Midha: Most Discord voice activity is casual, low-energy hanging out
Anjney Midha · Building the Next Generation of Conversational AI · Mar 15, 2025 · at 55:15
Anjney Midha is a General Partner at a16z. He is contrasting natural human voice usage patterns on Discord with the overly energetic behavior of conversational AI agents.
0:00 / 0:33exact quote · 33.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“You know, we spend a lot of time at Discord and, you know, a huge amount of Discord usages in voice channels, and when you look, when you actually kind of spend time looking at and trying to observe what the shape of a great conversation and voice is on Discord, a lot of it is actually not that interesting, right? It's people just hanging out talking. The core action moments actually happen when there's an other activity, like gaming, or there's people are watching a movie or something together. But the vast majority of talking is actually quite natural, sometimes boring, not that exciting.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Anjney Midha
Midha: Slowing frontier AI delays critical medical breakthroughs like curing cancer
“Until we've solved cancer, every month that we're not rushing to the frontier of accelerating biological discovery or scientific progress is a month that millions of people are suffering from disease that we could be solving with the eye.”
Midha: Existing regulatory tools are sufficient to manage AI risk
“Marginal risk is, I think, a slightly just more technical way to say, we have the tools to manage risk. We don't need new ones.”
Midha: Claims of a multi-year US AI lead over China were false
“No empirical evidence at the time that this was, that AI was creating net new marginal risks, and just factual inaccuracies that we were ahead of China, because if you just paid attention to what's happening, DeepSeek had already started to publish a fantastic…”
Midha: Distilling frontier capabilities from US AI outputs is easy
“No, actually it's not that hard to distill on the outputs of our labs.”
Midha: Downstream liability for open-source AI developers destroys the innovation ecosystem
“The status quo is you do not hold scientists liable for downstream uses of their technology. That's absurd. That's a great way to shut down the entire innovation ecosystem and start throwing literally like researchers in jail.”