AI助理付费意愿：主动性、信任与Agent交互

the general population does not care about being 10% more efficient. I have a hot take thesis that this Muse charm is actually less about trying to win the hardware game and it's more about data collection in the real world to fuel Zuckerberg's future metaverse of mapping out the actual world.

We were joking internally like we're days away from an agent messaging someone saying I noticed you weren't that into her so I went ahead and broke up with her.

There is massive defensibility around proactivity. I was biking to work. I want to get stuff done and I just start talking to chat GBT voice and throughout my 30-minute bike ride to work categorized my emails submitted them to different labels sent out calendar invites got to the desk inbox zero but it will be a very fine line because if you cross that line once you lose all trust with your user

does feel like there's going to be infrastructure and products that exist only for agentto agent interactions that doesn't exist today what do you think

it is inevitable that we're going to see All right, welcome to the A16Z show. I'm so psyched to be here with my friend David Pollen. We hung a couple of weeks ago. We're both so enthusiastic about everything that's been happening with personal assistant um and consumer AI generally. And man, so much has happened in the last couple of weeks. Maybe to tee it up, you know, I sort of think that there's been a few moments where some part of the, you know, ecosystem has sort of seen God.

Um and chatbt was a big one. And you know, I think for a lot of folks in November 22 and a bit of 23, it was like, what is this thing that can, you know, write emails and poems and, you know, start to have a conversation back and forth and feel like you're interacting with the synthetic person? That was of course the the beginning, the big bang. Um, the second moment really was coding agents and everything that developers have been obsessed with around sort of quad code and codecs and the ability to trivially create software.

And then finally, most recently with Instinct, Muse, and ChachiPT work, we've had this extraordinary enthusiasm around personal agents and what they can do for us as consumers. So, we're here to talk about all things personal agents. Um, we're going to go as deep as we can. We're going to assume that everybody has seen many of the same things that we have seen and we're going to make this the first in a series of conversations.

Welcome, David.

Thank you. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Let's like zoom out and and maybe talk about you know the arc of uh personal agents over the last few months, the last few weeks. What have you been seeing? What's your sort of view on things?

Yeah, so this space has exploded over the past four weeks. We can roll it back. I was I was an early adopter of Poke. So I want to say Poke, which was kind of one of the first like consumer AI agents to really hit the market. Yes. That launched I believe it was September 8th and then I started using it September 11th, like 3 days later. And like I remember it so vividly cuz it was just an unbelievable experience. Their their whole gimmick was this, you know, negotiation with the agent on how much you're actually going to pay.

And it totally blew my mind. Um then comes late November and Open Claw gets released and that kind of takes the actual world by storm of like there is there is something coming. And then a few other have popped up here and there, but most recently we saw Instinct really blow up the the tech Twitter bubble. just absolutely rode a wave, went nuts, and then it was just dominoes. You have Grockbot, you have Muse, you have a bunch of longtail ones like Caddy or Ali or Pi.

And it's really been amazing to see, you know, this whole tech bubble is just exploding with interest and like an intellectual curiosity for what can these agents do for us on a day-to-day basis. And there's uh I think everyone's kind of in the same boat where nobody really knows like it's it's the wild wild west. We're just playing around here.

I totally agree. And you we should take a moment to talk about Assistant Bench, which is this new, you know, really important and discussed benchmark that you're the author of. Maybe tee up Assistant Bench a little bit and then I'll ask you a few questions.

Assistant Benchmark is a site that essentially compares all these AI assistants on a use case basis. So we're asking all of these assistants the same prompt. Book me a flight to Chicago. find me a vegetarian restaurant within five blocks of my specific location, etc., etc. And we're comparing the actual outcome on like on a oneshot prompt. Does it actually work? Does it ask follow-up questions? How does it perform across 16 different dimensions?

And we compare those all. So, it's we use the word benchmark. Think of it more as like a consumerf facing benchmark, not necessarily technical behind the scenes, but if I want to book a flight, which one should I actually use? Who is performing the best? how fast are they actually replying? Got into this whole comparison because I was just doing market research myself trying to figure out how are these all comparing against one another?

What are the gaps? And uh published a bit of that and it was uh almost two weeks ago. It's 16 days ago today that we launched it and it's just absolutely exploded. It's, you know, over 100,000 views on the the website has website has had over 100,000 visitors have out had outreach from basically every single founder. Um, and I think it really just goes to show like everyone's curious. People people are looking for for answers to where this industry is is moving.

And so talk us through David. That's incredibly exciting. It's cool to actually It's funny how benchmarks have become such a staple now of the conversation because it's so there's so many launches it's hard to try everything which is also an exciting signal. Maybe talk us through everybody who's not Instinct and Muse. We're definitely going to deep dive on those later, but who else do you think is doing interesting work and what are the kind of directions of specialization that you're seeing?

Totally. So, we've got a bunch of longtail solutions out there. I think I would categorize it into two groups. You have like the BTOC consumerf facing generalized agents. That's like the Instinct or Muse. Um, some of the longer tail ones, you have Caddy, you have Ali, you have Season. Um there's I believe 64 right now just in the general category on the site and then we can break that down even further into a little more specialized within that.

So you can have travel specific ones uh like soore or miso. You can have email specific ones. The other side of the spectrum is going to be more of like your B2B workflow type uh assistants. And those are, you know, anyone from the town to catch to Vellum. And they're all essentially doing the same thing, right? They're they're your assistant that's actually like more of like an executive assistant, not not the consumerf facing um approach to it.

And that's kind of like the general landscape at the moment. Um, so far to my knowledge there are 122 different ones.

Wow.

Across all the categories.

Incredible. And what about areas of concentration? Where is the most sort of interesting competitive focus?

So everyone right now by and large is focusing on the generaliz like

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just trying to do trying to do everything.

And when you think about something like travel, just to pick on that, that's an infrequent high value behavior. Do you think that that category ends up being organized more as a connector into the horizontal agent or do you think they have the right to win as a general horizontal agent as well?

I think you're going to maybe see potentially one winner as as an independent agent, but by and large I really think it is going to be more of a connector. Um,