Fun hanging w @EricNewcomer this week, topics: - Lots of whitespace for vertical agents in areas like finance; this feels under competed today - Computer use unlocks consumer fintech ambitions to improve the balance sheet of every American - Opus 5.5 is as big of a deal for games and entertainment as Opus 4.5 was for code

Agree with this - consumer AI products are fighting a three front war across customer acquisition, compute capacity + token subsidies. Sign-in with chatgpt solves for capacity+token cost and plugin extensions theoretically solve for distribution.

CFO.ai is the truth - if you want to know what the heck your company is spending on and if it is driving to ROI, you owe it to yourself to set this finance agent up for yourself The integrations out of box mean you're up and running almost instantly

Introducing our State of Markets pt 2, along with a companion podcast where we unpack the data and discuss what comes next. Tech is the everything cycle. Supply: putting the buildout in context, just passed railroads as % of GDP. The wisdom of Elon is real: the factory (or the datacenter!) is the product. Demand: diffusion is so, so early. Median AI vendor spending in the top 1% of companies is 8x that of the top 10%. Only about 30% of S&P 500 companies report a quantified AI impact, which means there’s a substantial opportunity in connecting models to a company's data and workflows. Diffusion into companies is one of the main themes of the next 5 years. We’re entering the agent work period. Only a few million users today, but applicable to billions of internet users with massive surplus created. META/GOOG monetize US users at $200+ per year today. Agent opportunity is much higher. Mega-trends the next 5 years: Consumer agents, Robotics, Autonomy, AI x bio, Personal health, Diffusion into enterprise, New era of American Dynamism. Much more in our SoM report here - a16z.news/p/state-of-markets… @a16z @sarahdingwang @aleximm @santiago__rdz

Assistant Benchmark creator David Pawlan sits down with a16z's Anish Acharya to unpack the sudden explosion of personal AI agents and what it will take for one to become part of everyday life. David has been testing dozens of assistants across real-world tasks, from managing email and booking travel to handling financial admin. They discuss why the most useful agents may become increasingly invisible, proactively checking you into flights, finding refunds, filing reimbursements, or simply handling the small tasks that pile up across everyday life. They also explore whether the winning interface is an app, text thread, voice, or wearable; how much autonomy consumers will actually give their agents; and what happens when agents start interacting with other agents. From commerce and restaurant reservations to entirely new agent-native services, Anish and David ask what the internet looks like when software starts acting on our behalf. 00:54 Poke, Instinct, Muse: the agent boom 03:41 What Assistant Bench actually tests 09:14 Cost savers beat time savers 14:53 Muse charm as Meta's data play 20:03 Silent agents in group chats 26:01 Proactivity is the real moat 32:21 Assistant vs agent, defined 40:22 Amazon blocks Muse, Shopify opens the door 47:35 The $20/day agent economics YouTube: piped.video/3T5sij3spWw @DavidPawlan @illscience

Oh man there is so much in the OAI launches this morning, early reactions: - OAI leaning into its strengths around model breadth (full duplex voice / computer use), compute (ultrafast / decisions / price cuts), and knowledge work (spaces / dots) - Spaces is an impressive effort to connect two key lessons from the last 6 months; one that consumers need "human shaped" interfaces to use models to their full ability (slack / imessage / anthropomorphic agent) and two that group productivity >> sum of individual productivity and requires dedicated collaboration tools like agent native docs / slides / etc. - Dots acknowledges that consumers have a bounded view of chat interfaces ("better google") and the personal agents primitive needs a different positioning and personality. I like that the UI starts with a single "dot" (agent) and imagines expanding to teams, which combines the simplicity of a muse style approach with the power of grok bots, progressively disclosed. - Security cloud is the first of many efforts where sensitive / proprietary model capabilities are vertically integrated and sold as an outcome vs API. Expect more of this in areas like biology (smartly framed today as "antibiotics" - who could dislike those?! 😂). - Yes there are offerings at every spot on the Pareto curve (ultrafast at the high end, decisions at the low), but the wild 3D demo of ultrafast shows that these points on the curve represent new capabilities (i.e. just in time software, real time video transformation etc) - Consumer adoption has accelerated w/ 1.2B WAU + Connect is a huge unlock for developers by letting users bring their own tokens—this unbundles the unit economics from product value & locks developers + users into the OAI ecosystem - Plugin directory + discovery is maybe, finally the distribution channel we've been waiting for - Marketplace allows SAAS partners to sell to OAI customers w/o the procurement headache - $500 plan, and it's "cheap" given the capabilities .. I predict a $1000 plan by next year that will provide even more price/performance to consumers Will think + share more when I have a chance to process, but wow some cool launches today.

.@benthompson said it well: "consumers have many software shaped holes in their life." putting coding agents + personal agents in a familiar social space will help consumers understand new capabilities so much of the overhang is an interface + product problem

today we're rolling out Wabi 2.0 personal agents today all live in chat. the most magical technology of our time greets you with an empty text box: "what do you want me to do?" early adopters know what to type, but most people try a couple of things and then don't know what to do next. and the more you use a chat-only agent, the worse the experience gets. your history and ongoing tasks end up buried in one endless scroll. people don't just want to type-type-type. they want to tap-tap-tap, scroll and look. they love what agents can do, but they also like software. the most powerful agent will be the one that combines both. Wabi 2.0 is a messenger where you talk to Wabi, a personal agent that does stuff for you and builds the interface you need in the moment. you can add anyone in your life to any thread. chat + AI that acts + software made on demand + your people = an operating system for the agentic era. UI on demand also takes agents way beyond one-off productivity tasks, into the ongoing parts of your life. my health thread has a calorie tracker, a weightlifting log, a weight tracker and my health appointments. Wabi tracks my macros, books appointments, and plans workouts around my calendar and sleep score. my kids thread has a calendar of all their activities, the daily preschool menu, a Japanese learning app for my daughter, SF events to take them to next weekend, and a princess selfie app they love. Wabi stays on top of it all in chat, including triaging every school email. their dad and our nanny are in that thread too. without the apps, they'd have to ask the agent every time they needed something. now they just glance at the right app. my boyfriend and I have a thread with an app that recommends experimental and techno shows, a map of our favorite restaurants, and a daily question about our relationship. Wabi books tickets, plans date nights, and occasionally tells us how great we are together. so far, personal agents have been one person, one chat, a stream of one-off tasks. we think the future is your agent, your apps and your people in one place, running the parts of life that matter most, together. invite-only to start - reply with your first use case to get off the waitlist!

Introducing @Supertake, a new platform that transforms your unique takes on the world into real, shareable investment portfolios using frontier AI and trading agents. Supertake makes it easy for anyone to invest in their ideas, even if they know nothing about investing. 1/

Good conversation, notes: - Approaching $1B in transaction volume; 50% is travel - After 3 weeks, 40% have shared a credit card - 80% retention rate for people who have shared a credit card - Focused on achieving higher-order objectives like establishing trust and having the user’s back versus being a “task accomplisher” - Biz model: blanket transaction fee - Trying to figure out pricing power in terms of take rate and value provided to the merchant through distribution. - Bounds are between payment networks on the low end and the App Store on the high end - How adversarial will businesses be to agents? It depends on what percentage of revenue is driven by the user’s attention on the platform versus transaction completion - Hope is that the incremental volume driven by the headless service will be greater than the compression from being intermediated - At the limit, demand is initiated by Instinct - Product philosophy focused on understandability vs. capability - 10% of people invite someone daily - One way to drive cost improvements is to batch workloads that can be done asynchronously - On the other side, proactivity consumes compute that the user didn’t explicitly ask for - On balance, estimates that these two imply an order of magnitude more compute for personal agents than coding agents - Product improvements coming include full-duplex voice and voice recognition to validate identity - Software will collapse and be generated in real time - Seeing some small businesses run Instinct-native, focused on higher-order objectives like maximizing revenue - Broadly, this represents a path for future direction: achieving higher-order objectives - Less than 50% of traffic is iMessage - Capital-intensive business and focused on using the money to ensure that the product can be free for now

What’s cool about @cosign: - Reputation is inferred, not stated - The model can capture many of the nuances of real relationships (backchannel / mentorship / investment) - It’s bootstrapped from our SV community Anyway, here are my v1 recs—more to come: cosign.co/lists?tab=mine&lis…

Muse and Instinct have set the price for consumer personal assistants: free. Costs are high right now. They’ll come down substantially, but these products will still require a LOT of capital and time before they come anywhere near break even. Feels like a very hard category for startups without enormous balance sheets. Meta, OpenAI, Google, etc. can subsidize heavy usage for years while waiting for costs to fall and monetization to emerge. Most startups can’t. I won’t be surprised to see Instinct raise more money in the near future if they scale- they’ll need to! In consumer agents, having the best product may not be enough. You may also need the ability to lose a lot of money per user for a long time. There are verticals with enough economics to subsidize the agent (financial services, commerce, travel). But even there, I’m not sure the opportunity is the assistant itself... seems like we will use general agents. If general agents own the consumer relationship, the better business might be owning the transaction, supply, or regulated infrastructure those agents need to call.

Hearing this week that personal assistants cost $3k-$7k per user per year, depending on scale effects / vertical integration / model selection. Implications/questions: - Consumer subsidies will be a huge factor; people don’t care about privacy, they want utility and they want it for free. - Model costs are deflating, but not fast enough for many startups. The dark horse is that Jev may rapidly deflate computer-use costs 100x. - An interesting counter-position would be building an expensive and narrowly focused agent — perhaps combining proprietary supply (Carbone tables!) with a unique POV (“no one goes there anymore, go to The Grill instead”). - Social is wide open but hinges on a key design challenge: how can agents increase social cohesion and not feel invasive in a group chat? A working social agent would rightly attract an avalanche of capital and be hard for incumbents to replicate. - Finally, there are vertical focus areas like financial services where the LTVs outweigh the subsidy needed and are outside the near-term competitive focus of the incumbents. If it were me, I’d focus here — Credit Karma as an agent >> Credit Karma as an app. Overall, it’s still very, very early, and we may very well be in the MySpace era of social or iPhone 2010. Hang onto your hats and keep building!!

Muse now solves Captchas too..

Ethos is now paying out $1M / day.