Chatbots

“I feel like on the user interface side of where we are we're kind of in our MS-DOS moment right now. We haven't had our Windows moment, and I don't think that it's necessarily going to be a Windows interface, but typing into a chatbot or talking into a chatbot…”

“And people have taken their lives after speaking with chatbots.”

“We get questions like, well, isn't the chatbot going to tell everyone what to buy and just complete the transaction and no one will ever do e-commerce off of an ad again. And what that leaves a sight of is that people actually like to shop and people want to l…”

“We're kind of trapped in this local attractor state of chatbots and coding agents and like turn taking in batches. And this is absolutely not how humans interact with each other.”

“I imagine that. In a matter of months, we will look back at today and we won't even be able to empathize with the mental models that we have right now because they are so over-indexed on chatbots and coding agents.”

“And, you know, so far in early 2026, I would say chatbots can lull you into feeling generative, but if I actually look at like the actions that I've taken, like you can feel really productive after like a good two hour session on a chatbot, but I actually don'…”

“I don't think foundation models. A product. I don't think a chatbot is a product. I think the value will be further up.”

“The chat bot is going to be the place where you're going to want to direct most of your interactions With the web, with the internet, with information online, with computing.”

“I feel like chatbots are terrible interface and users need product and interface and tooling and company and go to market around that. And so that we all have thousands of companies that go out and build that.”

“For example, I think yesterday it was announced that a chatbot had come up with an interesting mathematical proof of one of the Erdos's conjectures that impressed mathematicians. It was original. It wasn't just searching the literature.”

“But right now, I would say we're at about, we're close to AGI, because if I ask a chatbot, I can ask it any question, and most of the time it'll answer at the level of a not very good expert. It'll be much better than me at anything I don't know a lot about. S…”

“Oh, I think that's complete nonsense, and anybody who uses a chatbot regularly knows they understand.”

“I believe they're already conscious, yes, but I don't talk about that much because that puts people off from the other safety messages.”

“Because the chatbots have this habit of Playing dumb when they're being tested, so you don't know how smart they are.”

“The big companies should be putting a huge amount of work into making sure it doesn't happen in future. And for that, you need regulations. You need independent organizations testing out new chat pods.”

“The chatbot is a blank screen in a jagged edge. And what am I supposed to do and what will work? And that's a big problem. And the solution to that problem is to wrap it in, in use cases.”

“Research is showing that the more you use these kind of chatbots, the lesser your cognitive skills are, the divergence between the scores.”

“You can at least double, if not five X, what you're getting off your traditional chatbot with a superhuman.”

“So what I think is e-commerce, you want a very rich user interface. It would be agentic. You can be able to have a conversation with it. You can talk to it. I could talk back to it, but I think the point is it has to be more visual. I think a text-based interf…”

“The referral traffic from these chatbots are converting higher than Google, and so actually the chatbots are actually additive to travel companies.”

“And so I think we're clearly moving from a world where you will use AI as this thing you chat back and forth with. And that was kind of the first manifestation of the chat bot to now a paradigm where the agent is given a task. It has a set of resources it has …”

“90% of kids who are using chatbots for academics are cheating and not learning.”

“This is also going back to my conversation with Sam last week. I do think that there is this, you know, if not a stated preference, a revealed preference in the data that they're seeing that people really want to bond with their bots.”

“And because all I guess for the most part, all currently deployed chatbots are based on transformers or transformer adjacent technologies. They're all vulnerable to Prompt injection, jailbreaking, forms of adversarial attacks.”

“Putting up a guardrail is not, it's not going to do anything in terms of preventing that user from doing that, because, I mean, first of all, if the user's like, ah, guardrail, you know, too much work, they'll just go to one of these websites and get that info…”

“Hot take, maybe, 20, 26 is the year of speed. Maybe customers cannot tell the difference between a 120 IQ chatbot, a 130 IQ chatbot, a 140 IQ chatbot.”

“The current chatbots are really the Microsoft DOS era for AI interfaces, and that there will be some sort of a Windows Mac OS moment.”

“It's why I say chat bots or cheat bots and they're terrible. Like if we could ban Like those chatbots being in school, that would be great.”

“Yeah, it's five and 10 years tough, but the next year, I think, is going to be a lot of us finally cresting the hill of getting past working with chatbots and maybe having to do a little bit of deep research, which is our first agentic flow, in truly taking ov…”

“A lot of applications companies pursue because they can't measure the concrete outcome. And I feel like booking on a sales chatbot is very clear, right? Like what's a conversion rate right now with that chatbot, with human operators and what could be a convers…”

“It's really the only hope, actually. Ads, ads in the chatbots is like the only hope.”

“Where we find that chatbots and RAG, which is essentially Taking documents and putting them into a vector database so AI can read them, right? AI that can read your documents in a custom way is RAG. When you think about a chatbot in RAG, the value there is giv…”

“In art, or in video, or in filmmaking, or in just, like, any artistic mean endeavor, There's no such thing as a right or wrong answer. There is in, like, there is in, in, in a chatbot or in a search engine. And so a lot has to do with just training the right e…”

“The chatbot isn't the right product is what's going to happen is these are going to spiral off in different places where they actually do have different product strategies.”

“Nobody wants to use a chatbot on your website. I don't want to use chatbots on people's websites. Like if things pop up on a website when I go to visit it, I just like, I fly into a visceral rage. I'm definitely closing the window if not closing the tab.”

“So my best advice on how to improve your prompting skills is actually just trial and error. You will learn the most from just Trying and interacting with chatbots and talking to them than anything else, including, you know, reading resources, taking courses, a…”

“We will still be deploying AI. In its current form as a chatbot in 10 years.”

“Chatbots are, in my eyes, like the TI-eighty-four, or like the HP-twelve-c, like a calculator. It's a one-off, you know, I'm gonna go and put in my equation and then get a response. Nobody does their taxes in a calculator. Nobody, you know, computes a DCF or, …”

“That shows that the number one use case of chatbots today has gone from idea generation to companionship and therapy.”

“The thing is, what, all these chatbots have a, often hidden, system prompt, and they have an ideology, one way or the other. Sometimes, most of the times, not as overt as this, And that to me is the risk about these things becoming the last website is that you…”

“It's one of six or seven, let's call it. It's a real problem. It's a huge problem. It's a, from a pure kind of like information health standpoint, it's far worse than anything we have seen”

“Once it gets into those areas in which verifiability just escapes me, which is most areas, because we're not professionals in most areas, and although a lot of us want to be jacks of all trades, jacks and jills of all trades, then we lose that ability, and we …”

“Hugging face is the winner. They were in a bootcamp for chatbots. And pivoted from a chatbot into hugging face. So that's your answer.”

“That investment leads to lock in because the bot that you talk to the most is the one that is going to want to, is going to be the most useful to you because it knows you best.”

“If we want to do something even more meaningful, it felt like the next kind of advancement is not this kind of, I'm chatting with some software in a kind of a synchronous back and forth model is that software is going to do things for me. In kind of multi-step…”

“So we're used to the chat bot back and forth. Fine. I get that. I think we're gonna move to a blend of some of those things are gonna be synchronous as they are now, but some are gonna be async. It's just gonna put it in a queue”

“What it was doing as these chatbots do is it was actually remixing the knowledge that it had. So it would take problems that I had given it chronologically that happened 20 years ago for me and sort of project them into the present and mix them with something …”

“Right now we have these chatbots or these, you know, surface level search engines that, that give you facetious, you know, surface level value. You know, it'll help your kid cheat on their homework, but to drive to whether or not something's a good investment …”

“Do I think it's how people are going to want to consume their news? No”

“This is another thing where you could just look up chatbot on the App Store and pull out the UI. It does not need to reinvent the wheel. The only thing that's important to reinvent here is the prompting, and that's probably, so before we go into that, I want t…”

“And I saw a survey last week that 60% of consumers for purchase decisions in the last 30 days used a chatbot.”

“Self-supervised learning is what has become Very prominent over the last five, six years and is, is really the main component or the main contribution to the success of things like chatbot and natural language understanding systems.”

“Chatbots are or LLMs, large language models, are a special case of that, where you train a system to predict a word, But you only allow it to look at the words that precede it, you know, that are to the left of it.”

“Interacting with a chatbot is sort of novel at first, but it's not interesting. Right. And it's like humans are what makes interacting with chatbots interesting. It's like, ha ha ha, I'm going to try to trick it. It's like, that's interesting. Spell strawberry…”

“We believe students are experiencing chatbot overload, and they often don't even know what to ask a chatbot, so we really tried to create chunked out tools that help them with specific parts of the process as they need them”

“We didn't build a chatbot. We didn't build a co-pilot. We didn't build any of these surface level obvious capabilities. We're gonna build them. They'll be in there at some point. Who cares? It's not gonna sell a single extra subscription of software.”

“There's no world where suddenly we all start dating chatbots and, you know, human birth rates plummet. I don't think that happens, right?”

“Chatbots right now, like, if you want to see the future where it's better than human, it's actually in homework, where in most cases it kind of solves the issue, writes an essay better than most people.”

“There was the Turing test of, you know, which got passed some months or years back without even being noticed. Because you can't tell the difference now in having a chat with a lot of the chat bots, whether they're human or not.”

“Having hallucinations in chatbots and in, like, image generators is, like, a really good thing, right? Because it gives you like, a starter tool for, like, getting to, like, solve the blank page problem, right? Like, and, like, gives you, like, little bits of …”