The Personal Agent Race Is Here | Anish Acharya & David Pawlan

The general population does not care about being ten percent 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 wanna get stuff done, and I just start talking to ChatGPT Voice. And throughout my thirty-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.

It does feel like there's going to be infrastructure and products that exist only for agent-to-agent interactions that doesn't exist today. What do you think?

It is inevitable that we're gonna see- Personal AI agents have gone from experiment to one of the fastest-moving areas in consumer AI. But what would it actually take for one to become part of everyday life? In this episode, a16z's Anish Acharya sits down with Assistant Benchmark creator David Pollin, who has been testing dozens of personal agents across everything from email and travel to shopping and financial admin. They discuss why the best agent might be the one you barely notice, proactively handling the tedious parts of life without needing to be managed. They also get into how much autonomy we'll actually give these systems, whether we'll interact with them through text, voice, apps or wearables, and where specialized agents could still beat the big general purpose players. And looking further ahead, they explore what happens when agents start transacting with other agents, reshaping everything from commerce and restaurant reservations to how we spend our time online.

All right. Welcome to the a16z show. I'm so psyched to be here with my friend David Pollin. We hung a couple of weeks ago. We're both so enthusiastic about everything that's been happening with personal assistant and consumer AI generally, and man, so much has happened in the last couple of weeks. Maybe to tee it up, I sort of think that there's been a few moments where some part of the ecosystem has sort of seen God, and ChatGPT was a big one. I think for a lot of folks in November twenty-two and a bit of twenty-three, it was like, what is this thing that can write emails and poems and start to have a conversation back and forth and feel like you're interacting with a synthetic person? That was, of course, the beginning, the Big Bang. 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 ChatGPT 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.

Yeah.

We're gonna