Seeing The Future from AI Companions to Personal Software

0:00Right now, AI is just an app on your phone. It should not be that way. Sometimes you need to sort of go big or go home. Not having the balls to do that, especially in this current environment, you can suffer the consequences. There's a huge mind trap that exists among builders in the space where they somehow think that voice is the main interface. That's because they are somehow thinking about the movie Her all the time, but not in the right way. So you were a true pioneer in the space before everyone else was doing it. Maybe just talk about your reflections of how that category has emerged as you helped create it and then how it's evolved.

0:34It definitely evolved. I have noticed. It's really crazy. We had a very strong belief that it would happen, but we still were so surprised when it actually happened, I guess. This was just, it just still felt like complete magic. Personal software is about to explode from 20 million developers to 8 billion creators. Today, you'll hear from Eugenia Koita on how Wabi is building the YouTube of apps, where anyone can create, remix, and share software as easily as posting a video. We discuss why current AI interfaces are holding us back, how many apps will become the new social currency, and what it really means when software becomes ephemeral, personal, and delightful.

1:16Let's get into it. So, Eugenia, excited to get into everything you're doing with Wabi, but first, let's contextualize this a little bit. when you look back at sort of the arc of your career, perhaps the last decade, what is the through line, through replica, Wabi, et cetera? Oh, wow, that's a hard question. But I guess maybe the main theme is we're always early, sometimes a little bit too early. Sometimes, hopefully this time we're on the right tab of early. But generally, yeah, I've started working on AI in 2012, so over a decade ago, and was always fascinated by kind of the idea that you'll be able to talk to a machine, to have a meaningful conversation with a machine.

1:53But more importantly, with the fact that that could influence your life in a really good way. And before that was really the focus was on these AI companions, AI friends that could really be there for you and help you live a better life, help you feel better. And now I guess it's just the same idea, but applied to personal software. Like, can we build many apps or software that will really help us throughout the day in a very personal way? And we'll be focused on you, on helping you live a better life. Trace the journey of how you got excited about this new category and what you hope it becomes.

2:29I guess while running Replica, we always had these conversations with our users about what other products they use and how they use AI. And it always struck me as strange that they were using products like Chagipity or Gemini, Claude, but really they were mostly using it for very simple use cases, like they were using Chagipity just for search or to help them write something, help with homework or something else. And no one was really mentioning any of these exciting capabilities that we just kept seeing the models get. And so we felt like there must be an interface problem. When people look at a command line or a chatbot, they really just see search, writing tool, maybe I can talk to this.

3:14But if you think about that, that's the affordance of a command line. Really, these are the main use cases. I think even recently, ChagipT, I published one of those studies showing that these are, in fact, the main use cases for ChagipT. I think a third of all of the use was around writing, writing help. And so that gave us an idea that there should be some next interface. There should be something else on top of this. There should be something more interactive, visual, simple for everyone, me included, to actually discover these amazing use cases that all these models already have. And so we started thinking, we got obsessed with this metaphor that the current chatbots are really the Microsoft DOS era for AI interfaces, and that there will be some sort of a Windows Mac OS moment.

3:59And I think the confusing part for most people is that there is so much traction with chatbots anyway, almost a billion people using these AI tools already, but they only use them for these kind of simpler use cases. And in order to unlock something else, you need a more exciting interface. Paint more of a picture of what the world will look like when this Windows or Mac OS moment happens. What will that look like? Well, I do think right now we exist in the paradigm of, When I was growing up, we had TV, and here you had maybe a few dozen TV channels. Back in Russia, we only had six TV channels.

4:34And so then, of course, now TV still exists, but now we watch YouTube and Reels and TikTok, a lot of UGC stuff. And so I think the same will happen with software. Right now, we're kind of stuck in this world where these few apps developed by professional developers. and then eventually, of course, we're going to move on to this new world where apps are built by all of us for all of us and maybe sometimes by AI for us. So if you think about it, the operating system of the future, you open it up and you see your regular popular apps you use all the time. Maybe it's X, maybe it's Instagram, whatever it is.

5:10And then you see maybe some cool apps that you discovered your best friend's using or maybe you built for yourself or you tweaked one of the apps you found for yourself. And then you'll see AI suggesting some apps for you. Maybe you're going to New York next week and you're into art. So it made an art show finder app for you, which is going to help you find art shows around the Airbnb you're staying at. So it's a lot more flexible, malleable, and very deeply personalized. Think of it as an operating system built on the platform of you and not on some random fixed context. Can you talk about that?

5:46We've always had this idea that software has to be durable. because it's really expensive to make and it seems really serious. What types of ephemeral software like the New York Art Gallery app do you imagine existing? Well, so right now we're already seeing some of our first users building very specific apps that would never exist on the App Store. They're just too small, too personalized, too niche. They don't have 20 ,000 features. Someone built a motivational quote app that's only pulling from one particular show that I didn't even know anything about. But he's really obsessed with that show.

6:18And so he just wants that at 5.30 a.m. when he wakes up. I feel like people are building very particular things to fit their needs. Like, for example, I was putting my kids to bed the other day, and my daughter wants to play these puzzle games. When I tell her something, she's trying to guess what it is. And so we built a game very quickly where it's a puzzle, and then she sees four pictures. She can click on one. But she also wanted them to be about Princess Elsa and Princess Jasmine, and so we had to incorporate that. And so now she was so happy because now she's doing these puzzles, learning something new.

6:51And then we changed it to Italian because she goes to an Italian preschool. And so this is another way to practice. And she's so excited. We couldn't put this thing away. And it took me two minutes to build it and then, you know, a few seconds to tweak it versus going on the app store. I don't even know if an app like that exists and going through 15-minute onboarding, pain again. Then it's not really what she wanted. There's no personalization there. So I think these are the use cases where something like that should happen. And I do think in the future I should just be able to say, hey, I'm putting my kids to bed.

7:22Or I should know that context and just maybe suggest a few apps that are already pre-built for me that I could use right now. It's funny. I just got a new iPhone. And on the new phone, I got to delete a bunch of my old apps because I like to start fresh. And there were like probably over a dozen apps that I downloaded and in some cases paid for that I just totally didn't need anymore because I built better versions of it on Bobby. Everything from like migraine tracking to like tracking restaurant recommendations to like a really hyper personalized notes app to special things around image transformation in a particular style.

7:56And I can imagine that will be true for a lot of people, which is like, instead of having to find this long tail app that's running all these crazy ads, pop ups all the time and is hard to use and is not personalized to you, you can just make exactly what you want on the fly and tweak it, which is another really cool part of the product, I think. This is what, and I'm so glad to hear that you're using it, but for me, that was kind of the product market fit with Wabi for me was around that, where I found there were a few things I really needed and wanted an app for to track my weightlifting, very beginner level weightlifting workouts.

8:30I just figured out you got to go up and wait. I didn't know. I wouldn't know. A woman. Anyway, so I got this app and I was tracking it in Apple Notes and I tried to find some apps on the App Store. There's just so much in these apps that I didn't need. And so I just wanted a really simple, I'm also trying to follow one particular book. I wanted the workouts to be based on that book. So anyway, I built a simple app to track these workouts. And then now, anytime I go to the gym, I built it on the way to the gym. But now anytime I go to the gym, I find something else I want to add to it. First, it was just a tracker.

9:03Now it's generating new workouts based on all of my inputs, where I am, Matt, the book, I'm trying to follow whatever the ladder technique of like progressive overload. And so I put it all in the prompt. And every time I go to the gym, I add a little bit to that. I want a little more of this, a little more of that. So now I'm not just using the app. I'm kind of constantly in the process of tweaking it and republishing it to Wabi kind of mini app store. Hopefully someone will find it useful. How many people do you think, or generally as you think your audience, do you think it will be 90-10 sort of consumption creation?

9:36or do you think that most people, I think one of the things we saw with Sora, for example, is that many people, the majority of people are creating. Do you think that Wabi will be like that? I hope that more people will at least tweak, but I'd say like fully kind of original creators probably still under 10%. And what we're working on right now, this week we're releasing, we're pushing sort of a big update, the social graph. So you'll be able to see who is downloading what mini apps, how they're using them. you're going to be able to see comments or like mini apps. And so in this case, for example, if I created that workout app, someone in comments can ask me to tweak it.

10:13They can also remix it and change the app however they want. But maybe they just want this particular app to be slightly different. So they can put in comments and maybe as a creator, of course, I'm going to be reading all the comments and changing the app also for these people to be able to use it. So I think this is cool because it creates all of a sudden, it's not just about building apps for yourself. It's really about discovering apps and finding what your friends are using, using these apps together, and so on and so on, and even asking creators to change them in some particular way. Amazing.

10:44Anish and Justine, how do the categories or the topics that we've been discussing as it relates to personal software relate to themes that we've been exploring on the investing side in terms of what got us excited here? Yeah, I mean, look, I think that the YouTube metaphor is the right one that Eugenia outlined, which is that we would have said in 2007 that 100 cable channels is enough, or six in your case. And now obviously there's this entire ecosystem, everything from unboxing videos to all of the very YouTube native content that exists. And I think people sort of have more content or are more fulfilled by it.

11:16And then there's also the act of creation. Some people create for a business, but many create and post just because it's fulfilling to themselves. and software has just been so restrictive because there's only 20 million developers in the world. So in a sense, all of the software that we consume is downstream of the preferences of those 20 million people and it seems intuitive that if more people could make software, they would and that there would be a mass market consumer product here. I think unlike many of the other products, and you should comment on this, that we've seen, it feels like this is not text to app.

11:46It's not a developer or developer adjacent tool. It's truly a mass market consumer product for non-technical people. I agree with you, and we really made this kind of choice early on that we're never going to show any code or anything or say anything in the app that's even remotely technical. No API keys, no bring this, whatever, connect this integration or anything like that. We do have integrations. You can add your apps and services, but you can just say, you know, use my Apple Health or use this, use that, or use my email. And we call them power apps. So that's sort of probably the most technical you're going to get here.

12:25So yeah, we wanted to make it super simple for anyone to make apps and to make this process very delightful. And almost to feel like you're just creating something really quick. You're not even really building many apps. What we're adding right now is more, I think the company or the product we're looking at most is Canva. And the ease with which they're letting people create beautiful presentations. the similar kind of similar thing needs to happen here. Right now we're talking about Vibe coding a lot, but I feel like we should be more about Vibe kind of taste or Vibe designing these apps. So we're going to give a lot more of the just visual controls, more in the vein of like choose a style, choose some colors.

13:08You can go a little bit deeper, but really it's just one button and things look great versus, yeah, you need to go deep and just really trying to understand what to do and get technical with your mini app. And I do think that unlocks a certain level of creativity where all you need to think about is like, what's the use case? One other interesting thing that one of our investors, Soleil, mentioned was that apps, mini apps could become kind of community starters. So if today the app store is very much not social and it probably won't ever be social because of Apple's mandate for privacy and how important that is for them, which is great.

13:49But at the same time, you probably do want to know who else is into, I don't know, toddler activities in Petrary Hill. I want to know what other moms are going to in Italian preschool. I want to, you know, have their kids go to that preschool. And maybe, I don't know, my designer is really into bird watching in London in his particular neighborhood. So creating that app and finding some other people who could be a little bit of a community building around that topic. Yeah, I think there's a bunch of really interesting choices you guys made in designing the product that it feels like really built on the explosion in like vibe coding or building with AI, whatever you want to call it, in a super interesting way.

14:35One of which is like, yeah, for many consumers, the existing tools are a lot more accessible than like coding something from scratch. But it's still pretty easy to like break them or get to something where you don't know what to do. Whereas I think Wabi, you've purposely put guardrails around the experience to make it hard to like super mess up, which is actually extremely helpful for consumers. and then it also feels like you know we needed to move beyond this paradigm of like great you vibe code a website and it exists out there but like is that the best interface for you to be using a product you want to use daily and storing personal information on and having your own records and like all of these sorts of things probably not and for a lot of people like their phone is where they spend most of their time online it's kind of their primary interface and where they want to use things.

15:25And so obviously I know there's like challenges designing for mobile and that sort of thing, but it felt like a really smart choice for you guys to start there just to get so much more deeply ingrained in someone's daily life or daily workflow. You know, I've only pretty much built mobile apps. Yeah. I really like the idea of mobile apps and a lot of things you're not going to be doing on really just putting in a website or whatever, some link. And I do believe a lot in the concept of an organizational layer. Like to a degree, the App Store is the organizational layer for the mobile. And the browser is the organizational layer for internet.

16:08And so something like that should exist for Fype coding, I guess, or for this new era of software for AI. Let's call it AI software. And I don't believe that people will be, I do believe that we're all going to be building some sort of software and using software that everyone builds, some UGC software. But I definitely don't believe in links that people will share with each other and with me relying on some random person somewhere who's not a professional developer to support the database for the app where I might store some sensitive data or at least data that I don't want to disappear, even if it's not very sensitive.

16:46And we've already seen this with some apps, Vibe-coded apps reaching the top of the app store. I think the one around women dating that all the super sensitive information got leaked. And that wasn't because they are bad actors. It's just they're not professional developers. So there needs to exist some platform where everything will live. And to a degree, we're not watching videos somewhere. You just see videos somewhere. We're watching them on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube. it's not like people are passing around links. And so the current situation I do think is very similar to the very beginning of the internet where people were creating personal pages with GeoCities and some other tools like that, which I don't remember very well because it was very little.

17:29But yeah, before LinkedIn, people were sending these links to each other. And of course, now there's LinkedIn. There are certain guardrails you can't really do everything the way you could do in GeoCities. But at the same time, you get the social graph, You get the platform, you get all sorts of cool things there. I guess the same as Shopify for e-commerce. Yeah, you can build your own online store, but no one's really doing it anymore. Everyone's just using Shopify, and then they also get all the platform benefits. And I feel like the same will happen with Wabi. Yes, you cannot download an app from Wabi and put it on the App Store, but you can use it inside Wabi, and you can get the social graph and all the integrations and potentially the shared context between all the apps and the memory behind, you know, for that user and so on, so on, so on.

18:19Our mutual friend Heaton said that Wabi is not just a collection of apps. It's a framework for memory, context, and expression. Every time you create or share, you're teaching it who you are. Is that how you see it? I believe in it 100%. I think with every, I believe, I still remember, of course, and you guys obviously remember too, but I do remember how the first iOS apps were just people trying to squeeze those websites into an app format or just kind of toy apps like iBeer or there was my favorite one, I Am Rich, that was$999.99 and it didn't do anything. And then, of course, people figured out, well, there's something special about this being a mobile app and maybe GPS and connectivity and things like Uber and Tinder came out, whole new categories of apps.

19:11And so they figured out what's so special about mobile. And I feel like for AI, the super special thing is personalization, but really deep personalization. So for me, kind of vibe coding an app, but that still is sort of like the same old software that's not really taking any of your context into consideration, where the data of that app is not exposed to AI that keeps learning. It's kind of just old school. I do believe a lot in Andre's idea of like software 3.0, some next level of software that's super deeply personalized. So if you think in the context of a Wabi mini app, how can you personalize it?

19:47First of all, you can personalize the features, the looks, you know, where I skin the app in a certain way. But then on top of that, you can also change the problem. So for example, for my workout app, I added to the problem a couple things. First of all, the book that I'm reading, that method that I want to work out using that method. Also, the fact that I go to as a fitness and it has a certain, I added a photo of that gym. So kind of the model is not generating workouts and completely different sides of the gym. If it's a super side, it has to be next to each other. So this is the deep, deep, deep level of personalization that is following.

20:22And of course, on the YB platform level, the mini app also knows that I'm a certain age, that I live in San Francisco, that I have kids, these are my fitness goals and so on, so on. And then eventually when I build another mini app, maybe around nutrition, those apps should be able to talk and pass along that context. And today, of course, all of that exists in just the, you know, the walled gardens. You're fully locked in in one app, which to me feels absolutely crazy. And I can't connect. If I connected my email or my calendar, it can be connected to both of these apps. I have to go through the process with every developer all the time.

21:00They have to build it. I have to connect it. That seems crazy to me. Do you imagine people building true social apps where the in-app experience involves a community? I'd love that. And we're building multiplayer right now, as we speak. We spend the whole day trying to figure out, like, what. It's pretty complex just because all apps can be, can have very different type of multiplayer. And that needs to be explained to users as well in a very intuitive way. But yeah, totally believe in, first of all, using apps together, at least with your friends, your family, but also potentially building these more kind of community apps where everyone can join.

21:41Maybe I can make my app multiplayer and open for everyone to join. A good example of that is made some image gen app around dogs where you can turn any of your dogs into like a royal, some user built it, like a royal portrait of different era. And so that would be cool for all the dog owners to just join that app and to be able to post to the universal feed. And so that's something we've been talking about today because this would be really cool. Instead, if you're just making these photos and then sharing somewhere, you're just adding them to the ongoing feed of dog photos. Sorry. Yeah, there's, I mean, no, no, no.

22:17I think it's a great example. Well, yeah, I'm definitely going to use that on my dog. But I feel like there are so many examples too of image and video prompt sharing that happens in very unoptimized ways today. Like I've been following a lot, as you know very well, like teen girls and college-age girls are often early adopters of stuff. And they have been making all of these like Nano Banana and Quinn image edit prompts of like them like lying on a couch and the ghost-faced killers behind them for like Halloween. And they'll like post the image on TikTok or Reels or wherever and it'll blow up.

22:52And then they'll be like commenting like this long form prompt like in the comments on TikTok, which makes no sense as a way to do it. And then everyone's asking like, where do I go to do this? Like I have the Google app. Why isn't it letting me do this? And you have to explain like, no, you need the Gemini app. And it just feels like there's already this consumer demand and consumer behavior around like prompt sharing in particular for creative stuff that could be done. I've already made a bunch of Wabi mini apps for this and it could be done so much better. And I think that the creative community would really thrive with this.

23:24Oh, that was the most, and I guess this is why we started the company. how is it possible that we have this godlike technology yet we pass around these text prompts which is almost like Microsoft DOS commands but worse because at least the commands were sort of like you could learn them they were a few, whatever, they were short, they weren't that long and now these crazy unstructured paragraphs of text sometimes you also need a reference image or something else to me that's a little bit crazy And I think that is kind of one of the biggest problems of discovery. With AI, it's hard to find these prompts, even if you saw the output of, you know, you saw this cool photo with the ghost, whatever, but then how do I recreate that?

24:09I need to find the prompt. I need to know what app. I need to know what model to choose. Oftentimes, it's not even very intuitive. And at that point, I've just lost all my motivation to do that. Instead of that, if you could just quickly, you know, click on the link in comments on TikTok and open a mini app where everything's already set up for you, just add a photo. And you can see examples, you can choose different styles and this and that, and then you can see in comments what other people are doing. I think this is the way to go. And I think what's most interesting, that it sort of combines the Vibe coding apps, one of the biggest kind of trends of the last year at least, and also just using AI.

24:47Before that it was all, you know, it's either the, are you in the text to prompt to app market or are you in some other market? And this kind of puts together, like this is really the one place to use amazing prompts and it kind of blends this difference. How much, you know, it's interesting you mentioned, just seeing that it's a mass market consumer behavior or maybe like a future one to be sharing prompts this way. How much do you think for the average person whose only AI experience has been with ChatGPT that this is going to be a surprising new behavior that they have to sort of adjust to or something that feels very intuitive and obvious and like, wow, I've been waiting for this?