The Exchanges

Q Do you worry about your five-year-old becoming more comfortable talking to models and agents than they are humans?

A I've had so many conversations with Alex Wang about this because he has this whole thing about how in the future most friends will be AI friends. And, um, you know, I, I don't think he's wrong. Um, and I think that there's, uh, there's ways in which Uh, that's already starting to be the case with, you know, people, uh, you know, having lots of online game experiences, and some of those are NPCs, and you might just have, like, more of, like, a comfortable sort of existence in there as well, even if you're not breaking through this. I do, I worry, she is so gregarious that, like, I'm not actually worried in her particular case, but, like, let's, uh, abstract to the broader sense. There is a lot you can learn, uh, from, you know, what it feels like, like, Here's the bull case. I was a fairly awkward, you know, you know, teenager, and I probably could have benefited from some practice mode, like AI interactions around some of these things to build it up. And at the same time, that's like not the real, it's doesn't feel like it's totally closing the loop around like the consequences of real interaction. Like it's the difference between reading about what it's like to have your first, like really hard argument with your high school girlfriend and then actually having it. And like, when you're in that moment, you know, it's, this is like now the, the classic, like, Is it the Chinese r…

AI assessment note: “I'm not actually worried in her particular case, but, like, let's, uh, abstract”

Q Does Llama show that there is no value in the model and all the value is in the data? If Facebook are willing to give it away for free, Because they know that no one can copy the data that they have. Is that what that shows?

A I think it's a good, interesting question is like whether Lama, is the quality of Lama due to the fact that they can, I don't know if they've said that they do, but they clearly can train on, on Instagram and Facebook and et cetera data. Or is Gemini better for being able to train on, on YouTube? It's actually clear to me that Gemini benefits from that. Like whenever they have like a good, like video understanding demo, for example, I'm like, well, I, Somebody has like probably the largest repository of video in the world and can likely train on a lot of those pieces. Less clear on the Facebook front. Um, I, I've never heard from people. Gosh, you know what Lama does extremely well is generate good content that would work well on social media. It just seems like a, like a good general purpose model. So it actually go back to like the value is all in our conversation earlier. The value is all, uh, in how good is your, your, your team? Um, you know, do you have the underlying data that you need to do it, but then also How, um, how useful is your model in actual use cases? And that is like the highest order bit. I almost wish I'd started with that because evals aside, evals are really useful for hill climbing and for internal research, but they don't tell the story of like, is the model going to be excellent at what it needs to be excellent or deployed for, or even if it is excell…

AI assessment note: “Less clear on the Facebook front... The value is all, uh, in how good is your team”

Q When you look at usage, you see emerging markets usage retains, and you see Western markets not really at all. How do you think about them as sustaining credible threat?

A They already have this sort of like, they're known at a level where that has some like ability to To generate that ongoing, like, staying powder, et cetera. On a retention front, I think if all we're doing in these AI-first sort of, like, lab-generated products, even six months from now, or you from now, I was like, asking questions, maybe sometimes having, like, slight proactivity, like, I don't think that's differentiated or interesting in the long run. It should be, wow, I can now do something uniquely because I am using Claude, or I'm using DeepSeeker, or any one of these products, and It unlocked hours of work for me, and it made me smarter, and it made me, like, a better partner to whoever are the important people in my life. Like, it has to transcend beyond the, kind of, surface level utility. Some people find the deeper level, don't get me wrong, and those are the people that, like, are your DAUs right now. But for a lot of people, they'll try it, they generate a poem with it, they, you know, write a letter to their son. Like, there's all this stuff that they can do that, like, provides some value in the moment. But I still think we are in like day one around is AI an indispensable part of most people's work? And I think the answer is no for most of them. And so, um, there's, I think deep seek and all of our honest product staying power will come from who can get there …

AI assessment note: “staying power will come from who can get there and do that sustainably over time”

Q You said three years sounds ridiculous. A year would be much more realistic. I agree, and I get you when we look at the speed of scaling. Do we think that we hit a plateau or an asymptote in product releases, the speed of development? Because it feels so fast now to our point earlier. Do we hit that plateau or do we continue in this exponential progression movement?

A Is a question I think a lot about. I started the year by looking at our product development process and looking at where we are Clodified, like where are we using Claude and where we're not? And, uh, you look at him and say, okay, you know, Claude can be useful in sort of taking initial ID and creating a PRD out of it. And Claude can be useful, obviously in the coding side. Um, Claude can be useful in synthesizing a lot of conversations that people are having about a product and kind of like finding like the kind of thorny issues of disagreement, driving alignment and actually figuring out what to build is still the hardest part, right? Like that is actually like the only thing that is still best resolved by Just getting together in a room and talking through the pros and cons or going off and exploring it in Figma and coming back. And so like any dynamic system, if you optimize one piece, all of a sudden something else becomes the, um, uh, the, like the, the blocker or the, or the critical kind of path. And I think alignment, deciding what to build, solving real user problems and like figuring out a cohesive product strategy, still very hard. And probably like the models are more than a year away from solving that. That is the constraint. It's why I'm really bullish on at least startups being able to explore the space because, you know, I remember this from my, both Instagram …

AI assessment note: “if you optimize one piece, all of a sudden something else becomes the... blocker”

Q What do you think they did to break through that maybe Claude hadn't?

A I think there is a, uh, A lot of interest, of course, in like world politics right now and like have the narrative be, you know, this was much cheaper and whether that was exactly true or like what, you know, like, oh, they were able to figure something out. Like that was, you know, it's the story. And like, frankly, and then I've had this conversation with our, with our, our marketing team as well. Like, I don't think we tell the, the Claude story well enough externally yet around what is different or what is notable about the fact that, you know, the Claude three, we were training a model at the frontier that was state of the art with a team that was much, much, much smaller. Um, than any other lab. Right. Um, and I think we're, we've been always very, very like, uh, efficient with our, with our compute as we train.

AI assessment note: “have the narrative be, you know, this was much cheaper”

Q Should Artifact integrate a Discord at the verticalization of communities, of community building, management, maintenance? Is that the future, do you think?

A Yeah. We thought a bit about like what it means to have a community around conversation. Cause ultimately if we get really good at learning your interest, it's an exciting other kind of area is while it's fun to converse with people about those interests that you might not know at all, you know, and it's grounded in, in content that exists. Um, but for sure we've thought about, and, and, and I think it's exciting to think about what are the, what are the ways in which these communities can form around Interest around people similar to your, you know, taste profile were either in your city or, you know, also in interested in F one. And like I said, we've gotten these little glimpses of it in the beta group, you know, like we had a world cup group where actually a couple of the folks went to the world cups, they were on the ground DMing us. And then we were talking about it. So, you know, I've seen that and I didn't know any of them. That's what was lovely. It was, I didn't know any of them in person. There are people that I met purely through interest. And I think that there's, there's real power in that.

AI assessment note: “We thought a bit about like what it means to have a community around conversation.”

Q Final one before we move into like Verdict Clive's products, just did DeepSeat cause you to rethink anything or change anything about the way that you progress?

A There's some architectural pieces and I won't speak for the research team because they're, you know, they're, they're definitely the deep experts, but they're like, oh, interesting. Like that, that's That's worth us considering or some ideas that had been considered and maybe were worth reevaluating. So I think there's that, that piece, um, there as well. It's interesting. Our plan was already to show the chain of thought when we launched our reasoning model. Um, so that was not a reconsideration, but maybe like, uh, it was interesting to see somebody else do that. And there's some like user interface kind of details in there. And I think Grok does as well now. And there's, um, so it'd be curious to see how that evolves to your distillation question. That might be a reason why. Um, more labs either choose to not show or otherwise obscure the, the, the chain of thought down the line. The other piece that like, from a product perspective, there were two, um, I think that's like the under talked about piece of Deep Seek. It's, I think they were able to go from nobody knowing about them to them being like, frankly, in many circles, better known than Claude, right? Like Grey Dot was calling me about Deep Seek. I'm not even joking. Like, it was like a cliche. It was actually happening. Like I had a thing like, what do you think about Deep Seek? I'm like, great. Like it's broken throu…

AI assessment note: “There's some architectural pieces... worth us considering or some ideas that had been considered”

Q Should Artifact integrate a Discord at the verticalization of communities, of community building, management, maintenance? Is that the future, do you think?

A Yeah. We thought a bit about like what it means to have a community around conversation. Cause ultimately if we get really good at learning your interest, it's an exciting other kind of area is while it's fun to converse with people about those interests that you might not know at all, you know, and it's grounded in, in content that exists. Um, but for sure we've thought about, and, and, and I think it's exciting to think about what are the, what are the ways in which these communities can form around Interest around people similar to your, you know, taste profile were either in your city or, you know, also in interested in F one. And like I said, we've gotten these little glimpses of it in the beta group, you know, like we had a world cup group where actually a couple of the folks went to the world cups, they were on the ground DMing us. And then we were talking about it. So, you know, I've seen that and I didn't know any of them. That's what was lovely. It was, I didn't know any of them in person. There are people that I met purely through interest. And I think that there's, there's real power in that.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. We thought a bit about like what it means to have a community”

Q Does Llama show that there is no value in the model and all the value is in the data? If Facebook are willing to give it away for free, Because they know that no one can copy the data that they have. Is that what that shows?

A I think it's a good, interesting question is like whether Lama, is the quality of Lama due to the fact that they can, I don't know if they've said that they do, but they clearly can train on, on Instagram and Facebook and et cetera data. Or is Gemini better for being able to train on, on YouTube? It's actually clear to me that Gemini benefits from that. Like whenever they have like a good, like video understanding demo, for example, I'm like, well, I, Somebody has like probably the largest repository of video in the world and can likely train on a lot of those pieces. Less clear on the Facebook front. Um, I, I've never heard from people. Gosh, you know what Lama does extremely well is generate good content that would work well on social media. It just seems like a, like a good general purpose model. So it actually go back to like the value is all in our conversation earlier. The value is all, uh, in how good is your, your, your team? Um, you know, do you have the underlying data that you need to do it, but then also How, um, how useful is your model in actual use cases? And that is like the highest order bit. I almost wish I'd started with that because evals aside, evals are really useful for hill climbing and for internal research, but they don't tell the story of like, is the model going to be excellent at what it needs to be excellent or deployed for, or even if it is excell…

AI assessment note: “the value is all, uh, in how good is your, your, your team?”

Q What do you think they did to break through that maybe Claude hadn't?

A I think there is a, uh, A lot of interest, of course, in like world politics right now and like have the narrative be, you know, this was much cheaper and whether that was exactly true or like what, you know, like, oh, they were able to figure something out. Like that was, you know, it's the story. And like, frankly, and then I've had this conversation with our, with our, our marketing team as well. Like, I don't think we tell the, the Claude story well enough externally yet around what is different or what is notable about the fact that, you know, the Claude three, we were training a model at the frontier that was state of the art with a team that was much, much, much smaller. Um, than any other lab. Right. Um, and I think we're, we've been always very, very like, uh, efficient with our, with our compute as we train.

AI assessment note: “I don't think we tell the, the Claude story well enough externally yet”

Q Can I ask a weird one? How do you define a retained user? Is it number of articles consumed? Is it number of shares? Is it number of time on app? What's the definition for you of retained user?

A Like, are they coming back, and are they, you know, browsing feed and reading articles? And that's, you know, the core. The interesting thing for what we're building is, even if you join in, you know, the social part is, you know, in a very small closed group right now as we, like, develop it, but If you join the sort of non-social bit, even if your friends aren't on yet, the world is happening, you know, like things are getting covered. There, there will be something new for you that day. Um, and, you know, and the hope is, you know, you come back and, you know, you do get, you know, for me, I, my interests, my, my non-unique interests. I'd like to find something that actually like, uh, differentiates me from, from this particular cluster. But, you know, I love Formula One. I grew up in Brazil. So, you know, that's a kind of core interest of mine. Although more and more.

AI assessment note: “are they coming back, and are they, you know, browsing feed and reading articles?”

Q Can I ask a weird one? How do you define a retained user? Is it number of articles consumed? Is it number of shares? Is it number of time on app? What's the definition for you of retained user?

A Like, are they coming back, and are they, you know, browsing feed and reading articles? And that's, you know, the core. The interesting thing for what we're building is, even if you join in, you know, the social part is, you know, in a very small closed group right now as we, like, develop it, but If you join the sort of non-social bit, even if your friends aren't on yet, the world is happening, you know, like things are getting covered. There, there will be something new for you that day. Um, and, you know, and the hope is, you know, you come back and, you know, you do get, you know, for me, I, my interests, my, my non-unique interests. I'd like to find something that actually like, uh, differentiates me from, from this particular cluster. But, you know, I love Formula One. I grew up in Brazil. So, you know, that's a kind of core interest of mine. Although more and more.

AI assessment note: “Like, are they coming back, and are they, you know, browsing feed and reading articles?”