Zoë Schiffer: This is a conversation?
Brian Barrett: It is though. So I’m talking over you because—
Zoë Schiffer: No, no, do it.
Brian Barrett: I’m joking, but the whole point of I think the fact that they’re making these so cutesy and fluffy and adorable is obviously intentional. It is what is going to win over the average consumer and make you forget that you are giving away all of your privacy and all of the information and all of your accounts to this adorable fuzzy-wuzzy little thing instead of a data center.
Leah Feiger: Is that part of internet safety conversations now, Brian? When you sit around with your kids and you’re like, you’re going to have access to this, don’t be fooled by the fuzzy avatar. They just want your bank details.
Brian Barrett: Yeah, I think don’t hang out with fuzzy avatars online is a well-established directive for children.
Leah Feiger: Brian’s rules for the road folks. You’ve heard it here.
Brian Barrett: Yeah.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. Well, I was just going to say, I was at the Developer Day yesterday, and I had a few observations. On one hand, OpenAI does seem really focused right now. I heard from people at the company that they shipped Dots, these kind of cute, fuzzy, always-on agents within a matter of weeks. They saw Instinct and Muse, these other kind of OpenClaw for normie-type agents and were like, “OK, we have to play this game.” And they got it together really, really fast. I think it’s interesting because a lot of these capabilities have actually existed for a minute now, but when you talk to people in the industry, they’ll talk about form factor a lot. The new agents have to download a new app or learn new tools, and they’re actually proactively learning about your life and then suggesting things they can do for you versus you seeing this blank text box and being like, “I can build anything. What would I want to build,” is actually a big difference. I was really struck yesterday thinking, “Wow, Anthropic is on the back foot,” which hasn’t happened a lot recently. And they, I think, really do need to ship something interesting in this space sooner rather than later. But like you both said, there’s just this constant tension and trade-off, which is to make these agents useful, you have to give them a lot of personal information. Otherwise, they just can’t frankly do that much. And to give them that much personal information, you’re taking a risk. It’s totally reasonable to decide you don’t want to go that route. Dots gets access to your email, your calendar, sometimes your financial information, and then it can do things on your behalf. The kind of gateway drug, if you talk to people who use these, and I’m one of them, is restaurant reservations. You can say, “Hey, I’m going to New York at this time. Can you book these tables for me?” And it’ll wait for when the reservation block opens and it’ll book you a table. I was actually, I have to say, Noah Shinn, who’s the CEO of Instinct, he’s 23 years old. I repeat, this man is 23 years old. His company, less than two years old, valued at $10 billion now. He gave his first longform interview since his app completely blew up, and he talked about restaurant reservations. I was really waiting to be like, “This man has thought deeply about what happens to the internet when agents are doing all of your browsing and booking.” No, sir. No. Mm-mm. He was like, “It’s going to be great because previously restaurant reservations were first come first serve, and now your agent can say if it’s your birthday or an anniversary and then the restaurant can prioritize you.” I was like, “You only have to think about this for two seconds to realize that then everyone will just say it’s their anniversary or birthday. What do you mean?” Anyway.
