage collector, and I can only assume that the conversation that went down in the engineering meeting room was, oh, who cares about the garbage collector? Anyway, Moore's law is here, and so that's all going to go to zero eventually. Sure, but in the meantime, you are operating on a 400 MHz CPU. It was like the first CPU on the iPhone 1, and it's really slow, and the garbage collector is introducing a tremendous overhead on top of that, especially a memory overhead. For the longest time, and it's really only been recently that Android caught up to iOS in terms of how smooth the interactions were, but for the longest time, Android phones were significantly slower
Swyx [00:39:07]: and laggier
Flo [00:39:08]: and just not feeling as good as iOS devices. Look, when you're talking about modules and magnitude of differences in terms of performance and reliability, which is what we are talking about when we're talking about API use versus computer use, then you can't ignore that, right? And so I think we're going to be in an API use world for a while.
Swyx [00:39:27]: O1 doesn't have API use today. It will have it at some point, and it's on the roadmap. There is a future in which OpenAI goes much harder after your business, your market, than it is today. Like, ChatGPT, it's its own business. All they need to do is add tools to the ChatGPT, and now they're suddenly competing with you. And by the way, they have a GPT store where a bunch of people have already configured their tools to fit with them. Is that a concern?
Flo [00:39:56]: I think even the GPT store, in a way, like the way they architect it, for example, their plug-in systems are actually grateful because we can also use the plug-ins. It's very open. Now, again, I think it's going to be such a huge market. I think there's going to be a lot of different jobs to be done. I know they have a huge enterprise offering and stuff, but today, ChatGPT is a consumer app. And so, the sort of flow detail I showed you, this sort of workflow, this sort of use cases that we're going after, which is like, we're doing a lot of lead generation and lead outreach and all of that stuff. That's not something like meeting recording, like Lindy Today right now joins your Zoom meetings and takes notes, all of that stuff.
Swyx [00:40:34]: I don't see that so far
Flo [00:40:35]: on the OpenAI roadmap.
Swyx [00:40:36]: Yeah, but they do have an enterprise team that we talk to You're hiring GMs?
Flo [00:40:42]: We did.
Swyx [00:40:43]: It's a fascinating way to build a business, right? Like, what should you, as CEO, be in charge of? And what should you basically hire
Flo [00:40:52]: a mini CEO to do? Yeah, that's a good question. I think that's also something we're figuring out. The GM thing was inspired from my days at Uber, where we hired one GM per city or per major geo area. We had like all GMs, regional GMs and so forth. And yeah, Lindy is so horizontal that we thought it made sense to hire GMs to own each vertical and the go-to market of the vertical and the customization of the Lindy templates for these verticals and so forth. What should I own as a CEO? I mean, the canonical reply here is always going to be, you know, you own the fundraising, you own the culture, you own the... What's the rest of the canonical reply? The culture, the fundraising.
Swyx [00:41:29]: I don't know,
Flo [00:41:30]: products. Even that, eventually, you do have to hand out. Yes, the vision, the culture, and the foundation. Well, you've done your job as a CEO. In practice, obviously, yeah, I mean, all day, I do a lot of product work still and I want to keep doing product work for as long as possible.
Swyx [00:41:48]: Obviously, like you're recording and managing the team. Yeah.
Flo [00:41:52]: That one feels like the most automatable part of the job, the recruiting stuff.
Swyx [00:41:56]: Well, yeah. You saw my
Flo [00:41:59]: design your recruiter here. Relationship between Factorio and building Lindy. We actually very often talk about how the business of the future is like a game of Factorio. Yeah. So, in the instance, it's like Slack and you've got like 5,000 Lindys in the sidebar and your job is to somehow manage your 5,000 Lindys. And it's going to be very similar to company building because you're going to look for like the highest leverage way to understand what's going on in your AI company and understand what levels do you have to make impact in that company. So, I think it's going to be very similar to like a human company except it's going to go infinitely faster. Today, in a human company, you could have a meeting with your team and you're like, oh, I'm going to build a facility and, you know, now it's like, okay,
Swyx [00:42:40]: boom, I'm going to spin up 50 designers. Yeah. Like, actually, it's more important that you can clone an existing designer that you know works because the hiring process, you cannot clone someone because every new person you bring in is going to have their own tweaks
Flo [00:42:54]: and you don't want that. Yeah.
Swyx [00:42:56]: That's true. You want an army of mindless drones
Flo [00:42:59]: that all work the same way.
Swyx [00:43:00]: The reason I bring this, bring Factorio up as well is one, Factorio Space just came out. Apparently, a whole bunch of people stopped working. I tried out Factorio. I never really got that much into it. But the other thing was, you had a tweet recently about how the sort of intentional top-down design was not as effective as just build. Yeah. Just ship.
Flo [00:43:21]: I think people read a little bit too much into that tweet. It went weirdly viral. I was like, I did not intend it as a giant statement online.
Swyx [00:43:28]: I mean, you notice you have a pattern with this, right? Like, you've done this for eight years now.
Flo [00:43:33]: You should know. I legit was just hearing an interesting story about the Factorio game I had. And everybody was like, oh my God, so deep. I guess this explains everything about life and companies. There is something to be said, certainly, about focusing on the constraint. And I think it is Patrick Collison who said, people underestimate the extent to which moonshots are just one pragmatic step taken after the other. And I think as long as you have some inductive bias about, like, some loose idea about where you want to go, I think it makes sense to follow a sort of greedy search along that path. I think planning and organizing is important. And having older is important.
Swyx [00:44:05]: I'm wrestling with that. There's two ways I encountered it recently. One with Lindy. When I tried out one of your automation templates and one of them was quite big and I just didn't understand it, right? So, like, it was not as useful to me as a small one that I can just plug in and see all of. And then the other one was me using Cursor. I was very excited about O1 and I just up front
Flo [00:44:27]: stuffed everything
Swyx [00:44:28]: I wanted to do into my prompt and expected O1 to do everything. And it got itself into a huge jumbled mess and it was stuck. It was really... There was no amount... I wasted, like, two hours on just, like, trying to get out of that hole. So I threw away the code base, started small, switched to Clouds on it and build up something working and just add it over time and it just worked. And to me, that was the factorial sentiment, right? Maybe I'm one of those fanboys that's just, like, obsessing over the depth of something that you just randomly tweeted out. But I think it's true for company building, for Lindy building, for coding.
Flo [00:45:02]: I don't know. I think it's fair and I think, like, you and I talked about there's the Tuft & Metal principle and there's this other... Yes, I love that. There's the... I forgot the name of this other blog post but it's basically about this book Seeing Like a State that talks about the need for legibility and people who optimize the system for its legibility and anytime you make a system... So legible is basically more understandable. Anytime you make a system more understandable from the top down, it performs less well from the bottom up. And it's fine but you should at least make this trade-off with your eyes wide open. You should know, I am sacrificing performance for understandability, for legibility. And in this case, for you, it makes sense. It's like you are actually optimizing for legibility. You do want to understand your code base but in some other cases it may not make sense. Sometimes it's better to leave the system alone and let it be its glorious, chaotic, organic self and just trust that it's going to perform well even though you don't understand it completely.
Swyx [00:45:55]: It does remind me of a common managerial issue or dilemma which you experienced in the small scale of Lindy where, you know, do you want to organize your company by functional sections or by products or, you know, whatever the opposite of functional is. And you tried it one way and it was more legible to you as CEO but actually it stopped working at the small level. Yeah.
Flo [00:46:17]: I mean, one very small example, again, at a small scale is we used to have everything on Notion. And for me, as founder, it was awesome because everything was there. The roadmap was there. The tasks were there. The postmortems were there. And so, the postmortem was linked
Swyx [00:46:31]: to its task.
Flo [00:46:32]: It was optimized for you. Exactly. And so, I had this, like, one pane of glass and everything was on Notion. And then the team, one day,
Swyx [00:46:39]: came to me with pitchforks
Flo [00:46:40]: and they really wanted to implement Linear. And I had to bite my fist so hard. I was like, fine, do it. Implement Linear. Because I was like, at the end of the day, the team needs to be able to self-organize and pick their own tools.
Alessio [00:46:51]: Yeah. But it did make the company slightly less legible for me. Another big change you had was going away from remote work, every other month. The discussion comes up again. What was that discussion like? How did your feelings change? Was there kind of like a threshold of employees and team size where you felt like, okay, maybe that worked. Now it doesn't work anymore. And how are you thinking about the future
Flo [00:47:12]: as you scale the team? Yeah. So, for context, I used to have a business called TeamFlow. The business was about building a virtual office for remote teams. And so, being remote was not merely something we did. It was, I was banging the remote drum super hard and helping companies to go remote. And so, frankly, in a way, it's a bit embarrassing for me to do a 180 like that. But I guess, when the facts changed, I changed my mind. What happened? Well, I think at first, like everyone else, we went remote by necessity. It was like COVID and you've got to go remote. And on paper, the gains of remote are enormous. In particular, from a founder's standpoint, being able to hire from anywhere is huge. Saving on rent is huge. Saving on commute is huge for everyone and so forth. But then, look, we're all here. It's like, it is really making it much harder to work together. And I spent three years of my youth trying to build a solution for this. And my conclusion is, at least we couldn't figure it out and no one else could. Zoom didn't figure it out. We had like a bunch of competitors. Like, Gathertown was one of the bigger ones. We had dozens and dozens of competitors. No one figured it out. I don't know that software can actually solve this problem. The reality of it is, everyone just wants to get off the darn Zoom call. And it's not a good feeling to be in your home office if you're even going to have a home office all day. It's harder to build culture. It's harder to get in sync. I think software is peculiar because it's like an iceberg. It's like the vast majority of it is submerged underwater. And so, the quality of the software that you ship is a function of the alignment of your mental models about what is below that waterline. Can you actually get in sync about what it is exactly fundamentally that we're building? What is the soul of our product? And it is so much harder to get in sync about that when you're remote. And then you waste time in a thousand ways because people are offline and you can't get a hold of them or you can't share your screen. It's just like you feel like you're walking in molasses all day. And eventually, I was like, okay, this is it. We're not going to do this anymore.
Swyx [00:49:03]: Yeah. I think that is the current builder San Francisco consensus here. Yeah. But I still have a big... One of my big heroes as a CEO is Sid Subban from GitLab.
Flo [00:49:14]: Mm-hmm.
Swyx [00:49:15]: Matt Mullenweg
Flo [00:49:16]: used to be a hero.
Swyx [00:49:17]: But these people run thousand-person remote businesses. The main idea is that at some company size, your company is remote anyway. Yeah. Because if you go from one building to two buildings, congrats, you're now remote from the other building. If you want to go from one city office to two city offices, they're remote from each other.
Flo [00:49:35]: But the teams are co-located. Every time anyone talks about remote success stories, they always talk about this real force. Yeah. It's always GitLab and WordPress and Zapier. Zapier. It used to be Envision. And I will point out that in every one of these examples, you have a co-located counterfactual that is sometimes orders of magnitude bigger. Look, I like Matt Mullenweg a lot, but WordPress is a commercial failure. They run 60% of the internet and they're like a fraction of the size of even Substack. Right?
Swyx [00:50:05]: They're trying to get more money.
Flo [00:50:07]: Yeah, that's my point, right? Look, GitLab is much smaller than GitHub. Envision, you know, is no more. And Figma, like, completely took off. And Figma was like very in-person. So, I think if you're optimizing for productivity, if you really know, hey, this is a support ticket, right, and I want to have my support ticket for a buck 50 per support ticket and next year I want it for a buck 20, then sure, send your support ticket team to offshore, like the Philippines or whatever, and just optimize for cost. If you're optimizing for cost, absolutely be remote. If you're optimizing for creativity, which I think that software and product building is a creative endeavor, if you're optimizing for creativity, it's kind of like you have to be in person and hear the music to do that.
Swyx [00:50:52]: Yeah. Maybe the line is that all jobs that can be remote should be AI or Lindy's and all jobs that are not remote are in person. Like, there's a very,
Flo [00:51:04]: very clear separation of jobs. Sure. Well, I think over the long term,
Swyx [00:51:09]: every job is going to be AI anyway. It would be curious to break down what you think is creativity in coding and in product defining and how to express that for sure. You're definitely what I call a temperature zero use case of LLMs. You want it to be reliable, predictable, small. And then there's other use cases of LLMs that are more for creativity and engines. Right? I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure no one uses Lindy for brainstorming. Actually,
Flo [00:51:36]: probably they do. I use Lindy for brainstorming
Swyx [00:51:38]: a lot, actually. Yeah, yeah. But you want to have something that's anti-fragile to hallucination. Hallucinations are good.
Flo [00:51:45]: By creativity, I mean, is it about direction or magnitude? If it is about direction, like decide what to do, then it's a creative endeavor. If it is about magnitude and just do it as fast as possible, as cheap as possible, then it's magnitude. And so sometimes, you know, software companies are not necessarily creative. Sometimes you know what you're doing. And I'll say that it's going to come across the wrong way, but linear. I look up to a huge amount, like such amazing product builders, but they know what they're building. They're building a I don't mean to throw shade at them. Like, good for them.
Swyx [00:52:20]: I think they're aware that they're not like They recently got s**t for saying that they have work-life balance on their job description.
Flo [00:52:26]: They're like, what do you mean by this? We're building a new kind of product that no one's ever built before. And so we're just scratching our heads all day trying to get in sync about like, what exactly is it
Swyx [00:52:37]: that we're building? What does it consist of? Inherently creative struggle. Yeah. Dare we ask about San Francisco? And there's a whole bunch of tough stuff in here. Probably the biggest one I would just congratulate you on is becoming American, right? Very French, but your heart was sort of in the U.S. You eventually found your way here. What are your takes for founders? A few years ago, you wrote this post on Go West, young man. And now you've basically completed that journey, right? You're now here and up to the point where you're kind of mystified by how Europe has been so decel.
Flo [00:53:11]: In a way, though, I feel vindicated because I was making the prediction that Europe was over 14 years ago or something like that. I think it's been a walking corpse for a long time. I think it is only now becoming obvious that it is paying the consequences of its policies from 10, 20, 30 years ago. I think at this point, I wish I could rewrite the Go West, young man article but really even more extreme. I think at this point, if you are in tech, especially in AI, but if you're in tech and you're not in San Francisco, you either lack judgment or you lack ambition. It's funny, I recently told that to someone and they were like, oh, not everyone wants to be like a unicorn founder. And I was like, like I said, judgment or ambition. It's fine to not have ambition. It's fine to want to prioritize other things than your company in life or your career in life. That's perfectly okay. But know that that's the trade-off you're making. If you prioritize your career, you've got to be here.
Alessio [00:54:03]: As a fellow European escapist, I grew up in Rome.
Flo [00:54:05]: Yeah, how do you feel?
Swyx [00:54:06]: We never talk about your feelings about Europe.
Alessio [00:54:08]: Yeah, I've been in the U.S. now six years. Well, I started my first company in Europe 10 years ago, something like that. Yeah, you can tell nobody really wants to do much. And then you're like, okay. It's funny, I was looking back through some old tweets and I was sending all these tweets to Marc Andreessen like 15 years ago like trying to like learn more about why are you guys putting money in these things that most people here would say you're like crazy to like even back. And eventually, you know, I started doing venture six, five years ago. And I think just like so many people in Europe reach out and ask, hey, can you like talk to our team and they just cannot comprehend like the risk appetite that people have here. It's just like so foreign to people, at least in Italy and like in some parts of Europe. I'm sure there's some great founders in Europe, but like the average European founders, like why would I leave my job at the post office to go work on the startup that could change everything and become very successful but might go out of business instead in the U.S. You have like, you know, we host a hackathon and it's like 400 people and it's like, where can I go work that it's like no job security, you know? It's just like completely different and there's no incentives from the government to change that. There's no way you can like change such a deep-rooted culture of like, you know, going and wine and April spritz
Flo [00:55:27]: and all of that
Alessio [00:55:28]: early in the afternoon.
Flo [00:55:29]: So, I don't really know how it's going to change.
Alessio [00:55:32]: It's quality of life. Yeah, totally. That's why I left. The quality is so high that I left. But again, I think it's better to move here and just, if you want to do this job and do this, you should be here. If you don't want to, that's fine.
Flo [00:55:47]: But like,
Alessio [00:55:48]: don't copium. Don't be like, oh no, you can also be successful doing this and knees or like whatever. No, probably not, you know? So,
Flo [00:55:59]: yeah,
Alessio [00:56:00]: I've already done my N400
Flo [00:56:01]: so I should get my U.S. citizenship interview soon. Yeah. And I think to be fair, I think what's happening right now to Europe and they've said no to capitalism. They've decided to say no to capitalism a long time ago. They've like completely over-regulated. Taxation is much too high and so forth. But I also think some of this is a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy or it's a self-perpetuating phenomenon because, look, to your point, like once there is a network effect that's just so incredibly powerful, they can't be broken, really. And we tried with San Francisco. I tried with San Francisco. Like during COVID,
Swyx [00:56:35]: there was a movement of people moving to Miami.
Flo [00:56:38]: How did that pan out? You can't break the network effect,
Swyx [00:56:41]: you know? It's so annoying because first principles wise, tech should not be here. Like tech should be in Miami because it's just a better city.
Flo [00:56:48]: San Francisco does not want tech to be here.
Swyx [00:56:50]: San Francisco hates tech.
Flo [00:56:51]: 100%.
Swyx [00:56:52]: This is the thing I actually wrote down.
Alessio [00:56:54]: San Francisco hates tech. It is true. I think the people that are in San Francisco that were here before, tech hated it and then there's kind of like this passed down thing. But I would say people in Miami would hate it too if there were too much of it. You know? The Mickey Beach crowd would also not gel.
Swyx [00:57:08]: They're just rich enough and chill enough to not care.
Flo [00:57:10]: Yeah, I think so too.
Swyx [00:57:11]: They're like, oh, crypto kids.
Flo [00:57:13]: Okay, cool. Yeah. Miami celebrates success which is one thing
Swyx [00:57:17]: I loved about it.
Flo [00:57:18]: A little bit too much.
Swyx [00:57:19]: Maybe the last thing I'll mention, I just wanted a little bit of EUAC talk. I think that's good. I'll maybe carve out that I think the UK has done really well. That's an argument for the UK not being part of Europe is that, you know, the AI institutions there at least have done very well. Right?
Flo [00:57:34]: Sure. I think a lot of Britain is in the gutter. Yeah, exactly.
Swyx [00:57:38]: They've been stagnating at best. And then France has a few wins.
Flo [00:57:41]: Who?
Swyx [00:57:42]: Mistral.
Flo [00:57:43]: Who uses Mistral?
Swyx [00:57:44]: Hugging face.
Flo [00:57:45]: A few wins.
Swyx [00:57:46]: I'm just saying. They disappointed their first AI minister. You know the meme with the guy
Flo [00:57:51]: who's celebrating with his trophy and then he's like, no, that's France. Right? To me, that's France. It's like, aha, look, we've got Mistral! It's like champagne! It's like maybe 1% of market share. And by the way, and it's not a critic of them, it's a critic of France and of Europe. And by the way, I think I've heard that the Mistral guys were moving to the US. They're opening an office here. They're opening an office here. But, I mean,
Swyx [00:58:15]: they're very French, right?
Flo [00:58:16]: Right.
Swyx [00:58:17]: You can't really avoid it. There's one interesting counter move which is Jason Warner and ISOCAT moving to Paris for poolside. I don't know. It remains to be seen how that move is going. Maybe the last thing I'll say, you know, that's the Europe talk. We try not to do politics so much, but you're here. One thing that you do a lot is you test your overturned windows. Right? Like far more than any founder I know. You know it's not your job. Someone, for sure, you're just indulging. But also, I think you consciously test. And I just want to see what drives you there and why do you keep doing it? Because you treat very spicy stuff, especially for like the San Francisco sort of liberal dynasty.
Flo [00:58:59]: I don't know because I assume you're referring to I posted something about pronouns and how nonsense...
Swyx [00:59:05]: Just in general. I don't want you to focus on any particular thing unless you want to.
Flo [00:59:09]: You know, well, that tweet in particular, when I was tweeting it, I was like, oh, this is kind of spicy. Should I do this? And then I just did it. And I received zero pushback.
Swyx [00:59:20]: And the tweet was actually
Flo [00:59:21]: pretty successful and I received a lot of people reaching out like, oh my God, so true. I think it's coming from a few different places. One, life is more fun this way. Like I don't feel like if everyone always self-censors, you never know what everyone, what anyone thinks. And so it's becoming like a self-perpetuating thing. It's like a public lies, private truth sort of phenomenon. Or like, you know, there's this phenomenon called the preference cascade. It's like, there's this joke. It's like, oh, there's only one communist left in USSR. The problem is no one knows which one it is. So everyone pretends to be communist because everyone else pretends to be communist. And so I think there's a role to be played when you have a boss who's going to fire me. It's like, look, if I don't speak up and if founders don't speak up, I'm like, why? What are you afraid of? Right? Like, there's really not that much downside. And I think there's
Swyx [01:00:14]: something to be said about standing up for what you think is right and being real and owning your opinions. I think there's a correlation there between having that level of independence for your political beliefs and free speech or whatever and the way
Flo [01:00:27]: that you think about business too. But I think there's such a powerful insight at its core, which is groupthink is real and pervasive and really problematic. Like, your brain constantly shuts down because you're not even thinking in your other way or you're not thinking. You just look around you and you decide to adopt the same beliefs as people around you. And everyone thinks
Swyx [01:00:48]: they're immune
Flo [01:00:49]: and everyone else
Swyx [01:00:50]: is doing it
Flo [01:00:51]: except themselves. I'm a special snowflake. I have free will. That's right. And so I actually make it a point to look for, and then I think about it and I'm like, do I believe this thing? And very often the answer is yes. And then I just say it. And so I think the AI safety is an example of that. Like, at some point, Marc Andreessen blocked me on Twitter and it hurt, frankly. I really look up to Marc Andreessen
Swyx [01:01:13]: and I knew he would block me. It means you're successful on Twitter.
Flo [01:01:17]: It's just the right message. Marc Andreessen was really my booster initially on Twitter. He really made my account. And I was like, look, I'm really concerned about AI safety. It is an unpopular view
Swyx [01:01:27]: among my peers. I remember, you were one of the few that actually came out in support of the bill.
Flo [01:01:32]: I came out in support of SB1047 a year and a half ago. I put like some tweet storms about how I was really concerned. And yeah, I was blocked by a bunch of AI safety people and I don't like it, but you know, it's funny, maybe it's my French education. But look, in France, World War II is very present in people's minds and the phenomenon of people collaborating with the Nazis and there's always this sort of debate that people have like at dinner and it's like, ah, would you really have resisted during World War II? And everybody is always saying, oh yeah, we totally have resisted. It's like, yeah, but no. The reality of it is 95% of the country did not resist and most of it actually collaborated actively with the Nazis. And so 95% of y'all are wrong. You would actually have collaborated, right? I've always told myself I will stand up for what I think is right because some people got attacked and the way I was brought up is if someone gets attacked before you, you get involved. It doesn't matter, you get involved and you help the person, right? And so, look, I'm not pretending we're nowhere near a World War II phenomenon but I'm like, exactly because we are nowhere near
Alessio [01:02:45]: this kind of phenomenon. The stakes are so low and if you're not going to stand up
Flo [01:02:49]: for what you think is right when the stakes are so low,
Swyx [01:02:52]: are you going to stand up when it matters? There's an inconsistency in your statements because you simultaneously believe that AGI is very soon and you also say stakes are low. You can't believe both are real.
Flo [01:03:03]: Well, why does AGI make the stakes of speaking up higher?
Swyx [01:03:06]: Sorry, the stakes of safety.
Flo [01:03:08]: Oh yeah, no, the stakes of AI
Swyx [01:03:11]: are like physical safety?
Flo [01:03:12]: No, AI safety. Oh no, the stakes of AI safety couldn't be higher.
Swyx [01:03:17]: I meant the stakes
Flo [01:03:18]: of speaking up about
Alessio [01:03:19]: pronouns or whatever. How do you figure out who's real and who isn't? Because there was a manifesto for responsible AI that hundreds of VCs and people signed and I don't think anybody actually thinks about it anymore.
Flo [01:03:30]: Was that the pause letter?
Swyx [01:03:31]: The six-month pause?
Flo [01:03:32]: No,
Alessio [01:03:33]: there was something else that I think general catalyst and some fun sign. And then there's maybe the anthropic case which is like, hey, we're leaving open AI because you guys don't take security seriously and then it's like, hey, what if we gave AI access to a whole computer
Flo [01:03:49]: to just go do things?
Alessio [01:03:50]: How do you reconcile like, okay, I mean, you could say the same thing about Lindy. It's like, if you're worried about AI safety, why are you building AI? Right? That's kind of like the extreme thinking. How do you internally decide between participation and talking about it and saying, hey, I think this is important but I'm still going to build towards that and building actually makes it safer because I'm involved versus just being like anti. I think this is unsafe but then not do anything about it and just kind of remove yourself
Flo [01:04:20]: from the whole thing. What I think about our own involvement here is I'm acutely concerned about the risks at the model layer and I'm simultaneously very excited about the upside. Like, for the record, my PDoom, insofar as I can quantify it, which I cannot, but if I had to, like my vibe is like 10% or something like that and so there's like a 90% chance that we live in like a pure utopia. Right? And that's awesome. Right? So like, let's go after utopia. Right? Let's talk about the 10% chance that we live in a utopia where there's no disease and it's like a post-scarcity world. I think that utopia is going to happen through, like again, I'm bringing my little contribution to the movement. I think it would be silly to say no to the upside because you're concerned about the downside. At the same time, we want to be concerned about the downside. I know that it's very self-serving to say, oh, you know, like the downside doesn't exist at my layer, it exists at like the model layer. But truly, look at Lindy, look at the Apple building. I struggle to see exactly how it would like get up if I'm concerned about the model layer.
Swyx [01:05:21]: Okay. Well, this kind of discussion can go on for hours. It is still daylight, so not the best time for it. But I really appreciate you spending the time. Any other last calls to actions or thoughts that you feel like you want to get off your chest?
Flo [01:05:33]: AGI is coming.
Flo [01:05:37]: Are you hiring
Alessio [01:05:38]: for any roles? We are.
Flo [01:05:40]: Oh yeah, I guess that should be the...
Swyx [01:05:43]: Don't bother.
Flo [01:05:44]: No, can you stop saying AGI is coming and just talk about it? We are also hiring yeah, we are hiring designers and engineers right now. Yeah. So hit me up at flo.lindy.ai
Alessio [01:05:55]: And then go talk to my Lindy. You're not actually going to read it.
Flo [01:05:58]: Actually, I have wondered
Swyx [01:05:59]: how many times when I talk to you, I'm talking to a bot. Part of that is I don't have to know, right?
Flo [01:06:05]: That's right. Well, it's actually doubly confusing because we also have a teammate
Swyx [01:06:09]: whose name is Lindy. Yes, I was wondering when I met her, I was like, wait, did you hire her first?
Flo [01:06:14]: Marketing is fun. No, she was an inspiration after we named the company both after her. Oh, okay.
Swyx [01:06:19]: Interesting. Yeah, wonderful. I'll comment on the design piece just because I think that there are a lot of AI companies that very much focus on the functionality and the models and the capabilities and the benchmark. But I think that increasingly I'm seeing people differentiate with design and people want to use beautiful products and people who can figure that out and integrate the AI into their human lives. You know, design at the limit. One, at the lowest level is to make this look pretty, make this look like Stripe or Linear's homepage. That's design. But at the highest level of design it is make this integrate seamlessly into my life. Intuitive, beautiful, inspirational maybe even. And I think that companies that, you know, this is kind of like a blog post I've been thinking about, companies that emphasize design actually are going to win more than companies that don't. Yeah,
Flo [01:07:06]: I love Steve Jobs' quote and I'm going to butcher it. It's something like, design is the expression of the soul of a man-made product through successive layers of design. Jesus. Right? He was good. He was cooking. He was cooking on that one. He was cooking. It starts with the soul of the product which is why I was saying it is so important to reach alignment about that soul of the product, right? It's like an onion, like you peel the onion in those layers, right? And you design an entire journey just like the user experiencing your product chronologically all the way from the beginning of like the awareness stage I think it is also the job of the designer to design that part of the experience. It's like, okay, design is immensely important. Okay.
Alessio [01:07:46]: Lovely. Yeah.
Flo [01:07:48]: Thanks for coming on, Flo. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latent.space/subscribe
Emergency Pod: ChatGPT's App Store Moment (w/ OpenAI's Logan Kilpatrick, LindyAI's Florent Crivello and Nader Dabit)
This blogpost has been updated since original release to add more links and references.
The ChatGPT Plugins announcement today could be viewed as the launch of ChatGPT’s “App Store”, a moment as significant as when Apple opened its App Store for the iPhone in 2008 or when Facebook let developers loose on its Open Graph in 2010. With a dozen lines of simple JSON and a mostly-english prompt to help ChatGPT understand what the plugin does, developers will be able to add extensions to ChatGPT to get information and trigger actions in the real world.
OpenAI itself launched with some killer first party plugins for:
* Browsing the web,
* writing AND executing Python code (in an effortlessly multimodal way),
* retrieving embedded documents from external datastores,
* as well as 11 launch partner plugins from Expedia to Milo to Zapier.
My recap thread was well received:
But the thing that broke my brain was that ChatGPT’s Python Interpreter plugin can run nontrivial code - users can upload video files and ask ChatGPT to edit it, meaning it now has gone beyond mere chat to offer a substantial compute platform with storage, memory and file upload/download.
I immediately started my first AI Twitter Space to process this historical moment with Alessio and friends of the pod live. OpenAI’s Logan (see Episode 1 from *last month*…) suggested that you might be able to link ChatGPT up with Zapier triggers to do arbitrary tasks! and then Flo Crivello, who just launched his AI Assistant startup Lindy, joined us to discuss the builder perspective.
Tune in on this EMERGENCY EPISODE of Latent Space to hear developers ask and debate all the issues spilling out from the ChatGPT Plugins launch - and let us know in the comments if you want more/have further questions!
SPECIAL NOTE: I was caught up in the hype and was far more negative on Replit than I initially intended as I tried to figure out this new ChatGPT programming paradigm. I regret this. Replit is extremely innovative and well positioned to help you develop and host ChatGPT plugins, and of course Amjad is already on top of it:
Mea culpa.
Timestamps
* [00:00:38] First Reactions to ChatGPT Plugins
* [00:07:53] Q&A: Keeping up with AI
* [00:10:39] Q&A: ChatGPT Intepreter changes Programming
* [00:12:27] Q&A: ChatGPT for Education
* [00:15:21] Q&A: GPT4 Sketch to Website Demo
* [00:16:32] Q&A: AI Competition and Human Jobs
* [00:18:44] ChatGPT Plugins as App Store
* [00:34:40] Google vs ChatGPT
* [00:36:04] Nader Dabit on Selling His GPT App
* [00:43:16] Q&A: ChatGPT Waitlist and Voice
* [00:45:26] LangChain with Human in the Loop
* [00:46:58] Google vs Microsoft vs Apple
* [00:51:43] ChatGPT Plugin Ideas
* [00:53:49] Not an app store?
* [00:55:24] LangChain and the Future of AI
* [01:00:48] Q&A: ChatGPT Bots and Cronjobs
* [01:04:43] Logan Joins Us!
* [01:07:14] Q&A: Plugins Rollout
* [01:08:26] Q&A: Plugins Discovery
* [01:10:00] Q&A: OpenAI vs BingChat
* [01:11:03] Q&A: App Store Monetization
* [01:14:45] Q&A: ChatGPT Plugins API
* [01:17:17] Q&A: Python Interpreter
* [01:19:58] The History of App Stores and Marketplaces
* [01:22:40] LindyAI's Flo Crivello Joins Us
* [01:29:42] AI Safety
* [01:31:07] Multimodal GPT4
* [01:32:10] Designing AI-safe APIs
* [01:34:39] Flo's Closing Comments
Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Latent Space Emergency episode. This is our first ever where chatty PT just dropped a plugin ecosystem today, or at least they demoed their plugins. It's still on the wait list, but it is the app store moment for ai. And we did an emergency two hour space with Logan from OpenAI and Flo Coveo from Lin AI and a bunch of our friends.
[00:00:28] And if you ever wanted to listen to what it's like to hear developers process in real time when a new launch happens, this is it. Enjoy,
[00:00:38] First Reactions to ChatGPT Plugins
[00:00:38] I assume everyone has read the blog post. For me the, the big s**t was do you see Greg Brockman's tweet about FFMPEG? I did not. I should check it out. It is amazing. Okay, so. So ChatGPT can generate Python code. We knew this, this is not new, and they can now run the code that it generates.
[00:00:58] This is not new. I mean this is like, this is good. It's not like surprising. It's, it's fine. It can run FFMPEG code. You can upload a file, ask it to edit the video file, and it can process the video file and then it can give you the link to download the video file. So it's a general purpose compute platform.
[00:01:22] Wow. Did they show how to do this? Agents? I just, I just, I just pinned it. I just, it did I, did I turn into this space? I dunno how to use it. Yeah, it's, it's showing up there. Okay. It can run like is. Is, is, is my And by, by the way hi to people. I, I don't know how to run spaces. I, I not something I normally do.
[00:01:42] But You wanna say something? Please request. But yeah, reactions have a look at this video because it run, it generates and runs video editing code. You can upload any arbitrary file. It seems to have good enough compute and memory and file storage. This is not chat anymore, man. I don't know what the hell this is.
[00:02:01] What, what is this?
[00:02:02] Well, progress has been all faster than I expected. . That's all I can, I, I, I don't know how to respond. . Yeah. It's pretty wild. I wonder, I wonder, I'm wondering how, how this will affect, like opening up the app store different from, let's say Apple App Store when it opened up. Because there are a lot of, of big companies just building stuff already and how like a small developer will be able to, to build something that's not already there.
[00:02:31] I dunno. It will be interesting. So one thing that's really nice, have you seen the installation process for the plugins? It's right at the bottom of the blog post and you have to play the video to kind of see it, but literally anybody can write your own plugin. It's a small little json file. It's, it's literally like 10 lines of code.
[00:02:49] It's 10 nights of, you described what your plugin does in English, you given an open API spec. That's it. That, that's, that's the plugin. It's amazing. You can distribute your plugin. This is, this is, this is easier than extensions manifest v3, which nobody knows how to use. This is English.
[00:03:15] You write English . So, so, yeah. I mean I think, I think I think there'll be a lot of people trying to develop for this if they can get access, which you know, everybody's on a wait list. I, I've, I've signed up to 200 wait lists this week. . I wonder if, if it'll be different if you, if you sign up as a, as a developer or as the chat user.
[00:03:35] Hopefully it doesn't matter, right? Use different emails and sign up to both. Let's, let's just see, in fact, use t to generate like, plausible sounding reasons for why you want to build whatever. Cause they don.
[00:03:47] But yeah, I mean, how do you compete? I, I don't know, man. You know, it, it's really OpenAI is definitely a partnership strategy to do what they do here which means they're essentially picking favorites. So if you're a competitor of Expedia Kayak Open Table Wolf from Zapier, you're a s**t out of luck, kind of, you know?
[00:04:06] Cause these are presumptive winners of their spaces. Right. And it'll happen in too many industries, probably. Right. I was thinking about maybe summarization or, or I don't know, YouTube video summarization, but there seems to be some application of that already on the examples that you shared. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:04:26] They have shared that, but I think there's always room to improve the experience. It's just, you know It's interesting which platform, like sort of platform strategy, right? Like if you write an OpenAI chat plugin, you instantly gain access to a hundred million users, right? All of them can instantly use your thing.
[00:04:47] Whereas if you are a standalone app or company, good luck trying to able to use OpenAI through you. There's just no point. So you much rather just be on OpenAI platform and promote there. The the fortunate thing is they don't have some kind of like popularity ranking yet. Actually, someone should go open, someone should do register, like OpenAI plugins list.com or something where like everyone can like submit their own opening app plugins and like upload them, review them cuz this like, this is not a complete app store without reviews and a rating system and a reputation system and probably monetization opening app probably doesn't care about that.
[00:05:26] But I mean, I can go start that right now. F**k. I can go start it right now.
[00:05:34] Yeah, it'll, it'll take a while, right? Like this is the, like the basic version of the, of the app evolving. But this is a pretty basic version. Yeah. The basic version can browse the web, it can write, write an execute code. It can retrieve you know, we can retrieve data from documents, right? So all the documents search just died.
[00:06:02] There's like five of these in Y Combinator right now. Oh.
[00:06:08] Examples. Pretty crazy how, how they use the FFMPEG library or, I dunno if I'm saying that correctly, but right in there. You don't need to, to write code to,
[00:06:27] it's crazy. Dunno. Yeah. Any reactions? Please, please, you know, open space. Anyone can request a speaker. Oh, Ash, come on in. Ash. I have to add you a speaker. Yeah, we're, we're just reacting here. I just, I, I needed a place to talk and I'm in Japan and I don't have anyone else to talk to, so I need, I, I I just want to share this moment.
[00:06:46] I think it's a special moment in history. This is the biggest new app source since ever. Yeah. Hey, Shawn. I think plugin is already taken. . Oh man. Someone, someone bought it already. Yep. , of course. Right? Of course. , what are your reactions? What how are you feeling? What's what are you seeing out there?
[00:07:07] Just crowdsource all the tweeting. Yeah, man, it's, it's been wild. I mean, I get out of there to like five minutes and then anything drops, you know, , I think productivity today will be like zero. If I, if I still, like, I quit my job you know, a few weeks ago but I would not be working today. There, there's no point.
[00:07:26] There's nothing else. There's nothing else that's important, like, nothing's going on. Like this is the only story. Yep. . I wonder if you have any, any frameworks or anyone that's listening any frameworks on, on how you're handling all of this new, new stuff. Like every single day if something new comes up and, or you can like get the, the wait list invitations to, to use the new products.
[00:07:52] Q&A: Keeping up with AI
[00:07:52] Like, for example, today I just got the, the one from GIK cli and I was just playing around with that. And then suddenly I started to see all of the, these Twitter threads with announcements. It's getting crazy just to follow up with, with the stuff. And every day something new comes up and started. I was starting to feel a lot of formal, you know, like, h how do you keep up with all of these?
[00:08:12] Or how do you focus? Does anyone have any, any good frameworks for that? Well, feel free to respond. Also, we, we have some more room if anyone wants to share your feelings. This is a, this is a safe space to share your feelings because. We all dunno how to react right now. I don't know. I just, I, I, I have a few notifications on for OpenAI employees and people that I do that I think do good recaps.
[00:08:37] So in other words, find the people who are high signal and who do a lot of gathering of other people's stuff for, and then just subscribe to those people and trust that that is 90% of it and forget the 10%
[00:08:57] Alright. And Sean probably, I have, I have another question. So I can't really figure out like what's left for us to do, you know, without AI tools. Like what, what is we learn next? You know, there's no learning some coding stuff, because you can only do that. You know, we can't do arts, we can't do poetry.
[00:09:17] Farming
[00:09:17] bakery, probably making things with your hands. Enjoying the sun.
[00:09:23] Do you guys think this should be regulated? Like you don't go more than like the speed is going? I don't know. I dunno. There's, there's no point. Like if, like, if you regulate OpenAI, then someone else will come along. The secret is out now that you can't do this, and at most you'll slow things down by 10 years.
[00:09:44] You called the secret. This is the end. . Yeah. Yeah. I, I don't know. Secret is out. China's trying to do it right, so I don't know if people have seen, but like China was, was fairly strict on crypto, which is probably good for them. And now they're, they're also trying to clamp down on AI stuff, which is funny because oa like they're, you know, the m i t of of China Ihu, I was actually doing like producing like really good bilingual models.
[00:10:10] But yeah, they, they seem to be locking this down, so we'll see. We'll see. Right? Like you know, in, in, in sort of the, the free world there, there's open innovation that may be unsafe. OpenAI, try to be safe. You know, there, there's a big part of the blog post that was talk, talking about red team meeting and all that.
[00:10:24] I'm sure every one of us skipped it. I skipped it. And then and then we just care about capabilities and now that, you know, every time people have their minds opened, like, I did not know Ron. EG in chat.
[00:10:38] Q&A: ChatGPT Intepreter changes Programming
[00:10:38] Now that I know my conception of what a REPL is, or literate programming or what a notebook is, is completely blown outta the water, right?
[00:10:44] Like there's no like this, this is a new form factor for me. So not now that I know that I won't be innovating on that or trying to, to shape this into something that I can use because I want to use this, and this is, this is clearly better. Does, does this ha have to do with, with the, like AI as backend?
[00:11:00] Yeah. Ideas that have been, yeah. You know, GP as backend. So, so apparently I had a few friends reach out to those guys and they're not doing that because it's not mature enough. Like it works for a simple demo. So, so for, for those who don't know ScaleAI did a hackathon I think two months ago just before I did mine.
[00:11:18] And the winner on the hackathon was, was something called GPT is all you need for backend. And they actually what in register? DBC is backend.com. But as far as I can tell, they're not gonna start a company based on that because if you even push a little bit, it falls apart, right? So GPT3 wasn't good enough for that.
[00:11:36] Maybe GPT4 is maybe GPT5, but then it'll still be super slow and super expensive. Like you don't want to run, you know, a large language model on every API request. So I don't know. I think it'll be good for scaffolding. I think it'll be good for re type use cases. Like, Hey, I need to edit this video on an ad hoc basis.
[00:11:53] I don't, I don't want to learn FFMPEG. I don't need to now, because I can just talk to ChatGPT. That makes sense. But if you want a reliable, scalable backend you probably don't want to use it on a large language model, but that's okay because language model can probably help you write it rather than run it.
[00:12:13] Hey, Lessio. Hey guys. Oh yeah. Hey guys. What's up? Hey, yeah, we're, we're just, there's no structure. Just drop your reactions. Let's go. Awesome. Awesome, awesome guys.
[00:12:26] Q&A: ChatGPT for Education
[00:12:26] What do you think what if Shawn, what do you think if you could use you know AI and the education field, like, you know, like personal attribution system for students?
[00:12:35] What's the thought automation education or attribution edu edu education. Yeah. That is the holy grail. This is called the Blooms two Sigma problem. Like the, the, the, one of the big issues of education is we have to teach to the slowest person in the class. And, and, you know, I'm a beneficiary of, of a gifted education system where they take out you know, nominally high IQ people and put them in a separate class.
[00:12:56] And, and yeah, we did, we did do better. What if we can personalize every student's experience there's, there's some educational theory. This is called Bloom's two Sigma problem. Where the results will be better. I think that we are closer, but like, I still hope that we're pretty far , which sounds like a negative, like why do I want to deny education to students?
[00:13:18] Because if we are there, then we will have achieved theory of mind for ai. The AI has a very good model, is able to develop a representation of who you are, is able to develop theories that the test who you are in, in a short amount of time. And I, it's a very dangerous path to, to go down. So I want, I want us to go slowly rather than fast on, on the education front.
[00:13:41] Does that make sense? Yeah, definitely. It makes a lot sense and yeah, definitely. I think personally the education for each student and making it turn the best way would be great. And what do you think how about like, first of all, I'm, I'm having very curious, curious question, you know, like we are having, this week was full of launches, so how you guys are keeping up with if we're not, this is, I created the space though cuz I cannot handle it.
[00:14:05] Today, today was my breaking point. I was like I don't know what's happening anymore. Yeah, like every single day I'm just in constant anxiety that like everything I assumed about the world is gonna be thrown up. Like I don't know how to handle it. This is a therapy session, so feel free to express.
[00:14:21] Definitely. It's, it's been a very overwhelming feeling for everyone of us like that. I think, you know, like past two weeks and like the industry was definitely a lot, lot of ones we are definitely open for, you know, to discuss more about it. Thanks a lot for this space. Sean. Yeah. Appreciate. Yeah. Va one more thing.
[00:14:39] So I think that the most constrained version of education use cases is language teaching. So there are a few language teachers out there speak I think is one of them that is an OpenAI partner. And they're also part of the chat GPT plugin release. , but there are also other language tutor platforms.
[00:14:57] You can certainly have your news. There was one that was released maybe like four or five months ago that you can try to see what the experience is like. And you can, you can tell when the teacher has no idea who you are and it breaks the illusion that you're speaking to another human. So I, I just, you can experience that today and, and decipher yourself if we're ready for that.
[00:15:14] I hope that we're not ready and it seems like we're not ready. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Thanks a lot for sharing. And guys, what do you think?
[00:15:19] Q&A: GPT4 Sketch to Website Demo
[00:15:19] Like I, in the launch of four we have show that we could, you know, generate apps and web apps just from you know, like a single simple sketch, you know different tent.
[00:15:30] Just start from sketch. So what do you think like how, how it would be impacting the industry? It's all because it's not just like that, that sketch was very, was a very shitty sketch. Right. It was just like drawn on a piece of paper. But if you combine that with the multimodal, like it was that they had another part of that demo where they had a screenshot of the discord the opening eye discord and you're mm-hmm.
[00:15:57] and they put it in and it, it like read the entire screen to you and if you can read the entire screen, you can code the entire . Screen. So it's over like
[00:16:12] It's definitely, I think interaction, interaction designers, you know, like people who like, think design function still have some time. Yeah. I, I just, I just, I just tried the same thing, you know on bar today and it was like much more better than GPT3 so definitely it's you know, things are really changing.
[00:16:30] Q&A: AI Competition and Human Jobs
[00:16:30] Great forward. I'm, I'm really worried what we wanna do, you know? Do you think the competition will like stable everything? Like what competition? Anthropic. Well, like Google, Google won't race, I don't think. Google Race, like Google the fight. The one that, the one that launched the W links list of blog posts.
[00:16:50] That, that Google.
[00:16:55] Well, no, not, not the list. Not the list. Competitions will come. . I have a question. I mean I mean my fear is many of the jobs that are going away, whether it is developer and designers, because I mean, I think GPT four is very capable. So how to deal with it. I mean, it's going to replace, I mean, many of the jobs, that's for sure.
[00:17:16] Yeah. It's okay. We'll find new jobs or we'll, we'll not need jobs anymore. We should, we should also, Start universal basic income. That's, that, that is something I, I do believe, yeah, I think the, the main change is going from the web of like, syntax to like the web of Symantec. So if your job is valuable because, you know, a unique syntax or like, you know, how to transform things from like words to syntax, I think that will be a lot less useful going forward.
[00:17:45] But the Symantec piece is still important. So a lot of product work, it's not just writing CSS and HTML and like the backend for it. It's a lot more than that. So I just thinking about how do you change your skills to do that. But yeah, even the sketch, you know, you gotta like, you gotta draw the sketch and to draw the sketch, you gotta know where the button should go.
[00:18:06] You know, you have, you know, incorrect with it. Yeah. I'm just processing this as I, I just read the whole thing as well. And Yeah, I mean, it's been a wild wild couple of weeks and it's gotten me thinking that maybe all our role was over the past couple years was we were just middlemen to talk to computers, right?
[00:18:27] So we're sitting in between, it's over man PMs or business folks or whoever wanna build a product. And then as a software developer, you're just a middle manish talking to the machine and it seems like. N LP is the way forward and, oh, yeah. Yeah. It's, it's been it's been, it's been a while.
[00:18:42] ChatGPT Plugins as App Store
[00:18:42] Couple of weeks. It's, I feel like we all just have to move either move upstream or, or find other jobs. You just gotta move upstream, either toward product directly. Cuz right now the plugin is yeah, is, is just you know, it's still a very sanitized UI that is controlled by OpenAI. But imagine them opening up the ui portion as well.
[00:19:03] So you no longer need to have a siloed product that needs to integrate. ChatGPT instead you can bring your product directly into into ChatGPT, I don't think exactly. I think that would be probably the next next logical move after this, and I'm sure they're already thinking about that.
[00:19:22] So that's a great, I don't know if this is, it's wild. What are you guys think? Yeah. Yeah. Like, so before you came up, right, I was, I was talking about this like ChatGPT has at least a hundred million users. Why would you bring people to your platform rather than write a plugin for ChatGPT and use their platform?
[00:19:39] It's an open question now. Zapier just launched their integration. OpenAI and OpenAI just launched their integration of Zapier. Which one is gonna be more interesting? Probably OpenAI.
[00:19:50] Totally a hundred percent . this is the app store of wow, our century of our decade. Like, I don't know, maybe century. I, I think the thing with ster though, if you think about it, like how many native apps do you download every week, every month versus like how many web things you use. So I think it's all about whether or not long-term opening eyes incentivize to keep broadening the things you can do within the plugin space.
[00:20:17] And I think the lab, you know, as this technology gets more widespread, they're gonna have a lot more pressure from regulators, safety, blah, blah, blah. So I'm really curious to see you know, all, all the, all the government stuff that they'll, they'll have a congressional on this in six months and by then it will be completely irrelevant.
[00:20:34] It's like that beside that time, they, they, they called it the GameStop guy after he made like 20 million on GameStop. And he just, you know, he was like, yeah, you know, followed the rules, made a bunch of money for those who don't know, unless you're our co-host. On the, we were supposed to drop an episode today, which I was supposed to work on, and then Chatty Phi dropped this thing, and now I, I can't think about anything else.
[00:20:59] So this, this is my excuse for not, for for not working on the podcast today. . I know it's funny, we have like three, four recorded ones and spend last week, like GP four came out and we're like, okay, everybody's talking about this is irrelevant. What else? Anything else? Like, but I'm really excited about the, I, I feel like the first, the first use case for this, and I think he tweeted it about it too, is like, before if you had to do like data reformatting and stuff like that, it was really hard to do programmatically.
[00:21:32] You know, like you didn't have an natural language interface and now you have it. And before if you had to integrate things together, like you could explain it very easily, but you couldn't like, put the APIs together and now they kind of remove all that part. So I'm excited to see what this looks like.
[00:21:48] For commercial use cases, you know, you could see like, is there gonna be like a collaborative ChatGPT where like you're gonna have two, three people in the same conversation working on things. I think there's a lot of ui things that will improve. And so as we have lining from OpenAI for a second, almost pulled them up, but I'm sure you cannot talk about it
[00:22:07] But yeah, it'll be interesting to see. Yes, sir. We're extremely excited. Extremely excited. I, I don't, if you, I don't know what else I'm, I'm like, so as far as I can tell there's the, there's hacker and Twitter. I haven't looked at Reddit yet, but I'm sure there's a bunch of reactions on Reddit.
[00:22:23] I'm sure there's the OpenAI discord that we can also check out. I got locked out of the discord at some point, but yeah, anyone, anyone else like see news, demos, tweets the whole point of this is that it's live, so please feel free to share on comments or anything like that. But yeah. Yeah, the, the craziest thing I saw was the Mitchell from Hash.
[00:22:44] We tweeted about Yes. How the integrations actually work and you just write a open APIs back and then just use natural language to describe what it's supposed to do. And then their model does everything. I wonder if they're using the off-the-shelf model or they have like a fine tune model to actually run integrations.
[00:23:02] I wonder, I don't think they'll ever say it. Knowing them, probably they would just use the base one cuz they want, like, I think opening eyes kind of wants a God model, right? There's no point. It's not intellectually interesting to do small models, but like, like it's trivial. Yeah. Yeah. It's, this is a minor optimization problem as far as the, the long arc of history and the, the point is to build a gi safe agi and I, I do think this is kind of safe, right?
[00:23:33] Like, . One of the criticisms that people were saying on hacks was that this is very closed. Like it's, it is an app store. At any point opening, I can randomly decide to close this like they did for Codex, and then they change their minds. Whereas if you use something like Alan Chain, it is more open and something that at the same time, like clearly this is a better integration path than long-chain.
[00:23:56] Like, I much rather write this kind of plugin than a long-chain plugin. So they, they've managed to, I mean, they know how to ship man, like they're an AI research lab, but they also know how to ship product. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. I, I'm curious to see what the pricing models gonna look like. Also, I mean, if I'm writing the plugin, this is great because I don't even have to take care of the compute, you know, like, I just plug it in, then they actually run everything for me.
[00:24:26] Yeah, but how, how it'll be monetized. I mean if the is giving their plugin know Expedia, I mean, people will not go to their website. Yeah. I don't, I mean, yeah. I have no idea that they, I don't think they said also don't super care . Yeah. It's because in the, in the app store, it's transaction driven.
[00:24:46] But on Channel G, you're just paying a flat fee every month. So like, you can't really do revenue share on a flat fee. And I don't think that we use like, the Spotify model, but it's like a why not the amount of times? No, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Why not , you have Spotify. I just, Spotify model works. Cause swyx has power, right?
[00:25:05] Opening has power. Same thing. They have all the audience. Yeah. But every, every every song is like the same value. Like if you listen to song actor to song y. , like, you're gonna make the same money. Like if I'm calling the API to, for like the meme generator or if I'm calling the API for the, you know, business summary thing, they're probably gonna cost the firm things, you know, so it's kind of hard to model up for OpenAI to say, Hey, okay, we're charging, we're going from 20 to 35 bucks a month.
[00:25:36] But then like, how do you actually do royalties on a per model basis? Like how do people decide what royalties to negotiate? This probably needs to be a flat fee, but I dunno. Or put your credit card it OpenAI and then every time you wanna use a plugin, you pay for it separately. Uvp, usage based pricing all the way, and then you just get at the end of every month.
[00:25:58] Exactly the, the only question mark is like, how much does OpenAI value the training they on and like how much they wanna subsidize the usage. Canada they have, they have promised to not use any of our usage data for training. So, oh, but the, I think like the plugins, it's a, it's a different thing.
[00:26:16] It's like, like how you could, you could easily see how are like requests usually structure for like these things, you know, like, are people searching? So how are people searching for flights and stuff like that. I don't know. I haven't read the terms for like the actual plugin, you know, so. Well if anyone has please come up to speak cuz we're all processing this live.
[00:26:37] This is the therapy session. Yeah, go ahead. One thing I see is basically you have to change the plugin I mean, to ask anything or even if you did browsing, right? I mean I see. I mean, they are becoming directly competitor to Microsoft also, I think, because now a user can actually just see, I mean, instead of being chat or Google, I mean they, they just.
[00:27:04] Basically select the browsing plugin and basically get all the updated data. And other thing I see is basically you have to change the plugins. Like if you want to use the Expedia data, I don't know how it'll fit with the browsing plugin or you can select multiple plugins. But yeah, it is interesting.
[00:27:23] I mean, if we get access, yeah, there is no actual browsing plugin. The browsing is a new model. So just like you can select GT three, GT 3 45, GT four, there's a new model now that says browsing alpha. So you, you can use CHATT in browsing mode and then you can use it in plugins mode, which which is a different model again.
[00:27:45] So the, the plug browsing don't cross over.
[00:27:51] Oh, that's interesting. And how do you see, I mean, in this whole descending, they are becoming competitive to Microsoft or how they're playing it out. I mean, Bing is just by the way, like, yeah, this, this killed the bing wait list. Cuz you don't need to wait for Bing. You can just use the browser mode open of Chatt.
[00:28:11] How does it compete? It competes for sure. I don't think Microsoft cares. I don't think OpenAI cares. This is one of those things where like, you know, they are the two, two friends, you know, and they're clearly winning, so who cares? I don't like, I don't imagine it takes any of their mental bandwidth at all.
[00:28:29] Yeah. The main thing is Google is Yeah, the main, like how is Google competing? Well let's see. Right. Bard is out there. I haven't got us yet, but could be interesting. Again, like it doesn't seem like they have the shipping capacity or velocity of Open I Microsoft and. That is probably going to bite them eventually because there's already been a big brain drain.
[00:28:53] Something like four researchers, four, the top Google Brain researchers left Google Brain for OpenAI in January. And you know, those are the ones that I know about. And I, I imagine there's, there's quite a bit of brain, brain drain and firing going on at Google, so who knows.
[00:29:08] All right, well, any other topics, concerns? Hyperventilation, if you just wanna scream I can turn down the volume and you can just, ah, for like five minutes. , that was literally, I was like, I, I need to like scream and just, ah, because what is going on?
[00:29:29] I said that I'm filling out the form right now for the Oh, yeah. Okay. So wait list. So use use chat t to fill out that form. Right. And then, and then use a fake, use a different email and fill out the form a different way. This maximizes . I'm going to ask GT for what plugin do I want to build or, right, right.
[00:29:51] Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I, we can brainstorm. My plugins can live. Yeah. I think that will be a fun exercise. Like the, the main thing that breaks my brain is just this, this whole ability to run code, right? Like this is a new notebook, a new ripple. Mm-hmm. It, it looks like it has storage and it has memory.
[00:30:08] Probably it has GPUs. That, I mean, can we run Lama inside GP?
[00:30:19] I don't know if that's a, a model within a model. I think for me, most of the things come to like, you know, if I have my own personal assistant, what I want the assistant to do. I think like travel is like the first thing that comes to mind. Like, if I could use pt Yeah. Expedia, plug in with my calendar.
[00:30:39] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it needs to like know where I, where I'm supposed to be going to, you know, like if I just add a calendar that's like I'm going to, you know, room this week. Yeah. And then like can automatically both send my calendar and say, okay, these are like, or like the times that you like to travel, I know that you don't like ops and yada yada, yada.
[00:31:00] That's one thing that I've always, we had this thesis at my peers firm about personalized consumer. There's so many website like, . I go to a lot of basketball games and every time I open Ticketmaster or whatever, it always shows me that she's a seat. And like, I'm not gonna see, that's not what I, that's not the tickets I wanna buy, you know?
[00:31:18] But doesn't matter how many tickets I buy, never remembers that. So I think a way to say, to see, take all the information in and suggest, Hey, I saw that there's actually a price drop for the specific seats that you want, not for like any seats. You know, I think that would be a, a very good use case. So I've been a personal entertainment assistant for like, travel like going to shows, going to games.
[00:31:41] That would be cool. That's what I'll submit on the wait list. Then we'll see if anybody cares. Right. Did you see get Lindy? Yeah. Yeah. At the, maybe you wanna recap, get Lindy for people. I'm gonna pin it up on the. . Yeah. So basically and this is like the kind of like a assistant lend the ai, right?
[00:32:03] Yeah. Lend the ai it's on the board right now. Yeah. For those who can see it through the space. Yeah. Yeah. Actually at the AI Thinkers meet up the, the other day, you can basically like create all kind of like personal workflows and you, it kind of looks like integrations like zier, but it's actually just natural language.
[00:32:24] So you can pop this thing up on your desktop and say, trying to hire 10 software engineers. So go on LinkedIn and plan 10 software engineers. The next step, draft a, an email that says, I'm the CEO of this company and I'm trying to hire for my team. If you wanna talk. Then the next step is like, send emails to all these people and it's gonna use people data labs or something else that they use on the backend to get the emails.
[00:32:50] Then it actually sends the emails and. This is just gonna run in the background as if it was like you actually doing it. It's pretty neat that you don't have to write the actual integrations. Like it just uses natural language so you're not bound by what they build. Like theoretically anything you wanna integrate with, you can just explain to it how it works and it's gonna figure out how to do it.
[00:33:12] So there's a wait list now. Flow didn't give us any papers just because we were at the meetup, so I'm also waiting to get access to it, but it looks really, really good. Yeah, so generative AI's top use case is generating wait lists, right? Like we we're, we are, so we have never had such an easy way to generate a lot of wait lists.
[00:33:30] A lot of signup for witness. Oh my God. So much interest. So much product market fit. But also you know, one thing that you, you raising this point? I think, I think, I think by the way, I also pin this up. Mindy can support complex roles like no meetings on Fridays, all one-on-ones on Monday. , I like my meetings back to back within five minutes.
[00:33:47] Five minutes in between. So it's just arbitrary rules that you could not program in a normal assistant type environment without a large language model. Which is kind of exactly what you want when you're booking your travel, right? Like, hey, I only like aisle seats unless it's it's a flight that is less than one hour that I don't care, right?
[00:34:02] Mm-hmm. . So stuff like that I think is, is super interesting. And but also like not a common use case. Like how many times do you travel a year? Like, you know, five, right? Like more than that, but yes, I think for, yeah, a lot of times it's not a, it's not like a super widespread thing, especially if you don't do it or work.
[00:34:21] If it's infrequent, you want high value and then if it's, if it's frequents, you can do low value, right? Like that, that's the sort of binary tradeoff, like the Uber is sort of frequent and low value. Airbnb is high value in frequent there's something of that nature. . So like, you want, you want sort of inspections of that sort.
[00:34:37] Google vs ChatGPT
[00:34:37] But the other thing that you brought to my attention was, and, and has room for Google to do something is do you notice that OpenAI plugins, none of them are Google because they're not friends. So Open BT will probably never have first party access to Google Calendar, probably never your Gmail and probably whatever, you know, Google copies, OpenAI again.
[00:35:04] They will do, Hey, we have all your docs.
[00:35:10] Yeah, I, I, I'm interested in that because I don't know if you remember, but like in the first iPhone, like YouTube came, like pre-installed on the homepage and then I forgot when, but one of the early ioss, they removed it. So now obviously Google's not a friend. Who's gonna be a friend in the future, who's not gonna be like, do we all have to hail our AI overlords?
[00:35:33] Yeah. To get access to the, the only plugin system. Yeah. The only winners are brown CEOs. Think you're fine. Alright. But yeah, yeah. I just invited nada. C my old boss. Hi. You can't lurk. I, I want, I want to hear from you. And but, but also, you know, yeah, I, I think the Google point is actually novel.
[00:35:50] I'll probably write something about that. Yeah. I mean, I'll have to write something about this today. So please feed me things to write.
[00:36:01] Nader Dabit on Selling His GPT App
[00:36:01] Oh, there we go. Hey, what's up man? What are you think. I know it's like, not entirely your space, but like you're, you're all about the future, right? I mean I did build and sell an AI company about a month ago, . I did the wait, what travel app was built on GP T three Tweeted about You sold it? Yeah.
[00:36:21] It was getting like a hundred thousand visitors a day, like 60 to 80,000 unique a day. And then I, whoa. Yeah, I sold it like within about 24 hours. I tweeted out that it was for sale. I had like 30 or 40 people in my inbox. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay. I need, so like, but you're right. This isn't my, my man like domain of expertise.
[00:36:41] It's fine. You make, you may just a thousand dollars on the side. It's, it's cool. Wait, wait. So I saw you tweet your original thing, which was, Hey you know, GP three can plan your travel. I don't know what happened since then. Can you, can you fill the rest of. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean I was basically, you know, I travel a lot for work.
[00:36:55] I, I do travel like once a month and, you know, but I'm also very resource constrained on my time. So I usually like to spend like one day sightseeing. So what I typically do is I go a trip advisor and then I kind of like, you know, Google around and like look at all these things and it usually takes me about an hour to figure out like what I wanna do on my day or two off to go, like sighting.
[00:37:14] And then I realized GPT3, you know, you can just literally ask and, and say, okay, within X number of. Like, I'm gonna be in this city, I want to have an iter itinerary. You know, you can give all these different parameters and it gives back a really good response. This was before GPT, even three and a half or four was out.
[00:37:30] So I just built like a nice UI on top. Then, like I mapped over the results and, and was linking to, you know, the the Google searches for these different items and, and kind of made it into a nice user interface and, you know, just built it out and tweeted it out. And it, it just got a lot of traction and attention.
[00:37:48] Like I said, I had around a hundred thousand visitors a day, like right off the bat, 60,000 uniques like per day. So it was getting a shitload of of traction and. I don't have a lot of free time to kind of like, maintain or build something like that out. So it was costing me money, but I wasn't monetizing it.
[00:38:06] So the way that I was thinking to monetize it would be to use affiliate links and stuff like that. So I could either, you know, spend time figuring out a way to monetize it or just try to make, flip it and just make some money. So I decided to sell it and that was kind of it. I just sent a tweet out and kind of said, this is for sale, who wants it?
[00:38:25] And I had I had so much inbound from that that I had to delete the tweet within about two hours cuz I was just unable to keep up with all the people that were coming in. And I filled it out a couple of offers and I, I found the person with the most money that could close within the shortest amount of time and just took it.
[00:38:44] Well done. Well done. Nice. Awesome. I need a, I need a, I need an applause button right here. . Okay. So with that context your thoughts on today, what you seeing? There's Expedia there, but. Comment on travel or not travel, whatever you want. . Yeah, I'm still reading up on the, the chat plugins actually.
[00:39:01] And I was hoping to kind of chime into this to learn a little more about how they work. I'm here on the the page. I've had API access from fairly early on. I signed up and I've been you using it a lot. I'm trying to find some different ways to integrate AI and machine learning into the blockchain space.
[00:39:20] There's a lot of stuff around civil resistance that I think are gonna be, you know, pretty interesting use cases for us. It's obviously not like a, a a type of use case that is gonna be useful to, to the general public maybe, but yeah, I'm still, actually still trying to understand how these plugins work.
[00:39:35] So what have you seen the developer documentation, which developer documentation at the bottom? Yes. That's where I'm, I'm check, I'm reading through as of now, I see the examples, which are pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. So my, my quote the, the quote I put on Hacker News was, this is OpenAI leveraging chat, GPT to write OpenAI op open API to extend OpenAI chat.
[00:39:58] GPT. I'm confused, but it sounds sick, but yeah, I mean, so open api, you know, not to be confused is OpenAI is randomly the perfect spec for OpenAI to navigate because it, you know, is somewhat plain English. And then you just supply a description for model. You described a off method. So they actually provided a link to a repo where you can see some examples.
[00:40:20] The examples are not very, not very flesh out. But you can do, like, bear off, I assume you can do whatever, whatever kind of off you like then you just provide like logo url, legal info url. It's not, it's not, it's not that much. This is 10 times better than Chrome manifest.
[00:40:37] Like manifest v3. Yeah, I mean, I'm reading through some of these examples and a lot of them are in Python. I wish they would've more JavaScript stuff, but I would say 10 times would be kind of an understatement if I'm understanding how some of this stuff is gonna work. English is all you need, man.
[00:40:53] English is all you need.
[00:40:57] Well, so, so, and then I think in buried in the video is sort of the Ethan experience, right? Which is where you specify. So if you're, if you're first party congrats, you know, you're, you're inside of the the chatt ui, but if you're third party, you can just host your Js o file anywhere. It's literally a JSON file on an API spec, right?
[00:41:15] You hosted Jason file anywhere. And then you just like plug it into their their, their text field here and then they, they validate a little bit and it's installed. So there is a third party app store on day one. Yeah, that open table plugin example is pretty sick. Yeah. So like yeah, I I What would you want as a developer that's missing?
[00:41:41] I think that we're like in the golden age of of being a developer and I don't know if it's gonna go downhill quickly or if it's gonna go like, get better quickly or this is like the, the end of all of it. like, is OpenAI just gonna be where like we do everything like nothing else is like gonna exist.
[00:42:00] I think that Okay. You know what I, I know that's not the answer for sure. I'm just kind of joking, but I think it will, this is obviously shut down a lot of companies. This is the app store moment, right? For like, just like, I mean, you and I remember the iPhone app store moment. Some people dropped everything to write apps and they made it big and some, a lot of people did not.
[00:42:20] But the people who were earlier rather than later probably benefited from understanding the platform. Like imagine, imagine you, like, you know, you, you are a big React native person for a long while. Like imagine if you had the chance to drop everything and be one of the first developers on a new app store.
[00:42:35] Like that's pretty huge. Yeah, a hundred percent. But I'm wondering like the, the type of mode that you'll be able to build with some of this stuff, because it seems like that OpenAI AI will just continue adding more and more features directly into the platform. But I think like for very like, Proprietary type of stuff.
[00:42:54] It might make more sense, but like if you, if you want to build like an app for the general public it just seems like they'll end up integrating something like directly within their platform for a lot of different ideas like, such as this travel app that I sold. I have a feeling like they'll have a way better version of that built directly into their platform sometime soon.
[00:43:13] Q&A: ChatGPT Waitlist and Voice
[00:43:13] Hey, hey guys. Can I ask just to get a quick update does anyone here have access to it yet? Like is it, is it open? Cause I signed up for the wait list, but I haven't seen anything yet. Yeah, no, it's just, it's just wait list where just like 90% of the stuff that people launch, you know, she has a few, she has a few videos and demos, but yeah, it's just a wait list.
[00:43:31] Who knows? I mean, thanks. Opening OpenAI Pretty has been pretty good about getting people off wait list, right? Like a lot of people got off the GT four API wait list, like the day after they launched. Mm-hmm. . This one, I feel like they're quite fully baked, like it's. I wouldn't be surprised if they started dropping tomorrow.
[00:43:50] So we'll see. But like you can start developing your, your third party plugins today, because there's examples. The docs are like two paragraphs, but that's all I need really . So, so I've been, I've been working and, and I've been following a lot of projects where people are, the one thing I don't see with ChatGPT is like, why are they have, we have Whisper, we have the APIs for ChatGPT.
[00:44:13] It's like, why are we not at the point where we're talking to this thing and it's talking back to us? Like, I don't know how we haven't, nobody's wrapped their head around that yet, but it's like, it seems to me like, don't you wanna be like, Hey computer build me an app that does X and it says okay and builds it for you and talks back to you.
[00:44:29] Like, I just, it's like, I don't know. That'll be the first probably plugin that I try to work on, but it's just driving me a little nuts. That's all interesting. I like the voice interfaces because sometimes it gets really long, like some of the prompts get really long. They're like, I don't wanna talk that long.
[00:44:46] Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I was so, so I was doing, I was messing with the system prompt, basically get it to be like, Hey look, I'm gonna be talking to you. So keep it condensed. I think like the ideal interface would be like, for like, talking to, it would be like putting that at like the system level, but also, you know, being able to type as well as speak to it is just something that I'm, I'm trying to work on.
[00:45:08] And I think with Plug, you know, if we could do that with plugins, I'd be huge. Cuz I know there's already a, like a Chrome extension that allows you to talk to it. Or, or I guess you could do it natively as well, but, you know, native stuff on like iPhone and Android is not too good.
[00:45:24] LangChain with Human in the Loop
[00:45:24] Hey, you, you mentioned that. Hi, by the way. You mentioned the hey way of, of talking to or having way the AI talking to you as a user. So just today there was a new release to of LangChain. I know it's kind of, not really the plugin, but this is the closest thing probably. And they edit a Ask Human tool.
[00:45:46] So now the model can ask you a question if it's not sure. About something
[00:45:55] to share. Share what? Go ahead. So, so the ask you if it's during its chain of thought, when it's not sure. To an example. Right, right. Oh, I would love that. Yeah. Probably not gonna do that. It's too confident. Yeah, I, I've seen a little bit about. LangChain, but I haven't used it yet. Has anyone here it?
[00:46:15] Oh, it's all about it.
[00:46:19] I did, I did. I built the LangChain on UI too. It's pretty nice. I mean, especially when it first came out, the, the trolling, it was like so rudimentary. But it's nice to be able to change things together. I think the agent part is pretty interesting. I haven't used it myself because I didn't need it.
[00:46:34] But yeah, there's a, a very big community. See, see, light chain was very smart, right? Like they picked out the open source angle first, and then the others like dust or did the closed source angle. Now they have indirect competition with ChatGPT, but Langchain still has that. It's open source, extensible, like you own your agent.
[00:46:55] Google vs Microsoft vs Apple
[00:46:55] Them doing business deals with OpenAI in, in closed doors, right? Like, so pretty smart, like strategic position. All things considered.
[00:47:05] It's a little, isn't it? It's like a little funny to me. That, you know, it's like goo because Google just came out with Bard, right. And I don't know if you guys have messed with Bard at all, but it's at least to me another wait list. Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean, to me it was a little underwhelming. I mean, I'm, I don't know if you've seen like the same, yeah, if you've seen like the screenshots going around, like it seems like, you know, someone tweeted it was like in, in guys in a boardroom or whoever's in a boardroom just being like, s**t.
[00:47:30] Like, we need to you know, we lost our first mover advantage here. But it's just kind of funny to me that like, I guess now Microsoft's gonna have like an app store, right? Like just after everything, you know, Microsoft dominated in the nineties and stuff, and then it was Apple, apple, apple. But it's just kind of funny to me that it's gonna be, I guess Microsoft now, right?
[00:47:49] Bard feels like Bing does to Google. Totally. Yeah. A hundred percent. I agree with you a hundred percent. All the turntables, right?
[00:47:57] Yeah. So for, for those of you who might have missed the earlier discussion the one thing that OpenAI or Microsoft will not do is integrate with your Google calendar. So, the one saving grace that Google probably has it, it probably owns your workspace, right? Like most of us have Google accounts, Gmail accounts.
[00:48:14] When we work, we log into Gmail and Google, again, use Google Docs spreadsheets. So if Bard is smart, they will take advantage of that. And then slowly watch as everyone moves to Microsoft Office.
[00:48:31] I think Apple should do a partnership with the OpenAI and basically Microsoft. Cause Google has huge advantage of Android. So basically having OpenAI on the, I, I mean, it would I mean having the partnership with OpenAI would make, I mean, very useful on I devices if they, I mean, Siri is really bad and if they integrate with I, I mean they've win the world I think.
[00:49:00] So it would be huge, beneficial to Apple and basically the Microsoft also if they integrate together because Microsoft doesn't have any of the devices and most people, I, most ordinary people use the devices iPhone or phone and . So it would be huge advantage. And for the 10, basically Apple I, I'm very curious to see what Apple ships next.
[00:49:24] You know, everyone's shipping AI stuff and then Apple was like, Hey, look at our AR glasses. . Yeah, but I mean, ar ar with, with the, with the 3D models that are, that are coming out cuz isn't it mid journeys working on like a three, like their lab, I know is, is building a 3d generative model. And I think that sort of stuff with, with AR is very, oh, is that, is that public?
[00:49:45] How did, how did you know that? I don't know if it's public. I, I saw a tweet about it I don't know, like a week ago. It is a semi, semi open secret in San Francisco, but I, I don't know if it's public. Yeah, I think I, I saw them, it was some context of they were talking about text to video and they were like, well we're, we're doing our like 3D modeling first.
[00:50:02] So, I mean, my assumption is, and I, I don't work in the space yet, unless anyone's hiring please, I'm looking for work. But it seems to me like Apple. Seems to have their head on straight and like it might be that if they're gonna release these ar like mixed reality ar vr glasses, like, you know, the mo the thing that makes the most sense to me is like getting with generative AI graffiti modeling.
[00:50:24] It's like, you know, it would be cool to go to like a coffee house or a bar. And then, you know, when you see like the graffiti in the bathroom when people write sometimes funny stuff, sometimes, like the worst stuff you've ever read in your life and you're like, what is going on when this person's going to the bathroom where they have this much hate?
[00:50:38] But it's like, it would be cool to have a component of that, you know, like in the metaverse, so to speak, right? Like, so you put on your AR glasses and it's like, oh cool, I can see like a bulletin board here that exists in the fizzled. But it's also in the, you know, it's like augmented, right? That's just, to me it seems to be like the logical next step.
[00:50:57] Interesting. Well, we'll, we'll see that when that happens. I recently got a Quest Pro quest to my, and yeah, my parents love it. And any tech, any type that my parents like, I think has a real crossover appeal. You know, the thing that you, your conversation had gimme an idea for winners of every app store in the early days, like Facebook has an app store, apple had an app store, you know, the winners of an app, store games like what we need Yep.
[00:51:24] Is a multi-player. Like everyone logging into chat, BT and then playing a multiplayer game line. Mpc. MPCs are gonna text you on your. , that would be kind of cool.
[00:51:40] ChatGPT Plugin Ideas
[00:51:40] Actually. I was thinking, I don't, I don't know if it's gonna be game games at first though. Like, it seems like games always push the envelope with tech.
[00:51:47] Well, it's like pornography and games, right? But like, I don't know, I was talking to like, you, you mentioned your parents and like you know, I was talking to my mom about this stuff and I was like, you know, I'm seeing stuff that are just demos of just like, Hey, take a picture of your fridge and it'll tell you like, here's what you can make.
[00:52:01] Or you know, even like talking to it and just being like, Hey, here's what I ate today. You know, what's my, how many calories I ate today? Or, you know, what's my diet plan? Just things like that. And that's why I brought up the talking to it just with na using natural language and then having it, being able to talk back to you.
[00:52:17] I'm surpri I'm like really surprised that they haven't implemented that yet. Cuz it seems to me like that's a use case that a lot of people would use it for, you know? Or if you could just like, you know, call it on a phone if you built like a Twilio back in, into it or something. Like I just don't, it, it boggles my mind why they haven't.
[00:52:35] Put that feature in yet? . Yeah. Yeah. I really don't think it's gonna be too long before you're, you're sitting there at work and you get a text or call on your phone from an nbc, Hey, our village is burning down. You need to come over here and help . Do, do you guys think there's gonna be different silos?
[00:52:55] Like you know, with Bard coming out and you know, people implementing GP T three and four now, I guess, into all their apps, but do you think they'll be like, chat GP p chat, GP, PT will have their store and then Google will have their store? Do you think it'll be like, there's gonna be a clear Victor here and then, you know, it'll be like, okay, Google's apps or, you know, Google Docs or whatever is like part of chat GP t's plugins, right.
[00:53:20] Yeah, it is gonna be like crypto. Everybody's just gonna be fighting for the top. You're gonna have the couple of dominant people, but then you're gonna have all the, the small guys who go up and down and Yeah, I I, I feel like it's gonna be pretty similar to, to how crypto was. So we're gonna have some slur juices is what you're telling me.
[00:53:41] Yeah, boy. Nice, nice. I dig it.
[00:53:46] Not an app store?
[00:53:46] So may maybe we aren't, tell me what you guys think about this, cuz maybe we aren't thinking about this right? Because maybe this is not an app store. Cuz typically in an app store you'll go ahead and choose which plugins you want installed, like on a phone or whatever have you.
[00:54:02] But the path forward seems like all the plugins are like omnipresent. I, I don't know why Google isn't shitting their, shitting their pants right now. Cuz basically you check like openly I could just force all. The big companies to write plugins and then just be a single search box for everything. So imagine if you wanna like fly somewhere or you wanna book a hotel you, we have the Expedia and booking.com.
[00:54:29] Both of those plugins summoned up and it shows you both the results. And then you can click through on whichever ones you want. And then, yeah, you charge 'em based on click throughs. Like I, I think like we're, maybe we're just getting tripped over by the fact that you have to choose a plugin right now and only interact with that single plugin.
[00:54:49] But I think I think the smart move forward would probably be just to have all of them omnipresent and then have this like n l p higher layer up there to summon the right plugin when need be. What, what do you guys think about that? Yeah, so, so that's like the LangChain thing. That's what I haven't used LangChain yet, but it sounds like that's, from what I was reading with LangChain, it sounds like that's kind of is how I thought that worked.
[00:55:12] But I don't know, can someone here like enlighten me? I, I don't know if it, how, how LangChain works.
[00:55:21] LangChain and the Future of AI
[00:55:21] Yeah. I don't know how LangChain works either, but I think it's gonna be a two-way street. Everybody's gonna be making plug-ins with chat GP p t and everybody's gonna be making chat GP plug-ins for other services as well. I think there's gonna be a whole bunch of people about to make a bunch of Jira plugins and stuff like that, so I think it's kind of gonna be a, a two-way street.
[00:55:45] I dunno, is anyone else, like, this is super exciting to me. I haven't been this excited about like, the internet since like, probably like the, like the web 1.0 days. Like I, I, I hate, I'm so . Yeah. Like, I hate web two. Like, this is cool. I'm glad that like spaces exist, but I hate Web 2.0, like Web 3.0. I'm about, and like, I, I consider this part of Web 3.0.
[00:56:04] But it's exciting, right? Like, this is cool. Like I, I'm really, you know, I'm stoked about, about the progress that's being, like, the joke is like, you know, every day in, in AI is like, it's like way longer, right? It's like we're telescoping very quickly. Yeah, I mean, one of the things, telescope and updating.
[00:56:23] Yeah. You know, I, I would say I noticed towards, maybe like three years ago when I was working at aws, it just seemed like for, for about five or or so years, everything was very stagnant and there just wasn't a lot of exciting things that were happening. Everyone was like, if you remember, all the Devrel advocates were like all creating like tutorials around creating your own CMS and your blog, and you saw like that exact same tutorial given by like hundreds of people over the course of a few years because there just wasn't any cool s**t that was happening.
[00:56:52] And then I think when crypto and, and blockchain stuff like that kind of caught my attention. Caught my attention, and I'm still excited by that, that stuff. And then this seems to be just almost like when, if you were like around when the iPhone was coming out and actually realized how important it was, I think everyone now is, is seeing this and they're all like realizing how important it is.
[00:57:13] And it's cool to be like part of this moment as a software engineer. Yeah, I'm, yeah, go ahead. Oh, sorry. I was gonna say, like, I'm, I'm excited for you, I'm sure you guys saw the alpaca stuff, right? And I know that they're doing D D M C A stuff, but essentially someone's gonna train one of these models and it's gonna, you know, you're gonna be able to run this stuff offline.
[00:57:35] And just like the way to, if, if you have access to like I forget which one of the EAC accelerate people was talking about it, but it was like wharf in the flask. It's like you've gotten the machine offline. So if you don't need internet access to access, like, the entirety of human knowledge, whatever's in the data set up until 2021 or whatever, and you don't need internet access, like that's gonna revolutionize everything.
[00:57:57] Like, that's insane to think about
[00:57:59] Yeah. Oh, well we won't speculating You can run in Inside Chat runs Python. Oh, really? Is that, is that happening? I mean, it has a file system and it has file storage and CPU at memory. Yeah.
[00:58:20] is turtles all the way down. Turtles all the way down, man.
[00:58:23] The, I, I think the plugin system, if people can get to run their own models like the LAMA ones and the same structure for plugins, you can see like going back to the Metaverse thing like a and snow crash where people built their own like demons. You know, it's like I got the demonn that like kicks people out of the club, the, the black sun.
[00:58:43] But you can see in real life it's like I have a bunch of plugins that only I have, you know, and I use them to make myself more productive, use them to make myself, you know, look like I'm working when I'm not working and I'm like responding to my emails and stuff like that. But I think like, The OpenAI releasing this today makes it so much easier to start it because you don't have to worry about any of the infrastructure.
[00:59:07] You just build the plugin and then they run everything and you get the best model possible. But I think none line, you know, I would love to walk around with my own, you know, raspberry pie or whatever of my wrist, kind of like I'm fall out and say, Hey, I wanna do this, I wanna do that. I don't know, I don't think we're that far away, so I'm excited to, to keep building.
[00:59:28] Shoot, the, the technology exists where you could make that now, but it'd be a little awkward to have a raspberry pie on your wrist at the moment. . Well, well, well, that's kind of what I'm saying with the, with the al alpaca thing, right? It's like if you don't need internet access to, to use the model, I mean, we're, we're still pretty far off floor.
[00:59:48] I don't know if Moore's Law even applies anymore. You know, we're not that far off from being able to run this stuff on, you know, consumer hardware that's cheap and that's gonna be huge for, for, you know, the majority of the world, right? Like, that's gonna be very big. Like e e even bigger than this. Like, it's great that we can do it with the internet, but as soon as we don't need the internet to access it, like it's, it's over, but we're back.
[01:00:12] Whatever, whichever one you believe. It's just, this is crazy to think about that. Yeah, you could, you could if that happens, you can go and hook it up to a coding compiler and have it sped out human readable errors, but at that point it's probably just gonna be brighten on the cup for us anyways.
[01:00:30] So we have a Hey guys. Hey. Hey, Alex. Go ahead. I, one more question, but yeah. Oh, go ahead. No, no, no. I have a right in question from someone who's trying to join but was unable to Stefani. , who I met, by the way, at the LangChain Hackathon, LangChain meetup in San Francisco. She has a lot of cool insights.
[01:00:45] Q&A: ChatGPT Bots and Cronjobs
[01:00:45] Follow it. Yeah, go ahead, Alex. I'll, I'll cue the question up. Oh yeah, for sure. Uh, One thing that really got my mind out this stuff and, you know, high vision mode is the fact that you can kind of externalize memories now. So the main use case I was thinking about is you could basically set up crime jobs, for lack of a better word.
[01:01:04] So suppose you're, I don't know, building a trading bot, right? And you can say, Hey, Chad, GPT, look at the price of wheat every day at midnight. And you can just cue that up in the background and then have that send the response back to back to the LLM at a certain time. , and, you know, that's just like one use case.
[01:01:21] But here comes like the play where like there's time sensitive things that break the one by one synchronous nature of ChatGPT and adds a little more, you can say from one level more humanness to it rather than like direct response and reply with latency. So there's that level, but also you can like schedule tasks and I think that's gonna be the killer plugin, whoever creates like the, the cal.com or the you know, theron integrations for just like, Hey, look at this point in time, and they give me the response.
[01:01:48] I don't know if anybody's been thinking about that. Yeah, I, I was thinking about that a lot. Like how you said the expand, it's like an expandable, it's like a portable brain. Like, it's like, Hey, here's my secondary brain and it does, it's like my secretary, or it's like my assistant, right? Like somebody had a prompt where it was, you know, you're a form of, you know, one person's wisdom, one person's, you know, thinking about.
[01:02:11] things x X way. Someone's thinking about it y way and like being able to have that just on demand with the like expandable component where you're able to basically Yeah. Delegate tasks to it and be like, Hey, you know keep what's, what's like the way to think about it? Like, not like a crime job, well, sort of like Aron job, but like like, you know, like news alerts, like Google news alerts, like things like that.
[01:02:33] Just being able to be like, Hey, like keep, keep an eye on this thread for me while I do other things. And then if something comes up, you know, whether, you know, you just do some NLP or whatever, search for keywords you know, alert me or do whatever. And being able to do that without having to go through, you know, setting a reminder or doing all that painful, like, pain in the ass calendar stuff.
[01:02:52] Cuz I think there's so many, there's so much software for that because people just hate doing it so much. Like, that's gonna be so big. Yeah, no, I was thinking that's probably a better way to put it, right? Like asynchronous alerts or I guess you could do timed alerts also. Because the one thing I was thinking about is the Instacart api, which is what they're demoing.
[01:03:10] I don't know if anybody uses Instacart, but it's pretty slow on the lookups. So that's like, you know, that's a blocking process in the current integration of chat GPT. But if they could figure out a way to make it like asynchronous and then actually interact when it's done getting the, the fetch, and then you can do stuff in between that, that's gonna really change the interface.
[01:03:27] And that's like, that's really the step closer to having like a real personal assistant in your pocket, man being able to just give chat d p t all of your Ps that you cook that week, and then just have it, order all the stuff from Instacart, from you. I can't wait for that man. Oh my God, that's great.
[01:03:49] Oh, okay. Okay. You know, you can ship a boat Logan, like a cook, a cookbook with like actual recipe, but yeah. Yeah. Let's introduce Logan. So does this, like physical companies that integrate with software are gonna be coming like more of a moat as opposed to just software specific companies? Every software is a software company.
[01:04:10] I know
[01:04:13] Yeah. But if you're just a software company, OpenAI or, or, or some, one of these companies can just build that feature in now a lot easier than they could maybe in the past. Yes. For instance, you know I don't know, like we were talking about travel and, and stuff like that. But, but let's say you have a physical, you know, product that that, that maybe you can just separate yourself from other products by building, you know a better quality user experience.
[01:04:40] Logan Joins Us!
[01:04:40] And so we got Logan here was our first podcast guest and the first Devrel person at OpenAI actually. . So Logan, welcome. Obviously, a lot of people here are excited to talk about this. One thing I noticed from the plugins is that a lot of them are more mundane things. You know, you got travel, you got grocery.
[01:04:58] Can you tell us a bit more about how you picked those and like maybe give us a sneak peek of other use cases that you all are excited about? Yeah, I, I think first of all, I think going back to the conversation about the ability to like queue up tasks for you in the background, I'm, my understanding is that Zapier actually already does this by default.
[01:05:20] And I'll, I'll go play around with it after this and see, but my, I, I think Zapier has the ability to schedule things and I think this is the part. Yeah, people are sleeping on this the most is that basically Zapier is already connected.
[01:05:36] Zapier's already connected to 5,000 different plugins, and now you can just integrate directly with all of those through Zapier, which is incredible. So you don't even need to wait for like the plugin or whatever to come. Zapier will already do that for you. Which is, which is super cool. And it already has the ability, I'm 90% sure to like schedule certain actions to happen which is awesome.
[01:05:57] So I, I think going back to the point of like how these folks were, were specifically chosen, I think the reality was when it was initially scoped out for doing this work, there was just, we needed people who were willing to sort of deal with the idea of of sort of, we were still building this entire platform and infrastructure from the ground up.
[01:06:15] And I think those. Those folks who were featured today during the blog post, did a lot of work of iterating on these things with us as we figured out a lot of the challenges. So huge shout out to all those, the engineering teams of those companies for, for working with us so closely to make it happen.
[01:06:32] I just gotta say too shameless, shameless plug here. It's my birthday today and this is a super cool birthday gift. So thanks for, for doing this and the blog post. It's really awesome. happy birthday. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I think we all just got a, a huge gift like look like. Yeah, Logan, you don't have to speak on opening as we have here.
[01:06:50] Like, we're all just like, you know, large model and Enjoyers here. I think. And this is a, this is a app store moment for like all of us. Like it's, I I'm just processing this and, and just trying to. Do therapy in public
[01:07:06] There's a lot of wait list fo here, so we're all excited. Oh, yes.
[01:07:11] Q&A: Plugins Rollout
[01:07:11] What do we have to do to get the wait list? Yes, . I, I think the reality is yeah, it, it's, they're rolling people out really slowly and I think the intent is part of this is to understand, and I think it was one of the big highlights of the blog post about what are the new sort of accesses for, for harm here.
[01:07:30] And I think we know some of those things, but there's a lot of known unknowns, so it'll be intentionally small for the time being. But hopefully we'll, we'll expand that access in.
[01:07:44] bottom line, get on, get on the wait list and, and keep your, keep your fingers crossed. Come up, like come up with a cool use case. I think there's something, there's part of the wait list is like submitting what you would be interested in working on and actually in, they actually will, we will actually read that to make sure that, you know, we're bringing people in who are gonna build cool things, not stuff that's uninteresting or potentially harmful.
[01:08:06] Okay. Are you using Tri GB two to analyze the wait list? ? Yeah, that was my question. It'll probably be humans to analyze the wait list would be my guess, but maybe, maybe not. I'm not sure. Very old. What's the difference? Old, like, yeah, yeah, we have a question from write in who couldn't join for technical issues.
[01:08:23] Q&A: Plugins Discovery
[01:08:23] Stefania, who is a researcher at Microsoft right now. and her question is about search. How what is the future of search for plugins? How do we discover new plug-ins? Do we need a schema for plug-ins with complex queries or, or complex behaviors? And does it limit the context window as well?
[01:08:41] Like, do we install like a hundred different plug-ins and like, does that, does that hurt help? I don't know. . Yeah, it does. So there's a limited, and I, it's all in the developer documentation right now if you wanna read through it. But there's a bunch of limits on like your open API spec and the descriptions you use.
[01:08:58] But we actually take all that information. We take a sample request, we take a sample response, we take the description of it, and it's actually all inside of the, the context window to begin with. So it is limited right now. And I think that's where some of those larger models like GPT four with 32 K contacts in the future, when that's the available will be super helpful and you'll be able to bring a lot of plug-ins in.
[01:09:20] But at the current moment, the more plug-ins you add, the less, the less context to you you actually have in the conversation. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Makes sense. I mean with like 50 pages worth of context, that that's a lot. And you know, I was very impressed at the latency as well that that at least the demo was able to pull off, which is awesome.
[01:09:39] Yeah. Any, any other like, reactions, thoughts, questions to plugin? I have a couple new people joining. Hey ar Yeah, I had a couple of them. If I can chime in. First of all, just blown away. I mean, it's a fairly interesting approach to deal with, like live data with this data that you guys train on. Couple of quick questions for you.
[01:09:57] Q&A: OpenAI vs BingChat
[01:09:57] How do you see this? Maybe it's too early to ask, but how do you see this starting out to something like a Bing Chat? The, the reason why I ask this is, I mean currently Bing is more of the UI that you're dealing with and chat GP t's being launched on the side. But do you see it more being like a platform or do you see it more consumer facing?
[01:10:20] I mean, I dunno if this question was to me or not. Yeah, you don't, you don't have to answer that. You know, obviously Logan cannot comment on Microsoft.
[01:10:31] I do think though, that the, the interesting differentiator is that the, the work, and I think this was in their public blog post, is that a lot of the stuff that Bing is doing is optimized for search specifically. So it's, it's just a fundamentally different experience. I still think that like if you're, if you want like that search first experience, I think something like B makes a ton of sense.
[01:10:54] Yeah, it's just, it, it feels like a different experience to me, so, thanks.
[01:11:00] Q&A: App Store Monetization
[01:11:00] So I think it's been mentioned a few times that this is like the new app store or ai. What, I guess I'd, I'd like to hear thoughts of other people as well, but like, what's the, so the app store is monetized, right? So that's a big incentive for people to put their apps on there.
[01:11:14] So how does in, in this case, you put a manifest and it hits, hits the API for your app maybe. So what side of the monetization strategy here? I mean, this is not a question for OpenAI, it's just like a general sort of direction for things. Yeah. I don't know if they care. , this is like trivial to OpenAIr.
[01:11:34] Yeah, we were talking, you're paying for the api, right? So you're you mean like on top of, of paying for API access, like you're using your credentials, you supply your credentials when you, when you sign up to plug in. Right. So I guess you do building off platform.
[01:11:50] Yeah, I guess so. So not from an OpenAI point of view. So Open of course, makes money on wins anyway. What I mean is like for an app developer to go on there. So I guess you have an app outside of OpenAIr, which is useful. And this is kind of distribution for your app. Is that, is that kind of the, the sale for the app?
[01:12:07] I mean, we're three hours into it, so it's hard to say , definitely. But I think that's, I'm just waiting for someone to write a mega threat on how to make money with the app store here. Seven ways. I'm sure. I'm sure there's gonna be people on YouTube making videos with themselves streaming, and that's how they all saying, I just figure figured how, how to make millions.
[01:12:27] But yeah, one model we were talking about was maybe you can do kind like Spotify or like a, you have Achen GD subscription and then people each plug in gets royalty. Or a lot of things. So like Instacart, like the Chan GD thing is more like a UI alternative rather than like an app itself.
[01:12:46] So it makes a lot of sense. Do I have things like that? But yeah, it would be. . Yeah, I guess what I mean I think Dylan or somebody else said earlier that this might not be the, the app store might be like something different. I think App Store is like the closest we, we have to think about. Like that's the closest analogy, but it might be just something completely new.
[01:13:06] And that's very interesting. I think that's that's a pretty, pretty exciting place to be. Well, well, I don't know how much overlap with like the web three stuff, but it seems to me, I know there's like a couple projects out there that are, I think there's one called Bit Tenser, where it's like people are you know, basically selling their you know, their, their GPU usage, right?
[01:13:24] Like, you know, there's tons of gamers out there that just have, their cards are just sitting idly by, and I don't know, it seems to me like a monetization model for OpenAIr might be to, you know, they own the model, right? So it's like, I don't know if they can like, lease out the model if you could like write a smart contract that like, uses their model somehow, or, I dunno, maybe plugins could be like written into a smart contract where it's like if you, if you're using this plugin, like, I don't know how that would work specifically, but thinking ahead, like, I don't know, do you think it's gonna just be centralized this, this whole time or like, surely there's gonna be a way for this to, to spread.
[01:13:58] And you know, obviously like there's a. What's the, what's the word? It's, it's kind of like you're trying to hold all this water back with like this one stone, and it's like eventually it's gonna break. So like, there's gonna be some decentralization in this at some point. So I don't know if that makes sense.
[01:14:12] I'm just trying to think about like, how, how there's a monetization you know, pathway for, for this. For, for the, for these plugins.
[01:14:24] Yeah. We're not gonna get the answer today.
[01:14:34] Let's, it's Farmville. We're gonna, we're Farmville on ChatGPT. Let's do it. Yeah.
[01:14:42] Q&A: ChatGPT Plugins API
[01:14:42] . Yeah. I was interested in like if there's already an API for this or if there's like an planned, so like when chat was just a weapon interface and then we got the API later, or is this like a web only?
[01:15:02] There is a API available today, but you have to have access to actually create plugins. So you won't have the interface to install a plugin or do anything like that. You can basically build all the stuff on the backend right now if you want to, and then when you get access you'll be able to actually install the plugin through the ChatGPT UI test it out and all that stuff.
[01:15:23] But as of the present moment, no one beyond a very small group of people are able to actually install those developer unverified plugins. Yeah, I was I don't know if if that's what you meant, but I was thinking about like, do we have a programmatic way of calling the ChatGPT API with these plug-ins enabled and get like adjacent response back opposed to like using the weapon interface with the plug-ins enabled?
[01:15:47] Yeah, so that, that doesn't exist yet today either. I think it's, it's unclear when and if that will come, but it's definitely something that folks are, are thinking about. I think there's just a little bit more a bunch more security and other challenges like that when you give the plugin access through the api, but it's, it's definitely something the team has talked and thought about internally.
[01:16:09] Alright. Thanks for your insight, Leo, follow up question. Did, did you have a specific use case in mind for that that specific need that that can help to motivate things sometimes? No, not right now. It's just a general question exploring. Yeah. Well, okay. You know, you can sort of hack it together with the stuff that Diane Gross was doing in the early days of chat.
[01:16:27] Bt. But then also, like, I, I feel like we could make like a mock validator for plugins such that we are ready to go when it's live. I don't think it'll be too hard. Yeah. Any clones, 20 clones out there for like chat ui, so you can sort to kind of hack it in. Maybe it's like not, not the highest fidelity, but the, the schema is out there, so there's nothing really stopping us apart from, you know, waking up tomorrow and, and seeing that Chad opening, I have done it already.
[01:16:54] So , I, I think the only, the only, you could definitely do some of that today. I think some part of the challenge will be that it's a different model that's powering some of these things, which isn't available. Yeah. Yeah. I think that would be, but I still think even with probably base Sahara and just injecting some of this in there you could probably get most of the way there.
[01:17:14] Q&A: Python Interpreter
[01:17:14] Yeah. By the way, that, that was a misconception that I had to correct a bit early on in the space before you came on. You dropped three models today. Like there was a browsing model and then there's a separate plugins model. And the plugins model doesn't talk to the browsing model. And then there's a, you know, there's.
[01:17:28] Python running, which is still going my mind by the way. . Yeah. The Python running also goes back to the piece around, if you wanna basically have things like set things up to dispatch, you can essentially have it write the code and just like plug into any third party library and like set up crime jobs and all that stuff for you.
[01:17:47] So going back to sort of having chat b t do your bidding, you could, you could do all that with the code interpreter, which is super cool. And I think Greg tweeted like 20 minutes ago or an hour ago, something like that. An example of it, yes. Like doing video compression and like editing and stuff like that, which was super cool.
[01:18:05] That that is the one. Like are we gonna have that or is that Greg's special box? Like No, I think that he's just running straight up interpreter is my understanding. I don't think there's anything special going on there because like that is insane, that like you have storage, you have compute you are a compute platform now.
[01:18:22] Like CHATT is not a chat app. It's crazy. Like this is what made me start this space because I was like, wait, like this is not chat. This is a new thing. I don't know what this is. So yeah, I have to drop, but this was, this was awesome. Thanks for hosting this, and thanks for, thanks for having me on again.
[01:18:41] Appreciate you. Happy birthday, Dylan. Hopefully this was a, a worthwhile present. , it was great. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Bye, Logan. Okay. A couple more questions. If anyone has them. These things tend to drag on a little bit, so I always like to end on a well-defined note. Anyone else have reactions, questions, see anything out there that might be interesting?
[01:19:01] I did see you know, the, the, the chat partners are starting to tweet out some stuff, so Ane Patel tweeted up about the Milo plugin that they developed with OpenAI, so we can see a little bit of that. Oh, particularly, I haven't particularly like dived in. . But yeah, you know, I, I'm collecting all, all sorts of information and, and reactions.
[01:19:18] I'm gonna write out something today because I think this is one of the biggest days again, in tech since, I dunno, Tuesday since last week.
[01:19:30] it's hard, but I mean, does anyone agree that things were like, really boring for a while? And this is like the first exciting thing that I've seen. The, the reacts people are still talking about use effects. Like, f**k that. Like ? Yes, exactly. Like we were stuck and reacting like CMS land for like 10 years, just.
[01:19:52] Thank God. Thank God. Hey Peter. Hey. Thanks for having me on.
[01:19:55] The History of App Stores and Marketplaces
[01:19:55] I just wanted to say something real quick to the person that was asking earlier about monetization models and, and plug-ins and touch and I just, I thought one, one thing that occurred listening was that you know, a lot of these, I've done a lot of these plug-in marketplaces over my career and I think there's obviously an opportunity to like, offer different levels of validation and sort of test compatibility kit pass.
[01:20:16] And you know, there's also an ongoing component of it cuz there's, you know, potentially data streaming through and, you know, You know, concerns around, you know, the quality of that data does it, you know, circumvent or inter interfere with OpenAI safety systems. So, you know, one obvious way that they could, you know, potentially monetize, you know, any marketplace really, you know, app store, whatever, JetBrains, you know intelligent idea marketplace, right?
[01:20:38] Is to have that concept of different levels of validation and, and compliance, you know, to a certain specification. And, you know, you get a little logo or something like that and, you know, so anyway, just a quick thought as I was listening. Fascinating. And thanks for having me on. Hey Peter, since I want you, you to, since you had felt like you have a bunch of experience could you list like the, the, the marketplaces that you've been a part of?
[01:20:59] And like, maybe like one thing they did well, one thing they recorded. Sure. I, I'd love to get a top down view. Sure. Yeah. I, I, I don't know that I've seen all of them, but I mean, you know, obviously I'm an iPhone and Android user, so I've, I've seen the marketplace like the rest of us. But JetBrains marketplace I think was particularly good.
[01:21:13] Postman has a really good API marketplace rapid. I didn't know that. Rapid ap. Yeah. You know, I think, I think a lot of platform companies have gotten the message and, and they think about marketplaces, obviously the, the hyperscalers, right? You know, you've got the, you know, the, the cloud marketplaces from Amazon.
[01:21:28] From Amazon and Google and, and Azure and such. But you know, it's some of the, sometimes it's these smaller ones that are also surprisingly good, like the intelligent idea, you know you know, you go to their website and it's like, you can buy an ad banner if you're in marketing, but, you know. Yeah. Anyway, so this concept of like validated plugins, right?
[01:21:44] Especi. when there's this aspect of the data that's flowing through them I think presents an interesting opportunity not only for, for developers to, to make non-st plugins, pardon my frank for you know, for for OpenAI to, to, you know, say, Hey, we looked at this and not just with chat, GPT, no offense
[01:22:01] you know, we, we we're giving it a th seal of approval. Right. You know, and that'll, that'll carry weight and carry meeting and people will pay for that is my guess. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, if I think there's an appetite for like, understanding how to do well in the marketplace right now, if you write a post about that, I think you'll be very well received.
[01:22:18] Sweet. Cool. I'll try to find you on Twitter. I, I just kind of dropped in. This was sort of an instinct and then I saw like, NARS here and all these other people here, so it was just kinda like, wow, this is awesome. I know, I know, I know, I know. Well, we're all just like reacting and we need a, we need a space to, to yell because this was huge.
[01:22:34] So thanks Peter. No problem. And yeah, let's, let's connect offline.
[01:22:37] LindyAI's Flo Crivello Joins Us
[01:22:37] Flow is here. I'm trying to invite you, Flo. Because we were talking about Lindy earlier. We're talking about what this, what judge plugins means for Lindy. I don't think it'll, it will, I, I think actually like it will help highlight the differences.
[01:22:49] But Oh, you're speaker. Okay. Congrats on your launch, by the way. Very, very, very well done. Thanks. Yeah. One hell of a day. . Hi everyone. Hell of a day. Did you know this was coming by the way? We didn't know it was coming today, but yes, we knew, we knew about this and we knew it would come in the, in the viewing of future.
[01:23:05] Yeah. So I'll, I'll intro, I'll reintroduce cuz like the space is like, like four x since the time I talked about. But, you know, AI, virtual assistant is able to arbitrarily respond emails and step meetings and use natural language to do all of that. I think the, the user interface also was very, very well.
[01:23:22] Which you know, I, I can't, I can't imagine how long you took to, to do that, but like that is the polish that you need for personal use stuff, right? Like it, this is the, this is the table six. Thank you. I'll, I'll pass your compliments to the designers who hate me now,
[01:23:38] it did take a long time to reach this point. I mean, my take is that I think like the button is being passed from the folks like the, the, the, the lab coat researchers working on the models, they're passing the button over to like the, the product teams, basically. And I think we're gonna see a new wave of aed, not just about, Hey, we have a model that is X billion parameters, but we're gonna see a new wave of startups that own a business of building great products around these models.
[01:24:07] And with a very simple interface, which is well, sorry, sorry. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you about plugins, but you're talking about over the foundation model APIs. . That's, that's correct. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, are, are you worried about competition from like, you know, chatt, like, let's, let's talk, let's talk this out, right?
[01:24:22] Like what do you see sort of the products gaps that, that PTs have versus whistle? Yeah. My understanding is that chat PT is really like chatt plugin by understanding, so up on the announcement, it's like, it's really more of like a developer product. So OpenAI is remaining true to the DNA of like, you know, we're building models and we're building stuff for, for developers to build product on.
[01:24:42] So the impact on companies like Lin is that it's lowering the barrier to entry, which I think you're not targeting developers. Yeah, well, it's not just, it's like, it's become easier to buildy, like a whole lot of stuff that we've built, like over AI just released for free and we're like, well, f**k, like, I guess we build that.
[01:25:01] So it's, it's lowering the barrier to entry, but you know, you, you're still left with your expertise. . Yeah, that's true. That's true. Yeah. And also also commenting before you came on that open, I probably will never have Google Calendar on their list of preferred, you know, plugins. They'll never have Gmail on.
[01:25:20] And, and your, your integration is already super tight like this, this plugs in exactly to where, what people use today instead of having difficulty Microsoft and Google. Yeah. I wouldn't say never. I think the, but certainly their incentives are not secure aligned. And so I think there is going to be merit in being Switzerland here.
[01:25:37] Right? It's like, look, our incentives are aligned with you as the user. Like we're not embed with, with Microsoft or Google or whatever. We're not protecting an existing ecosystem. We're just like, send AI assistant and we are gonna play as well as we can with all of your product. Yeah. Yeah. Does anyone have like I'll open up, you know, obviously we have the founder of Lindy here.
[01:25:55] Like, does anyone have questions about Lindy? Did you see the launch? Did you have a follow up? Like this is a very nice place to. Ask it. Unless you wanna , you wanna start? I just wanna get, I'm gonna pay you just wanna get access. yesterday. It would be cool for you to maybe talk a little about how the integrations work.
[01:26:16] And I know you're using natural language for it. I think like when tools like it, they think, oh, is my tool gonna be supportive? So yeah, maybe you wanna talk about it. Yeah, definitely. So the, and so I actually tweeted about that separately. Like, the way we build integration is we literally just give the documentation of the API to Lindy and then she out how to use the APIs on her own.
[01:26:36] And so it's trivial for us to build a new integration. Like it actually takes 15 minutes to build a new integration. And so the answer to will my product, like, will my thing be supported will be yes. Like in 15 minutes. Like, it'll be like, Hey, you asked us do something. And literally it's like, we couldn't do it yesterday and today we can.
[01:26:52] And it's gonna be as simple as that. So, yeah. . Yeah. I, I think to me the most interesting thing is that a lot of companies, I mean, even if you think about Airbyte and Fivetran, like when it comes to connectors, there was like the whole closed source versus open source. Like the open source usually at an advantage because the community can help you build more connectors.
[01:27:12] But now using natural language, like the barrier is so much lower and just, it's just super exciting to, to, to use everything right away instead of waiting like four months because I'm the only person using that one tool. So excited to, to . Yeah, 100%. Well, even considering a world in which the user creates their own integration by themselves in like 10 minutes, it's like, hey, like give us, really the only thing we need is like, we need a, a documentation and then we need like an API token.
[01:27:39] Like that's the only part that right now requires like an engineer's involvement. But you know, perhaps some power users would be fine generating some developer API token and building their own integration in like 10 minutes. I mean, I, the, the sort of app store model between Google and, and Apple and it's like the bar for quality that they held, you know what I mean?
[01:27:57] That, that, I don't know. It's, it's, I don't know. It makes me think of that whole race again and it's like, do you lower the bar for quality and, and go the Android route or do you keep the qual, do you keep the bar high? And especially if, if there's, you know, issues with circumventing or interfering with safety systems and, and data quality and you know, things that are inappropriate, like, I dunno, I wonder, it makes me think, well the thing is that there is a ceiling to quality here when it comes to this integration.
[01:28:23] Like, how good can you make a Gmail integration? There's like, there's like 20 endpoint or something, and then the question is like, can you call this endpoint and can you support their parameters? And it's not even the user who would actually like write the endpoint and the parameters. They would literally just like point us to the right API documentation.
[01:28:39] Good point. . Yeah, I do think it's a little scary when I give my, you know, if I give like my, my Gmail integration and then you have Brad access, like actually just open source, the GBD four, like email drafter. And I didn't put any auto send or anything like that because I was so scared of it. But I wrote all the code, so it's I trust it.
[01:29:02] But it'll be interesting to see how people are gonna trust these systems. Yeah. So we've built some, like hard guardrails in place where certain actions especially any endpoint that is a post endpoint we, we, we flag these actions as like, we call them like a right action. So it's like read action versus right actions.
[01:29:18] And if it's a right action, we require user of information in a way that I mean this is like technical details, but like, it, it is physically impossible for the model to actually take a right action without user of inform. So the user, it asks for his information and like the user through the confirmation actually issues a token that is required for the model to be able to call that, that thing.
[01:29:39] AI Safety
[01:29:39] How worried about you about AI safety is, is this like coming from a place of UX or AI safety? , I'm, I'm super worried about very long term AI safety, right? Yeah. I am, I am, I am moderately worried about like medium term AI safety, like the whole like misinformation thing and like, yeah, like I'm sure there are ways in which Lindy may go wrong, but like, that's not the top of my concerns, and especially because I've built this kind of system.
[01:30:04] Like I see the ways in which you can build guardrails and like, this is just like an engineering challenge. Like it's, it's very solvable now. The very long term AI safety thing, like Yeah, I mean there's like an existential race and this is, this is a whole different beast. Yeah. Part, part of me, like trying to do B2B stuff, you know, in the, in the face of AI safety issues, it feels like, you know, you're just kind of rearranging textures on the Titanic.
[01:30:25] Or like, you, you know, you're the four piece string quartet playing music to entertain people while the strip is thinking like . Yeah, yeah. It is discouraging a little bit because you, you don't really have a take on the problem, do you? Right. You're like, all right, I guess this is coming. And I, like, I, I, I'm my head and I'm like, I don't really see what I can do about it.
[01:30:46] Sam Altman seems to think he can turn it off. Like he has his blue bag, which presume presumably has the off the off button. That that's why he, that's why he always has it with him. Dunno. Yeah. I dunno. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, . Yeah.
[01:31:04] Multimodal GPT4
[01:31:04] Well, can I get your reactions just generally on like potential of like maybe multimodal GT four, like just anything that your, your, you know, US builder are looking to really take advantage of as it, as it comes down the line?
[01:31:14] Yeah, I think multimodality and you know, audio and, and image especially, I think is like the next big zero to one thing, but otherwise, I think like, just language gets so far, man. So I was just having this conversation. To me it's the same thing as like the cpu, right? Where it's like Fairchild Semiconductor and like Intel, like they gave us the CPU and I think again, like the lab coat researchers passed the button to the hackers and Z garage, like the Steve Jobs and, and, and Steve Snak who now owns the business of building the pc.
[01:31:42] And so that doesn't mean that like innovation in the CPU is over, like the CPU still has like four decades of ahead of it. But yeah, like we've got the cpu and now I think that the product and engineering and hacker teams have to, to take it from there. I mean, Intel did pretty well. Totally. Yeah.
[01:31:59] I'm not, I'm not saying like OpenAI is going anywhere, for sure. Yeah. Cool, cool, cool. Uh, Any other yeah, does anyone else have questions? No, I see you unmuted.
[01:32:07] Designing AI-safe APIs
[01:32:07] Yeah. Just upon the on the like safety, AI safety side, I mean, as much as I Sure. Hit the complexity of Im I mean like permissions in AWS and GCP and so on, the server purpose, and I think like maybe in this page, like if you can hit any endpoint on the internet like how do you control which endpoint?
[01:32:24] Yeah. So maybe this is, this is like a connection for flow, like one new generation of Im, which is, you know, you have a proxy sitting in front of, in front of the internet and you're only allowed to see certain parts of the internet. You said you have like, you have like right access on the post request already, but yeah, maybe there's something around.
[01:32:40] Yeah. So we're looking into this kind of catchall guardrails right now. The way our must, for example, the Gmail API is, so it actually writes code, but at no point does it use a library to make rest API and, and phone calls, right? Like it actually we give it a function that's like Gmail, send email with like primaries for like two and subject and bugging and all of that stuff, right?
[01:33:01] And certain of these actions, again, require an authorization token that is specific for like that one action, and these authorization tokens actually expire. So yes, in theory the model could circumnavigate that by writing code to like call the, the API endpoints directly. We've not seen it do that yet.
[01:33:17] And, and that's just not the way we train the model to behave. That's pretty response. That's like general platform question for maybe you in the future, maybe OpenAI. That if you hook it up to the, how do you prevent it from, I, I'm not saying that the AI will do something malicious, but like a developer who gets it to write some code and hidden endpoint that you didn't give it permission for.
[01:33:40] So for example, you can, in Deno, I I love the permission system in Deno. You can give it access to your file system or the n or you know, like the internet, but like how do you specify only a part of the internet or only a part of a domain or so on?
[01:33:56] Yeah, so open by the way, I, I, I'm a little bit bearish on the Deno permissioning because it's permissioning on the whole executable. And and that's, you know, it's basically you're going to try to relax it the moment you run into errors and people just kind of relax it all the way, you know, it's kind of.
[01:34:12] True. Very. I was actually I, the way I got around it, I, I was starting a new a new process subprocess and only giving it access. Really? So instead of making Yeah, it was, it was really done. Really annoying. Well done. They should go get it only. Exactly. Yeah. It's kind of overselling the security if like everybody just runs like, you know, pseudo whatever the pseudo is in, in, in Deno.
[01:34:34] But yeah. Okay. Cool. Any other reactions?
[01:34:36] Flo's Closing Comments
[01:34:36] Flo, before I'll give you the, the last word here, just reactions to Chatt, PT and open the eye shipping velocity in general. You're, you're always a good speaker, so leaving to you for soundbites. Soundbites. No, it's great. You know, I, I, I'm excited to see this kind of product, see the light, and I, I, I don't use them as like direct competitors just yet.
[01:34:51] And even if they. Look, I think the market, this is going to be the model of our market, so I think it's gonna be, it's gonna be more than fine, but maybe room full. Mini here. Blue ocean. That's right. Time to build. Let's go. What do you think swyx? What do I think? I, I, I, I don't know what to think. That's, this is why I started this space because I saw that CHE BT can run f fm Peg, which means it is a compute platform, right?
[01:35:16] Like it generates Python code, it runs the Python code. It can receive files, it can store files, it has memory and then it can let you download the files. Give it some GPUs, and you can run Lama inside of chat, gbc, for whatever reason you want. It is a new compute platform now, and I want to build for it, but I don't know what I, what I can.
[01:35:38] Yeah, I, I agree. I think it's, it's, these large models are like the next operating system. I'm, I'm very convinced that that's the way people are gonna interact with the computers. Like, you're no longer gonna do work at your computer, you're gonna have a conversation with your computer and the computers gonna work for you.
[01:35:55] Well, you're, you're certainly building the platform for that. So everyone go check out Lindy. I think this is a great conversation. I always want spaces to end on a high note. But thanks for joining in. I know it's like zero notice. I was just DMing you. But thanks for coming on, man. Yeah, thanks everyone.
[01:36:09] Yeah, all. Go out there. Bye. Thanks.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.latent.space/subscribe
