Technology, Culture, and the Next AI Interface with signüll

0:00It's funny how the internet now, everybody can comment on everything. Every technology cycle to me is increasingly harder because you're probably going into a different part of how the human mind operates. Right now we're like developing personality. That's insane.

0:14Anish Acharya:There's technology, there's culture, which is collective, and then there's our individual progress as a human species. Culture's changing, technology's improving, where are we as people? I can't believe the scale of which we're at now. Like, it's absolutely unbelievable. I was at OpenAI, we were discussing a bunch of things around how do you think about personality development of models, and these are really technically hard problems. I think the number one challenge even OpenAI mentioned is that how do we make the power of the models more easily accessible and useful in terms of what they can do?

0:49And I think this is happening with agents, but it still seems very primitive and very inaccessible to a lot of individuals.

0:55Anish Acharya:I think that the number one way you change the NPS of AI is you make important things cheap quickly.

1:01Erik Torenberg:Shakespeare argued brevity is the soul of wit. Prediction markets bet that crowds know the future better than experts. and dating apps turn the most universal human desire into a design problem that technology may have made worse, not better. These three ideas seem unrelated, but they share a root. The gap between what people know formally and what they understand intuitively. Economists call this tacit knowledge. It's a knack for reading a room, fixing an engine, or sensing when a product is right before the data confirms it. Most of Silicon Valley still rewards the formal kind, But something is shifting, and one of the sharpest observers of that shift has been writing about it online under a Shakespeare avatar.

1:44Erik Torenberg:I speak with Signal, online commentator, alongside A16Z general partner, Anisha Charya. Here live with Signal, the great culture commentator of our time. You have opinions on everything from, you know, what's happening in AI, both as a consumer, but also the industry, to what's happening in all the big tech companies, to what's happened in dating markets more broadly, to how the product should be developed. There's no commentator like you. How do you sort of make sense of yourself on the Internet in terms of how you thread these topics together? What sort of threads at all? I mean, I could have an opinion on Iran and dating at the same time.

2:27Maybe even Iranian dating. You're like, by the way. How does it work there? Are they using Tinder? I don't know. I mean, there's probably several jokes about there about love bombing and stuff. I apologize. Don't apologize. Okay, I have this weird tendency to where I like to add humor to things that are maybe not inappropriate. Anyway, I think, look, it's funny how the internet now, everybody can comment on everything. There's a lot of people that have a great perspective in a singular dimension. Got Ben Thompson writing about technology and markets. And if you want to have an analysis of an earnings report of Microsoft, I mean, who better in the world than Ben Thompson?

3:09I mean, you can pack eight rates about deep tech and crazy, I think, 40-page papers about industries and things. And really fun to read, really great things. What I noticed is, like, I've been in technology for such a long time, since I was a kid. And I'm particularly fascinated with culture in general as well. And I think that intersection of tech and culture is so fascinating to me. And I like to relate everything back to computer science and how I've learned about the world through computer science and computers in general. And I think all my tweets and things are really, in essence, relating the idea of life to technology and culture to technology.

3:49And maybe an interesting, or this is how my mind works. I think my writing is all a reflection of the prompts that happen in my brain that get translated somehow into words that are in the right order that other people can interpret and therefore have a reaction to and maybe generate a little bit of hate online or a little bit of love. And I think that's actually quite beautiful.

4:11Erik Torenberg:That's the most poetic thing I've ever heard about. I do have a Shakespeare profile photo. Exactly. And, you know, I think that's been great. I grew up playing a game called SimCity, and in SimCity you can increase the simulation speeds. It's a button that allows you to increase the simulation of the city and the cars move faster and the people move faster and the disasters happen faster and everything is just increased. And I feel like in the recent, maybe obviously in the last 20 years with respect to iPhone and whatnot, but man, in the last two, three, four years, holy shit. Who the hell hit the 100x speed?

4:46Like it feels ridiculous. Like if I talk to somebody that something happened last month, it feels like it happened like 10 years ago. Nicolas Maduro got pulled from Venezuela and brought to America in the most amazing outfit. And people forgot about this. Like, it's just incredibly fascinating the way that the world is moving so fast. And technology is accelerating that. I mean, it's the fuel that is empowering that engine. And I don't know what we did, but it's moving really, really fast.

5:15Anish Acharya:And then do you think, if I was to almost separate the three ideas, you know, there's technology, there's culture, which is collective, And then there's a sort of, however you measure our individual progress as a human species, culture's changing, technology's improving. Where are we as people? Are we more spiritually mature, less spiritually mature than we were 50 years ago, 500 years ago, 5 ,000 years ago? Or are we just basically, you know, Neanderthals with iPhones? I think generally technology should help us understand ourselves in a better way such that we are able to have intellectual, spiritual potential growth as a species, as a collective and the individual, I suspect.

5:54And I think I firmly believe that I'm like pro-technology helping achieve that. I love using AI to be able to understand myself. Like if I say something, it's like, wait, does this make sense? Is this more interesting? Like how do I personally think about it? What am I missing? Those are really things that help me grow intellectually, spiritually, personally, relationships, all of those things. So inherently, I mean, if I understand your question correctly, it's more like these things are really helping us experience ourselves much better. And I think that probably is the greatest achievement you can possibly have.

6:31I mean, we're tool builders. And every tool that we've ever built has helped us progress as a human species or individually, whether it's art or the wheel or whatever. And I can't believe the scale at which we're at now, right? Like it's absolutely unbelievable. And I think what's shocking to me is that the collective has not caught on yet.

6:54Erik Torenberg:Do you think the norms around AI relationships with boyfriend, girlfriend, or just best friendships are going to be something in the next five to 10 years, extreme to a degree that seems unimaginable right now for the average person? What do you think? When you have ease of access and reward structures around it and a human desire paired with it that's deep, I think you get some interesting outcomes. And the desire and the pursuit of connection is an incredible and important element of any human's existence. and the idea that AI can help you facilitate that with depth and scale and ever-ending.

7:38AI doesn't get tired.

7:39Erik Torenberg:What else is surprising you most about how people are interacting with AI, particularly the different models, or what are you observing as you're looking at the landscape and trying to make sense of where things are going? Well, first of all, I don't think most people are utilizing them anything beyond the basics. like it's fascinating to me that every single time we're focused on really advanced capability demonstration holy crap this is a phd researcher or whatever yet i don't think most people are utilizing in such a fashion obviously and i think most people are utilizing very very very basic tasks and so i think we're in like the stone ages of how people view and perceive and use these things even though there's a billion people utilizing them but they're not utilizing them to the full capabilities.

8:25Like, I think the number one challenge for even, I think, OpenAI mentioned is that how do we make this stuff, the power of the models, more easily accessible and useful in terms of what they can do. And I think this is happening with agents. It's happening today, but it still seems very primitive and very inaccessible to a lot of individuals. I think I personally like to think about this because the way that I like to think about the world, one of my favorite Shakespeare quotes, and this is why the Shakespeare picture exists, is brevity is the soul of wit. and shakespeare was able to capture an essence of the world in very simple like not simple terminology maybe i don't back then it was simple but in a few words or a few sentences and i think we need to make this stuff much more easily accessible and useful for individuals i don't know how that will be what that will look like but it's certainly something that i love to think about personally and i don't know where we'll end up but i view it more as an art than a science at the moment.

9:20But it's cool. It's a fun time to exist as a technologist.

9:25Erik Torenberg:A lot of people are wondering what to even work on in the age of sort of the big labs, like what to start, how to think about what could be a real company versus something that they'll end up doing or what's just worth doing. How have you thought about it or how do you advise people to think about that? A lot of AI today is very much the big labs kind of are dominating consumer territory when it's open AI and for Outback. And then tons and tons of people trying to find a business use case for it in various verticals. It's interesting. I personally focus on what I'm passionate about. Like I was at a demo day or whatever.

10:02There's a lot of individuals who I thought clearly they were, they found the idea through AI to work on what to work on. It's fascinating. I was like, are you really interested in real estate? Like, I don't know. Do you want to spend your time working on this? And is this an interesting problem? I'm like, I don't think about it from a technology perspective. Like, screw AI. I don't care about what area are you interested in? What thing drives you? If I were an investor, I think that's probably the only thing that matters is, are you going to keep going into this problem space if you're not that interested in it?

10:31Look, we're having a lot of fun doing this. And I think if you're not having a lot of fun doing stuff, you probably shouldn't work on it. It's something that, like, it's a privileged thing, obviously. And often a lot of people don't find work fun. and they have to do it because it's economically necessary. But if you're going to build a company, try to have fun with it. There's a great quote in the Bhagavad Gita, which I read recently again, and I was like, you're not entitled to the fruits of your labor. And I never think about the outcomes. I just try to figure out what I enjoy, how much fun I like to have, and the problems that I like thinking about.

11:07All this account that I have is just pure fun. And like, I really enjoy talking and thinking about this. And my brain prompts me to think about it. We were talking about, you know, the real prompt is in your brain. Like, that is where it originates. And then you're translating that into some text that you're sending into AI, where we call that a prompt. And sure, yeah, but like, without the spark in your existence, in your inner self, nothing would happen. This is some Rick Rubin shit, man. It's true. Like, it's fucking, it's so fucking true. I agree. Like, how?

11:47Anish Acharya:We should get you together with Rick. This is why, this is why, you know, I think Rick Rubin, people made fun of him. No, he's amazing. He's incredible. He's incredible because he was ahead of the curve. Oh, totally. And I think music is such a, I know, Anish, you're a giant, you know, you're DJ in music, but like, it's such a, you have to feel it. Yeah. You have to feel it. And there's such an important element to it. I think when you're doing anything new, building a company, you have to feel it. Okay, so I have a question for you. So there's two different archetypes of great consumer founders, okay?

12:25Anish Acharya:I'd say there's the, maybe the modern archetype is somebody like, you know, Boris is working on Cloud Code or of course Dario or, you know, Sam and some of his co-founders who are so extraordinarily technical. They're like willing these things into existence that were unimaginable five years ago. Okay, and that's great. And ChatGPT is the fastest product to what I think is a billion users, et cetera, et cetera. There's a other archetype from the Web 2.0 days, right? These are like the gentle sort of consumer, I don't know, philosophers whose canvas was technology, right? Think Ev, think Kevin Rose.

13:03Anish Acharya:All these people were just cut from a different cloth and they were perhaps more students of culture than technology. Okay, and you got two very different forms of types of companies. And I don't quite know where I'd put Zuck, but let's set him aside for a moment. Do you think that there's a preferred model? Is the gentle builder more of a New York informed model and the technical builder is more of an SF informed model? Is it just something that matches with the product cycle? And then maybe talk a bit about what you think your strengths are and how it meets the moment. I think of most people as one type of artist or another.

13:36and they have like they have like brush strokes that you use you know I was like Monet and it was like I loved what I love is I love going in and looking at the actual brush strokes of the painting then you get these like pixel level um understanding of like wow he used this color for this brush stroke whatever and then you zoom out and you're like oh my god I see this wonderful little painting and um I'm deeply inspired by it so it's just like I think people are utilizing different styles and different forms of like a different type of, but it's in the end when you're doing anything new it is just a sort of a canvas, like the painting and some people like hard edge paintings and this renaissance style and some people like modern art and some people like this water lilies of clay, and I think just a different form and at least all the initial versions of it, going back to the Web 2.0 era with Kevin Rose and it was a very different time because building network products like that, whether it's Digg or Twitter, fundamentally different than developing personalities of a model.

14:47Like, holy crap, I was at OpenAI and we were discussing a bunch of things around how do you think about personality development of models and, you know, the fact that you can't really easily change them or how do you reduce the sycophency of the models. And these are really technically hard problems. I think every technology cycle to me is increasingly harder because you're probably going into a different part of how the human mind or the human operates. Right now we're developing personality. That's insane. If you asked 10 years ago if we were going to build personalities for computers, you would have kind of been like, wait, what?

15:24What does that really mean? And these guys were with Kevin and Jack and whatnot. they were architecting I think delivery vehicles in some sense right like they were developing architecture for humans to add payload and then send it to another human whether it's broadcast or one-to-one you know with dig was the news and people posted in the comments and Twitter was like another version of that now I think we're kind of designing this upper echelon of of how a human personality works and how intelligence works. And I think that's a grant, like it's such a, it no longer feels like a delivery vehicle.

16:10It feels like the actual thing and the payload and the underlying. I don't know if that makes sense. Does it not my mind works? I don't know if you guys think about it that way. But in some sense, we've moved up leveled a lot and the complexity has increased drastically. The training and model and then reinforcement learning, human feedback, what's interesting. There's like multiple different types of ways that things engage. I think these are just...

16:36Erik Torenberg:And talk a little bit more about what you've observed in terms of the personality differences between models or what you think particularly makes Claude so interesting. You know, I think one of the things that they focused on, going back to our Rick Rubin point, it feels artisan. It feels like it's got a soul. Whereas I think in some sense, the other models feel a little bit more robotic, a little bit more utilitarian, if you will. And, you know, if you think about what AGI is, and I think there's a great Simpsons episode, right, where one of the Bart sells his soul for$5 to Milhouse. It was one of the most profound, interesting episodes of The Simpsons.

17:20And, okay, well, he wrote Bart's soul on a piece of paper and then handed it to him. And then he felt it. Like he felt like he didn't have a soul. And I found that really interesting because, you know, it sort of explores the idea of like, I think going back to our initial point, like what is a human and what are we? What are we doing here? How does technology help us in terms of understanding ourselves and the way that we exist? And I felt like there was like less sycophancy. There was this pushback. It was like talking to a real human being. It's personified. Like it's called Claude and Claude is known as a person.

18:00So it is, it feels very crafted, artisan slash, dare I say, premium to a certain extent. And I think it's been really fun. And one of my, my sister is a doctor and she randomly just, she was using ChatGPT for a few years and she canceled and she was like, I'm using Claude now. And I got a weird, I was like, what? How did you find out about this? What? It's nuts. and I think it just goes to show you that the proliferation and the marketing and the storytelling of Claude has been aesthetically really next level. It's been really, really fun to watch. I like good products. I like talking about good products and I like praising the people who make good products.

18:40That's what we're about here, right? Like it's like give credit where credit is due. They've made a beautiful little tool and when paired with like a thing in your pocket that is also crafted and artisan with Apple and iPhone and then you get this like really magical, intelligent experience on your device wherever you are.

19:00Erik Torenberg:How do you think about what these product experiences might look like in a couple years? Like, how do you think, how do you see the interface evolving? Or what are you sort of predicting in terms of what's on the horizon? I think the most interesting thing to me is they seem like in a very infant state in some sense. I don't know. I mean, they're really powerful in one end of the dimension, right? But they're also like, it's unclear to me experiencing intelligence through just conversation back and forth is one way, but the ambient layers are really fun and interesting to think about. Like we were building a fun little product that woke you up with AI, right?

19:35And it's like a very primitive thing. Everybody wakes up in the morning, God forbid otherwise, but how is it going to weave into your daily existence as if it's not a chatbot, but more as a sort of ethereal entity that exists? I mean, obviously movies have personified this and there's been her and whatnot, But it is going to be fascinating to see how it weaves into your daily life, whether it's your home or work and in a very ambient state. I know it's not about like listening to you all the time, potentially, or it's not about. But I think there's a lot of these explorations that have yet to be done at the interface layers.

20:14How does AI talk to you first? Today, that's a push notification, I think, roughly. Is that it? I don't know. How does Apple integrate AI into iOS and weave it into the operating system? And how do we use applications or specific types of things? Are they even necessary anymore? Do we even need an interface if we're just talking to it? I don't know. I think those are really interesting questions. I personally like the ambient AI layer. I think that you're seeing a little bit of this with like OpenClaw and whatnot and sort of working agents working in the background and kind of surfacing the right things at the right time.

20:52There's a great product a while ago that didn't work called Google Now. The whole purpose of Google Now was to kind of predict a search, right? It's like, what are you going to search for next, Eric? Like in some sense, right?

21:07And it was ahead of its time in some sense, but when you marry it with context and intelligence, I think that is actually a huge factor for how to think about what the future of AI and how the stuff will weave into our lives. And I don't think anybody's, there's not going to be a single person who doesn't use this stuff. It's just a matter of when. Yeah, right. That's going to be interesting. I don't know.

21:33Erik Torenberg:I'll let you know just a quick story. I remember asking Balaji. I was like, Balaji, how do you know so much about, you know, crypto and economics and bio and math and science and, you know, all these things? like, give me all the books you read. He's like, books? I don't read books. I just get in fights with people on the internet. And then just, that's how I like internalize all the information. It's real time. I need to know, I learn what I need to know to win the argument. The coolest thing. And then he's like, really remembers it. Conceptually, those are really fun ways to have these discussions.