AI Is Becoming Permanent

Speaker

[music]

Speaker

[music] [music] Hello, everybody.

Andrew Keen

It's Monday, October the 5th. That Was The Week in Tech. We're a bit late, but Keith was in Los Angeles, a Hollywood superstar mingling with celebrities. Keith, were you in Los Angeles?

Keith Teare

Absolutely, I was. I was, you know, my successful audition for the role of Rambo in the next movie.

Andrew Keen

There's a new Rambo movie out actually about Stallone. And there is a really major tech movie out later this week called The Social Reckoning, which is a follow up. To Aaron Sorkin's The Social Networks. I'm looking forward to that. Maybe we'll come back to that later. It's a week, last week at least, where, at least according to Keith, That Was The Week newsletter, that AI is becoming permanent. He suggests that with products like Grotbot, Dot, and Muse,

Andrew Keen

Everyone is going to have a personal assistant. It's certainly big news this week. The Wall Street Journal also ran a piece by their tech What happened this week?

Andrew Keen

To make these grok bots and dots and muses so much more real. We talked about Muse last week, too. So it's not just this week. But clearly, has something happened to you in your own optimistic way? Suggests everyone's going to have a personal assistant. By when? By next week? By next year? By next century?

Keith Teare

Well, everyone's going to be offered one. That is absolutely certain. Probably that's the news of the week. Rather than everyone's going to have one, everyone's going to be offered one. OpenAI had their developer day, I think it was on Tuesday, Tuesday or Wednesday, and announced Dot, and Dot is their version of Muse. We already had Grootbot and OpenClaw, of course, and Hermes. There's a British one called Instinct, which today announced that it's supporting group chats with the agent, so a team can talk to a single agent and all Weigh in on what they want to achieve. And Instinct just raised a billion dollars at a $10 billion valuation, which for a UK company is huge.

Andrew Keen

That may be the pets.com of this particular AI boom. The one company that's missing from all this, and then my company, Anthropik and Claude, why don't they have one?

Keith Teare

They haven't really consolidated everything into a single agentic interface yet. I mean, you could argue that Claude Code and Claude Work and then Claude Chat together constitute something similar, but they don't use a virtual machine. And that's the key feature that all of these other ones share in common. What is a virtual machine? It's basically a computer that runs in the cloud. You never see it, but your agent owns it and can run browsers and email and write code on it to make things happen. So that combination of an agent with a virtual machine where you have an interface to the agent and that's the only relationship you need, that's what is new here. If you look at my open AI, there's this left-hand column with maybe 50 different chat sessions in it. That goes away. The agent sits on top of that and abstracts it away and you just Talk based on topics and outcomes to

Andrew Keen

a single agent. With my Claude, I have a similar situation, but I don't have 50 because I'm not quite as obsessive or mad as you, but I have quite a lot. But I know which they are. So I don't really even understand why an AI bot would benefit me in using Claude.

Keith Teare

An AI bot becomes the orchestrator of of multiple different sessions that have different goals. So if each of your chat sessions is basically the same, it's one session for one interview, then probably you don't need an agent. But let's say you were triaging your email, your calendar, your travel arrangements, your interviews, the book you're working on, certain commercial relationships, and they're all separate. An agent sits on top of them and knows about each of them at a level of detail that you can trust. It knows everything. And so you can basically subordinate everything to what is equivalent to a chief of staff that runs everything for you.

Andrew Keen

But so basically what you're saying is it knocks out a layer on Claude. I've got, I don't know, 15 separate conversations about different subjects. Private, personal, commercial, whatever. And so I don't have to go to that second level. I just deal with one interface and it can cover all that. I mean, to me, that's, I mean, maybe useful. I mean, certainly if Claude offered it, I'd be interested. And I only spend $20 a month on OpenAI because I'm not as wealthy as you. And my understanding is to use Dot You need to spend a hundred. So I'm contemplating spending a hundred just to see how it works, but I'm not convinced of its value, but maybe not everyone's like me. I mean, you already, how much are you spending a week, a month on all these AIs?

Keith Teare

Well, it's now starting to reduce. One of the benefits of this personal assistant, our chief of staff, is that you can use a single subscription. And in the case of Muse, it's free. But in all the others, you've got to have a subscription. And that subscription can be reduced down to a single subscription. I think I'm very close to closing down a bunch of accounts and just coming down to a

Andrew Keen

single one.

Andrew Keen

You avoided the question. How much are you spending a month at the moment?

Keith Teare

I probably spend across my work and my personal, because I pay for everything, probably $1,000 a month.

Andrew Keen

Well, you're a high roller, Keith. You're not very typical. I mean, you're in the top 0.1% of people. You have to be.

Keith Teare

Yeah, I'm not using myself as a poster child for what's not.

Andrew Keen

Is that why you're in Los Angeles? Were you talking to people about making a movie?

Keith Teare

Exactly, exactly.

Andrew Keen

So what do you make? I mean, you're always bullish on these things. I'm more suspicious. What do you make of Nguyen's two concerns? Firstly, it doesn't always work that well. In her Wall Street Journal piece, she talks about one example where someone was selling some land and it got the price wrong, so it was offering that land for a dollar. And the other point is on privacy, which I think is a bigger issue.

Keith Teare

We know these things aren't perfect and they'll get better, but they're always capable of errors.

Andrew Keen

On the other hand, what about the privacy thing, which certainly comes back to the social reckoning and, of course, the great critique. In some ways, even more powerful now of social media is Facebook's destruction of privacy.

Keith Teare

The interesting thing about her article is she answers her own question and says yes. So despite those, let's call them hesitations, She's all in. She wants to give it a try.

Andrew Keen

She's certainly not all in. I would say she's...

Keith Teare

Well, read the last sentence.

Andrew Keen

What does she say?

Keith Teare

I gladly accept the AI agent's help.

Andrew Keen

So I'm quoting, do all of our daily tasks need to be optimized for efficiency? Not necessarily. Sometimes I enjoy taking the slow route, but if I can safely and reliably avoid the grueling stuff, plain ticket refunds, insurance policy contracts, mortgage applications, I'd gladly accept an agent's help. But she does raise the issue of-

Keith Teare

She does, but I think she's fairly balanced and she's definitely going to lean into it. You know, she's not drinking all the Kool-Aid, but she's seeing progress and wanting to test it.

Andrew Keen

Yeah, I mean, she's a very seasoned tech reporter. The other thing that concerns me that strikes me is the stuff she lists, plane ticket refunds, insurance policy contracts, mortgage applications. They're certainly not everyday things. I mean, why do we need these agents for what sorts of things?

Keith Teare

Well, have you ever yourself applied for insurance?

Andrew Keen

Yeah.

Keith Teare

Was it an enjoyable experience?

Andrew Keen

No, and I take your point on insurance, but it's not a daily thing. I mean, it's something that you have to go through and you click all the boxes and then you just move on. I'm not suggesting that isn't useful, but on a daily basis, are we going to be doing, it's not the kind of thing we do on a daily basis.

Keith Teare

It's going to be, the extent to which you share your life with a chief of staff or an agent or an assistant is going to be very individual. I absolutely have given access to everything. To five different agents because I'm testing them all, including credit card, bank account, logging into stock accounts, everything.

Keith Teare

And I think it's pretty hard to get the benefits unless you do that. And you could call it privacy, but I'm not sharing it with a company. I'm sharing it with an agent that I own that's in a virtual computer that's encrypted that's only available to me. So I don't feel too much risk in doing that. What are you doing?

Andrew Keen

I mean, for example, what are you doing with your credit cards? Again, I'm not convinced of the need.

Keith Teare

Paying for things, Andrew.

Andrew Keen

But you can do that. And I have three credit cards and to pay them on a monthly basis, you just press a button.

Keith Teare

Let's say I say to an agent, you know, I want a lens hood for one of my lenses here from Amazon.

Keith Teare

Please go and find the right thread for the lens hood. I want the hogar one and I don't want to spend more than $40. Done. You know, that's it. I'm finished. Yeah, but you could do that. You could just do that by going to Amazon. Yeah, but why do I want to go to Amazon if I don't have to? And think about it. I just used voice. Let's try and capture what is novel here. And I accept your point that different people are going to have different levels of tolerance for what they want to do. But let's just talk about what you could do. Firstly, you can dispense with the keyboard and the mouse as an input. They all talk now. Secondly, that means you don't have to be sat at your desk. You can talk to your agent. I was in Orange County. My agent runs here on my Mac, but on my phone, I didn't need to know where my agent was. I could just talk to it. It can do any action that requires a browser. I don't know how many times a day I use a browser where it would be convenient not to, but all of those times now it can do it. I just got my renewal for my insurance on one of my cars. Now I can just say, please go and renew it. And so we're going to move to a point. Where the keyboard, the mouse, and the screen don't get in the way. And any task, let's just broadly say task, Instacart, ordering your groceries, sending a return back to Amazon because they sent you the wrong thing, almost anything could be done using your voice with your own personal assistant. That's obviously more Productive, and you're gonna you're gonna steal time away from those things for whatever it is you'd rather spend any time on.

Andrew Keen

Yeah, I'm again, as I said, I'm not convinced. But what do I know? Maybe I have a simpler life. I don't think of many tasks. Oh, you have people that do things for you. I do because I have a, I have a chauffeur and a personal assistant and all the rest of it. Yeah, I'm still not convinced. But we will see certainly it's gonna, it has some potential. I mean there's no doubt about that.

Andrew Keen

In that context as well will be, and I take your point on interface. I think that's really important. I mean, I think we're still in the very early stages of the AI revolution and that we're still using our keyboards to talk to these machines. And I think that that will move on very quickly, as you know.

Keith Teare

Are you going to talk about the Apple news about access to the drive? If not, we should just mention it briefly now.

Andrew Keen

Yeah, go on. What's the Apple news?

Keith Teare

So in response to some of these stories, Apple Announce that they're going to tie down access to your drive on your Mac Mini more than it currently is tied down in order to limit what an agent gets access to without your express permission. And it feels to me like for the first time, Apple's taking the wrong side of history here. The Mac Mini is the ideal machine for people to run agents on unless they choose to use a cloud one like Muse or some of these other ones. And it feels as Apple is so far down the privacy route due to social media that they're still living in that time zone where social media is the enemy. AI is a solution in a way. And their natural instinct is to want to limit it. I think that's probably a big mistake.

Andrew Keen

Well, we'll see, we'll see what the social, I mean, I'm guessing that the social reckoning will have some stuff to say about AI too. Meanwhile, I did an interview with Sherry Turkle, one of the most influential tech writers and critics, although she's not really a reactionary, but she's certainly ambivalent about tech. She wrote, of course, Alone Together. She's an old friend of mine. And she has a new book out called Artificial Intimacy, Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, which is an important new book. She, of course, is not, I think, particularly happy about, if not these agents, certainly the idea of us talking to them too often because it personalizes. And there was a piece which we didn't talk about, actually, a couple of weeks ago by Mustafa Hussain. Is his name the guy? Suleiman. Suleiman Hussain, the guy at Microsoft, who argues that what we've got wrong with AI is we humanize them too much and we still have to remind ourselves they're just machines. They don't have human qualities. Are these new interfaces, Keith? Grokbot and Muse and Dot, do they fall into that trap that Hussain Mustafa warns us about and which Turkle is certainly opposed to

Andrew Keen

giving human qualities to these bots?

Keith Teare

I think you've got to say yes to that. They manifest as an individual that you interact with. So you certainly treat them Mr. You know, in some ways, very similarly to the way you would treat an actual chief of staff or an actual personal assistant and and you know, of course, we all know that it's just computer code. Mr. But there are many people starting to believe it isn't just computer code. I don't know if you're going to go to it later in the show.