What Comes After Mobile? Meta’s Andrew Bosworth on AI and Consumer Tech

0:00Is there a better way I think there is? Every single interface that I interact with, every single problem space that I'm trying to solve are going to be made easier by virtue of this new technology. If you were starting from scratch today, you probably wouldn't build this app -centric world. You can imagine a post -phone world. The past 20 years of consumer technology have been a story of apps, of touch screens, and of smartphones. These form factors seemingly appeared out of nowhere and may be replaced just as quickly as they were ushered in. Perhaps by a new AI -enabled stack, a new computing experience that is more agentic, more adaptive, and more immersive.

0:43Now in today's episode, A16C's Growth General Partner, David George, discusses this feature with arguably one of the most influential builders of this era. That is, Metacetio, Andrew, Boss, Bossworth, who spent nearly two decades at the company, shaping consumer interaction from the Facebook newsfeed all the way through to their work on smart glasses and AR headsets. Here, Boss explores the arc of translating emerging technologies into real products that people use and love. Plus, help breakthroughs in AI and hardware could turn the existing app model on its end. In this world, what new interfaces and marketplaces need to be developed?

1:22What competitive dynamics hold strong and which fall by the wayside? For example, we'll brand still be a moat, and if we get it right, Boss says the next wave of consumer tech won't run on taps and swipes, it'll run on intent. So, is the post -mobile phone era upon us? Listen in to find out. Oh, and if you do like this episode, it comes straight from our AI Revolution series. And if you missed previous episodes of the series with guests like AMD CEO Lisa Sue and Throbbing Co -founder Barrio Amade and the founders behind companies like Databricks, Waymo, Figma and more, head on over to a16z .com slash AI Revolution.

2:02As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. Should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the company's discussed in this podcast. For more details including a link to our investments, please see a16z .com slash disclosures.

2:33Boss, thanks for being here. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Okay, I want to jump right in. How are we all going to be consuming content five years from now and ten years from now? 10 years I feel pretty confident that we will have a lot more ways to bring content into our view shed than just taking out our fun. I think our community glasses obviously are a real possibility. I'm also hoping that we can do better for really engaging immersive things. Right now you have to travel to like the sphere, which is great, but there's one of them in Vege since a trip. Are there better ways that we can have access to if we really want to be engaged in something, not just immersive, but also socially.

3:09So it's like, oh, I want to watch the I want to watch it with my dad. I want to feel like we're court side. Sure, we can go and pay a lot of tickets. Is there a better way? I think there is. So 10 years, I feel really good about all these alternative content delivery vehicles. Five years is trickier. For example, I think the glasses, the smart glasses, the AI glasses, the display glasses that we'll have in five years will be good. Some of them will be super high -end and pretty exceptional. Some of them will be actually little and not even a tremendously high resolution in displays, but they will be always available in your face.

3:39I wouldn't be doing work there, but like if I'm just trying to grab simple content in moments between, that's already good for that. So I think what we are seeing is, as you'd expect, we're the very beginning now of a spectrum of super high -end but probably very expensive experiences that will not be evenly distributed across the population. A much more broadly available set of experiences that are, and they're not really rich enough to replace the device that we have today. And then hopefully a continually growing number of people revving experiences that really could not be had any other way today.

4:10You're thinking about what you could do with mixed reality and virtual reality. Yeah, we're going to build up to a lot of that stuff. So throughout your career, I would say one of the observations I would have is you've been uniquely good at piecing together various big technology shifts into new product experiences. So in the case of Facebook early days for you, obviously you famously were part of the that created the newsfeed, and that's a combination of social media, a mobile experience, and applying your old school AI to it to create it. Yeah, exactly. But that's pretty cool. And a lot of times these trends, they come in bunches.

4:47And that's what creates the breakthrough products. So maybe take that and apply it to where we are today, with the major trends that are in front of you. Let me say two things about this. The first one is I think, if there was a thing that, not me specifically, but I think me and my cohorts at Meta were really good at, was like, we really immersed in like what the problem was. Like what were people trying to do? What do they want to do? And when you do that, you are going to reach for whatever tool is available to accomplish that goal. That allows you to be really honest about what tools are available and see trends.

5:18I think the more oriented you are towards the technology side, you get caught in a wave of technology and you don't want to admit when that wave is over and you don't want to embrace the next wave. And you're building technology for technology, right? Yeah, yeah. So like solving a product product. but if you're embracing like what are the issues that people are really going through in their life and they don't have to be profound? I bring that up just because I think we're in this interesting moment where I think all of us have been through a phase where a lot of people wanted a new wave to becoming because it would have been advantageous to them.

5:45Yeah. But those things weren't solving problems that regular people had. I think the reason we're so enthusiastic about the AI revolution that's happening right now is it really feels tangible. These are real problems that are being solved and it's not solving every problem. It creates new problems. It's fine. So it feels like a substantial real nuke capability that we have. And what's unusual about it is how broad -based it can be applied. And while it has these interesting downsides today on factuality and certainly compute and cost and inference, those types of trade -offs feel really solvable and the domains that it applies to are really broad.

6:21And it's, that's very unusual. It's really in my career. You almost always, when these technological breakthroughs happen, they're almost always very domain -specific. It's like, cool. Like, this is going to get faster. Yeah. or that's going to get cheaper, or that's now possible. This kind of feels like, oh, everything's going to get better. Every single interface that I interact with, every single problem space that I'm trying to solve are going to be made easier by virtue of this new technology. That's pretty rare. Mark and I always believed that this AI revolution was coming. We just thought it was going to take longer.

6:48We thought we were probably still 10 years away at this point. But what we thought would happen sooner was this revolution in computing interfaces. And we really started to feel 10 years ago, like the mobile phone form factor as amazing as it was. This is 2015 was like already saturated. That was what it was going to be. And once you get past the mobile phone, which is again, the greatest computing device that any of us have ever used to this point, of course. It's like, okay, well, it has to be more natural in terms of how you're getting information into your body, which is obviously, I do usually through our eyes and ears, and how we're getting our intentions expressed back to the machine.

7:24You no longer have a touchscreen, you no longer have a keyboard. So once you realize those are the problems, it's like, cool, we need to be on the face because you need to have access to eyes and ears to bring information from the machine to the person. And you need to have these neural interfaces to try to allow the person to manipulate the machine and express their intentions to it when they don't have a keyboard or mouse, or a touchscreen. And so that has been an incredibly clear -eyed vision we've been on for the last 10 years. But we really did grow up in an entire generation of engineers for whom the system was fixed.

7:56The application model was fixed. The interaction design, sure we went from mouse to touch screen, but it's still a direct manipulation interface, which is literally the same thing that was pioneered in the 1960s. So we really haven't changed these modalities. And there's a cost to changing those modalities because we as a society have learned how to manipulate these digital artifacts through these tools. Yeah. So the challenge for us was, okay, you have to build this hardware, which has to do all these amazing things and also be attractive and also be light and also be affordable. And none of these existed before.

8:31And what I tell my team was, I was like, that's only half the problem. The other half the problem is great. How do I use it? Like, how do I make it feel natural to me? I'm so good with my phone now. It's an extension of my body, of my intention at this point. How do we make it even easier? Yeah. And so we were having these challenges. And then what a wonderful blessing. AI came in two years ago, much sooner than we expected. And it's a tremendous opportunity to make this even easier for us. Because the AI that we have today are much greater ability to understand what my intentions are. I can give vague reference and it's able to like work through the corpus of inflation as available to like make specific outcomes happen from it.

9:09There's still a lot of work to be done to actually adapt it. And it's still not yet a control interface. like I can't reliably work my machine with it. There's a lot of things that we have to do, but we know what those things are. And so now, you know, much more exciting place, actually, whereas before we thought, okay, we've got this big hill to climb on the hardware, we've got this big hill to climb on the interaction design, but we think we can do it. And now we've got a wonderful tailwind where on the interaction design side, at least, there's the potential of having this much more intelligent agent that now has not only the ability for you to converse with it naturally, and get results out of it, but also to know by context what you're seeing, what you're hearing, what's going on around you, and make intelligent interference based on that information.

9:55Let's talk about reality labs and this suite of products what it is today. So you have Quest headsets, you have the smart classes, and then on the far end of the spectrum is Orion and some of the stuff that I demoed. So just talk about the evolution of those efforts and what you think the markets are for them and how they converge versus not over time. So when we started the Rebend Meta project, they were going to be smart glasses. In fact, they were entirely built, and we were six months away from production, when Lama 3 hit. The team was like, no, we got to do this. Now they're AI glasses, right?

10:26They didn't start as AI glasses, but the form factor was already right. We could already do the compute. We already had the ability. So, yeah, now you have these glasses that you can ask questions to. And in December to the Early Access program, we launched what we call live AI. So you can start a live AI session with your Ray -Band Mediclasses. And for 30 minutes until the battery runs out, It's seeing what you're seeing. Yeah. And it's funny because on paper, the Rayban meta looks like an incremental improvement to Rayban stories. And this is kind of the story I'm trying to tell, which is the hardware isn't that different between the two.

10:56But the interactions that we enable with the person using it are so much richer now. When you use Orion, when you use the full AR glasses, you can imagine a post phone world. You're like, oh, wow. Like if this was attractive enough and light enough and added battery life enough to wear all day, this would have all the stuff I need. Like it would all be right here. And when you start to combine that with images that we have of what AI is capable of. So you did the demo where we showed you the breakfast. Yeah, it's like, and it's yeah, and for what it's worth out me to explain it because it's very cool.

11:27Kind of walk over and there's a bunch of breakfast ingredients laid out. And I look at it and I say, hey, meta, what are some recipes? That's right. And it's easy ingredients. So that is for me at least when we think about Orion Initially it didn't have that AI component when we first thought about it It had this component that was very direct manipulation So it was very much modeled on the app model that we're off and there was of course And I think there's a version about yeah, of course you're gonna want to do calls and you're gonna Do your email and you'll be able to do your texting and you want to play games and we have yeah play stargazer game And you know you ought to do your Instagram Reels What we're now excited about is okay take all those pieces and layer on the ability to to have an interactive assistant that really understands not just what's happening on your device and what email's coming in.

12:14But also what's happening in the physical world around you. And is able to connect what you need in the moment with what's happening. And so these are concepts where you're like, wow, what if the entire app model's upside down? Whatever it is, like, hey, I wanna go fetch Instagram right now, it's like, hey, the device realizes that you have a moment between meetings, you're a little bit bored. Hey, do you wanna catch up on the latest highlights from your favorite basketball team? Like those things are become possible. Having said that, the hardware problems are hard and they're real and the cost problems are hard and they're real and Come for the king you best not miss the phone is an incredible centerpiece of our lives today It's how I operate my home.

12:45I use my car. I use it for work. It's everywhere. Yeah, and The world has adapted itself to the phone. So it's weird that my ice maker has a phone app, but it does like I don't know I'm not sure it's excessive, but like super -fitted. So many today's like I got to make an ice maker number one job I got to have it out. It's like, it's a real printer. It's like the smart refrigerator. You're like, I don't need this. It's like, take it out of me. I do think it's gonna be a long, this is what has the 10 year view for me is, I think, much clearer. I think these things are gonna be available while they accepted, increasingly adopted.

13:16The five year view is harder because man, like even a knocking out. It's amazing. Dominance of the phone in five years. It just seems so hard. I'm thinking, it's like, uncorrect. It's like, uncorrect. That's what I said. Like, Orion was the first time I thought, me. Orion, like, put it down on his head. I was like, the first time I've had it into that. It could happen. There does exist a life for us as a species past the phone. It still has the whole dynamic of, well, how do I envision my life without the operating system that I'm so accustomed to? Totally. So I have the physical stuff that you do, but just the familiarity and all the stuff that's working in there.

13:44So, what do you think of the interim period? So, maybe you get to the point where the hardware is capable. It is market accessible, but do you tether to the phone? Do you take a strong view that you will never do that and let the product stand? and how do you think about that piece? The phones have this huge advantage and disadvantage. Huge advantage, which is like, the phone is already central to our lives. It's already got this huge developer ecosystem. It's this anchor device, and it's a wonderful anchor device for that. The disadvantage is, I actually think what we found is the apps want to be different when they're not controlled via a touch screen.

14:20And that's not super novel. A lot of people failed early in mobile, including us by just taking our web stuff and putting on the mobile phone, and be like, oh, the mobile phone, we'll just put the web there. Yeah. But because it wasn't native to what the phone was, and I mean, everything from interaction design to the actual design, to the layout, to how it felt, because we weren't doing phone native things, we were failing with one of the most popular products in the history of the web. Yeah, it's like the major design field, like the Schumorffic idea versus the native idea. Yeah, and I think having developers is a true value, and I think having all this application functionality is a true value.

14:56but then once you actually re -project it into space and you're manipulating it with your fingers like this as opposed to a touch screen you have much less precision it doesn't respond to voice commands because there's no tools for that there's no design you need to get into that so having a phone platform today feels like wow I've got this huge base to work from on the hardware side but I've also actually got this kind of huge anchor to drag on that software side and so we're not opposed to these partnerships and I think it'll be interesting to see once the hardware whereas a little bit more developed how partners feel about it.

15:29And I hope they continue to support people who buy these phones for $1 ,200, $1 ,300, being able to bring whatever hardware they want to bring to take the full functionality of that with them. The biggest question I have is whether the entire app model, because we were imagining a very phone -like app model for these devices, amidst the very different interaction design, input, and control schemes are very different, and that demands a little extra developer attention. I am wondering if the progression of AI over the next several years doesn't turn the app model on its head. Right now it's kind of an unusual thing where I'm like, I want to play music.

16:04So in my head I translate that to, I have to go open Spotify or open title. And the first thing I think of is, who is my provider going to be? Yeah, of course. As opposed to like, that's not what I want. Streaming and limiting. What I want is to play music. Yes. And I just want to be like, go to the AI, I'm like, cool, play this music for me. Yeah. And it should know, oh, like you're already using this service, we'll use that one. are these two services are both available to you, but this one has a better quality song, or this one has lower latency, what the thing is. Or it's like, hey, the song you want isn't available on any of these services.

16:33Do you want to sign up for this other service that does have the song that you want? I don't want to have to be responsible for orchestrating what app I'm opening to do a thing. We've had to do that because that's how things were done. In the entire history of digital computing, you have an application -based model that was the system. So I do wonder how much AI inverts things. That's a pretty hot take. Yeah, it's a hot take. Inverts things. That's not about wearables, that's not about anything. that's just like even at the phone level, if you were building a phone today, would you build an app store the way you used to or would you build an app store, or would you say like, hey, you as a consumer express your intention, express what you're trying to accomplish, and let's see what we have.

17:07Let's see what it can produce. You have to do it. But I do think if you were starting from scratch today, you probably wouldn't build this like, AppCentric world where I as a consumer I'm trying to solve a problem and first have to decide which of the providers I'm going to use to solve that problem. Yeah, of course. That's fascinating. And again, I think it's a function of where the capabilities are today, and I think where we have line of sight into orchestration capabilities. As I'd say, knowledge -wise, that is probably capable today. I think orchestration -wise, it's probably a little bit away.

17:37And then, of course, you've got to build the developer ecosystem. To develop on the platform. Which is incredibly hard. That's the thing I want to see in the focus, right? That's the hardest piece. Yeah. The stronger we get at agentic reasoning and capabilities, the more I can rely on my AI to do things in my absence. And at first it will be knowledge work of course. That's fine. But once you have a flow of consumers coming through here, what you're gonna find is that they're gonna have a bunch of dead ends where they're gonna ask the AI, hey, can you do this thing for me? And it's gonna say, no, I can't.

18:07That's the gold mine that you take to developers. And you're like, hey, I've got a hundred thousand people a day trying to use your app. This problem, yeah. They're trying to use your app. Yeah, they don't know they are. But they're trying to use their app. Look, here's the query stream. Here's what's coming through. and we're even gonna tell him no today. If you build these hooks, you got a hundred thousand people clamoring for something. Coming in and day. For your service. Yeah. And it's totally fine for R .A .I. to go back and say, hey, you got to pay for this. There's a guy who does this for you.

18:33You got to pay for it. Yeah. And by the way, I'm not just talking about apps. I'm like, it's a plumbers. Yeah, of course. There's something in a marketplace here that I think emerges over time. So that's how I see it playing out. I don't see it playing out as like someone goes into a dark room and comes up with this app platform. No. What's gonna happen is, there's going to become a query stream of people using AI to do things. And the AI will fail repeatedly in certain areas because that's a type of functionality that is currently behind some kind of app wall. And there's no, there's no real building.

19:04There's no real building. It's built native to whatever. That's where consumption mechanism is. There's no bridge that's built. And everyone wants to build the bridges. No, it's going to manipulate the pixels and it's going to manipulate. It's like fine, it can do those things. I'm not saying the AI can't cross those boundaries. But I think over time if that becomes the primary interface for humans interacting with software as opposed to the like pick from the garden of applications. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. That's a very alluring in state, just as a consumer, right? Yeah, it's messy and I think it creates these very exciting marketplaces for functionality inside the AI.

19:37it abstracts away a lot of companies' brand names, which are things gonna be very hard for an entire generation of brands. Like the fact that I don't care if it's being played on one of these two music services, that's hard for those music services who like really want me to care. Yeah, and like they want me to have a stronger opinion about it and like they want me to have an attachment. Yeah. I don't wanna have an attachment. There are some things where you may value the attachments. You don't want to ever. In the world where I'm like, here's an app garden and these two are competing for my eyeballs, the brand that they've built is the hugely valuable asset.

20:12In the world where I just care if the song gets played and sounds good, a different set of priorities are important. I think that's net positive because what matters now is performance on the job, be it actual product experience. And value and price for performance. Like matters a lot. I think a lot of companies won't love that. Well, abstracting away, that's like effectively articulating abstracts. I'm doing the way margin pools, which puts a lot more pressure on us trusting the AI, or the distributor of the AI. And so far as I'm floating between different companies that are each providing AI's, the degree which I trust them to not be bought and paid for in the back end, they're not giving me the best experience or the best price for money.

20:51They're giving the one that gives them the most money. Yeah, of course. So yeah, it's the experience of this very today, right? It's a very different world. It's a very different world. It was a very different world. But you can actually see inklings of it today, right? So certain companies are willing to work with the new AI providers in Agentic task completion. Yeah. Yeah. And then they're like, well, actually, wait a minute. I don't just want the bots executing this stuff. I want the humans coming to me. I think I need that. Yeah. But it's existential that I have this brand relationship directly with the demand side.

21:20Yeah. So that's potentially messy, but a bright future, especially if we don't have to pay that like brand tax. Yeah, it'll be very messy. I don't know it's avoidable. because I think once consumers start to get into these tight loops where more and more of their interactions are being moderated by an AI, you won't have a choice. That's like where your customers will be. Yeah, but it's gonna be a pretty different world. Yeah, it'll be a different world and there'll probably be some groups that try to move fast to it as a way to compete with things that are branded. Yeah, and just say I'm gonna compete on performance and price.

21:50Yeah, that's right. Where do you think that could potentially happen first? It probably will mirror query volume. I think of this a lot. We do have a model of this, which was in the web era, when Google became the dominant search engine. So before that, the web era was like very index -based. It was like Yahoo, and it was like links and getting major sources of traffic to link to you was the game. And then once Google came to dominance, which happened very quickly over maybe a couple of years, I feel like. All that mattered was like SEO. All that mattered was like where you were in the query stream.